The Black Pits II Ending = What the Hell?!
HalfOrcBeastmaster
Member Posts: 301
Thank goodness I didn't get through the second chapter of the "arena" levels in the Enhanced Edition on pure skill and determination alone, because if I did, I expect I would be almost choking with rage right now, instead of confused and exasperated.
Leaving as many spoilers to the side as possible, I can say it provided a whole lot of catharsis for me. But just when things were getting good, that smug bastard Baeloth appeared out of f***ing nowhere and teleported my party back to the Black Pits, which the backstory says they fought hard to escape from. After he basically stood in the corner mocking me with how he was right there and I couldn't so much as give him a sock on the jaw without the Winged's interference.
I hope whoever wrote that ending had more fun than I did, because it was the equivalent of fighting to the end of Throne of Bhaal and then suddenly having someone leap out from behind a pillar and stealing our Bhaal essence and ascending to godhood while going, "Nya-na-nee-na-na!" the whole time. Is that really how you reward hard work and effort when your endings aren't scripted by existing content being kept inviolate?
Leaving as many spoilers to the side as possible, I can say it provided a whole lot of catharsis for me. But just when things were getting good, that smug bastard Baeloth appeared out of f***ing nowhere and teleported my party back to the Black Pits, which the backstory says they fought hard to escape from. After he basically stood in the corner mocking me with how he was right there and I couldn't so much as give him a sock on the jaw without the Winged's interference.
I hope whoever wrote that ending had more fun than I did, because it was the equivalent of fighting to the end of Throne of Bhaal and then suddenly having someone leap out from behind a pillar and stealing our Bhaal essence and ascending to godhood while going, "Nya-na-nee-na-na!" the whole time. Is that really how you reward hard work and effort when your endings aren't scripted by existing content being kept inviolate?
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BTW I would pay for a dlc continuing of Black pits.
I wouldn't have liked that ending either, if I got it. I would also have been severely disappointed, so I sympathize.
What is the alternative ending? You manage to escape?
Even if you are at epic levels you will be exhausted after such a battle (all of the enemies are very high level as well), and Baeloth is still a very powerful Sorcerer anyway, despite his arrogance. I don't find it too absurd that he should be able to capture the exhausted team, not to mention he could have put some spell components into your dishes or that kind of things.
The only "alternate ending" is if you win against the Winged's Crew in the very first ambush but this won't happen with a normal team anyway.
I'm never going to play the black pits -- because gladiator pit games are boring -- but now I'm curiou. How does the BP2 end?
I would highly recommend you to play bp2. It is fun and has tactical depths. Much, much better than bp1.
You should give it a try, BP2 has some nice sidequests as well and quite a good piece of story as well. But if you want to be spoiled, here you go:
After each fight you will be interviewed by a scribe named Stannel Eibor who has the same voice and the same appreciation for alliterations as Baeloth, the ex-master of the Black Pits. If you ask him about that he will be displeased.
After the final fight he will interview you and then reveal he is actually Baeloth, and he teleports the team somewhere. Then you have a short cutscene involving Dennaton and Szass Tam and it ends
But you can't win against them.. Can you? I remember that after a certain amount of time, I got deus ex machina'd to black bit 2.
Also my problem with the ending is the fact you handed Baeloth is @$$ even when he had back up, and a djinn's protection. Unless he deux ex machina you, there really shouldn't be a black pit 3 with him in control since he should know that he can't beat you, and this time he doesn't have a djinn to protect him.
I have done it a couple time with a max level, top equipment sorcerer, but I am rather sure no one can do it with a 6 member party with no equipment, no spells (since you just created them and they could not memorize any) and 500k experience which is what you normally get when you start BP2. Even as a max level team it is quite hard because the Winged has those short cast, no save Otiluke Resilient sphere.
As for the ending, if you take a look at Baeloth Character File in BG2 he now is a level 31 sorcerer with 8M exp, that's stronger than what you get in the end in BP2, and the XP cap in BG2. He IS very very strong as such. The question might then be: how did he get that strong?
And the ending... well, it's strangely symptomatic of Beamdog writing in general for the EEs, in that they seem to have a deep-rooted objection to clean victories: the quests for Rasaad, Neera and Hexxat all culminate in fights you can't win, and BP2's Dennaton gets his comeuppance from someone you'll only recognize if you do Neera's content, while Baeloth gets to swoop in and nullify your BP2 win by kidnapping you again. Just very weird and unsatisfying creative decisions overall.
By the way, as I am not a native English-speaker I cannot find the Stannel Eibor anagram. What is it?
And FR lore is all well and good, but it's not quite playing fair to expect players to have that kind of knowledge, especially since you don't even see Aznar Thrul in BP2 or Neera's quest; in context of the game itself, Dennaton escapes, and then someone we don't know teleports into his room, talks to him about some scheme that has nothing to do with the actual story of BP2, and kills him while Baeloth is kidnapping the heroes again. Not exactly a climax to remember.
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There is no alternate ending and this one does not sound too absurd IMHO.
Even if you are at epic levels you will be exhausted after such a battle (all of the enemies are very high level as well), and Baeloth is still a very powerful Sorcerer anyway, despite his arrogance. I don't find it too absurd that he should be able to capture the exhausted team, not to mention he could have put some spell components into your dishes or that kind of things.
I'm not complaining that the ending doesn't make sense. I'm complaining that after everything I did to get there, I got whisked away to gods only know where by an infuriatingly smug piece of crap who by all rights should have stayed dead after the original Black Pits.
For what it's worth, here's the real story behind Stannel Eibor: The Black Pits II was pretty much the first thing I was assigned to work on when I arrived at Beamdog. Several aspects had already been locked in--Dennaton and his place in Thayan society, the Winged and her crew, and I believe Baeloth's role in the story, though that might have come later. The ending, as best as I can recall, was locked in before I arrived, with an eye towards a possible Black Pits III at some later date.
Stuff I added to the mix were the pit fighter characters (Brother Ellraish and Feldrak Feldraki were loosely based on tabletop characters I'd played), some sidequest stuff, the "address the audience like a pro wrestler might" idea, and Baeloth's alias.
I'm not sure if I heard Mark's delivery as Baeloth before I read Baeloth dialogue text on the page, but I distinctly remember asking Phil, "Is this guy supposed to talk like Stan Lee?" To my eyes--which have spent a lot of time reading comics--that's certainly how it came across to me. Turns out that wasn't the case so far as Phil knew; I can't recall ever asking Dave Gross what influence, if any, was there.
But that's still how it read to me, and in BPII he was going to be a scribe, and have an alias, and Stan Lee was a famous scribe of a sort. "Lee" was a shortened version of his actual family name, Lieber, I started juggling the emphasis around in Stan Lieber in a search for something Forgotten Realms-y enough to pass muster, and eventually landed on Stannel Eibor as reference people with a certain pop cultural frame might catch without calling too much attention to itself.
To the best of my knowledge, nobody made that connection. But I did hear about a screwed-up anagram, which up until tonight confused the heck out of me.
Honestly, I wish I had been thinking along those lines, it would've been easy enough to get a workable pronunciation and the anagram in, and an anagram alias wouldn't be out of character for Baeloth. But I wasn't. Maybe if I'd gone on to write the BP2 text I would've twigged to it, but another writer whose name escapes me after several drinks at 12:45 in the morning handled the dialogue.
And that's how the sausage gets made. Part of it anyway. The word sausage.
As for the phenomenally-talented Mark Meer, I'm going to stand by my assumption that he was channeling Mark Hamill's Joker:
Thank you for the insight, and yeah that anagram thing confused me for a while as well, though I did think of Stan Lee.
And congratulations for the pit fighters, each of them is really a good one in my opinion. I'd have liked more interaction with them, because most of them is just "will you fight with me?" or "will you make a poison for Joker?", but their personality is great and unique. I particularly like Brother Ellraish Who said "Koveras"?
Loatheb would have been nice but it is taken by Warcraft...