" I can't think of many developers that make patch updates virtually modular so that everyone can experience the game how they want."
Yeah, too bad they didn't give the option to use the old (and much better IMO) UI Failboat!
No, but they made the entire UI completely moddable for the first time ever – you can even mod it in real time while you're playing the game. Not only will you have the old UI back, but you'll probably have dozens of other options in relatively short order as well. Hardly "failboat."
Edit: "Other changes aren't going to go over as well for the purists who still replay the original regularly, however. The health bars above everyone really ruins the Baldur's Gate feel (although they can thankfully be toggled off).
Some obvious changes are also missing but feel like they should have been added in the updates to a new edition – like a radius to show you where an area effect spell like entangle or fireball will strike." -Gameskinny
Again if it can be turned off, why make an issue out of it? Moreover, the author would want to add radius visuals...why do I get the feeling that should it have been added, he would also complain? Ah, yes, because he's saying that health bars are not for the purists, when the same can be said to a radius visual.
"Graphics – 21 / 25 Many of the assets may be taken from the original game, but Baldur’s gate is still beautiful and the new expansion does not change that. The new areas are well drawn and animated.
Sound – 6 / 25 A long standing but unresolved bug with the enhanced edition plagued the reviewer throughout the game leaving the sound experience considerably worse than the original.
Gameplay – 11 / 25 Siege of Dragonspear uses the beautiful and beloved Infinity Engine with Baldur’s Gate graphics to tell a mediocre and frequently offensive story.
Ease of Use / Glitches – 5 / 25 The sound effect bug brings the game down into the ‘well below acceptable quality’ category. This impression is fortified by the character import bug and other glitches.
Adjustment – -10 The final step in the MHN Game Review Guidelines is the reviewer’s adjustment. In this case your author gives -10 for making such a disappointing, unnecessarily politicised, botch of expanding a well loved game.
Overall – 33%"
This "review" is just abysmal. Hugely downvoting the game because of one bug (and even if it's a severe bug) is plain wrong.
"Not that you’ll really want to complete the side content, and that brings us to the primary complaint about Dragonspear: the writing. The Baldur’s Gate games were renowned for their writing, with memorable characters and quest lines often mixing jokes with serious discussions that felt right at home in it’s setting, and pretty close to a proper DnD campaign. Dragonspear doesn’t have any of that, and the only characters that are memorable usually are for the wrong reason.
Quest writing ranges from boring to confusing to outright aggravating when the game doesn’t seem to know how to react to your input.
Despite whatever idea you might have, and even if that idea worked in the last game, it probably won’t work here. Quests have one, maybe two resolutions, and anything outside of that is a no-go, usually breaking the game. There’s no sense of adventure, and no joy in figuring out obscure ways to finish missions like you would in a real DnD setting, just go to X and kill/collect/activate Y. Very few of the quests have multiple endings, and your choices rarely make a difference, save for one or two major sections.
Worse is the NPC writing, with most characters vomiting up their entire back story to you the second you meet. There’s no progression over time, it’s just “hello, my name is X, and here is my entire backstory and character arc, thank you, come again.” within the first few seconds. That’s if the writing stays within the game, and while the original Baldur’s Gate had some fourth-wall breaking moments, way too much of the writing in Dragonspear seems to be pop-culture references, often thrown in randomly without any reason. There’s a hippie you can meet that has some of the most aggravating dialogue in the series, or the “LOL, so randumb!” writing of one of your companions. There’s a Viking character that only ever mentions that he’s a Viking and nothing else, and several references to things that have absolutely nothing to do with the world of Baldur’s Gate that are out of place and immersion breaking. Returning characters now have inconsistent and occasionally paradoxical personalities to what they used to have, and most often character’s intentions make very little sense, even after you learn their whole story.
Even if the writing were better, Dragonspear is still something of a mess. Working off of an improved version of the engine, the game is now able to render more NPCs on screen, and it uses this to make crowded areas like the streets of Baldur’s Gate seem actually crowded. The effect looks cool and really works to sell the scene, until you realize that this has completely ruined the game’s already spotty path-finding AI, making it an absolute chore to move around and a nightmare to identify your party in a sea of faces. It also contains several battle scenes, which handle like a hot mess when there’s dozens of weak NPCs clashing and loot drops littering the field. If there’s something you want to actually take when the fight is done, you’ll need to dig through a mountain of useless garbage to get to it, and trying to keep track of your party during these scenes is nearly impossible.
Dragonspear felt like someone tried to make a new Baldur’s Gate game without ever bothering to play the old games. Between the confusing and boring writing, bland and generic locations, and myriad of bugs there’s no way any fan of the original games should play this when so many better options exist. Beamdog have said they want to make a third Baldur’s Gate game in the future, and if Dragonspear is what they do when given creative license, then perhaps it’s best the series remains dormant.
What few good ideas there are disappear under a mountain of bad design choices and poor writing. It's saving graces are mostly what we already had in the original Baldur's Gate games, and many mods present better content at no cost."
I feel like these two reviews are fairly unjustified. The first one is too vague in my opinion. A sound bug without an explanation what it's about? Not buying it.
The latter....there's a lot of misinformation within it imo. The part about characters seems to be the most jarringly visible one.
You have to take into consideration that an average of 69 makes the game "mediocre" by todays Industry-standards, which, as a message, to many gamers reads as "Don't buy it."
Hmmm... I'm starting to wonder. Am I just blinded by glorious nostalgia if I think the game is better than that? I'll gladly be, if so.
In all honesty, I don't understand what the first reviewer was trying to say by claiming that "Many areas were taken from the original game." Which ones? I can't think of any apart from the Baldur's Gate locations themselves and even those received touch-ups here and there such as the addition of the marketplace stands in front of Ducal Palace or the Refugee Tents next to the Iron Throne HQ. It just feels insincere.
I am a bit puzzled at the 'bland and generic' locations note in the 2nd review. Every location that I visited felt fresh, new and interesting to me (not to mention some of them with gorgeous artwork).
You have to take into consideration that an average of 69 makes the game "mediocre" by todays Industry-standards, which, as a message, to many gamers reads as "Don't buy it."
Hmmm... I'm starting to wonder. Am I just blinded by glorious nostalgia if I think the game is better than that? I'll gladly be, if so.
@justtravelinthrough Yes, this game is mediocre to good. Not great or excellent.
You have to take into consideration that an average of 69 makes the game "mediocre" by todays Industry-standards, which, as a message, to many gamers reads as "Don't buy it."
Hmmm... I'm starting to wonder. Am I just blinded by glorious nostalgia if I think the game is better than that? I'll gladly be, if so.
@justtravelinthrough Yes, this game is mediocre to good. Not great or excellent.
Come now, SoD is better than any Elder Scroll or Witcher game.
Remember: when (if) you go there and comment, try to follow the site rules, especially this: flaming other users, whether provoked or not, is not allowed.
Just out of curiosity, what standard are we using to define an 'official' review? Is a review from some guy named Mathew Hopkins' blog being given the same weight as, say, PC World? Can I start up a wordpress page, write a review, and have it included in the score?
I think small time bloggers that aren't being paid for their reviews are going to be more subject to biased motivations for writing the reviews in the first place (as appears to be the case in this rather agenda-heavy piece). If we start including 1-man unpaid blogs in this score, we might as well start including user reviews from here on the forums.
@illathid I think that point is entirely up to what you want from a video game and I don't think you'll find a objective set of criteria to make a comparison fair for both sides.
As to what @FinneousPJ said: I think I need to clarify how I feel about SoD: I really, really feel the game is at least "good" and I'd probably score it something like an 8 out of 10, all things I picked up on my one and a half playthroughs considered. The typical "mediocre" review (60 to 70%) I see online is awarded to games that, while somewhat entertaining on a first playthrough, does not invite to a second and is generally forgotten as the years role by. Personally, I can see myself taking characters through SoD five years from now and I'm certain Beamdogs continuos support will bring it closer to the nine out of ten, by that time.
My previous comment was meant to be ironic, however I forgot to add in emoji. (totally not ironic now)
@justtravelinthrough I know. All reviews are entirely subjective in nature. I just like to present alternatives opinions when people say something I like is objectively bad, or in this case mediocre.
You have to take into consideration that an average of 69 makes the game "mediocre" by todays Industry-standards, which, as a message, to many gamers reads as "Don't buy it."
Hmmm... I'm starting to wonder. Am I just blinded by glorious nostalgia if I think the game is better than that? I'll gladly be, if so.
@justtravelinthrough Yes, this game is mediocre to good. Not great or excellent.
Come now, SoD is better than any Elder Scroll or Witcher game.
@illathid I don't play Elder Scrolls but I think Witcher 1 was a lot better than this
@FinneousPJ The Witcher 1 had some of the worst writing I've ever seen in a game: a main villain called "the professor"; it has you looking for "mutagens"; and the main character was an amnesiac. I rest my case.
This is a thread for official reviews, yes (people are free to think that SoD is better/worse than Witcher games, but this is not a subject of this thread). And it's very hard to define what an official review is.
The Intenet today is such a tool that anyone, pushing the right puttons, could post something that quickly becomes known to hundreds of thousands of people.
When choosing which reviews to count in this thread, I look at gaming sites. And rpgwatch.com, the source that is respected in the gaming world, counted Matthew Hopkins News review as a review among others - http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33168
It could be unfortunate and there could be people who are not happy with this or that review, but whether we share the views expressed in it is a question different to "what reviews are available".
As Trent Oster mentioned, "it’s the internet and pretty much hates everything."
So, looking at the links in the OP here and discussed in comments in this thread, each person decides him(her)self, whether he(she) shares this or that review, or not, whether he(she) should trust a review by a blogger or a huge gaming site, like rockpapershotgun.com, venturebeat.com and pcworld.com.
The 33/100 review does not read like one from the get-go, and has some far reaching attempts at connecting in-game material with real world events like a broken crayon would to a connect-the-dots picture.
Corwin is not racist to African Americans but the author does their best to write as if it is indeed so. It is such a blatant attempt to create an illusion of correlation between Corwin of the Flaming Fist, and a Corwin the police officer who may or may not be living in Ferguson.
Corwin is racist to Drow.
Reach any further and one's arms will pop out of their sockets.
It would be nice if you could separate the blogs from gaming sites, definitely if you got an overall score that can be effected by random bloggers with an agenda.
Last year GameSpot's The Lobby had a long discussion about whether we should be scoring games at all in reviews, since reviews by definition are subjective--and every site has their own criteria for what scores are based on, what metrics they use, whether a reviewer can "boost" a score based on their personal bias (i.e. someone who's a long-time fan of Baldur's Gate might feel inclined to raise the score of a Baldur's Gate expansion, whereas someone who's never really liked Baldur's Gate might feel inclined to lower it).
Metacritic has its own limitations: some sites do their ratings out of five stars, but don't do fractions--so a game that gets 4/5, by Metacritic's standards, would be counted as 80/100, which might not match the reviewer's actual feelings about that game (they might have rated it higher or lower).
How review "scores" are generated has always been interesting to me. I generally prefer the x/10 system, using only whole numbers, because it's easier to guess at the reviewer's overall impressions of the game, compared to a percentage score that feels like more of an accumulation of subjective criteria.
When it comes to this thread, pay attention to the reviews you trust, ignore the ones you don't, and look at the average score as the aggregate of everything that's out there, good and bad.
This is a thread for official reviews, yes (people are free to think that SoD is better/worse than Witcher games, but this is not a subject of this thread). And it's very hard to define what an official review is.
The Intenet today is such a tool that anyone, pushing the right puttons, could post something that quickly becomes known to hundreds of thousands of people.
When choosing which reviews to count in this thread, I look at gaming sites. And rpgwatch.com, the source that is respected in the gaming world, counted Matthew Hopkins News review as a review among others - http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33168
It could be unfortunate and there could be people who are not happy with this or that review, but whether we share the views expressed in it is a question different to "what reviews are available".
As Trent Oster mentioned, "it’s the internet and pretty much hates everything."
So, looking at the links in the OP here and discussed in comments in this thread, each person decides him(her)self, whether he(she) shares this or that review, or not, whether he(she) should trust a review by a blogger or a huge gaming site, like rockpapershotgun.com, venturebeat.com and pcworld.com.
I would genuinely be reluctant even if it were a positive review – I'm looking at the aggregate score to see what professional gaming sites are saying about the product, and Matthew Hopkins' personal blog sticks out like a sore thumb on that list. You should of course use whatever review judging criteria you feel is appropriate, but if PC World and some guy named Matt are being given the same weight then we might want to just post the reviews and their scores without putting a numerical average in the thread title.
This isn't about not wanting it included because I think the game is perfect – I happen to give it about a 7.5. I just think Kotaku or PC Gamer's reviews are more official than yours or mine.
Sorry if any of that came off in any way acerbic, it wasn't meant to.
This is a thread for official reviews, yes (people are free to think that SoD is better/worse than Witcher games, but this is not a subject of this thread). And it's very hard to define what an official review is.
The Intenet today is such a tool that anyone, pushing the right puttons, could post something that quickly becomes known to hundreds of thousands of people.
When choosing which reviews to count in this thread, I look at gaming sites. And rpgwatch.com, the source that is respected in the gaming world, counted Matthew Hopkins News review as a review among others - http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33168
It could be unfortunate and there could be people who are not happy with this or that review, but whether we share the views expressed in it is a question different to "what reviews are available".
As Trent Oster mentioned, "it’s the internet and pretty much hates everything."
So, looking at the links in the OP here and discussed in comments in this thread, each person decides him(her)self, whether he(she) shares this or that review, or not, whether he(she) should trust a review by a blogger or a huge gaming site, like rockpapershotgun.com, venturebeat.com and pcworld.com.
I would genuinely be reluctant even if it were a positive review – I'm looking at the aggregate score to see what professional gaming sites are saying about the product, and Matthew Hopkins' personal blog sticks out like a sore thumb on that list. You should of course use whatever review judging criteria you feel is appropriate, but if PC World and some guy named Matt are being given the same weight then we might want to just post the reviews and their scores without putting a numerical average in the thread title.
This isn't about not wanting it included because I think the game is perfect – I happen to give it about a 7.5. I just think Kotaku or PC Gamer's reviews are more official than yours or mine.
Sorry if any of that came off in any way acerbic, it wasn't meant to.
Meh I would leave the review in, people reading that review will go either; 1. wow this guy is weird or 2. this guy is totally right! In which case they were probably too oversensitive to be able to handle playing the game in the first place.
@bengoshi quite frankly, I would not consider that review at all. The "reviewer" demonstrates lack of basic understanding of the FR setting, and still goes on and complains about things he clearly could have understood had he done his homework before reviewing. It discredits the entire review in my opinion.
I think an official review is done by someone who is a professional reviewer. How do you become a professional reviewer? You get paid to do it. Same thing with being a professional actor/actress, carpenter, or anything else really: to be professional with the thing you're doing, you have to have it as a profession and get paid doing it.
This is a thread for official reviews, yes (people are free to think that SoD is better/worse than Witcher games, but this is not a subject of this thread). And it's very hard to define what an official review is.
Comments
http://matthewhopkinsnews.com/?p=3357 33/100 (!!!)
"Graphics – 21 / 25
Many of the assets may be taken from the original game, but Baldur’s gate is still beautiful and the new expansion does not change that. The new areas are well drawn and animated.
Sound – 6 / 25
A long standing but unresolved bug with the enhanced edition plagued the reviewer throughout the game leaving the sound experience considerably worse than the original.
Gameplay – 11 / 25
Siege of Dragonspear uses the beautiful and beloved Infinity Engine with Baldur’s Gate graphics to tell a mediocre and frequently offensive story.
Ease of Use / Glitches – 5 / 25
The sound effect bug brings the game down into the ‘well below acceptable quality’ category. This impression is fortified by the character import bug and other glitches.
Adjustment – -10
The final step in the MHN Game Review Guidelines is the reviewer’s adjustment. In this case your author gives -10 for making such a disappointing, unnecessarily politicised, botch of expanding a well loved game.
Overall – 33%"
This "review" is just abysmal. Hugely downvoting the game because of one bug (and even if it's a severe bug) is plain wrong.
http://www.quadnine.net/reviews/baldurs-gate-siege-dragonspear-review/ 45/100
"Not that you’ll really want to complete the side content, and that brings us to the primary complaint about Dragonspear: the writing. The Baldur’s Gate games were renowned for their writing, with memorable characters and quest lines often mixing jokes with serious discussions that felt right at home in it’s setting, and pretty close to a proper DnD campaign. Dragonspear doesn’t have any of that, and the only characters that are memorable usually are for the wrong reason.
Quest writing ranges from boring to confusing to outright aggravating when the game doesn’t seem to know how to react to your input.
Despite whatever idea you might have, and even if that idea worked in the last game, it probably won’t work here. Quests have one, maybe two resolutions, and anything outside of that is a no-go, usually breaking the game. There’s no sense of adventure, and no joy in figuring out obscure ways to finish missions like you would in a real DnD setting, just go to X and kill/collect/activate Y. Very few of the quests have multiple endings, and your choices rarely make a difference, save for one or two major sections.
Worse is the NPC writing, with most characters vomiting up their entire back story to you the second you meet. There’s no progression over time, it’s just “hello, my name is X, and here is my entire backstory and character arc, thank you, come again.” within the first few seconds. That’s if the writing stays within the game, and while the original Baldur’s Gate had some fourth-wall breaking moments, way too much of the writing in Dragonspear seems to be pop-culture references, often thrown in randomly without any reason. There’s a hippie you can meet that has some of the most aggravating dialogue in the series, or the “LOL, so randumb!” writing of one of your companions. There’s a Viking character that only ever mentions that he’s a Viking and nothing else, and several references to things that have absolutely nothing to do with the world of Baldur’s Gate that are out of place and immersion breaking. Returning characters now have inconsistent and occasionally paradoxical personalities to what they used to have, and most often character’s intentions make very little sense, even after you learn their whole story.
Even if the writing were better, Dragonspear is still something of a mess. Working off of an improved version of the engine, the game is now able to render more NPCs on screen, and it uses this to make crowded areas like the streets of Baldur’s Gate seem actually crowded. The effect looks cool and really works to sell the scene, until you realize that this has completely ruined the game’s already spotty path-finding AI, making it an absolute chore to move around and a nightmare to identify your party in a sea of faces. It also contains several battle scenes, which handle like a hot mess when there’s dozens of weak NPCs clashing and loot drops littering the field. If there’s something you want to actually take when the fight is done, you’ll need to dig through a mountain of useless garbage to get to it, and trying to keep track of your party during these scenes is nearly impossible.
Dragonspear felt like someone tried to make a new Baldur’s Gate game without ever bothering to play the old games. Between the confusing and boring writing, bland and generic locations, and myriad of bugs there’s no way any fan of the original games should play this when so many better options exist. Beamdog have said they want to make a third Baldur’s Gate game in the future, and if Dragonspear is what they do when given creative license, then perhaps it’s best the series remains dormant.
What few good ideas there are disappear under a mountain of bad design choices and poor writing. It's saving graces are mostly what we already had in the original Baldur's Gate games, and many mods present better content at no cost."
Is that really the game I'm playing right now?
The latter....there's a lot of misinformation within it imo. The part about characters seems to be the most jarringly visible one.
Hmmm... I'm starting to wonder. Am I just blinded by glorious nostalgia if I think the game is better than that? I'll gladly be, if so.
Remember: when (if) you go there and comment, try to follow the site rules, especially this: flaming other users, whether provoked or not, is not allowed.
Just out of curiosity, what standard are we using to define an 'official' review? Is a review from some guy named Mathew Hopkins' blog being given the same weight as, say, PC World? Can I start up a wordpress page, write a review, and have it included in the score?
I think small time bloggers that aren't being paid for their reviews are going to be more subject to biased motivations for writing the reviews in the first place (as appears to be the case in this rather agenda-heavy piece). If we start including 1-man unpaid blogs in this score, we might as well start including user reviews from here on the forums.
As to what @FinneousPJ said: I think I need to clarify how I feel about SoD: I really, really feel the game is at least "good" and I'd probably score it something like an 8 out of 10, all things I picked up on my one and a half playthroughs considered. The typical "mediocre" review (60 to 70%) I see online is awarded to games that, while somewhat entertaining on a first playthrough, does not invite to a second and is generally forgotten as the years role by. Personally, I can see myself taking characters through SoD five years from now and I'm certain Beamdogs continuos support will bring it closer to the nine out of ten, by that time.
My previous comment was meant to be ironic, however I forgot to add in emoji.
I know. All reviews are entirely subjective in nature. I just like to present alternatives opinions when people say something I like is objectively bad, or in this case mediocre.
@justtravelinthrough That's cool. You say 8, I say 7. It's all subjective
EDIT: but I think some people on these forums are - understandably - highly emotionally invested in this game, and can't see anything wrong with it...
The Witcher 1 had some of the worst writing I've ever seen in a game: a main villain called "the professor"; it has you looking for "mutagens"; and the main character was an amnesiac. I rest my case.
For example, do http://shaneplays.com/the-siege-of-siege-of-dragonspear-a-baldurs-gate-story/, http://www.zam.com/article/300/why-i-probably-wont-beat-baldurs-gate-siege-of-dragonspear count?
The Intenet today is such a tool that anyone, pushing the right puttons, could post something that quickly becomes known to hundreds of thousands of people.
When choosing which reviews to count in this thread, I look at gaming sites. And rpgwatch.com, the source that is respected in the gaming world, counted Matthew Hopkins News review as a review among others - http://www.rpgwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=33168
It could be unfortunate and there could be people who are not happy with this or that review, but whether we share the views expressed in it is a question different to "what reviews are available".
As Trent Oster mentioned, "it’s the internet and pretty much hates everything."
So, looking at the links in the OP here and discussed in comments in this thread, each person decides him(her)self, whether he(she) shares this or that review, or not, whether he(she) should trust a review by a blogger or a huge gaming site, like rockpapershotgun.com, venturebeat.com and pcworld.com.
Corwin is not racist to African Americans but the author does their best to write as if it is indeed so. It is such a blatant attempt to create an illusion of correlation between Corwin of the Flaming Fist, and a Corwin the police officer who may or may not be living in Ferguson.
Corwin is racist to Drow.
Reach any further and one's arms will pop out of their sockets.
Metacritic has its own limitations: some sites do their ratings out of five stars, but don't do fractions--so a game that gets 4/5, by Metacritic's standards, would be counted as 80/100, which might not match the reviewer's actual feelings about that game (they might have rated it higher or lower).
How review "scores" are generated has always been interesting to me. I generally prefer the x/10 system, using only whole numbers, because it's easier to guess at the reviewer's overall impressions of the game, compared to a percentage score that feels like more of an accumulation of subjective criteria.
When it comes to this thread, pay attention to the reviews you trust, ignore the ones you don't, and look at the average score as the aggregate of everything that's out there, good and bad.
Or just look at Metacritic.
This isn't about not wanting it included because I think the game is perfect – I happen to give it about a 7.5. I just think Kotaku or PC Gamer's reviews are more official than yours or mine.
Sorry if any of that came off in any way acerbic, it wasn't meant to.
1. wow this guy is weird
or
2. this guy is totally right! In which case they were probably too oversensitive to be able to handle playing the game in the first place.
The OP is edited, blog reviews are no longer counted in the overall score.
I left links to blog reviews, though.
I'm enjoying the game so far by the way but I am only about 5 hours in at this point.