My 2.0 complaint dump (GONE SEXUAL!)
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It is rwally frustrating to wait for so long to play a full run through the three games and then... This
I like the fact that they care enough to improve things, that's an awesome thing. We're talking about a really old game after all. So I hope to see things change for the better.
But as it is, some of the additions and are just annoying and unnecessary, or just plain ugly.
- The main menu is pretty nice as it is, but I dislike the font (might be a personal gripe.) The grey theme overall isn't a huge win for me, the blue and gold had a lot more warmth to it that I liked.
- Generally speaking, when browsing the menus, it can feel like the game is black and white because of the lack of color.
- The Save/Load menu looks a bit wonky as it is. Do I really need to see 'CHARNAME' blasted on there on the right side...?
- When I grab a weapon in the inventory, I get to see how it compares to the one I'm holding, but that table looks jarring. Actually, the table on the right side of the inventory screen that encases all the info is a bit ugly as well.
- On the Record seen, some line breaks are missing (I'm sure that'll be fixed eventually) but a lot of the information is still just dumped in there. It's great that we have all these categories, but I still have to click all over the place to find some stats that I'm looking for. I love the new information, though!
- I'd love to slap the text on the Record page to the right side, so that the picture is in the middle and the abilities are on the left, so that it's more like it used to be.
- The new spellbook is great, but what's with the washed out color? I loved the old gold parchment.
- When I go into the Options menu while playing the game, why do I see the SoD logo? I'm still playing BG.
- The world map was destroyed by that white font and the unnecessary display of traveling times. They should really stick to using a brown font and get rid of the times.
- The new tooltip is way too simple and it's almost a sin removing the classic scroll one.
On the positive side of things, however:
- The new icons for empty gear slots are great, I love them.
- The new Journal is awesome, some colors and the highlighting look a bit weird to me, otherwise it's a great addition.
- It's great that we get to choose so many colors for attire.
- I love the live map. On small areas it feels unnecessary to have it appear as large. I feel like the map shouldn't fill the whole screen, there should be a small black border around it. This would be great in small areas.
- Dual-wielding and ranged weapons both in quick weapon slots at the same time.
- Some great new settings (thankfully I can turn of quite a few that I hate.)
Now I wished I could refund all of them, not just SoD. And since I am not on steam I cannot even revert to 1.3.
Excellent!
Disappointed I was to find the Shaman to be something like the sorcerer is for the mage... In other words: not a particularly _new_ kind of kit... Also: The character creation screen went from being amazinge and easy to navigate to become a complete mess. The stone button-things we used to have were great. Now there's no borders or inactive buttons to let us see what alignment is disabled for what class, etc. and creating a new character is just confusing. Is this some kind of beta-bug brought on by the update or is this the actual update? Because right now it feels like I'm dealing with some kind of reversed King Midas, who has touched gold (the original BG games) and turned gold into shit (the present EE games)... Did you guys just want our money? When the news of bg:ee first came I thought it would be in the hands of someone who shared our passion for the games. Instead I see the game raped more and more for every update. Why?
In other news, water discovered to be wet
Seriously, I wish everybody would chill out. Change is hard, but change is good. It's almost impossible to make a fundamental change to a game without any teething trouble.
I'd at least give Beamdog a chance to fix the obvious bugs before releasing a wave of pure hatred. They may have broken a couple of things, but that's no reason to get shitty about it. It's day 1 of the game, give it a rest. Take a walk, come back a while later when the bugs are fixed. Even John Carmack never made a bug free game on release day. Even silly console games get patches these days.
Such a fallacy. You imply that all change is good. So if your health change from not having cancer to getting cancer, then that is good? Because that's basically what Overhaul did to BG. They gave it cancer.
When all the numerous complaints and reports of broken/flawed parts of Siege of Dragonspear and the new patches are dealt with, then maybe I'll update to the new patches and buy their new game. I'm just disappointed in Beamdog's own performance and their inability to come up with these solutions on their own, we're the ones that have been giving them our money and support for this stuff. There's nothing wrong with the consumer criticizing the product they paid for, mods should be a supplement not a permanent solution.
While it's true some of the changes are welcome additions like dual wielding being easier to switch in and out of, and that some of their ideas could be good, they screwed around with things they thought were a good idea and actually weren't as well as numerous things just not being tested well enough to be fixed. People have bashed Obsidian all the time for the same thing, and as much as I love them some of their games would have been more successful like Alpha Protocol if their QA didn't fail them. This is true, but part of change is testing your own product to make sure when it's available on the shelf, it performs the way it should for those paying for it. Yes, we're only talking about video games here, but even so it's the responsibility of Beamdog to do that. It's not our responsibility to do all that for them, particularly when it's been several years now that they've been working on these games. Do they want people to buy a game to test it for them, or actually hire people to do these things inside and out to correct most of the issues before the game even reaches us? The Metacritic/GameRankings scores for BGEE and BG2EE would certainly have been better had Beamdog released the games with better functionality than they did. It affects perception and affects sales too, go to the GOG forums for example and there are those who are less than pleased with Beamdog's work.
I understand the need to be patient and that things will slip through. But I think it's been happening that way for far too long and too many things are slipping through the cracks for it to seem like acceptable. That's just how I feel anyway, I still like the Enhanced Editions before these new patches hit as they're mostly functional the way they should be. I was hoping the new patches would clear up the hiccups instead of what I'm hearing about in such a short amount of time which is more negative than I was hoping for.
Yes, there are bugs, yes, the UI is not finished (especially in BG1 and BG2), yes things should have been postponed a few weeks yet. No, world is not going down.
I also remember the initial release where they bragged about bug fixes. Well, I can honestly say I never encountered a bug with the original BG games (or if I did they were insignificant), but when I tried BG:EE for the first time, then there were loads of bugs. So you might see how I'm not so positive towards Overhaul seeing as I genuinely feel that they took gold and just wanted to profit off of it instead of improving upon it. And after this recent update the character creation screen is fugly imo. Now you can only see the spells you can use, but you can't see spells that are disabled for that class and alignment etc. And you have to scroll to see all available spells, AND there's a lot of extra clicks in order to do simple stuff. They just overcomplicated it and gave it a poor beta design. I don't see how that's good in any way. So yes, I will take the liberty of using the "complaint dump" in order to complain a bit about it.
1. It seriously affects my gameplay in a negative way.
2. It is hardcoded and un-modable and/or there are no workarounds for it.
In this case all you have to do is readjust an option every once in a while. Annoying? Definitely. Gamebreaking? Absolutely not.
Caveat: If LoB difficulty is still broken (haven't checked in a few updates) and you want to play with it turned on, then that would be gamebreaking by my criteria.
The UI is interesting, and I welcome what they are trying to do. That it still has issues and some... odd... choices in parts is I think obvious to everyone, including the devs. I always appreciate boldness in trying new things, but this does look like it would have needed another month or two in the oven before it was ready to be unleashed on a hungry public.
I feel sorry for SoD. It could have been something really cool, a new, original IE game; it still is, it's just that the slew of problems with bugs, the UI, etc. will forever haunt this release. Why you would do something like that rather than have people miffed at a pushed-back release date is beyond me - unless they really do plan on this being the last title for their IE projects, in which case they don't care about future goodwill, just about the impulse sales on release. Guess no PWT:EE or IWD2:EE are coming.
Me personally I'll reserve my verdict until I see how they deal with this fiasco - and how quickly. I never did plan on buying SoD before summer when I actually have time to play it, but if things keep going this way I'll just skip it entirely.