My SoD review
TrudeauIsSanta
Member Posts: 161
"A good game whose biggest downfall is having to work between the defined boundaries of two long-standing titles."
There's been some controversy surrounding this game so I'm going to get that out of the way first. The "political agenda" accusations come from one vendor character who also happens to be transgender, which I didn't even know was the case until I heard about the controversy, then went back to use that dialogue option. When I initially encountered her I just bought things from her and moved on. Hardly "in your face" when you have to ask a specific question to get a specific answer you then take issue with. Almost every character in BG spills the beans to you when questioned - I don't see why this was expected to be any different.
Minsc's joke is out of place but it's a one-time thing and takes a good amount of effort to trigger in-game. I think the comparison to the Newhart show event from Baldur's Gate 1 is fair. It's more of an Easter Egg than anything, these are traditionally 4th-wall breaking, so I have no problem with either of these.
Finally, some people have claimed that Safana's character had been reworked. She's a bit more sarcastic than she was in BG1, but when you first meet her, there's something that just occurred that explains why she might have this new demeanor towards men (although she also immediately follows up by flirting with the PC if you've made a male CHARNAME). I had Safana in my party from BG1 to the end of SoD, and she seemed fine to me. There are some spoilers I could give to further explain how she is still her character at the core, but I'll leave it at that.
As for the game itself...
The backgrounds are better drawn than anything in BG1 or BG2, mainly in the sense that they have better shadowing. They still aren't HD assets, but are overall better than anything seen in 1 or 2. They're still blurry, I think they did that intentionally because this isn't a modernized release, it's supposed to blend seamlessly between two existing, dated titles, so they had to keep things pulled back visually to keep the transition from the game before and after consistent. I do wish they could've made the textures sharper, but overall the game does look a bit better.
Beamdog has built a new UI which is a lot easier on eyes, and there are a lot of minor quality of life improvements that make the game far more playable. There are still occasional pathfinding issues with party AI but for the most part that's been addressed as well. My characters no longer "forgot" commands I'd given them as they had in previous versions (both original unmodded and modded, and EE's), and that's thanks to the 2.0 script updates as well. The game feels a lot smoother when everyone responds to every command you give them. It actually reduces a lot of the difficulty, which tends to happen when things get closer to working as intended. It's like playing a fighting game with input lag and then having that delay reduced.
Since this is Infinity Engine 2016 and they know people are running better systems than they were when the games were originally released, they've designed encounters to be much larger in scale. You are going to encounter more and larger enemy hordes than you did in BG1 or BG2, which makes demolishing enemies with AoE so much more satisfying, and there are some encounters where you'll have a pack of allies fighting with you against a horde of enemies. On the lower difficulties this probably makes the game easier, but I was playing on Core (not even the hardest difficulty) and if I didn't play carefully I'd die anyway. The presence of allies doesn't turn the game into a CoD "on rails" experience, it's really done to better portray the scale of the battles you're engaging in.
Mage fights are also more fun than BG1 since this is now mid-level DnD, but they aren't as challenging as what you got in BG2 and in some ways that's a good thing. You can accidentally stumble into a serious mage encounter, and survive with lots of pausing and calculated risk, whereas in BG2 if you were playing on Core difficulty or above your first time and just walked into a mage encounter with no prior experience on how the room was set up, what spells the mage opened up with, not being buffed yet, you were going to have an insane RNGfest and probably have to reload. I played SoD on Core difficulty and though I did die a few times, the game felt a lot more fair. I never had to resort to cheese tactics or endless kiting to pull through.
BG1EE's experience cap is 161k which put my Paladin at Level 7, and the cap in SoD is 500k which put my Paladin at Level 9. That's after about 40 hours of gameplay, and the slow progression will probably be off-putting to some people. My understanding is they kept the cap low so you wouldn't enter BG2 with a character that trivializes all the content, and this is one of the gameplay issues that arises by having to wedge SoD between BG1 and BG2.
The biggest issue this expansion has in that regard is that when you import into BG2, you lose everything but your character level. You find a lot of magical items that are really good in SoD and some are better than what you'd ever get throughout SoA, and they just get flushed. BG1EE to SoD you bring over all your equipment, all your party member levels, everything. You start off in very good footing - though you don't need to do this, because you can just start SoD fresh and your party will have the best gear and be leveled adequately anyway (though you won't have the stat bonuses you would've received from the Manuals in BG1). You also lose whatever romances you had made with characters in SoD, and at least in my experience, the romance in SoD with Safana was abruptly cut off, which my understanding is to explain why she would treat CHARNAME the way she does when you do finally meet her in BG2. So while the gameplay here is nice, I wouldn't get too attached to anything you earn or any of the characters you like (especially if they're new). The loss of items going into BG2 is explained by the story, but all the character development that occurs in SoD and no one referencing anything from there is something Beamdog can hopefully improve on with a future BG2EE update. Even Imoen needs new lines during the tutorial in BG2 based on what happens at the end of SoD, instead she only refers to Candlekeep and Sarevok. This needs to be fixed.
There is a new sprite outline that does make things look *slightly* comicbook-esque, but you can disable this through the options. I actually liked it on because it makes your characters stand out a bit more in battle, as does the backgrounds now greying on pause. This feature can also be disabled through the options, but once again I left it on because it made figuring out who was who in the larger-scale battles that are so common in SoD much easier than it was without.
Some of the music and voiceovers are recycled assets, which was pretty disappointing, I don't know why this couldn't have had an all new soundtrack and tossed the old VA. It's jarring to go from modern recordings to thin-EQ sounds from the original, which to comes across as a little lazy. Jaheira doesn't have any new VA, and one of the few "bugs" in the game I encountered came from her. She will occasionally run her "Things stir to the south as we speak!" line, which is supposed to only occur in base BG1 until you have cleared the Nashkel mine. SoD is well past that having occurred and it's a leftover voice file that she shouldn't be referencing anymore.
The game's story takes place between BG1 and BG2, but I'd also say the quality of the story lands right beneath both of them as well. The story is a bit slow to start, as it was in BG1. The first chapter isn't a tutorial but you have to run around Baldur's Gate a bit recruiting some old party members. There are a few sidequests here as well which I felt unnecessarily slowed things down, they give you the option of playing errand boy a bit in the beginning so you can completely avoid it if you choose, but completionists are going to be annoyed at the sluggish pace the game starts at. It isn't the dark fantasy that BG2 was, and because of that I think a lot of the dialogue suffers. Some of it is admittedly poorly written - which is then exacerbated by being voiced - but the biggest issue is that it can be very dry, which is a problem I thought BG1 had as well. Most of the characters simply aren't that interesting, nor are the quests they send you on, because everything is too "realistic". BG1 wore me down because the iron crisis was the equivalent of a real-life oil crisis. SoD you start off dealing with refugees and that concept doesn't start going away until the end of the game. The antagonist has a reasonable platform (for a murderous villain) but is no Irenicus, however I'd say she's definitely more interesting than Sarevok was. This is largely due to the fact that you interact with her throughout the course of the game, as opposed to being the mystery villain who reveals his master plan at the very end. When it comes down to it, BG2 is still king storywise.
It took me about 40 hours to beat the game. I didn't switch in any of the new characters or find the secret hidden character, though I did do almost all of the sidequests in the game. It is more linear than BG1, you don't have a massive area to roam, the World Map is actually pretty limited, but the areas have more points of interest than anything in BG1, and those points of interest are often longer distractions than what most points of interest in BG1 is. The good thing about this is you spend less time "lawn mowing" and more time actually engaging in encounters and exploring dangerous territory. The bad news is that purists will think this means the game has become a hand-holding on-rails experience, but the end result is that you're spending more time in the action end of the DnD pool than the RP "talk to everyone and learn their life's story" end (and then complaining if you're bothered when their life story includes being transgender) before killing a bear for them.
As far as dialogue options for RP goes this isn't Mass Effect, KotOR or Dragon Age (Origins), but there's more there than was present in BG1. There's an event near the end of the game which is similar to an event from Chrono Trigger. There is a response to every major action you chose to take (or not take) during the course of the game, which is something BG1 was lacking and I do think that despite the occasional shortcomings of the writing, this is something that makes the game experience more memorable. BG1 didn't have anything with as much weight in decisionmaking and while this doesn't do anything earthshaking (you do need to import your SoD character into the already written BG2 after all), this does make the adventure a bit more interesting.
I didn't encounter any game or quest-ruining glitches, or any crashes. I did play multiplayer for about 30 minutes so I don't know how long it would've lasted, but I've read a lot of complaints about it being completely broken, and at least in my case that wasn't true.
There are some minor annoyances with the outdated ruleset I wish could be addressed by Beamdog. Traps should really be scanned for more frequently, it gets tiresome having to stop every few steps for six seconds to see if your Thief will detect whatever traps are there. I've resorted to using a mod to remove traps from other entries, but I do enjoy the mechanic, I just think it needs to be made less time-consuming. There's still a lot of inventory management going on, especially if you don't use a tweak mod to allow endless stacking of ammo (which I do), and there is far too much item clutter that could be turned into nothing but gold drops, since its sole purpose is to take up space in your bag until you get back to a vendor anyway. And who really continues the game after one of their characters gets gibbed? That needs to go. I also think the concept of allies automatically reviving after battle with a debuff (like in DA:O) should be brought in to the BG games as well. They have a toggle for the other modernizations, there's no reason they can't include these updates with a toggle as well for the purists that want to remain in the 90s and pretend nothing afterwards could possibly improve the game experience.
Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear isn't without issues. But I enjoyed myself. It's better than most titles getting released recently, anyway.
There's been some controversy surrounding this game so I'm going to get that out of the way first. The "political agenda" accusations come from one vendor character who also happens to be transgender, which I didn't even know was the case until I heard about the controversy, then went back to use that dialogue option. When I initially encountered her I just bought things from her and moved on. Hardly "in your face" when you have to ask a specific question to get a specific answer you then take issue with. Almost every character in BG spills the beans to you when questioned - I don't see why this was expected to be any different.
Minsc's joke is out of place but it's a one-time thing and takes a good amount of effort to trigger in-game. I think the comparison to the Newhart show event from Baldur's Gate 1 is fair. It's more of an Easter Egg than anything, these are traditionally 4th-wall breaking, so I have no problem with either of these.
Finally, some people have claimed that Safana's character had been reworked. She's a bit more sarcastic than she was in BG1, but when you first meet her, there's something that just occurred that explains why she might have this new demeanor towards men (although she also immediately follows up by flirting with the PC if you've made a male CHARNAME). I had Safana in my party from BG1 to the end of SoD, and she seemed fine to me. There are some spoilers I could give to further explain how she is still her character at the core, but I'll leave it at that.
As for the game itself...
The backgrounds are better drawn than anything in BG1 or BG2, mainly in the sense that they have better shadowing. They still aren't HD assets, but are overall better than anything seen in 1 or 2. They're still blurry, I think they did that intentionally because this isn't a modernized release, it's supposed to blend seamlessly between two existing, dated titles, so they had to keep things pulled back visually to keep the transition from the game before and after consistent. I do wish they could've made the textures sharper, but overall the game does look a bit better.
Beamdog has built a new UI which is a lot easier on eyes, and there are a lot of minor quality of life improvements that make the game far more playable. There are still occasional pathfinding issues with party AI but for the most part that's been addressed as well. My characters no longer "forgot" commands I'd given them as they had in previous versions (both original unmodded and modded, and EE's), and that's thanks to the 2.0 script updates as well. The game feels a lot smoother when everyone responds to every command you give them. It actually reduces a lot of the difficulty, which tends to happen when things get closer to working as intended. It's like playing a fighting game with input lag and then having that delay reduced.
Since this is Infinity Engine 2016 and they know people are running better systems than they were when the games were originally released, they've designed encounters to be much larger in scale. You are going to encounter more and larger enemy hordes than you did in BG1 or BG2, which makes demolishing enemies with AoE so much more satisfying, and there are some encounters where you'll have a pack of allies fighting with you against a horde of enemies. On the lower difficulties this probably makes the game easier, but I was playing on Core (not even the hardest difficulty) and if I didn't play carefully I'd die anyway. The presence of allies doesn't turn the game into a CoD "on rails" experience, it's really done to better portray the scale of the battles you're engaging in.
Mage fights are also more fun than BG1 since this is now mid-level DnD, but they aren't as challenging as what you got in BG2 and in some ways that's a good thing. You can accidentally stumble into a serious mage encounter, and survive with lots of pausing and calculated risk, whereas in BG2 if you were playing on Core difficulty or above your first time and just walked into a mage encounter with no prior experience on how the room was set up, what spells the mage opened up with, not being buffed yet, you were going to have an insane RNGfest and probably have to reload. I played SoD on Core difficulty and though I did die a few times, the game felt a lot more fair. I never had to resort to cheese tactics or endless kiting to pull through.
BG1EE's experience cap is 161k which put my Paladin at Level 7, and the cap in SoD is 500k which put my Paladin at Level 9. That's after about 40 hours of gameplay, and the slow progression will probably be off-putting to some people. My understanding is they kept the cap low so you wouldn't enter BG2 with a character that trivializes all the content, and this is one of the gameplay issues that arises by having to wedge SoD between BG1 and BG2.
The biggest issue this expansion has in that regard is that when you import into BG2, you lose everything but your character level. You find a lot of magical items that are really good in SoD and some are better than what you'd ever get throughout SoA, and they just get flushed. BG1EE to SoD you bring over all your equipment, all your party member levels, everything. You start off in very good footing - though you don't need to do this, because you can just start SoD fresh and your party will have the best gear and be leveled adequately anyway (though you won't have the stat bonuses you would've received from the Manuals in BG1). You also lose whatever romances you had made with characters in SoD, and at least in my experience, the romance in SoD with Safana was abruptly cut off, which my understanding is to explain why she would treat CHARNAME the way she does when you do finally meet her in BG2. So while the gameplay here is nice, I wouldn't get too attached to anything you earn or any of the characters you like (especially if they're new). The loss of items going into BG2 is explained by the story, but all the character development that occurs in SoD and no one referencing anything from there is something Beamdog can hopefully improve on with a future BG2EE update. Even Imoen needs new lines during the tutorial in BG2 based on what happens at the end of SoD, instead she only refers to Candlekeep and Sarevok. This needs to be fixed.
There is a new sprite outline that does make things look *slightly* comicbook-esque, but you can disable this through the options. I actually liked it on because it makes your characters stand out a bit more in battle, as does the backgrounds now greying on pause. This feature can also be disabled through the options, but once again I left it on because it made figuring out who was who in the larger-scale battles that are so common in SoD much easier than it was without.
Some of the music and voiceovers are recycled assets, which was pretty disappointing, I don't know why this couldn't have had an all new soundtrack and tossed the old VA. It's jarring to go from modern recordings to thin-EQ sounds from the original, which to comes across as a little lazy. Jaheira doesn't have any new VA, and one of the few "bugs" in the game I encountered came from her. She will occasionally run her "Things stir to the south as we speak!" line, which is supposed to only occur in base BG1 until you have cleared the Nashkel mine. SoD is well past that having occurred and it's a leftover voice file that she shouldn't be referencing anymore.
The game's story takes place between BG1 and BG2, but I'd also say the quality of the story lands right beneath both of them as well. The story is a bit slow to start, as it was in BG1. The first chapter isn't a tutorial but you have to run around Baldur's Gate a bit recruiting some old party members. There are a few sidequests here as well which I felt unnecessarily slowed things down, they give you the option of playing errand boy a bit in the beginning so you can completely avoid it if you choose, but completionists are going to be annoyed at the sluggish pace the game starts at. It isn't the dark fantasy that BG2 was, and because of that I think a lot of the dialogue suffers. Some of it is admittedly poorly written - which is then exacerbated by being voiced - but the biggest issue is that it can be very dry, which is a problem I thought BG1 had as well. Most of the characters simply aren't that interesting, nor are the quests they send you on, because everything is too "realistic". BG1 wore me down because the iron crisis was the equivalent of a real-life oil crisis. SoD you start off dealing with refugees and that concept doesn't start going away until the end of the game. The antagonist has a reasonable platform (for a murderous villain) but is no Irenicus, however I'd say she's definitely more interesting than Sarevok was. This is largely due to the fact that you interact with her throughout the course of the game, as opposed to being the mystery villain who reveals his master plan at the very end. When it comes down to it, BG2 is still king storywise.
It took me about 40 hours to beat the game. I didn't switch in any of the new characters or find the secret hidden character, though I did do almost all of the sidequests in the game. It is more linear than BG1, you don't have a massive area to roam, the World Map is actually pretty limited, but the areas have more points of interest than anything in BG1, and those points of interest are often longer distractions than what most points of interest in BG1 is. The good thing about this is you spend less time "lawn mowing" and more time actually engaging in encounters and exploring dangerous territory. The bad news is that purists will think this means the game has become a hand-holding on-rails experience, but the end result is that you're spending more time in the action end of the DnD pool than the RP "talk to everyone and learn their life's story" end (and then complaining if you're bothered when their life story includes being transgender) before killing a bear for them.
As far as dialogue options for RP goes this isn't Mass Effect, KotOR or Dragon Age (Origins), but there's more there than was present in BG1. There's an event near the end of the game which is similar to an event from Chrono Trigger. There is a response to every major action you chose to take (or not take) during the course of the game, which is something BG1 was lacking and I do think that despite the occasional shortcomings of the writing, this is something that makes the game experience more memorable. BG1 didn't have anything with as much weight in decisionmaking and while this doesn't do anything earthshaking (you do need to import your SoD character into the already written BG2 after all), this does make the adventure a bit more interesting.
I didn't encounter any game or quest-ruining glitches, or any crashes. I did play multiplayer for about 30 minutes so I don't know how long it would've lasted, but I've read a lot of complaints about it being completely broken, and at least in my case that wasn't true.
There are some minor annoyances with the outdated ruleset I wish could be addressed by Beamdog. Traps should really be scanned for more frequently, it gets tiresome having to stop every few steps for six seconds to see if your Thief will detect whatever traps are there. I've resorted to using a mod to remove traps from other entries, but I do enjoy the mechanic, I just think it needs to be made less time-consuming. There's still a lot of inventory management going on, especially if you don't use a tweak mod to allow endless stacking of ammo (which I do), and there is far too much item clutter that could be turned into nothing but gold drops, since its sole purpose is to take up space in your bag until you get back to a vendor anyway. And who really continues the game after one of their characters gets gibbed? That needs to go. I also think the concept of allies automatically reviving after battle with a debuff (like in DA:O) should be brought in to the BG games as well. They have a toggle for the other modernizations, there's no reason they can't include these updates with a toggle as well for the purists that want to remain in the 90s and pretend nothing afterwards could possibly improve the game experience.
Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear isn't without issues. But I enjoyed myself. It's better than most titles getting released recently, anyway.
11
Comments
I really don't get their logic of trying to "recapture the glory days" when that was pretty much lightning in a bottle. It can never be recreated again or improved upon. Especially in 2016 where bad writing is running rampant without a leash. That's why it's called a CLASSIC. Do you see people trying to rewrite Shakespear's plays?
Now we have the resurrection of a long dead genre with divinity otiginal sin, pillars of eternity, this and Torment Tides of Numenara. I think thats a good thing.
Divinity is actually a series which originated with Divine Divinity in 2002. Divinity Original Sin is prequel to Divine Divinity.
Pillars of Eternity clearly took its inspiration from the Infinity Engine games. In fact, many of the PoE devs worked on IE games, iirc.
Torment Tides of Numenera is based in the Numenera setting, which was inspired by the D&D universe and became a published tabletop game in 2013. The very concept of "Torment" in the title is a clear hint back to the old Planescape: Torment title.
There's a saying, "There is nothing new under the sun" (originally comes the Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:9). And that's true. Everything takes inspiration from everything else. In some cases, said inspiration is quite obvious. That is so with SoD. In other cases, you need to do a bit of digging to figure it out. But really, none of the games I just mentioned are "all new original ideas" in the sense of never taking clear inspiration from other sources.