Tweaking the Beamdog NPC's a bit
lujo
Member Posts: 236
I've been doing a bunch of trolling / survey over on the codex boards and came across a line of reasoning the deplorable trolls over there consistenly share. It's not in itself unreasonable, and paying attention to this might improve the image of BG:EE.
They are almost universaly complaining about the added NPC's initiating dialogue too much, and praise the old NPC's for not doing so. I... I don't care much for the old NPC's, don't think the new guys don't fit in or anything, but I have to agree with the codex trolls on that. The new NPC's kind of force themselvs on the player and it does get irritating even if you don't mind the NPC's otherwise. This is a very legit complaint, honestly.
I think Beamdog would do very well to make the NPC's which do have dialogue the player can explore, to not automatically initiate dialogue. They do it way too often. Let the player talk to them instead. I find mostly everything else I got on the feedback front to be mostly laughable/insane/stupid, but this is a very good point.
The old companions might mostly be just cheezily portraited, lousily voice acted, stock fantasy cardbord cutouts for the most part (pardon me for not having much taste for classic fantasy), but they're pretty unobtrusive, and the new ones are pretty obtrusive in comparison. This can even be grating to someone who doesn't even care enough for Baldurs Gate to get worked up about it, but it seems to be very grating to a lot of people who do care about Baldurs Gate (even if they're evidently and undeniably not right in the head otherwise and seem to have repulsive worldviews and stuff).
It seems a lot of that anger could easily be remedied. Just make the new NPC's be talkable to but not initiate dialogue.
They are almost universaly complaining about the added NPC's initiating dialogue too much, and praise the old NPC's for not doing so. I... I don't care much for the old NPC's, don't think the new guys don't fit in or anything, but I have to agree with the codex trolls on that. The new NPC's kind of force themselvs on the player and it does get irritating even if you don't mind the NPC's otherwise. This is a very legit complaint, honestly.
I think Beamdog would do very well to make the NPC's which do have dialogue the player can explore, to not automatically initiate dialogue. They do it way too often. Let the player talk to them instead. I find mostly everything else I got on the feedback front to be mostly laughable/insane/stupid, but this is a very good point.
The old companions might mostly be just cheezily portraited, lousily voice acted, stock fantasy cardbord cutouts for the most part (pardon me for not having much taste for classic fantasy), but they're pretty unobtrusive, and the new ones are pretty obtrusive in comparison. This can even be grating to someone who doesn't even care enough for Baldurs Gate to get worked up about it, but it seems to be very grating to a lot of people who do care about Baldurs Gate (even if they're evidently and undeniably not right in the head otherwise and seem to have repulsive worldviews and stuff).
It seems a lot of that anger could easily be remedied. Just make the new NPC's be talkable to but not initiate dialogue.
Post edited by lujo on
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Comments
Then of course there's the drow Sorcerer you can get later on, but that comes with a minimum level cap and you can just tell him to take a hike without being forced into any heavy interaction if that's what you want.
Personally I found the voice acting for Dorn and Rasaad fine, their interactions were generally the best as well as their related stories/quests. The other two were less well done, even if useful party members if you need a spellcaster. Also one of the new added female voice sets from the Enhanced Edition sounds like a clone of Neera, so I don't really know why Beamdog did that since it doesn't really sound great.
All in all I don't mind NPCs occasionally initiating dialogues with you if you have them join your party. But if you don't want to be forced to interact with them when they're not in your party, or at least not be forced into combat because of their event, there should be an option for that.
Neera's presentation gets a lot of flack for potentially forcing you into combat, but she is in a pretty out of the way location overall, and if they'd put her anywhere else in Beregost she'd either be encountered *more* or not be findable by a typical player. And the combat is typically quite easy (I'm far more afraid of the spiders and the assassin which are also in Beregost, though behind doors - not that a player who was playing for the first time would really know those things). To make no mention of a budding evil NPC encounter FF and bounty hunters there. There's only 2 other encounters in the game that I can think of where a person you stumble upon requests your aid - and you can refuse them. I've never refused Neera because she gives me a gem bag which is by far one of the most useful items in the whole game.
Dorn's can be *totally* avoided by simply not speaking to him in the FAI if you don't like him/don't intend to use him.
Bealoth is an Easter egg that was popular enough to end up in SoD, and it's entirely possible to miss him completely.
Rasaad is totally passive, but he has a lot of on-screen flourish to show you he is there (his voice line and kicking motion).
So you can see they went a different route with each available character and I'm sure it was because they wanted to experiment with how to introduce new characters and best utilize the content they were allowed to add.
And to reiterate - this seems to be a dependably universal complaint. I'm not sure they were aware this bothered people as much as it does, but this seems to be a VERY sore point and it's generating randomly bad word of mouth. That wouldn't be a problem if it was just raised by truly repulsive marginals, but, unfortunately, even broken clocks are right twice a day.
I think your idea is reasonable though. A good compromise.
On a side note, I don't think the voice acting is bad at all––far from it. But that's just me.
And for anyone who disagrees there is http://www.shsforums.net/files/file/1135-disable-enhanced-edition-npcs/
I'm not bashing Beamdog, I'm pointing out that if the NPC's they added were exactly the same as they are now EXCEPT that they only talked to the player when the player initiated dialogue, it would be much better. The way it is now really does feel like they're being pushed into the players face and it gets annoying even if you like the way they are written. The way they are designed just needs that one tweak, that's all.
- always walk one step behind me
- only talk when you 're spoken to...
which decade are we living in - or which part of the world?
Disgusting.
And I like the new npcs. I don't love them, I generally think they're ok. I grab one of them on my team once in a while.
However, where I agree with you, is that NEERA is intrusive. In BG1 you can still avoid the area where she is, but in BG2, her cutscene in the Bridge Disctrict grates me a bit, especially when I don't plan to take her along. When you're interrupted by her when you get out of the area, it's just tedious. If only there was a way to avoid that encounter... At least, the other new npcs are not as intrusive, because you can simply ignore them.
This seems to be a very common complaint, and it's not culture specific. Hell, your "which part of the world" comment is pretty chauvinist, I have to say. I have no idea about Neera, I only did her cutscene thingy. I didn't have her in the party. I also don't know what Baeloth's like I also only picked him up for the achievement and dismissed him. Dorn was way too chatty and so was Rasaad and while I didn't mind either of them as characters, having them chat me up every other screen transition got tiresome pretty quickly. One guy described the situation as "It's like unwanted sexual advances, it ought to be banned in Sweden", and it's not really inaccurate.
EDIT: The reason it all freaks trolls out is that if they don't like a characters personality, they can't avoid having it shoved in their face all the time. If it was a PID thing they just wouldn't initiate dialogue and there'd be less backlash, the way things are it's inevitable. I mean, I don't like... about 90% of the orignal characters in BG. Really, I don't. I'd like the game much less if they kept pestering me all the time, it'd be unbearable.
Anyway, it's something to seriously think about.
As for the subjec at hand - I'm just saying that this one aspect of the added NPC's, overly frequent dialogue initiation and reliance on them rather than the player to prompt interaction, doesn't work well for BG1. This should be taken into account. Plenty of things make the experience better, this happens not to and seems to rub plenty of people the wrong way.
And apparently people are upset about the non-voluntary nature of Neera's cutscene. For whatever reason. They might have a point there, too, I'm not sure any of the orignal characters initiated dialogue with you unless you clicked on them, and respecting that would have also caused less backlash. Folks feel like the new NPCs are forced on them (or forcing themselves on them), why they think so can be pinpointed and remedied comparatively easily.
That said, I really don't think we should get in the habit of generalizing other communities or calling anyone deplorable trolls. It sets a bad precedent for the tone of the forums here.
https://github.com/Argent77/A7-NoEENPCs
BG:EE: This component prevents Neera from initiating a conversation on her own.
BG2:EE: This component triggers the introduction cutscene in the Bridge District only when you talk to Neera. She can be found near the place where the Red Wizards cutscene occurs after the townsfolk talked about the local murders.
At the very least what subtledoctor said probably leads to what happened in my case - the game pushed her into my party at a very low level, and I simply had to kick her out. Then because she remained lvl1 I never really took her back. This probably happens a lot.
Agreed. The only reason people seem to hate it so much, besides blatant favoritism (which I'd rather not get into) is because it's a hard fight. It'd be more reasonable to ask for it to be toned down, or at least give Neera the invincibility flag like Dorn has.
- The Thayan Wizard likes to lead with Mirror Image, which if not disrupted makes it nearly impossible to stop his Flame Arrow and Magic Missile which are effectively instant kills (and level 1 OHKO immunity doesn't help since they're multiple-instance damage)
- The wizard is also backed up with two fighters unlike the Flaming Fist who is alone
- Viconia's AI reliably casts Command unlike Neera who randomly casts a spell which can actually harm the party if she pulls out a Color Spray or something. Vic is also a neutral NPC unlike Neera so she's not targeted by enemies unless no one else is nearby
- The encounter is generally met super early unlike Viconia in Peldvale which makes the whole fight an RNG-fest
I won't deny the execution of the fight has serious issues, but the premise is nothing new. Personally if any of these issues were fixed I'd have no problem with it.