Has anyone tried Sandrah saga?
Arthas
Member Posts: 1,091
in BGII:EE Mods
How is it? Really curious.
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-Sandrah is super special, more so than your character.
-You character WILL romance her.
-She will romance everyone else as well
-She will know everything and your character will be forced to admire her and agree with her
-lots of broken equipment (overpowered) this one is pretty standard for EET mods though.
This is all apparent really early on. I've never seen the opinion of someone who played the mod all the way through BG1 (Let alone the whole trilogy) who wasn't an alt of Roxxanne's.
Yes, there are some things in the mod I do NOT like....her overly sexual personality gets to be a bit too much (there's one scene where she just meets a paladin and immediately goes to bed with him). The mod itself paired with other large quest mods really boosts XP received. Highly recommended to pair it with EETweaks XP reduction otherwise you could be lvl 10 in chapter 5. She does tend to overshadow CHARName at times but the author has repeatedly said this is geared towards those who have played the original saga for the umpteenth time and wants a new take on it.
I guess where I'm going with this - try it out and see if you like it. It's definitely not everybody's cup of tea.
It does have some interesting thoughts and points but truly is just a dialogue slog of bad content.
Interesting material poorly executed is what I should say.
Honestly, even if you could put aside the... ‘special’ type of character Sandrah is, it still doesn’t excuse the fact that the quality of writing is just abysmal. I’m not just talking about the incredibly juvenile, shallow, self-insert fantasy that basically is the mod’s entire package, but the fact that the writer can’t even be bothered to get simple things like punctuation correct. For example, the constant usage of double exclamation marks. No, it’s not dramatic. It looks childish. Never mind the excessive spelling errors because Roxanne clearly never bothered to double-check anything that she wrote. The whole thing looks unbelievably lazy in so many ways.
I had to read the text files to figure this mod out because I’m sure as hell not suffering through it. I don’t think I’ve been able to find one redeeming thing to talk about over the time I’ve spent reading the damn thing, scratching my head, facepalming, falling off my chair from boredom... it’s bad. Simply put, the quantity of content does nothing to compensate for the poor quality, it just makes it worse by forcing you to waste even more of your time. Don’t bother.
Sandrah is not a character. She’s a walking mouthpiece that Roxanne uses to drag the player around by the nose and force them to play the game her way and she’ll happily take a big steaming dump on canon and player agency and any sort of enjoyment in order to do so. No other mod I’ve ever used feels like this. Just this tripe.
how using her changes the game into Saerileth's gate 2 shadows of Saerileth.
sounds like sandrath to me.
I heard a lot of crap about Saerileth back in the day. When I finally played the mod myself I liked it very much. Great mod about love to put it simply. Not realistic, not mature, no, but honest and heartwarming if kinda sad. Not for cynics, pretty sure.
Sandarah I dunno. All that bunga bunga stuff is bad sign. I mean it is all about your SOUL, eh? Eh, Roxanne?
This mod is horrible. I don't even feel bad about saying it because the author has clearly proven to show no interest in actually improving as a writer. I hated every second of reading it, and I can't imagine the pain of actually playing it. Though I have been sorely tempted many times to install it on a spare EET download and do an MSTing session because a summary just doesn't do it justice, albeit that would probably be breaking a few rules here on the forums.
1) do it, please!!
With your opera you remind me of this let's play:
https://lparchive.org/Vampire-The-Masquerade-Bloodlines-(by-gatz-and-TheMcD)/Update 56/
This was one of the best walkthroughs I've ever read
2) How much time before you're going to release BG2\ToB content for your npcs mods? I'm really really eager for more content
I have literally never had this reaction to any other mod I've ever tried. Not even from the worst of CoM mods.
I know a player who loves Sandrah Saga and will not play the game without it.
So, there is one thing that can be said about this mod: it's probably the one where the saying "you love it or you hate it" is as true as it ever gets. One might add an "instantaneously" to that statement, even.
Even putting aside the writing which is at best incomprehensible and at worst deplorable, I just can't understand how even the simplest things aren't even done right. Here's just what I found in the first few minutes.
- Typos/grammatical errors in nearly every other sentence.
- A low-res, low-quality portrait taken straight from NWN (which I don't understand given that NWN has portraits with bigger than 210x330 proportions) with no efforts made at making it fit in and doesn't even match the colors on the character paperdoll.
- An impossible starting level (fighter 3/cleric 2 multi-class????) with incorrect stats.
- A dreadful soundset that's far too quiet and doesn't match the subtitles given.
- Items with no displayed stats, probably to obfuscate the fact that everything is too strong and granted too early for free. You get a longsword right at the start of the game that is as good or better than everything in the rest of the game. But you might not realize it immediately BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IT DOES. Too bad you didn't spec longswords, huh? Oh wait, it GIVES YOU AUTOMATIC GRANDMASTERY.
- Banters happen way too frequently. Within the first 10 minutes of recruiting a full party she has bantered five times, and none of the other party members have started their own banters once.
- Stuff happens for no reason with no context and no warning. Suddenly she decides to leave the party giving a stupid melodramatic reasoning that came out of nowhere. Why does it happen? Can I stop it? Can I get her back? I have no idea! Turns out it only happens if Branwen's in the party! Does any of it make sense? No!
- Every time I see double exclamation marks used in this mod, which is extremely frequently, I feel as though I am reading preteen fanfiction. And honestly, it actually suits what's being said most of the time. Juvenile, bloated but ultimately empty.
- There's no way this girl is Elminster's daughter. Absolutely not. It totally isn't beaten over our heads like a Bhaal-damned dead herring every time someone opens their mouth. This is NOT how you do foreshadowing!
This is not all that there is. This is just a few things that I remember without having to go back and look at everything again. I could easily find even more things if I were masochistic enough to keep trying.... *thinking*
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