Mostly because of Icewind Dales epilogue where he promises to return. Whether or not it could have been done better? Perhaps...well definitely but he was a decent final boss.
Still it set a precedent for him being in the game in addition to Dragonspears history of devils flooding through a portal.
I think he was a decent choice, they could have done far worse.
@Maurvir That was pretty stupid in my opinion though.
You have explosives and a way into the innermost part of the enemy castle.
What you end up doing is using the explosives against a wooden fence protecting the outermost bailey of the castle. A fence that could have been taken down any number of ways. A fence that the enemy chose to protect with a small group of archers outside of the castle.
If I had been the commander, I would not have opened a second front in the keep interior. I would have opened the main front there. There are no real defensive structures down there after all. Even if the elevator is a serious bottleneck, I would still prefer that over having my troops charge against well-defended walls.
I actually agree on that point. Going through the front door is almost always a terrible idea. Yes, being rate limited by the elevator is a problem, but once you take the elevator and lower basement, you then can bring up the rest of your troops and spring them on the castle proper. In almost any scenario like that, it is much better to find a hidden weakness than to barge in where you are expected.
Also, while the game considers it the "evil" move, putting a psychedelic or depressant in the enemy's food and water would be a legit move as well. In a way, that may even be more humane in the end, as the fight will end without the mass casualties you would otherwise have.
Another good place for a massive dungeon would be the Basalt Tower - instead of a lift, it would be more appealing to fight our way to the top (and that wouldn't damage the sense of urgency). I don't know if that comes from some FR canon, though.
If you mean the lift you take from the underground river, I'm pretty sure you were supposed to be spying, not opening a second front.
No. The lift at the very end of the DLC (as I said, the Basalt Tower).
The one in Avernus that takes you to Belhifet.
well as i'm not that familiar with forgotten realms lore that isnt from the games. i had no idea that tower had a name.
I didn't realize it had a name either, hence the confusion. However, in hindsight, it's fairly obvious. Doh!
A thought which occurred to me today, as I had just finished SoD again and moved on to BG2, is that I might've also been biased against it due to the very nature of the DLC - being set in between two of the old games.
I love BG2 more than BG1, TotSC and SoD, and as I said every time I restart the series I basically just look forward to reaching the BG2 part. Having said that, I found that I still have a sort of "bum factor" whenever I finish SoD, because it has a feeling of finishing the new content, the new game, and then advancing to the old part (I hope that was clear). It's not just about the graphics, though I would certainly like to see BG2 maps completely redone with today's capabilities, it also sucks that you're basically spending time on the expansion (SoD) which isn't recognized at all by the following game and there are no references (that I know of) to it. I think that is why I didn't really like that concept of putting the game in-between. I realize that this was the entire point, of bridging what happened between BG1 and 2, and still.
Other than that though, I can safely say now I thoroughly enjoyed SoD more than I have in the past, and that is in part thanks to this review, which really brought up some major good points which I was blinded to.
@fthku The REALLY crappy part of it? There were originally plans to port some SoD content over to BG2. Some of the new npcs were teased as possible, dialogue references to SoD (Neera actually has a line commenting on it in BG2), and even a full blown side quest for the Soultaker in BG2 got so far as having been plotted. It was gonna involve charname returning to chateu Irenicus (now in ruins) to find that it was being inhabited by somebody/something. But all the fake controversy made Beamdog change their mids about it.
SoD is my second part of the whole series (right behind BG2) so I I keep poking and prodding Beamdog to add some SoDing love to BG2.
I also have no idea why it was specifically Mizhena that was given so much backlash.
Personally, I believe it's because as a trans character she was the least "acceptable" kind of queer to modern eyes.
After Hexxat's reception I was fully prepared to take some heat for making Glint a homosexual male, but even Corwin's bisexuality turned out to be more controversial.
First off, there's the original writer herself, Amber Scott.
Amber isn't the original writer. I was the original writer, as well as one of the final writers. The bulk of the plot and the companions--really everything except sidequests--was in place before she came on-board. I don't mind people having issues with those things (believe me, I have plenty of issues with the game too), but those decisions were largely mine and Phil's.
What the actual hell is that. There's no bad response (the same way there's no bad response to Mizhena telling you she's trans),
Slightly different, in that I wrote the M'Khiin responses and Amber wrote Mizhena's. One difference is that negative responses to Mizhena were forbidden by higher up the chain than either of us while I could have done the M'Khiin ones differently and/or any of the dozens of people higher up than I was that reviewed the game before it went out could have twisted my arm to change them.
We get the analogy, she's "different" and technically "better" than the other goblins
That was one thing that was definitely imposed on the character by my superiors. I didn't want her to be "special" beyond the fact that she left her tribe, but got overruled.
LGBT and women empowerment agenda (which wasn't hidden, as I said Amber Scott herself said she did this in SoD and that she tries to diversify as much as she can).
She did say and does do that as much as she can. There was a limit to how much diversity she could add to SoD, as a lot of it had been nailed down before she started. If anything, I feel SoD dropped the ball when it comes to diversity, certainly among the companions.
I'm not saying that agenda is bad in general, there's still a lot of sexism in this world, but it is so forced here, and more importantly, it's just not fitting in Forgotten Realms setting.
For whatever it's worth, the guy who created the Forgotten Realms disagrees, as do the FR's current owners.
Many dialogues literally have only 3 options, good, evil, or neutral.
Absolutely and regrettably true. They also tended to be shorter than many of the responses in previous BG installments. This was a design choice; the idea was that the player would be able to see all available responses no matter what size screen they were playing on, so the writers were (with exceptions that were frequently fought long and hard for) limited in both the number of responses and the number of sentences/characters each response could contain.
Compared to the original games where you had, most of the time, a lot of options, and none so linear.
However, the general poor writing and the social agenda pushed into it really bum me out about this game.
I am sincerely sorry those things affected your enjoyment of the game. I always knew it was going to end up being a bummer--hard to avoid when you're leading into the beginning of BG2--but it's unfortunate that stuff contributed to any negative feelings towards the game.
While Safana's personality was changed, it did line up pretty well with what happened in BG2, so I don't really mind that much. If anything, I was annoyed at how BG2 ended her character no matter what.
I was not a fan of Safana's end in BG2. WotC prevented us from making any major changes to material from the pre-existing games, but if I had been lucky enough to continue working on the BG franchise and gotten to add the material I'd wanted to to finish certain SoD dangling plot threads in BG2, I'd planned to push as hard as I could to add material to her story, give her a way out and ideally make her available as a companion. "twas not to be.
One thing that I missed in SoD, however, was a massive dungeon (I thought the Temple of Bhaal would be one, but unfortunately I was wrong). TotSC gave us Durlag's Tower, ToB gave us Watcher's Keep, SoD could be inline and give us something like those.
Early on there were plans to have an extensive adventure set inside Warlock's Crypt, a lengthy optional subplot in Soubar, and a few other things I'd have loved to write, but at a certain point deadlines forced us to cut any major tangents that took the Bhaalspawn off the primary path to Dragonspear. It was later decided that the game overall was too railroad-y and smaller sidequests that didn't stray too far afield from the path were added.
instead of a lift, it would be more appealing to fight our way to the top (and that wouldn't damage the sense of urgency).
While the hellevator was part of the design early on, in retrospect a fight up the tower would have been much, much easier to implement. You wouldn't believe the number of hours burned getting the lift to work.
As it was, moving through Dragonspear Castle was originally going to involve more floors and even with the smaller number we had there were many more opponents blocking the way until quite late in development, when (I think it was) Phil decided it should be streamlined.
But you should have had the opportunity to side with the crusade near the end.
This was explicitly forbidden by parties very high up the chain, not just at the end but throughout the game. We were not allowed to give the PC the option to side with Caelar. The rationale given was that anyone who had any intelligence whatsoever that wasn't under Caelar/Hephernaan's influence would know, with absolute certainty, that Caelar's publicly stated goal was doomed to failure.
I argued the player should have that choice, even if, with the limited resources we had available, that would necessitate knocking the player out, skip huge chunks of the game, and wake up next to the portal to Avernus. That idea, which was admittedly far from ideal, was shot down very hard and very fast by people who know more about videogames than I ever will. I still think it would have made more sense, though I shudder to think of the blowback we'd have gotten if we did it.
I loved the battle with Belhifet though..he's a competent final boss and it connects with Icewind Dale decently.
You can thank Phil, or possibly Dave Gross, for that. Belhifet was part of the three page SoD outline that existed before I was hired.
Welp, I've spent longer on this than intended and if you're still reading, I salute you. I'd hoped to hit some stuff from the second page of comments, but I can no longer resist my bed's siren call. I want to say thanks to Maurvir for starting this conversation, everyone who tried the game and everyone who felt strongly enough about it, positive or negative, to contribute to this or any other discussion on the topic. Writing for BG, and SoD in particular, was a dream come true, but its reception was... let's call it challenging. It's truly gratifying to know that people are still finding it, and sometimes finding it enjoyable.
@AndrewFoley thanks for taking some of your time to answer those.
If I understood correctly, Beamdog actively decided to railroad the game? That sounds like a shot on their own foot.
Too bad that apparently so many things were cut out. I'm not a big fan of SoD but I do think that more BG is always a welcome thing.
I don't know who exactly was above you in the chain of command but they've dropped the ball. In my opinion, not being able to side with Caelar at the parley scene killed the game. SoD a lot of times gave me the feeling of being watching a movie instead of playing a game.
I wouldn't put the big dungeon right at the beginning of the game, but that would be better than no big dungeon at all. Heh, I'm a fanboy of Icewind Dale, so dungeon crawling is my thing.
@Raduziel You must not forget the restraints of time and money. Given the options of giving the players lots of freedom but then running out of time to finish the game on the one hand and streamlining the game and meeting the deadlines on the other, it is only reasonable that Beamdog would choose the latter.
I feel like the company is generally struggling to keep up with its schedules more than it should, though. As I am an outside observer I cannot say what is really going on, but it seems weird. The games have been using a buggy UI for years now.
SoD is a VERY good expansion game (or whatever you want to call it). I never liked ToB at all so I loved to get a new chapter that I really enjoyed.
Yes, compared to ToB, SoD absolutely nailed it. I got to the point in ToB quickly where I was tempted to just put it on story mode and push to the end to say I did it. It wasn't that the battles were all that hard, I just got bored with it. There were some really great moments, like Draconis, the mercenary battles towards the end, and even some aspects of Saradush were pretty cool. Unfortunately, the whole package just felt like a tacked on ending.
In contrast, I loved nearly every minute of SoD. Sure, it had the same linearity, but in the context of a war party marching off to battle, it made more sense. While I wish it could have had more side quests, it was still a good game overall, and I would definitely buy it again knowing what I do now.
As an aside, I'm a bit surprised that the folks at Beamdog didn't realize that bisexuality and transgenderism would be more controversial than run of the mill homosexuality. The inclusion didn't bother me, and in fact I have long felt that Jaheira should have been bisexual in BG2 (it would have been moot in BG1 due to Khalid) Unfortunately, I was entirely unsurprised that Corwin and Mizhena caused undue uproar.
Thank you for your insights @AndrewFoley . Considering Beamdog is quite secretive in general, this is probably the most informative post I have ever read in this forum.
When I read the posts here, it makes me realize how different everyone's experience with the same game can be. I read a lot of complaints about the NPCs and personality of companions in SOD, but after finishing the game twice I haven't noticed any that felt out of place to me. I actually quite enjoyed the writing of companions, antagonists, side quests, etc. I feel like the main thing that made people agitated was Amber's comments about it, stuff like giving a personality upgrade to Safana, putting SJW stuff to games on purpose, etc. For example, Safana didn't feel out of character at all to me, but when I read that comment before playing the game, I wasn't happy about that either.
So, even though I like SOD a lot in general, I still have a big issue with the game, which you have already kindly explained:
But you should have had the opportunity to side with the crusade near the end.
This was explicitly forbidden by parties very high up the chain, not just at the end but throughout the game. We were not allowed to give the PC the option to side with Caelar. The rationale given was that anyone who had any intelligence whatsoever that wasn't under Caelar/Hephernaan's influence would know, with absolute certainty, that Caelar's publicly stated goal was doomed to failure.
I argued the player should have that choice, even if, with the limited resources we had available, that would necessitate knocking the player out, skip huge chunks of the game, and wake up next to the portal to Avernus. That idea, which was admittedly far from ideal, was shot down very hard and very fast by people who know more about videogames than I ever will. I still think it would have made more sense, though I shudder to think of the blowback we'd have gotten if we did it.
Raduziel also mentioned something similar, but this is the biggest mistake Beamdog made with SOD in my opinion. It could be really easy and cost effective to make a cheap alternative like you said, skipping some sections but at least giving the player an option. This would make the game much more intuitive by giving the player an actual choice, even if not ideal, instead of 5 different conversation options which all lead to the same outcome. The way it's done now just makes me feel like I'm being tricked. Beamdog is saying to me: "Ok feel free to pick any of these 5 different conversation options as if it matters." Well, then it might as well have been a cutscene, and we could have watched it all.
"anyone who had any intelligence whatsoever that wasn't under Caelar/Hephernaan's influence would know, with absolute certainty, that Caelar's publicly stated goal was doomed to failure."
This is wrong in so many ways. SOD is showing us thousands of people in the Sword Coast following Caelar blindly, yet we can't because of this absolute certainty... I guess Beamdog was trying to teach us irony. Moreover, we had the chance to be influenced by Caelar, because she addressed us directly at some point.
Those people who know videogames too much and made this decision in the end, I wish they played Arcanum once or twice before. They could see how giving meaningful options to the player (which can lead to skipping major parts of the game/plot) and making the world reactive to your decisions can provide such an amazing experience to the player, even though main things like combat is really bad, repetitive and unbalanced.
I personally loved most of the companions, I challenge anybody to find an example where Safana's personality in BG1 was changed. There was no personality to speak of. I think SoD's biggest issue was in the clarity of some story beats. Some things you weren't told outright, so you had to piece it together yourself from different scraps of info you are given. As much as people act like they like stories that act like they are intelligent, its telling that people complain about SoD not explaining some things, when the info was there the whole time.
Limiting dialougue length and choice for the sake of smaller screens was a terrible choice and i hope beamdog can learn from their mistake there
This. Altering the UI to allow for better dialog handling would have been vastly preferable to making the dialog shorter "to fit". This was a classic case of form over function.
well it's easy to revert back to the old ui with using a mod. i just prefer to keep the new ui as i like it better. my only issues with it was the journal which i can change with mods so i'm good.
Comments
Still it set a precedent for him being in the game in addition to Dragonspears history of devils flooding through a portal.
I think he was a decent choice, they could have done far worse.
so it does make sense why he is there.
I actually agree on that point. Going through the front door is almost always a terrible idea. Yes, being rate limited by the elevator is a problem, but once you take the elevator and lower basement, you then can bring up the rest of your troops and spring them on the castle proper. In almost any scenario like that, it is much better to find a hidden weakness than to barge in where you are expected.
Also, while the game considers it the "evil" move, putting a psychedelic or depressant in the enemy's food and water would be a legit move as well. In a way, that may even be more humane in the end, as the fight will end without the mass casualties you would otherwise have.
I didn't realize it had a name either, hence the confusion. However, in hindsight, it's fairly obvious. Doh!
I love BG2 more than BG1, TotSC and SoD, and as I said every time I restart the series I basically just look forward to reaching the BG2 part. Having said that, I found that I still have a sort of "bum factor" whenever I finish SoD, because it has a feeling of finishing the new content, the new game, and then advancing to the old part (I hope that was clear). It's not just about the graphics, though I would certainly like to see BG2 maps completely redone with today's capabilities, it also sucks that you're basically spending time on the expansion (SoD) which isn't recognized at all by the following game and there are no references (that I know of) to it. I think that is why I didn't really like that concept of putting the game in-between. I realize that this was the entire point, of bridging what happened between BG1 and 2, and still.
Other than that though, I can safely say now I thoroughly enjoyed SoD more than I have in the past, and that is in part thanks to this review, which really brought up some major good points which I was blinded to.
SoD is my second part of the whole series (right behind BG2) so I I keep poking and prodding Beamdog to add some SoDing love to BG2.
Personally, I believe it's because as a trans character she was the least "acceptable" kind of queer to modern eyes.
After Hexxat's reception I was fully prepared to take some heat for making Glint a homosexual male, but even Corwin's bisexuality turned out to be more controversial.
Amber isn't the original writer. I was the original writer, as well as one of the final writers. The bulk of the plot and the companions--really everything except sidequests--was in place before she came on-board. I don't mind people having issues with those things (believe me, I have plenty of issues with the game too), but those decisions were largely mine and Phil's.
If Voghiln isn't considered new, that's true. Also on me and Phil.
That's all me. I'm pretty sure I had the daughter's dialogue written before Amber arrived, but can't swear to it.
I don't know where you want to start, but I created and wrote the bulk of her character.
Slightly different, in that I wrote the M'Khiin responses and Amber wrote Mizhena's. One difference is that negative responses to Mizhena were forbidden by higher up the chain than either of us while I could have done the M'Khiin ones differently and/or any of the dozens of people higher up than I was that reviewed the game before it went out could have twisted my arm to change them.
That was one thing that was definitely imposed on the character by my superiors. I didn't want her to be "special" beyond the fact that she left her tribe, but got overruled.
She did say and does do that as much as she can. There was a limit to how much diversity she could add to SoD, as a lot of it had been nailed down before she started. If anything, I feel SoD dropped the ball when it comes to diversity, certainly among the companions.
For whatever it's worth, the guy who created the Forgotten Realms disagrees, as do the FR's current owners.
Absolutely and regrettably true. They also tended to be shorter than many of the responses in previous BG installments. This was a design choice; the idea was that the player would be able to see all available responses no matter what size screen they were playing on, so the writers were (with exceptions that were frequently fought long and hard for) limited in both the number of responses and the number of sentences/characters each response could contain.
Compared to the original games where you had, most of the time, a lot of options, and none so linear.
I am sincerely sorry those things affected your enjoyment of the game. I always knew it was going to end up being a bummer--hard to avoid when you're leading into the beginning of BG2--but it's unfortunate that stuff contributed to any negative feelings towards the game.
I was not a fan of Safana's end in BG2. WotC prevented us from making any major changes to material from the pre-existing games, but if I had been lucky enough to continue working on the BG franchise and gotten to add the material I'd wanted to to finish certain SoD dangling plot threads in BG2, I'd planned to push as hard as I could to add material to her story, give her a way out and ideally make her available as a companion. "twas not to be.
Early on there were plans to have an extensive adventure set inside Warlock's Crypt, a lengthy optional subplot in Soubar, and a few other things I'd have loved to write, but at a certain point deadlines forced us to cut any major tangents that took the Bhaalspawn off the primary path to Dragonspear. It was later decided that the game overall was too railroad-y and smaller sidequests that didn't stray too far afield from the path were added.
While the hellevator was part of the design early on, in retrospect a fight up the tower would have been much, much easier to implement. You wouldn't believe the number of hours burned getting the lift to work.
As it was, moving through Dragonspear Castle was originally going to involve more floors and even with the smaller number we had there were many more opponents blocking the way until quite late in development, when (I think it was) Phil decided it should be streamlined.
This was explicitly forbidden by parties very high up the chain, not just at the end but throughout the game. We were not allowed to give the PC the option to side with Caelar. The rationale given was that anyone who had any intelligence whatsoever that wasn't under Caelar/Hephernaan's influence would know, with absolute certainty, that Caelar's publicly stated goal was doomed to failure.
I argued the player should have that choice, even if, with the limited resources we had available, that would necessitate knocking the player out, skip huge chunks of the game, and wake up next to the portal to Avernus. That idea, which was admittedly far from ideal, was shot down very hard and very fast by people who know more about videogames than I ever will. I still think it would have made more sense, though I shudder to think of the blowback we'd have gotten if we did it.
You can thank Phil, or possibly Dave Gross, for that. Belhifet was part of the three page SoD outline that existed before I was hired.
Welp, I've spent longer on this than intended and if you're still reading, I salute you. I'd hoped to hit some stuff from the second page of comments, but I can no longer resist my bed's siren call. I want to say thanks to Maurvir for starting this conversation, everyone who tried the game and everyone who felt strongly enough about it, positive or negative, to contribute to this or any other discussion on the topic. Writing for BG, and SoD in particular, was a dream come true, but its reception was... let's call it challenging. It's truly gratifying to know that people are still finding it, and sometimes finding it enjoyable.
See you next time, folks.
If I understood correctly, Beamdog actively decided to railroad the game? That sounds like a shot on their own foot.
Too bad that apparently so many things were cut out. I'm not a big fan of SoD but I do think that more BG is always a welcome thing.
I don't know who exactly was above you in the chain of command but they've dropped the ball. In my opinion, not being able to side with Caelar at the parley scene killed the game. SoD a lot of times gave me the feeling of being watching a movie instead of playing a game.
I wouldn't put the big dungeon right at the beginning of the game, but that would be better than no big dungeon at all. Heh, I'm a fanboy of Icewind Dale, so dungeon crawling is my thing.
Anyway, thanks for sharing.
I feel like the company is generally struggling to keep up with its schedules more than it should, though. As I am an outside observer I cannot say what is really going on, but it seems weird. The games have been using a buggy UI for years now.
Yes, compared to ToB, SoD absolutely nailed it. I got to the point in ToB quickly where I was tempted to just put it on story mode and push to the end to say I did it. It wasn't that the battles were all that hard, I just got bored with it. There were some really great moments, like Draconis, the mercenary battles towards the end, and even some aspects of Saradush were pretty cool. Unfortunately, the whole package just felt like a tacked on ending.
In contrast, I loved nearly every minute of SoD. Sure, it had the same linearity, but in the context of a war party marching off to battle, it made more sense. While I wish it could have had more side quests, it was still a good game overall, and I would definitely buy it again knowing what I do now.
As an aside, I'm a bit surprised that the folks at Beamdog didn't realize that bisexuality and transgenderism would be more controversial than run of the mill homosexuality. The inclusion didn't bother me, and in fact I have long felt that Jaheira should have been bisexual in BG2 (it would have been moot in BG1 due to Khalid) Unfortunately, I was entirely unsurprised that Corwin and Mizhena caused undue uproar.
When I read the posts here, it makes me realize how different everyone's experience with the same game can be. I read a lot of complaints about the NPCs and personality of companions in SOD, but after finishing the game twice I haven't noticed any that felt out of place to me. I actually quite enjoyed the writing of companions, antagonists, side quests, etc. I feel like the main thing that made people agitated was Amber's comments about it, stuff like giving a personality upgrade to Safana, putting SJW stuff to games on purpose, etc. For example, Safana didn't feel out of character at all to me, but when I read that comment before playing the game, I wasn't happy about that either.
So, even though I like SOD a lot in general, I still have a big issue with the game, which you have already kindly explained:
Raduziel also mentioned something similar, but this is the biggest mistake Beamdog made with SOD in my opinion. It could be really easy and cost effective to make a cheap alternative like you said, skipping some sections but at least giving the player an option. This would make the game much more intuitive by giving the player an actual choice, even if not ideal, instead of 5 different conversation options which all lead to the same outcome. The way it's done now just makes me feel like I'm being tricked. Beamdog is saying to me: "Ok feel free to pick any of these 5 different conversation options as if it matters." Well, then it might as well have been a cutscene, and we could have watched it all.
This is wrong in so many ways. SOD is showing us thousands of people in the Sword Coast following Caelar blindly, yet we can't because of this absolute certainty... I guess Beamdog was trying to teach us irony. Moreover, we had the chance to be influenced by Caelar, because she addressed us directly at some point.
Those people who know videogames too much and made this decision in the end, I wish they played Arcanum once or twice before. They could see how giving meaningful options to the player (which can lead to skipping major parts of the game/plot) and making the world reactive to your decisions can provide such an amazing experience to the player, even though main things like combat is really bad, repetitive and unbalanced.
This. Altering the UI to allow for better dialog handling would have been vastly preferable to making the dialog shorter "to fit". This was a classic case of form over function.