The still unsolved mysteries of Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 Cut Content (Spoiler Warning too)

Kaliesto

While I was looking through old forum posts from various places, and such I came across entries that never really made it into Unfinished Business for one reason or another and I thought as of the year 2024 it was time to gather all these bits of information into one forum topic as much as I can or anyone else here that like to contribute to this topic.

Sometimes there is special circumstances where there was a quest, but was later removed such as Edwin's Return (BG1) back in the very early days of Baldur's Gate (I found this out from a topic on this forum) or in other cases it was once part of the main quest before it was revised for final release of the game (in which case such restorations would be for the most curious among us of once what was).

It also seems there is still bits of dialogue that most of us would never really read about unless you're a modder.

Speaking again about Edwin, I vaguely remember back when BG1 came out I saw this quest called Edwin's Return and where it started specifically. I thought maybe as the years gone by I was just imagining it, but turns out it was not the case.

Lastly its good to keep in mind the reason some of this cut content was not restored was because of the lack of details such as the Yellow Dragon Eggs, and supposedly the only hint for their purpose had to do with a certain lair.

This was also the general problem concerning Unfinished Business itself since some cut content was so vague that some creative writing had to be used in order to justify the content's existence in some fashion (which I'm not totally against as long the writing and gameplay is good).

So whatever last bits & bytes of mysteries has yet to be written I would hope this topic would make a good creative repository of what is left for Cut Content Authors.

Current List of Known Mysteries:
The Yellow Dragon and his eggs
Bounty Hunters (????)
More obvious clue of WK (????)
Melissan turning your friends
Illasera's Return - (supposedly the one you kill was a Simulacrum)
Cespenar's flask - "Doesn't make sense, since we can move to the Pocket Plane whenever"
Viconia the Werewolf - Apparently this was the reason she was being burned at the stake originally, and was a personal quest of Viconia to be cured (I beleive).
Viconia's Betrayal - There was a option where she was going to betray you in Ust Natha.


Removed:
Edwin's Return (BG1 Event)

Currently Restored
Anything From BG UB 1 & 2 (too long to list for the moment)
Saemon disguising party as monks (Wheels of Prophecy)
The return of Yoshimo - "there's not a shred of evidence of it ever being planned." Least according to what was said about it many years ago, there is mods now that restore Yoshimo in Throne of Bhaal.

I'll keep adding on as I find more information, and please correct me if I made a mistake if another mod did restore something

Isewein

Some of these have already been restored by mods. Wheels of Prophecy has Saemon's disguise and various Yoshimo mods his retun, for instance.

Kaliesto

Ah thank you! I never looked too closely at WoP since that mod is apparently quite buggy, and I was hesitant to know what could happen.

From what I reading though that Ascension mostly covers the same thing, and I did not install that one either at the time since it was still being updated to fix some things.

and yes I saw the Yoshimo mods, I figured in a way that was a technical restoration, but the documentation of the original yoshimo returns couldn't be found or at least according to the forum posts I was reading about it; that quote is directly from that forum.

Isewein

All I can say is that at some point, WoP worked fine for me on BGT. I haven't tried on EE, but I can't imagine that should make a difference. The issue is that it's highly modular, so depending on your choices you may either be just fine or encounter some unknown bugs. But I urge everyone to give it a try - it's only through multiple playthroughs and bug reports that it will ever be smoothed out, after all, and conceptually it is one of the very best mods in existence. It goes far beyond Ascension in terms of what it adds to ToB.

Kaliesto

I do agree with that assessment to some degree, its just from a player point of view it would take us out of the game in a bad way and if the bug cannot be gotten around and especially so late in the saga. WoP bugs just seem so random with mod player to mod player, its hard to pinpoint if its coming from WoP or another mod entirely that affects ToB somehow.

Most of the older mods I've seen have seen gotten QoL enhancements recently, and mostly are almost bug-free (any minor bugs are not too problematic), but WoP seems to have some question marks around it.

I'll give it some thought later if I want to roll the dice on it though..but with a caveat that I either choose that or ascension/turnabout since apparently both mods don't play well with eachother from what I understand (though maybe that changed recently, idk).

Its always possible whatever I've been reading on the most recent posts about it could be just from user error, and not the mod itself.


Another note -

I'm currently putting together a unused content document for everything we know of to this point for the year 2024, I hope this document is going to prove useful for everyone later once I feel like I exhausted everything that is available online.

This is going to include the following:
Items (with item codes to spawn if available)
Spells or Spell Scrolls (with item codes to spawn if available for scrolls)
Monsters & NPCs
Behavior Scripts & Unused Dialogue
Portraits

Right now looking through the entirety of the Wiki, and looking around the forums too.

Also speaking of item codes earlier, I remember way back in the day I was playing around with that in BG1 the original version and I got some really strange things to spawn, shame I never did document those.