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Has anyone tried Sandrah saga?

ArthasArthas Member Posts: 1,091
How is it? Really curious.

Comments

  • ThacoBellThacoBell Member Posts: 12,235
    General points I've seen repeated a lot by players.

    -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.
  • southfla79southfla79 Member Posts: 214
    I've played with it many times...granted I've yet to finish BG1 (always end up restarting). I keep it in my install order for the extra content it provides. It expands upon some of the plot points in a way, at least to me, that make sense. I enjoy the new thief companion it adds to the BG1. The extra encounters are somewhat challenging.

    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.
  • RVNSRVNS Member Posts: 285
    The term unbalanced comes to mind. Blatantly sexual and overly so.

    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.
  • megamike15megamike15 Member Posts: 2,666
    this mod is turning into this generations Saerileth.
    ThacoBell
  •  TheArtisan TheArtisan Member Posts: 3,277
    edited August 2018
    I don’t even try and bother saying something like the premise is good nowadays because frankly it’s easy to plan out a solid premise and the capable writers are the ones that can take a difficult premise and make it work, and this is not one.

    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.
    megamike15RVNS
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 0
    edited August 2018
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
    StummvonBordwehrStefanOArthasSanctifer
  •  TheArtisan TheArtisan Member Posts: 3,277
    I’m just going to draw this distinction. As loathsome as Saerileth can be, at least the intention was to write a character and make her fit in the game. It was executed poorly with bad ideas, but playing it has never offended me.

    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.
    StummvonBordwehrmegamike15
  • megamike15megamike15 Member Posts: 2,666
    idk every single negative thred about Saerileth i've seen states almost the exact same thing.

    how using her changes the game into Saerileth's gate 2 shadows of Saerileth.

    sounds like sandrath to me.
  • The user and all related content has been deleted.
  •  TheArtisan TheArtisan Member Posts: 3,277
    The mod only lets you play it one way and practically insults you if you decide you don’t want to play it.
  • Permidion_StarkPermidion_Stark Member Posts: 4,861
    edited August 2018
    I haven't tried it but even if everyone said it was amazing I don't think I could bring myself to play a mod where the main character was called Sandrah.
  • InKalInKal Member Posts: 196
    How a mod can "insult" you? jumping to bed with a pally lol. silly? totally. insulting? not a chance.

    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?
    StummvonBordwehr
  • AstroBryGuyAstroBryGuy Member Posts: 3,437
    edited August 2018
    InKal said:

    How a mod can "insult" you? jumping to bed with a pally lol. silly? totally. insulting? not a chance.

    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?

    The mod insults the player by not giving the player agency over CHARNAME's reactions. It's not about Sandrah sleeping with every NPC she meets; it's the lack of dialogue choices for the player's character. If the player's character is given no option but to think Sandrah is the most beautiful/sexiest/smartest/cleverest/most amazing person the multiverse, then that's a problem.
    ThacoBell
  •  TheArtisan TheArtisan Member Posts: 3,277
    edited August 2018
    There are such things as personal insults (which, to this mod's credit, it does not make) and then there are things that insult your intelligence which this mod is full of. A majority - no, not one, not even a few, a majority of the dialogue is straight up handheld, with either a single response input from the PC or a couple of faux-options that all go along the same path and lead to the same conversation happening. The few occasions of the player having any illusion of freedom are sickeningly geared towards putting the focus on Rox- I'm sorry, Sandrah and the story she wants to tell and at no point do you get an option to actually call her out, and if you ever do anything that doesn't practically involve you eating out of her hand the mod clearly paints your actions as wrong and subtly mocks you while either continuing along the incredibly railroaded path or just cutting it short. It's clear just why this mod is so big - it's pretty much a long one-way road from start to finish. There's little to no variation or player agency involved. You're there to hit things and then smile and nod whenever a conversation happens and follow wherever the plot takes you. And that's just the surface of it all.

    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.
    Post edited by TheArtisan on
  • ArthasArthas Member Posts: 1,091
    @Artemius_I


    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 :D

    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 :)

  •  TheArtisan TheArtisan Member Posts: 3,277
    Who knows. Whenever I decide that I've written them as well as I possibly can, I suppose.
  •  TheArtisan TheArtisan Member Posts: 3,277
    edited September 2018
    Well after talking myself into it I decided to see if this... thing fares any better in game as opposed to reading the dialog files and I was just about ready to rage quit by the time I reached Nashkel. My head was dizzy from all the facepalming and violent headdesking out of the frustration that I felt. If this is how things look less than an hour into the mod I can't imagine how f---ing awful the rest of it is.

    I have literally never had this reaction to any other mod I've ever tried. Not even from the worst of CoM mods.
  • jasteyjastey Member Posts: 2,669
    @Artemius_I You are thougher than me, I didn't get beyond having to take her into my party (or to read all sorts of descriptions why my PC is regretting not having done so).

    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.
  •  TheArtisan TheArtisan Member Posts: 3,277
    edited September 2018
    I don't know how low someone's standards need to be in order to enjoy this.

    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.
    StummvonBordwehrArthas
  • megamike15megamike15 Member Posts: 2,666
    the fact it's author tried to make this mod a selling point for the eet just made me want to use it less.
  • CahirCahir Member, Moderator, Translator (NDA) Posts: 2,819
    Fantastic mod, I need to play it! Seriously, thank you @Artemius_I for pointing out cons and... completely no pros? C'mon, even the tiny tiny thing?
  •  TheArtisan TheArtisan Member Posts: 3,277
    edited September 2018
    @Cahir

    ... *thinking*

    ... ...

    ... ... ...

    ... ... ............

    Arthas
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User] Posts: 0
    edited September 2018
    The user and all related content has been deleted.
    StummvonBordwehr
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