My 2 cents on the BGEE dev team's achievements thus far and the criticism
IkMarc
Member Posts: 552
I am recently seeing an emergence of criticism on BGEE, the dev team on this forum. I have thus far not reacted, but the arguments and the tone of the criticism, up to the point that I saw a dev member actually extensively apologizing to a unreasonably grumbling poster for being sarcastic makes me wish to offer a different perspective.
I think the team did a pretty good job for the Enhanced Edition, especially given the contractual limitations, limited budget and other constraints. People don't understand how difficult it is to begin a small startup, to get people to work together towards a common goal and to actually get things going and achieve something like this.
The things that @TrentOster has done for this revitalization of an old classic took more guts, commitment and passion than 99.99% of the people on this forum and in this world will ever put into something in their lives. Yes you all paid some bucks for the game and this is a commercial company, but Trent and the dev team are bringing us this out of love and dedication to the game and its fans, if they were trying to make some quick and good money they would in all likeliness be doing something else.
So there are some shortcomings, but for your 20 bucks just enjoy what you got up till now and show the team your support. In any case they are working on it now and more great things are coming which would never be delivered to us if it wasn't for a bunch of enthusiastic geeks who actually put this together.
I think the team did a pretty good job for the Enhanced Edition, especially given the contractual limitations, limited budget and other constraints. People don't understand how difficult it is to begin a small startup, to get people to work together towards a common goal and to actually get things going and achieve something like this.
The things that @TrentOster has done for this revitalization of an old classic took more guts, commitment and passion than 99.99% of the people on this forum and in this world will ever put into something in their lives. Yes you all paid some bucks for the game and this is a commercial company, but Trent and the dev team are bringing us this out of love and dedication to the game and its fans, if they were trying to make some quick and good money they would in all likeliness be doing something else.
So there are some shortcomings, but for your 20 bucks just enjoy what you got up till now and show the team your support. In any case they are working on it now and more great things are coming which would never be delivered to us if it wasn't for a bunch of enthusiastic geeks who actually put this together.
29
Comments
did i get what i want? yes because they set out to remake an old classic and throw in some shiny bits aswell and thats exactly what we got.
could it have been handled better with the post launch problems in mind? yes but thats the same for EVERY GAME EVER! AAA titles with millions and millions of pounds worth of budget come out more broken than this did (in my opinion, i had a few blips like black screen upon start up but i managed to find a work around and i helped people on the beamdog forums with some of their problems) but thats just what happens. people say (paraphrase) "they didnt play test this bit" and maybe they are right, but play testing is doing every possible action to see if there is a glitch, now should they test every spell? perhaps, did they? probably not, would i? hell no and i didnt expect them to test every spell in the game to see if it worked. i expect them to cast a spell to see if it worked and thats about it (this ranty bit over with)
now as for the team bringing us this game just from the bottom of their hearts, i can agree that it maybe a factor but from a nothing company (never heard of it untill the BG:EE announcement) i personally think they did it to flex their skills and get us interested in the company which worked flawlessly (if someone from the dev team could give me a real reason in this forum or PM thats fine, if im wrong im wrong)
but rant over ill leave you with this message:
i love BG:EE
i love this company
they have ruined what little free time I have
god bless you
I disagree with you as I don't think my grumbling was unreasonable, but I agree with @Dee that I could have handled the situation in a better way by using PMs instead of posting directly in the board. I'm instead quite disappointed with the current state of BG:EE for several reasons I've already pointed out, more than once, in this board. I don't think it is necessary for me to repeat myself, but if you think otherwise let me know and I will be happy to explain again in detail my reasons.
For now it suffice to say that I believe that BG:EE has not been handled very well so far, but I see from the devs some positive signs and the genuine desire to do better in the future.
I see the big picture, but I see something completely different from what you see.
I see sadly a game that, despite his potential and all the enhancements, offers to me (at the moment) an overall experience that it is IMO inferior to what BGTutu offers, and by that I simply mean that I'm currently having much more fun playing BGTutu than BG:EE.
Granted, that is subjective, but I believe that the most important factor in evaluating a game should be the level of enjoyment that it offers.
If you are enjoying BG:EE I'm happy for you, I'm simply not enjoying it.
on a side note and a more positive one Im pretty satisfied with the EE sure its probably missing some of the things I wanted most from the re release but overall im happy I think the teams done well and the openness of the team on the forum is a breath of fresh air considering the attitudes of a lot devlopers these days
On a general note: has the game community gotten more picky lately? (Sorry if im derailing a bit here OP)
And this is why the posts criticising the game from posters such as yourself are unfair and unreasonable and shall ALWAYS remain so because the metric by which you are measuring the "quality" of BGEE is fundamentally flawed.
You aren't comparing BGEE to BGTuTu because if you were you would prefer BGEE because BGEE is TuTu fixed.
Claiming that that is what you are doing (others make similar claims to back up their "criticisms" of BGEE and then wonder why people say they are being unreasonable) is a bare faced lie. I don't even know you and I can say that thats a complete and total lie. Or at the very least you are seriously obfuscating the issue to both yourself and to us on the forums.
You are not comparing it to the experience that TuTu offers. You are comparing it to the experience TuTu offers when EXTENSIVELY MODDED with mods like SCS, BG Npc Project, NPC mods, the BG Tweak pack, Dark Side of the Sword Coast, and so on. And that is a fundamentally unfair metric to compare BGEE to; because a modded game is almost always going to be a Superior Experience FOR YOU because you mod it to play the way YOU want.
It's kind of the point of modding.
As an example it would be like Bethesda releasing an HD version of Morrowind for modern systems on skyrim's new engine (thereby rendering the old mods unuseable without expensive tweaking at least), and me going and complaining the playing the original game offers a better experience because the Less Generic NPC Project was a thing, or because I could play with a mod that let me play as a new race or something.
And the moment you do something that, then from the very start you are being unfair and unreasonable and have expectations that the developers CAN NOT POSSIBLY live up to in any realistic way.
Anyway, I can't praise BG:ee enough. Looking forward to BG!
That was precisely my point.
He is comparing BGEE to BGTuTu because of TuTu's modding that makes it "superior" which I conceed it does, cos well why would you mod a game if it made the game less fun to play for you?
And when that is your starting point, it makes it a completely unfair and unreasonable metric to measure the quality of BGEE by.
It's essentially comparing apples and oranges.
However, "99.99% of the people on this forum and in this world will ever put into something in their lives" you're just overstating that.
Also, I'm not blaming the devs for everything. I know that updating mods is not their responsibility, but knowing that unfortunately is not affecting in the slightest my lack of enjoyment of the game.
Besides, the fact that most of the big names of the modding community are actively involved in developing BG:EE and BG2:EE is really good news for the enhanced edition, but at the same it may have a negative impact, at least on the short term, on the modding community itself, slowing down progress on mods both old and new.
If @fitscotgaymer and others still think that I'm being unreasonable, I invite them to read the following discussion on the GOG Forums:
http://www.gog.com/forum/baldurs_gate_series/baldurs_gate_2_ee/page1
It is relevant and interesting IMO for the following reasons:
1) it shows what people with unreasonable complaints really look like
2) it shows that the developers are aware and acknowledge the reasonable complaints
3) @CamDawg is in it
I especially like this part but there are also reasons to praise the EE version, e.g. My own 2 cents:
There are several good reasons to like (pro) or not (cons) BG:EE. It's up to every one of us to evaluate them and decide if the good outweights the bad or viceversa. I personally believe that, at least for now, the bad outweights the good, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there is something wrong with me or my reasoning.
That takes some freaking severe commitment and audacity which I don't see often...
As I remember my tutu playthroughs, they were bugged with choice strings, and errors all over the place, possibly due to a myriad of mod on mod installing, that are as easy to get right, as french-kissing a cobra.
When I compare the two products - BG:EE wins by far on accessability and a bug free gaming experience.
But I guess it's maybe hardware related, or the fact that I simply don't see these bugs as bugs, thus they aren't interfering with my gaming experience.
I hope for you though, that these bugs gets sorted for you
I agree on this.
Hardware:
I may consider myself lucky in a sense because I'm playing on Windows and with an Nvidia video card. People with Intel graphics or some of those playing with the iPad have to deal with much worse bugs than mine.
Gaming Experience:
Most bugs that others find annoying doesn't bother me and viceversa. That's way I'm focusing in my posts to the subjective nature of one's perception of his own gaming experience.
Edit: The bugs are there, the developers themselves are saying that the next patch alone should fix hundreds of them.
Edit2: The official bug report for "the spawns disappearing on reload" is here.
The TL;NR version of it is that after an initial attempt to deny that this was a bug in the first place, there was confirmation from beta testers that indeed it was one and that it was worked on and that it should be fixed by the coming patch.
Frankly I just got tired of the criticism being retreads of debunked arguments. Detractors seem to keep going back to 'it has DRM' (not any more) or that it's ripoff of the modding community, neither of which is remotely true. Of my legitimate gripes... ...it's worth noting that two of those are actively being addressed. BG:EE is already a great product; mods being ported and patches being released are just going to continue making it better. v1.2 will be a major improvement on the bug front--the greatest frustration of the legal issue was the delay of the patch. v232 of WeiDU (tentatively scheduled for Sunday) will help immensely on the mod front since there won't be any need for hardcoding or other hacks to get installers to run. While I disagree with them, I really don't have a beef with folks who think it's too expensive or those that feel a modded BG/BGII is just fine for them.
My only beef is with the current status of BG:EE. As I have already said elsewhere, I will keep playing exclusively BGTutu, until the bugs I find most annoying are fixed and all my favourite mods are ported. After that I will be happy to switch permanently to BG:EE and maybe even praise it
Yeah I participated in a similar thread and tried to be as reasonable as possible, but I gave up when it was clear that some people were totally set in their ways and you can't debate somebody who won't listen.
I didn't notice you were in the GoG forum though!
For @Schneidend information, you can insult someone without "calling names". It's not kindergarten anymore, you know.
Uhfff
We need MOAR topics like that!
Further, what the OP actually said was that Trent has "more guts, commitment and passion" (emphasis mine) than others, not that he is the only one who has the capacity to commit/dedicate.