Baldur's Gate #BaldurGate: Siege of Dragonspear

[Lilura]

Siege of Dragonspear Walkthrough - Part XV

Avernus:

Caelar turns Blackguard (Aribeth tryhard char):

Just one more post to go...

 

[Lhynn]

Cant believe you still soldier on. That dialog is so bad, the writer there seems to be fapping about some shit no PC has any reason to care about.
Wasnt there an option to cut the dialogue short? an "i dont care, lets just get this over with".

I do like what theyve done with that small bit of hell, looks cool. better than that one trip with the planar sphere, tho i could be wrong and its the same shit.

 

[Trias_Betrayed]

lol'd at how the npcs totally ignore what the player says, just like the studio does

 

[Coma White]

Caelar turns Blackguard (Aribeth tryhard char):

No kidding Lilura. From everything I've read, it seems like Beamdog is just slapdashing elements from previous BioWare and Black Isle greats and cramming them all into Siege of Dragonspear. Caelar's overwhelming similarities to Aribeth from Neverwinter Nights. Belhifet as the evil-behind-the-villain like in Icewind Dale. The overwrought encounters with Irenicus (whose role seems utterly pointless in this expansion) from Baldur's Gate II. Etc.

Couldn't Beamdog have done something original? Instead of aping the giants on whose shoulders they stand.

 

[Lilura]

Cant believe you still soldier on.

It's out of pure stubbornness, now. The campaign never managed to claw its way back to Dwarves of Dumathoin/Siege of Bridgefort quality. Avernus is a total joke: it's fucking Baator and there are four tiny areas, one decent encounter (Thrix) and the rest are trashmobs leading up to the boss encounter (which is decent).

Wasnt there an option to cut the dialogue short? an "i dont care, lets just get this over with".

It really is schlocky writing, overall. Fuck storymode... they should have implemented a combat mode. One good thing: you can hit the combo of spacebar and 1-key to very quickly skip through the dialogue segments, and 95% of cutscenes are skippable with the Esc-key.

Foley wrote the dialogue for the Dwarves of Dumathoin (my fave part of Siege), see here. He left, though.

Couldn't Beamdog have done something original? Instead of aping the giants on whose shoulders they stand.

They definitely drew far too heavily from IWD, yes.

 

[huckc]

Oh god, the hyphens.

 

[Lhynn]

Foley wrote the dialogue for the Dwarves of Dumathoin (my fave part of Siege), see here. He left, though.

Thats a shame, it was good and fun writing really in line with what D&D is suposed to be about. Hard to find writers that just want to write a D&D adventure.

 

[Infinitron]

He also wrote Glint.

 

[ArchAngel]

He wrote the goblin companion and the introduction scene to her.

 

[Dux]

So is it good? It's good, right? Let me just read some of this...

It's Shakespeare all over again. The words flow like a river. They twist like a serpent's tongue.

God, I swear I've encountered a legion of fan fiction writers just like this. They can write some pretty lines, sure, but otherwise they have no idea what they're doing. Every goddamn line has to mean something, while shoving as many metaphors in there as possible. It has to hit home, or whatever you wanna call it. It's faggotry of the highest level. Baldur's Gate was never verbose or fancy. It was sometimes crude and downright silly. Sometimes it was serious but never too serious. It was just a low-level adventure in the Sword Coast. That's it.

 

[Lilura]

Thats a shame, it was good and fun writing really in line with what D&D is suposed to be about. Hard to find writers that just want to write a D&D adventure.

Yeah, where are all these ppl? Thank god for Rogueknight's Swordflight Series...

Caelar Argent:

Spoiler

If your party is full she just fights alongside but if your party has an opening, she actually joins (only for the boss fight).

I've listed her gear in Part XV of the walkthrough, linked above.

 

[Coma White]

Yeah, where are all these ppl? Thank god for Rogueknight's Swordflight Series...

Caelar Argent:

Spoiler

If your party is full she just fights alongside but if your party has an opening, she actually joins (only for the boss fight).

I've listed her gear in Part XV of the walkthrough, linked above.

Fighter? Not Paladin? Or is this because she's become a Blackguard?

 

[Agesilaus]

this game is still shit, right? I burned out on it sometime around the time the bridge explodes and you talk to the multi-coloured crusader lady. So bad.

 

[hell bovine]

this game is still shit, right? I burned out on it sometime around the time the bridge explodes and you talk to the multi-coloured crusader lady. So bad.

Depends on what you are looking for in a game. In a way, it's the opposite of PoE; PoE had better writing, quests and NPCs, but what killed the fun for me was the inane combat system combined with too many trash mobs. With SoD, I'm skipping through most of dialogues, but combat (on insane) is fun. SCS has better spellcaster scripts, though.

 

[mitochondritom]

I enjoyed it. Its not as good as any other infinity engine game, but it was new stuff in my favorite series and I am a sucker for infinity engine for all its shonkiness. As others have said, the writing is mostly crap. I felt like there were parts where it seemed like a better game was trying to claw its way out of lol-random-dialogue-shitsville, the most memorable being when you can discover a secret area in a cave if you have infravision (shock horror at the gating of content). It seemed like there was one person in a huge team who "got it" and was pushing all this decent stuff in amidst a team of morons circlejerking over their bioware-tier NPC creations.

 

[Delterius]

Lilura You actually did Neera's quest? You madman.

 

[Lilura]

Siege of Dragonspear Walkthrough completed in sixteen parts: Part XVI.

Spoiler

Giving evidence at the trial (reactivity):

There are two ways to escape Baldur's Gate, based on how the trial played out. You are either led by a Duke-appointed merc to safety or a thief in the employ of Imoen leads you to the sewers, through which you must fly solo - jumping from the top of a waterfall - in order to avoid capture.

1) Merc leads you to safety:

2) Waterfall escape after you make it through the sewers (with the Fist hot on your heels):

You then catch up with Imoen and the canon party in the forest and are waylaid by thieves. Ofc, that's when Shadows of Amn begins...

Enjoy!

 

[pippin]

You always post the game's walls of text but I don't remember BG2 having that much dialogue. Hell, not even more recent Bioware games seem to have that much from what I remember. Am I right or perhaps it's just an effect of seeing it all crammed into one picture?

 

[Delterius]

Siege of Dragonspear is much more similar to more modern BioWare in its writing, yes. There are also a lot more cutscenes, much more than SoA would indulge in.

 

[hell bovine]

Well, they are probably aiming for the same player base. Finished it yesterday - dialogues & plot were definitely the weak points (some NPCs, like the goblin, were interesting, while other, like that wild mage, just plain annoying), but I quite liked the combat.

To be honest, I'd rather they made expansions for Icewind Dale (or even better - another dungeon crawl like IWD), because I think when it comes to creating challenging monster encounters, they could deliver, if only they'd focus on that. But I guess there aren't enough players interested in that to make it a worthwhile enterprise.

 

[Delterius]

There is the appeal of themes and archetypes of modern BioWare stories yes, but when I say writing I mean that the tools of storytelling in Siege are much more modern in nature. Meaning verbiose dialogue and cinematics that clash even with what SoA had to offer. Otherwise the tone varies. You have Neera, the likeable girl next door and Glint, the puncheable gnome - each with their own brand of hit and mostly miss quirky humout. But you also have more simple and straightforward companions such as the disgruntled M'khin and the Lawful Neutral Corwin who at least won't detract from the adventure. It is uneven from mediocre to bad as opposed to the game itself which does hit some high notes with the Siege of Bridgefort and the Dwarves of Dumathoin. Strangely enough I left SoD feeling that Beamdog may have what it takes to deliver good DnD adventures if only specific parts of the development process grow in relevance as time goes on.

 

[DeepOcean]

Strangely enough I left SoD feeling that Beamdog may have what it takes to deliver good DnD adventures if only specific parts of the development process grow in relevance as time goes on.

Dunno, Beamdog looks like those types of Bioware fans that actually cried about Aerie wings and craved being cucked by Viconia, I don't know if they are emotionaly stable enough to make a story that isn't a incoherent EPIC fanfic mess with alot of low quality fan pandering.

 

[Delterius]

The real deal starts once Baldur's Gate is past. That means they no longer stand on the shoulders of the Infinity Engine and that fan pandering should not come as naturally as it does now. What sorts of choices would Beamdog make during the development process? Sure, they like to talk the talk of how modern games are dumbed down and at least some of SoD's content is great on its own. But let us not forget that this idea has slowly become mainstream in medium to indie studios. You see it with the marketing of darlings such as No Man's Sky. It does not guarantee that given limited time and resources they'd choose to pool efforts into creating a fraction of the beastiary and the rules implementation of the classic games, much less that they are willing to advance the subgenre in any way. Personally I feel those are more important issues than anything about the narrative. I never really played Baldur's Gate for its plot.

What I'm willing to hope for in fevered dreams is that Beamdog will be the BioWare that chose to improve on DA:O's niche back in 2011 with the added incentive of a DnD ruleset. That in itself has potential. And if the game is any good I'm willing to accept mindless so bad its good writing.

 

[DeepOcean]

Yep, while nobody sane plays Baldur's Gate for the story as it is barely developed DnD camp, it doesn't annoy the hell of you as SoD does, I don't trust BeamDog to not goldshower you with their piss that pass for writing all the time, even with the greatest combat ever, mountains of inane texts getting on the way can get tiresome quick.

 

[Anthedon]

All the Dragonspear writers are gone though, right? Only David Gaider is left.