Baldur's Gate #BaldurGate: Siege of Dragonspear

[LizardWizard]

This also has an uphill battle of being a Beamdog product that requires an additional Beamdog product.

Solution: Baldurs.Gate.Siege.of.Dragonspear-RELOADED

Still not worth playing though.

 

[Shadenuat]

Also, did you get the term "soldier boying" from Letho in TWitcher 2?

Dunno, it just felt appropriate - in a literal way. You follow the army from one little act to another caretaking for it's needs and fighting their war, mostly no step left or right allowed, and when you feel like you are given a choice in dialogue (like before storming actual Dragonspear), there is actually none in traditional Bioware fashion.
BG never were sandboxes but SoD is like Icewind Dale with a few locations from BG1 thrown around to explore a bit.
You never would even walk freely streets of Baldur's Gate city itself aside from small prologue.

You wish they'd written a different story?

I wish they'd just make their own separate game. Their new story is irrelevant for main plot of Baldur's Gate saga, their writing is average, so they could used their strong points (new locations, monsters, encounters) to make completely new game now instead. It even could have been a decent game.

 

[Gay-Lussac]

PSA: Sword Coast Stratagems does indeed break the game if you install the expansion. Messes with NPC lines and screws up random items. Thankfully all I had to do was uninstall the expansion and it all went back to normal, no permanent harm done.

No bugs if you apply the hotfixed mod on just the vanilla game with patch 2.0, though.

Are you sure you did everything right? Or maybe there is some conflict with the new SoD scripts and they don't work with SCS until the latter is updated. Maybe aVENGER knows?

I'm not sure if I'll buy this until SCS works. Not that I buy any games until the first patches are out anyway.

Yep, I'm positive. There's not much to do, honestly. You just open up the SCS .exe installer, let it write its files on the game directory, and then jus apply the hotfix to those files before going ahead with all the the DOS prompts that actually install the mod. Everything gets installed successfully, mod works perfectly in game with vanilla BG:EE patch 2.0.

If you already had the game installed with SCS pre patch 2.0 just remember to uninstall SCS through the stratagems .bat file that's on your game directory before doing all of the above.

For some reason my game just bugged the fuck out a while after having Dragonspear installed. Or it had bugged the fuck out from the very moment I installed the expansion, but it took me a while to notice because the things that had been bugged just hadn't had the opportunity to show up in my original campaign playthrough yet. Either way I uninstalled the expansion and everything instantly went back to normal.

This is from the guy who made the hotfix so that SCS installs on patch 2.0:

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/comment/731392/#Comment_731392

If SCS is essential to you, just hold on, IMO. But it's worth noting that patch 2.0 brought its own improved AI on insane difficulty (and you can turn off the cheesy double damage) and some of the mages have pre-buffs applied to them where sensible (i.e. in game situations where they would have known a battle is imminent). You'll probably only really be missing out on the spell tweaks, since the item and encounter changes wouldn't apply to the expansion anyway.

 

[Shadenuat]

And here we find a use for Infravision in the game.

Yes there's a small secret you can only find by moving character with Infravision to it. Although I didn't get the point of it (just a room with monster and no loot).

 

[Infinitron]

Also, did you get the term "soldier boying" from Letho in TWitcher 2?

Dunno, it just felt appropriate - in a literal way. You follow the army from one little act to another caretaking for it's needs and fighting their war, mostly no step left or right allowed, and when you feel like you are given a choice in dialogue (like before storming actual Dragonspear), there is actually none in traditional Bioware fashion.
BG never were sandboxes but SoD is like Icewind Dale with a few locations from BG1 thrown around to explore a bit.
You never would even walk freely streets of Baldur's Gate city itself aside from small prologue.

In general I think it's okay for expansions and DLCs to experiment with radically different game structures (see FO:NV DLCs etc). Sure, this one comes 16 years later so it's a bit weird, but for somebody who just got done with the freedom of BG1, it probably feels cool to change up the formula for a bit.

 

[Johannes]

Majestic storytelling

 

[Ezrite]

As I posted on Beamdogs forum

And you can turn your gender to female and stop being transgender.

To me, I think the biggest problem how it is formulate. It sounds so modern with that whole "me and my parents came to an understanding". The only missing words are triggering, safezones and so on to make it really just another pushed political statement. They could written it to more fit into the world and have the character have this come after the playing convincing them to speak about it in relation to their god and how Tempus views genders. It would be more interesting and also lift forward the diety and how diffrent they can be from each others. Lolth would clearly not accept a male priest of Lolth who proclaims himself female. This is the whole ordeal here, it is poorly put forward and do not deepen your knowledge of the world more than "okay transgenders is something people is okay with, not orcs, not goblins, not demons" No, no the world do not accept it overall. Lolth do not, probably not either a bunch of other gods. They could have swayed it into the setting better. Now it just comes off as a cheap poke at modern day families "They raised me like a boy" hell, some dumb farmers raised you in whatever manner you could. And Tempus? Tempus is a very northern god so she might come from a town in Icewind Dale. A totally diffrent culture. Her name is litterally female-male in Czech to. Which makes it even more of a forced statement rather than a show case of deepening the worlds lore and telling us about it overall.

Like give us this conversation, fiting to the world, lore and culture of this character, her god and her position in the Sword Coast. How they see it. If you should have it in, make it feel one with the world. Like they did in Witcher 3 with the homosexual hunter and so on. Or the crossdressing elf who is already of an outcast race so it makes it less of a bad thing to do when you already are hated.

If they JUST have to push it into game, atleast make it fit the setting and not be like a interview with some parents and their she-male kid in some documentary about how their kid and them finally came to an understanding about their kids weird gender views.

 

[Roguey]

Ah, I remember when it was just earlier last week when some delusionals claimed surely this would be the Pillars-killer. Meanwhile that one year old game can still spark up enough passion to get a 9 page thread within a week.

Trolling with goon observations:

Goddammit this game spoiled me so much, I just find it so hard to play the new BG expansion that came out now, everything is so old, slow and clunky

Yeah that's why people who insist on saying that BG is still better than PoE just make me Rose-tinted glasses are a powerful item.

Only including this so I don't get accused of cherry-picking like I usually do:

I don't find the IE games particularly clunky outside of Torment. Not sure why that would necessitate rose-tinted glasses.

Bonus:

2.0 will adjust difficulty down if you reload a save you've loaded a couple of times before because it's stupid, thinks you're frustrated, and wants to "help" you. If you were playing on Easy, this means Story Mode. Turn it off, be prepared to do so again (and again, and again). This is the worst thing they did for 2.0 and I hope they get rid of it.

Is this seriously a feature and not a bug because if so

 

[Infinitron]

Bonus:

2.0 will adjust difficulty down if you reload a save you've loaded a couple of times before because it's stupid, thinks you're frustrated, and wants to "help" you. If you were playing on Easy, this means Story Mode. Turn it off, be prepared to do so again (and again, and again). This is the worst thing they did for 2.0 and I hope they get rid of it.

Is this seriously a feature and not a bug because if so

WTF aVENGER is this true

 

[FeelTheRads]

Spoiler

Majestic storytelling

:mrpresident::patriot:

MAEK SWORD COAST GRAET AGEIN!!!
GOD BLES!

Is this seriously a feature and not a bug because if so

Wouldn't surprise me at all. Since it seems like a big chunk of their audience is "story mod" retards and pretty special flowers, you wouldn't want to make them feel bad.

 

[Trodat]

I'm having more fun playing this than PoE - but I mean it's BG combat, you can't really go wrong there.

I think that difficulty thing is a bug tho.

 

[Trashos]

lol I like how Ezrite barged into this thread with NEWS FROM 4CHAN and turned it into a complete shitshow overnight

How many people here are actually playing the game? Seems like if it's not a Kickstarter where the entire Codex hops on board and gets the game simultaneously, there's a problem getting a decent sample size of impressions.

To be fair, that writer's reply in Beamdog's forum is completely devoid of any interest in good storytelling. It is quite impressive how she answered like good storytelling is not a thing. If the people working on the product don't give a shit about it, why should anybody else?

Despite all this, I do hope that they do OK, because it is questionable whether the industry can overcome another big failure right now. And I too am waiting for feedback on the large battles, which I predicted to be a catastrophe (and hope I am wrong).

 

[Infinitron]

BRB calling the Pratchett estate

 

[ArchAngel]

I'm having more fun playing this than PoE - but I mean it's BG combat, you can't really go wrong there.

I think that difficulty thing is a bug tho.

I loved when I approached in stealth a group of spiders only to trigger a web trap which webbed me and those spiders killed my character before I could do anything with other 4 :D
This never happened to me in PoE, especially not in generic map encounter.

As I posted on Beamdogs forum

And you can turn your gender to female and stop being transgender.

To me, I think the biggest problem how it is formulate. It sounds so modern with that whole "me and my parents came to an understanding". The only missing words are triggering, safezones and so on to make it really just another pushed political statement. They could written it to more fit into the world and have the character have this come after the playing convincing them to speak about it in relation to their god and how Tempus views genders. It would be more interesting and also lift forward the diety and how diffrent they can be from each others. Lolth would clearly not accept a male priest of Lolth who proclaims himself female. This is the whole ordeal here, it is poorly put forward and do not deepen your knowledge of the world more than "okay transgenders is something people is okay with, not orcs, not goblins, not demons" No, no the world do not accept it overall. Lolth do not, probably not either a bunch of other gods. They could have swayed it into the setting better. Now it just comes off as a cheap poke at modern day families "They raised me like a boy" hell, some dumb farmers raised you in whatever manner you could. And Tempus? Tempus is a very northern god so she might come from a town in Icewind Dale. A totally diffrent culture. Her name is litterally female-male in Czech to. Which makes it even more of a forced statement rather than a show case of deepening the worlds lore and telling us about it overall.

Like give us this conversation, fiting to the world, lore and culture of this character, her god and her position in the Sword Coast. How they see it. If you should have it in, make it feel one with the world. Like they did in Witcher 3 with the homosexual hunter and so on. Or the crossdressing elf who is already of an outcast race so it makes it less of a bad thing to do when you already are hated.

If they JUST have to push it into game, atleast make it fit the setting and not be like a interview with some parents and their she-male kid in some documentary about how their kid and them finally came to an understanding about their kids weird gender views.

Tempus can be found all over the Realms. That is not a good argument. You actually have no argument.

 

[Alienman]

Polarizing game.

Compared to PoE I'm enjoying this more. The biggest plus is that I know something about this world. I don't have to read wiki-page after wiki-page to get some kind of understanding, and of course not having to deal with the weird leveling, item and combat -system PoE use. Now I haven't finished the game so I don't know if the story holds up to the end, but I enjoy it so far. Beside the SJW crap which have tainted the experience a bit it is fun and I don't mind the UI improvements. Actually, I don't even really remember how the old UI was or worked so I don't really have a reference point.

 

[aVENGER]

Bonus:

2.0 will adjust difficulty down if you reload a save you've loaded a couple of times before because it's stupid, thinks you're frustrated, and wants to "help" you. If you were playing on Easy, this means Story Mode. Turn it off, be prepared to do so again (and again, and again). This is the worst thing they did for 2.0 and I hope they get rid of it.

Is this seriously a feature and not a bug because if so

WTF aVENGER is this true

Nope, it's a bug. We don't intentionally adjust the difficulty level.

The way that difficulty settings work was changed for SoD, and this seems to be occasionally causing some issues with old (pre-SoD) savegames. The programmers are on it.

 

[Blackguard]

Yes there's a small secret you can only find by moving character with Infravision to it. Although I didn't get the point of it (just a room with monster and no loot).

There is loot, that's the secret.

 

[Llama-Yak Hybrid]

when will RPG devs learn that it's us shitlords that buy their games and they should pander to us?

 

[Metal Hurlant]

Fired up the game and some things I'm a little bemused by.

First I selected Legacy of Bhaal (Insane) difficulty.

Spoiler

My Fighter Dwarf stats. Obviously 18/00 would have confused some people so they show it as 18/100.

Spoiler

And my level 1 Fighter has recruited Edwin, trotted off to the Gnoll Stronghold to kill Dyanheir which I promptly did and now at the Nashkel Mines. Still on Level 1 (854/2000 xp). Also, I choose Khalid and Jaheira as companions as I'm intrigued by being a Marriage Counsellor. It's one of those I need to see it to believe it things. I'm thinking I might see how far I get with a Level 1 party with the exception of Jaheira which I've levelled up to level 2 already - just to see how hard this Legacy of Bhaal difficulty is.

Spoiler

 

[ArchAngel]

Fired up the game and some things I'm a little bemused by.

First I selected Legacy of Bhaal (Insane) difficulty.

Spoiler

My Fighter Dwarf stats. Obviously 18/00 would have confused some people so they show it as 18/100.

Spoiler

And my level 1 Fighter has recruited Edwin, trotted off to the Gnoll Stronghold to kill Dyanheir which I promptly did and now at the Nashkel Mines. Still on Level 1 (854/2000 xp). I'm thinking I might see how far I get with a Level 1 party with the exception of Jaheira which I've levelled up to level 2 already - just to see how hard this Insane difficulty is.

Spoiler

Are you playing on Legacy of the Bhaal or Insane? It is a big difference between the two.

 

[Metal Hurlant]

I did choose Legacy of Bhaal but it's showing up as Insane during gameplay. I assume the Legacy of Bhaal difficulty doesn't show up.

 

[Thonius]

Quite a lot of those artists were contracted from China

That`s explains retarded hairstyles, clothing. Also I really hated a 1 body type. I wanted to be classical mage and not some insanely ripped 24/7 in a gym dude with arms so big that daggers looks like toothpicks in his hand.

 

[Lacrymas]

Is that all the insane and "legacy of Bhaal" difficulties do? Raise monster damage? That's lame.

 

[Infinitron]

Is that all the insane and "legacy of Bhaal" difficulties do? Raise monster damage? That's lame.

Nah, see here: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...pre-release-thread.96369/page-70#post-4459934

 

[Metal Hurlant]

These are the difficulties. I did choose Legacy of Bhaal with my Fighter Dwarf but it's similar to Insane which is why it's showing up in the game as Insane. Unless it's that bug that's moved it down? Who knows.