Clicking on SoD, on gog.com, and the first review that I see... is distracting me.
Extremely disappointed
Patch 2.0/Dragonspear made Baldurs Gate EE a worse game for a number of reasons.
-random crashes
-mods aren't working properly any longer
-questionable graphic update (they managed to make a 16 year old game look WORSE than on release) I know, these are optional, but when i first started the game after the update i just couldn't believe it how ugly it looked. Funnily enough, the preview screenshots here and on steam don't show the ugly new sprites.
-questionable difficulty changes. Why the f*** does the game lower the difficulty after a few reloads by itself, without asking. I realized this awesome "feature" when i reached the so called "Story mode" which sets all stats to 25 and adds a ton of immunity. Basically Godmode. Obviously i thought it was a bug and tried to reload my game again. Well, i figured it out eventually. What a terrible feature.
-Voice acting The voice acting in the addon breaks the feel of the original game. I know, many people hate to read and prefer voiced dialogues. But Baldurs Gate has its own style and if suddenly whole dialogues are voiced it just feels out of place and you know immediately that it doesn't belongs to the game. It just feels wrong. They could have saved the money for the (mediocre actually) voice acting and spend it on fixing bugs.
-Multiplayer Its working barely at best.
So far this addon has been a huge disappointment. The worst thing is: Even if i refund it, the terrible patch 2.0 will stay. I guess i will let the EE games rest and play the original games with mods for a while. Maybe Beamdog gets their shit together and fixes the issues and i can enjoy playing EE. Hopefully this time it won't take them whole year.
PS (kinda unrelated on GoG): Steam Achievments are buggy as hell too. Some won't unlock. Others do unlock for the wrong quest... its a mess.
the third
An unnecessary add-on that no-one wanted
Siege of Dragonspear is beyond mediocre; it's plain bad.
Let me address the good elements of the game: they got back almost all of the original voice actors for the companions, including having a large part for David Warner, who voiced Irenicus. David Warner actually voices a player voice set. That's the sum of the good elements of this expansion.
This expansion what completely unnecessary. The expansion's level cap is one higher than BG:EE's and you lose all of your money and equipment as soon as you start BG2, so the only concievable reason you are playing this expansion is for the story. Unfortunately, the story is poorly written and delivered. It has little sense of scale, and feels as if it is trying to one-up Throne of Bhaal in order to be "epic". The story is mostly told in little "scenes" told on cut up maps from Baldur's Gate. Often you are given a map the size of a single screen, with nothing to explore and no possible way to miss the plot. The experience spoon feeds you the content because it doesn't trust you to consume it in the proper way, which is a message reinforced by its mechanics. I was playing through as a murderous blackguard and had a habit of answering insolence by making a mountain of skulls from the nearby. Except, often the game would just teleport in a guard-wizard who casts an impossibly high level spell and kills me instantly. I wasn't playing the game the way they wanted, so they decided to take it away until I did it the way they wanted. This is the spirit of Dragonspear. It is a rotten, little attempt to cash in on a legacy of more talented people than themselves.
One hears often about an attempt to hammer in a SJW agenda, but that's not why this game doesn't respect BG. If a minor npc who is transgendered offends you and you were around to play the original BG in its day, then its far time to grow up. Dragonspear is a travesty to the BG tradition because it doesn't respect the spirit of those games it steals from.
and the fifth review on the main page.
An abomination of an expansion
Some people say this game hasn't aged well, but I play a lot of retro games, so visuals usually aren't terribly important to me. But this "expansion" is an abomination. The UI is terrible. They tried to fix things that weren't broken and ended up making them worse. Multiplayer doesn't work, and on top of it all there is a good deal of ham-fisted social justice garbage thrown in, and you can't even have any kind of negative dialogue to respond to it. DO NOT BUY.
I am frustrated of that ridiculous reviews... what the peoples want, I do not know, well I can try to predict.
I have googled few time this social justice, and I have found "civil rights" and stuff - which is standard norm of the modern society, and obviously those guys who wrote that anti-civilrights-social-justice stuff is mostly alive, and in health condition because of existing this social norms and laws. So the very popular culture of now, is that peoples want to kill an innocents in the Video-games, to torture, to murder, become a tyrant of somekind.. Very predictable branch of the popular culture, indeed![:(]( ":(")
Cmon guys, SoD is just want do you expect when think about RPG of that kind - you gathering your party, entering dungeon, and then a horrible-horrible skeleton attacking your party, and you releasing a fireball... You have a good picture (if this is even possible with the game engine that is looks like some ancient artifact... !), you have a good gameplay (this D&D adaptation in PC is OK!), you have OK! story (I don't liked stories in BG-series, so I hope in SOD it will be better.), you have a good sound, dialogues, a fine atmosphere, etc... What do you need else? Just relax and play, and obtain your narcotic pleasure if you are gamer. Old skool RPG the SOD is. Nothin else, and nothin more. Perhaps if the SoD may released before BG2, for an example, the guys start shouting that BG2 sux and SoD was a mega-classic, or something like that.
I think almost the all of those reviews is the result of the campaing of the "pop-culture-warriors" nothin more, and this is a far from reality what a SoD is really is. Perhaps I should make normal reviews on that resources, after I will play in SoD for some longer time.
P.S. I am hardcore PC-RPG player, that have lot of experience with BG series, and started gaming in SoD.
Please, avoid the spoilers in your answers, if you can.
Extremely disappointed
Patch 2.0/Dragonspear made Baldurs Gate EE a worse game for a number of reasons.
-random crashes
-mods aren't working properly any longer
-questionable graphic update (they managed to make a 16 year old game look WORSE than on release) I know, these are optional, but when i first started the game after the update i just couldn't believe it how ugly it looked. Funnily enough, the preview screenshots here and on steam don't show the ugly new sprites.
-questionable difficulty changes. Why the f*** does the game lower the difficulty after a few reloads by itself, without asking. I realized this awesome "feature" when i reached the so called "Story mode" which sets all stats to 25 and adds a ton of immunity. Basically Godmode. Obviously i thought it was a bug and tried to reload my game again. Well, i figured it out eventually. What a terrible feature.
-Voice acting The voice acting in the addon breaks the feel of the original game. I know, many people hate to read and prefer voiced dialogues. But Baldurs Gate has its own style and if suddenly whole dialogues are voiced it just feels out of place and you know immediately that it doesn't belongs to the game. It just feels wrong. They could have saved the money for the (mediocre actually) voice acting and spend it on fixing bugs.
-Multiplayer Its working barely at best.
So far this addon has been a huge disappointment. The worst thing is: Even if i refund it, the terrible patch 2.0 will stay. I guess i will let the EE games rest and play the original games with mods for a while. Maybe Beamdog gets their shit together and fixes the issues and i can enjoy playing EE. Hopefully this time it won't take them whole year.
PS (kinda unrelated on GoG): Steam Achievments are buggy as hell too. Some won't unlock. Others do unlock for the wrong quest... its a mess.
the third
An unnecessary add-on that no-one wanted
Siege of Dragonspear is beyond mediocre; it's plain bad.
Let me address the good elements of the game: they got back almost all of the original voice actors for the companions, including having a large part for David Warner, who voiced Irenicus. David Warner actually voices a player voice set. That's the sum of the good elements of this expansion.
This expansion what completely unnecessary. The expansion's level cap is one higher than BG:EE's and you lose all of your money and equipment as soon as you start BG2, so the only concievable reason you are playing this expansion is for the story. Unfortunately, the story is poorly written and delivered. It has little sense of scale, and feels as if it is trying to one-up Throne of Bhaal in order to be "epic". The story is mostly told in little "scenes" told on cut up maps from Baldur's Gate. Often you are given a map the size of a single screen, with nothing to explore and no possible way to miss the plot. The experience spoon feeds you the content because it doesn't trust you to consume it in the proper way, which is a message reinforced by its mechanics. I was playing through as a murderous blackguard and had a habit of answering insolence by making a mountain of skulls from the nearby. Except, often the game would just teleport in a guard-wizard who casts an impossibly high level spell and kills me instantly. I wasn't playing the game the way they wanted, so they decided to take it away until I did it the way they wanted. This is the spirit of Dragonspear. It is a rotten, little attempt to cash in on a legacy of more talented people than themselves.
One hears often about an attempt to hammer in a SJW agenda, but that's not why this game doesn't respect BG. If a minor npc who is transgendered offends you and you were around to play the original BG in its day, then its far time to grow up. Dragonspear is a travesty to the BG tradition because it doesn't respect the spirit of those games it steals from.
and the fifth review on the main page.
An abomination of an expansion
Some people say this game hasn't aged well, but I play a lot of retro games, so visuals usually aren't terribly important to me. But this "expansion" is an abomination. The UI is terrible. They tried to fix things that weren't broken and ended up making them worse. Multiplayer doesn't work, and on top of it all there is a good deal of ham-fisted social justice garbage thrown in, and you can't even have any kind of negative dialogue to respond to it. DO NOT BUY.
I am frustrated of that ridiculous reviews... what the peoples want, I do not know, well I can try to predict.
I have googled few time this social justice, and I have found "civil rights" and stuff - which is standard norm of the modern society, and obviously those guys who wrote that anti-civilrights-social-justice stuff is mostly alive, and in health condition because of existing this social norms and laws. So the very popular culture of now, is that peoples want to kill an innocents in the Video-games, to torture, to murder, become a tyrant of somekind.. Very predictable branch of the popular culture, indeed
Cmon guys, SoD is just want do you expect when think about RPG of that kind - you gathering your party, entering dungeon, and then a horrible-horrible skeleton attacking your party, and you releasing a fireball... You have a good picture (if this is even possible with the game engine that is looks like some ancient artifact... !), you have a good gameplay (this D&D adaptation in PC is OK!), you have OK! story (I don't liked stories in BG-series, so I hope in SOD it will be better.), you have a good sound, dialogues, a fine atmosphere, etc... What do you need else? Just relax and play, and obtain your narcotic pleasure if you are gamer. Old skool RPG the SOD is. Nothin else, and nothin more. Perhaps if the SoD may released before BG2, for an example, the guys start shouting that BG2 sux and SoD was a mega-classic, or something like that.
I think almost the all of those reviews is the result of the campaing of the "pop-culture-warriors" nothin more, and this is a far from reality what a SoD is really is. Perhaps I should make normal reviews on that resources, after I will play in SoD for some longer time.
P.S. I am hardcore PC-RPG player, that have lot of experience with BG series, and started gaming in SoD.
Please, avoid the spoilers in your answers, if you can.