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Game News Beamdog announce Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, with Chris Avellone onboard

markec

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Working on a glorified mod is pretty much as low as you can get for a person of MCA status, well working on a Candy Crush sequel is probably worse but its still bad.

I remember one Russian interview with MCA where the guy asked him does he consider himself a has been and MCA calmly denied that. I wonder if the same question was asked today would MCA respond the same or would he pause for a moment.

I also remember beginning of Obsidian and I was ecstatic, I envisioned they would release loads of hardcore RPGs. We all know their past filled with hits and misses, disappointments, diamonds in the rough, canceled projects, financial problems and evil publishers. We all hoped that one day will come when they will finally make that one game they wanted to make, that no publisher will meddle with and they will have full creative freedom. Many of us hoped it would be a something like Arcanum 2 only with turn based combat.

Maybe MCA waited for that day also, a game where he would have freedom to do what he wanted and after so many disappointments, failed projects and watching his friends get fired he finally got to that point, a kickstarter. Maybe he hoped to use it to make game he waited for so long only for others to take that chance and play it safe. Obsidian had the best writer in the industry, and they played it safe.

When announced I saw PoE as a game of BG2 world design, PST writing and IWD combat, yet they failed miserably at everything. Hey, BG2 has great world design lets copy it by making pretty environments, IWD has great combat lets copy it by just randomly putting blobs of enemies everywhere. PST writing was great, lets copy it by putting loads of info dumps on every corner because people love to read, that will be enough right? In the end final result was a souless game which is quite ironic seeing how the game revolves around souls. I felt disappointed maybe MCA did also.

After so many years I wish MCA all the best on his new project and I hope he will have fun.
 

Infinitron

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RPG Codex Rule #23: Never miss any opportunity to launch into a tirade about PoE
 

Athelas

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While the narrative of 'MCA jumped ship to work on a true IE successor' must be appealing to a lot of people, they should probably realize that games aren't developed in the span of a few weeks. It probably was one of the bazillion projects he did on the side while he was still at Obsidian. Incidentally, at least one Beamdog employee helped out on PoE.
 

i.Razor

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Who knows. If this game/addon will do alright (along with Sword Coast Legends), it might be that Chris will lead on BG3 or something, and thats why he is involved.
 

Tigranes

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Am I in the POE thread or something? People whine about it almost as much as they post in anticipation of FO4.

So they're finally making an actual game, instead of pointless POS 'enhanced editions' stealing money from the ignorant. Well, all that wouldn't be so bad if this game is good, because a good IE game would be amazing.

So, what can we see on twitch? Really hard to judge important things like quest design and combat, especially since combat is, well, largely going to look like IE (and I suppose it's hard to go wrong there, unless you really fuck it up, given what you're working with). But the artwork they've done to create new areas generally looks nice, the environments are pretty impressive.

In contrast there is yet another shitty, ugly UI that looks like someone broke pieces of old UIs and started having them fly around. Christ. And even basic stuff like there being zero offset from the top of the page for the spellbook description, defeating the purpose of skeuomorphic design. And then floating, shiny, flashing health bars? I'm just going to assume that you can turn that off at least.

And what the fuck, is this a thing in all EEs? They changed the sprites? We all know sprites are cardboard cutouts but now they literally look like cardboard cutouts, like someone made BG1 merchandise and started selling little cutout paper sprites in real life... and you scanned them onto your monitor. (See ~1.09 where they zoom in). Christ. Many of the new inventory icons are also horrendous - there's a fucking wizard hat around 1.35 that literally defies all the colour conventions of the entire BG art, is clearly too big for the icon slot, and generally looks like a cutout from a budget children's TV show. In fact, here:

VDP45ST.png

YOU tell ME if that fucking hat, that background, those borders around the texts, those weirdly resized existing icons, those comparatively huge new icons... you tell me if ANY of this is an 'improvement'. There's literally only one: the character information on the right.

Gonna be hard for a relatively small company to get someone who's good at public presentations, but feedback can't hurt. Don't waffle, talk about specifics. Don't say "uhh there're bad guys" or "Bhaal's been dead for, like, twelve years or something". Get people with smooth and easy-listening voices like anybody would for TV or radio, not super-nasal lady and constantly-voice-is-near-breaking guy. Don't randomly exude how much you love working on this project while showing off a new translucent grey background for floating texts. Either get into the details and give people information they can't see with their eyes, or at least give them some Pete Hines hype about bringing back the magic.

So far looks like an unusually large IE total conversion mod, complete with badly written new NPCs, and then some terrible mangling in the UI area. That is to say, better than most big mods because it's bigger, consistent, and actually finished, worse than big mods because it costs you money and has a shit-ass UI.

We'll see, when they release some actually significant gameplay details, whether there's any significant, interesting improvements/changes: new enemies that are actually worthwhile? The shaman? Interesting encounters? Anything we could call a gameplay feature? If there are, great, the shitty EEs will have resulted in something pretty awesome. We shall see.
 

Athelas

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Being able to see your character's THAC0 and damage range as you change equipment is actually a pretty critical improvement. Though it seems to very barebones, with the lack of off-hand weapon stats and such (unless that's what the empty slots are for).
 
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Zed

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I think BG2 with 0 mods will remain my go-to IE fix.

There's no god damn way in hell that I'll be re-playing BG1 for this expansion. I re-played BG1 a couple of years ago and it was only fun because I picked up some companions I had never used before.

They should have made a stand-alone adventure.
 

Bester

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the environments are pretty impressive.
Considering that they're just 2d background images and that they look exactly like something from 15 years ago, they're only impressive in one particular way... I'm impressed by beandong's shamelessness.
 

Trodat

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I think BG2 with 0 mods will remain my go-to IE fix.

There's no god damn way in hell that I'll be re-playing BG1 for this expansion. I re-played BG1 a couple of years ago and it was only fun because I picked up some companions I had never used before.

They should have made a stand-alone adventure.

You don't have to replay BG1 for this. You just need the BG:EE to be installed and then start the new campaign.
 

Roguey

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I love how some people were triggered so hard by Pillars that they're looking forward to this (while also dropping negs about Pillars).
 

Bester

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Since I'll be playing it anyway (maybe I'll skip all dialogue, make it an iwd-like playthrough), I decided to rewatch the trailer in slow mo and noticed a few things.

What I initially assumed to be a spider...

696176e0209344a180afeaa459674f35.png


I've read in the log that it's a drider and only then was I able to recognize it. Worst drider in the history of shitty fan art. The upper body is supposed to be that of a drow, yet the upper body here is twice the size of a human even... this giant head, giant arm... Nice to know their modelers have no idea what dnd even is.

Moving on...

8a1134fd65d1209820e73a92d59b5fc8.png


In the console it says that it's Halatathlaer. Dragons_of_Faerun.pdf has this to say about him:
Challenge Rating: 24
Status: Ghostly
Gender/Kind: Male Ancient Copper
Lair/Domain: Dragonspear Castle

First of all, does this look copper or ghostly? Or is the size right? No. Again, big props to the modellers and/or concept artists.
(Ghostly dragons lose some size, but they absolutely don't shrink down to the size of a big horse)
And second, CR 24? You can't possibly beat that with a 7 lvl party, you need at least a 20 lvl party and killing one yields you 62k exp. I see nobody gives a fuck about anything at beandong...

Now, about that castle:
Dragonspear Castle was a fortress, built across three low hills on the southwestern edge of the High Moor, east of Trollbark Forest and just north of where the Coast Way joins the Trade Way. Extensive tunnels were dug under the keep, connecting with an underground river, the already-abandoned city of Kanaglym, and hence the larger Underdark. The Castle became most notable for its interplanar portals, through which come baatezu and other fiends.

Since we have both this dragon in the trailer and the drow, and this place isn't far from Baldur's Gate, we can assume that this is where things will be happening. Underdark, baatezu, ancient dragons... and a party of 7-10 levels. Cool...
 
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Athelas

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Judging from those health bars over their heads, they might be taking inspiration from PoE. :M

Also, smaller dragons are probably better, because it means less pathfinding issues from a giant creature moving through constrained IE-game corridors. Some of the golems in BG2 couldn't even pass through the hallways of the areas they were situated in.
 
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Self-Ejected

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Love the HP bars, IE games were seriously lacking in visual clutter so it's good to see beamdrog addressing it.

Also, smaller dragons are probably better, because it means less pathfinding issues from a giant creature moving through constrained iE-game corridors. Some of the golems in BG2 couldn't even pass through the hallways of the areas they were situated in.
Nice mindset
 

Roguey

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Worst drider in the history of shitty fan art. The upper body is supposed to be that of a drow, yet the upper body here is twice the size of a human even... this giant head, giant arm... Nice to know their modelers have no idea what dnd even is.

Icewind Dale 2 had driders, why didn't they just take 'em out????
 

Vikter

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Beamdog sure spent a lot of time polishing the new assets and writing amazing dialogue for this one.
 

Bester

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Icewind Dale 2 had driders, why didn't they just take 'em out????
I didn't realize it was from IWD2, obviously. I never liked IWD2, played it once ages ago and then forgot all about it. I'm not surprised IWD2 got something wrong, though.
 

Roguey

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I didn't realize it was from IWD2, obviously. I never liked IWD2, played it once ages ago and then forgot all about it. I'm not surprised IWD2 got something wrong, though.
As you can see from that pic, you misunderstood what I was saying ^_^ I meant why didn't they just take the asset from IWD2 instead of making their own bad one.
 

Jaesun

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Doesn't Obsidian own all the Icewind Dale assets?
 

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