Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear adds a new chapter to the Bhaalspawn saga. The events occurring between Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II are at last revealed in this 25-hour expansion for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition.Expand Your Story: Explore new areas, fight new monsters, and win new re...
Windows 7, 8.1, 10 64 bit, Dual Core Processor, 1 GB RAM, OpenGL 2.0 compatible, 5 GB available spac...
Description
Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear adds a new chapter to the Bhaalspawn saga. The events occurring between Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II are at last revealed in this 25-hour expansion for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition.
Expand Your Story: Explore new areas, fight new monsters, and win new rewards in the Siege of Dragonspear expansion to Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition. Continue the adventure by exporting your game to Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition
Explore the Sword Coast: Venture through vibrant new hand-painted areas in the classic style of the original Baldur’s Gate
Gather Your Party: The original cast returns to kick butt for goodness - along with Neera, Rasaad, Dorn, and four new additions!
Extra Class: New items, quests, and a new class: the spirit-calling shaman!
Story Mode: A difficulty setting to allow players to experience all of the story with none of the Game Over screens
Legacy of Bhaal: A new extra-hard difficulty setting for experienced players.
Wanted this expansion so badly when it first came out that I pre-paid (for the first time in 20 years) when it was still in beta. I really wish I could give it a clear and unbiased report, but this expansion is just plain awful. please, do yourself a favor, save your money and keep the fond memories of this game alive. Its just sad and pathetic what Beamdog did to this franchise. Would give a 1/4 star if I could.
It's been a little bit since I played this, but something possessed me to leave a review when I saw it while browsing Gog's catalogue. I thought it was fine, overall. The main plot is very silly, and the new characters are pretty shallow. Where the writing improves is in its expansion of existing characters and themes. Companions like Khalid and Jaheira are given more depth than they had in BG1, and the dream sequences were surprisingly well written, being on par with Black Isle's writing for most of them. Combat encounters were reasonably challenging and well designed.
Despite being an expansion of BG1, it feels more like a lead-in to BG2. Originally, the jump from 1 to 2 was quite jarring. Without spoiling anything, Siege of Dragonspear does an adequate job of bridging the gap and setting up important characters and themes that were explored in 2 but not in 1. The length is what will probably let you down, being about 30 hours on average. I think they probably could've succeeded a lot more if this had been shorter, more focused and kept the tone of BG1 before developing into the tone BG2 had. As it is, the characters are too talkative and the story is very tropey and lacks self-awareness and nuance.
If it seems like I'm being hard on the game for giving it 4 stars, I'll admit that my opinion is closer to 3.5, but that's not an option, so I went with 4, since there's a lot of 1 star reviews that I don't think were posted as good faith critiques. Such is life when there's a trans character for over a minute of screentime. My opinion of that character is the same as my opinion for all of Beamdog's original characters; shallow and perfunctory to the story. That said, her being trans doesn't magically make her worse than everyone else.
The tl;dr is that the writing ranges from kinda bad to surprisingly good, the combat portions are solid, and it does a decent job of leading into BG2, but it's longer than it needs to be.
I really don't understand why everyone is freaking out.
I first played Baldur's gate in the late 90s, I am an original fan. I was pumped when Beamdog released the EE versions, and I was SUPER pumped I heard they were releasing brand new content to bridge the two games.
I have just finished playing thru the entire thing, and would like to share my experience, using everyone’s complaints as an outline for my experience playing thru it.
Crashes: never during game play. Only happened when trying to import final save from BG:EE to DoS. If I just played thru the last fight instead it started DoS right away. Problem solved.
New graphics: I agree the new sprites look pretty lame, but you can turn them off. One click. Is that really worth complaining about? It certainly only took a second to fix. All the other graphic improvements are AWESOME.
Transgender thing: The way people complained, I got the impression he/she was a character you were stuck with in your party and he/she was constantly shoving an agenda down your throat. The he/she priest is in your camp, you don’t have to interact with it if you don’t want to. WHO CARES?!
Multiplayer: In fairness, I haven’t tried multiplayer, but I would venture to guess Beamdog is working at making it more stable at the time of this writing
Characters and Voicings: Only thing I was disappointed about was the lack of Jaheira voice, definitely missed her with everyone else on board. Otherwise it was fine!
Story: Lots of complaints about the writing, other than literally like two odd lines I noticed, I thought it was fine. On par with the rest.
Flexibility: Folks complained about the lack of flexibility in the gameplay, forcing you to do things certain ways. I didn’t see it as that much different from Throne of Bhaal.
If your expectation was for a standalone game, you have it wrong. Think of it like Throne of Bhaal for BG1. It’s an add on.
It's limited in scope adventure which can be pretty enjoyable depending on your expectations.
1. Visuals: Surprisingly fantastic D:
Fidelity: It's not at the level of Pillars of Eternity, but this game still performs infinitely better on older systems.
Art Design: Some maps look honestly more impressive than what Black Isle produced long ago in Baldur's Gate 2 and that's a high bar. Probably the best looking set of maps in the entire Infinity Engine history. It really helped overall atmosphere and exploration.
Character Design: Nothing changed from BG1EE so...
2. Sound: Great, but limited:
Music: All tracks are of high quality, imaginative yet still stylishly fateful to original Baldur's Gate. It's quite a feat. Crucial moments are properly underlined, and there is enough room to breathe. The only issue is very limited total amount of tracks which go on repeat too fast.
Voice-acting: It's ok, sometimes excellent and fittingly limited.
Effects: Same as in the original.
Environment: Not much to point out.
3. Gameplay: More of the same with extra challenge
A thing worth pointing out is increased amount of enemies in almost every encounter. Entire flow of combat shifts closer to what we saw in Icewind Dale as a result. So more emphasis on AoE spells and less useful single target abilities.
Difficulty tuning is also a bit more demanding (especially in first section) which I welcome with open arms.
4. Story: the ugly part 😬
Main Plot: The entire motivation of the whole debacle is questionable. Antagonists goal is forced and the means to achieve it are nonsensical. What's worse certain cartoonishly evil character makes direction of the plot pretty obvious from the start.
Side Quest: Few in number, but given how pressing the main plot is supposed to be it's quite fitting. The quality varies between fun and forgettable. Some of those come with dedicated locations and much better stories than the main plot.
Writing: It's most often modern, surface level writing popularized by marvel. It lacks understanding of nuance while constantly pretending to be more clever than it actually is.
Companions: Safana, Edwin and Viconia act completely out of character. In general evil companions aren't really evil, interesting, fun or faithful to original. Other party members fair slightly better, but they are often written around some quirk rather than personal story.
5. Other:
Performance: Still top notch. It runs better than file explorer xD
Replayability: There is none. Dialogues often reference what you just said to sell you an illusion of choice. On second playthrough you will sadly see through it. I bet the entire dialogue tree is just a straight line with couple squares on the way.
SUMMARY:
Despite poor writing I wouldn't call it a waste of time.
There is a lot of fun to be had, art and atmosphere to appreciate, monsters to kill, challenges to overcome.
If you approach it like an elaborate dungeon run you will have yourself a jolly good time.
Frankly if devs involved ever wanted to refresh visuals, sound and gameplay of old-school Baldur's Gate 1&2 I would gladly throw couple bucks their way.
But I would never trust writers responsible :x
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