After seeing the grumbling and bad user reviews I assumed there had to be some truth to all the complaining - it couldn't all be just a politically motivated backlash, right? I mean, it would be so hard to make a game that captured the feeling of the original series that it made sense to me that it might fall flat. I'm a long term fan of the Infinity engine games, but I avoided this one for quite a while until someone persuaded me to give it a go. I've been stunned to discover that Dragonspear is, in fact, good. It looks both nice and faithful to the originals, with cool new areas. Dungeons are designed with the same sense of pacing: minor fights, major fights, a main story line and lots of little diversions peppered around the place. Side quests feel nicely distracting, being self-contained short stories in the way that BG2 did so memorably. Combat encounters don't feel exactly like BG1 or BG2, but perhaps like a mix of the two, with some Icewind Dale-style encounters thrown in. The best moments are when the game emulates BG2's approach to mixed, balanced enemy parties, with spellcasters working alongside warriors and such. Characters feel faithfully recreated. This is a challenge, because the original BG1 characters didn't all return to BG2 and many of them had very little characterisation in the first game. By its nature this expansion explores gaps in the story so some elements are going to be filled in that were left to our imagination before, but they do make sense and the game goes to some effort to help set up the slightly abrupt start to the prologue of BG2. With SoD installed you will start BG2 at a higher level than before (if you import your save) so that will affect the balance somewhat, but in the longer run most of BG2 is balanced for this kind of level range anyway, so apart from some of the early stuff being a little easier I don't think it upsets the flow of the game much. I'd recommend this for new and old fans of the series.
