I love the Pillars game so much and was so gutted that a third never happened. If you love Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, you will probably love these games. If you have always been curious about them but a leery of their age, start here. The universe is one of the best in fantasy gaming, the gameplay is rich and the narrative is fantastic. It loses a star only because of the excesses of the Kickstarter campaign: the stupid backer NPCs which destroy immersion, the bloated mega-dungeon and the lifeless second 'big city' were all Kickstarter gimmicks which unfortunately lowered the quality of the product. The White March, however, corrects all these problems to deliver one of the best adventures in RPG history. Likewise the superb sequel set in the Deadfire. They truly don't make them like this anymore.
It's sad that in 2022 the review-bombing one star scores still dominate the GoG page. This expansion suffered greatly at the hands of toxic politics on both sides of the political spectrum. I maintain that the inclusion of LGBTQ characters in the game was not the problem, but the bizarre marketing leading up to release, in which a very vociferous lead writer marginalised the community by claiming that she was bringing a sexist, awful story into the 21st century and if they didn't like it, too bad. But guess what - it's a really good little module. Encounters are tight, balanced and very clever. There's multiple ways to solve a few quests - something the original, for all its flaws, didn't really do. As a huge BG2 fan, I actually prefer Dragonspear to ToB. None of the toxicitiy above takes away from some great design, and the emotional impact of hearing those voice actors again. It's a really faithful expansion that was buried beneath hideous US politics. More faithful, I would argue, than BG3. If you're on the fence, it is totally worth it whether you are a new or old player.
