DO NOT BUY
Game will feel horribly different to the originals because it was written with the sole intent to add feminist and social justice warrior propaganda to the game which makes it fall flat on its face.
To give you a quick example, gay guys will tell you as part of your first encounter with them that they are gay, as if you could not figure it out on your own. characters that used to be feminine and desirable are now full of feminist dialogue that will just want to make you put as much distance between you and them, total personality "upgrade" according to the Amber Scott lead writer. Community as a whole tried to address this despicable propaganda issue in the official Baldur's gate forum only to be banned from posting by Amber herself or her supporting moderators.
Thank you Amber Scott for destroying what could have otherwise been a great expansion to the Baldur's gate franchise. RIP any hope of beamdog studio ever again creating any games worth playing.
sincerely,
Your Ex-gaming community.
How can subpar devs making buggy games, with broken multiplayer and awful scripts (with shameless and blatant agenda pushing) destroy the games industry even further?
By making "expansions" for beloved classics, of course!
What hurt the evaluation of this game on GOG is that most of the gamers are racist, misoginist and homophobic and they went on a rampant after realizing that there was a transgender NPC.
"How outrageous Beamdog was! We need to punish them by evaluating them badly, recurring to facts that don't even matter to the game, when what REALLY is bothering me is that I don't accept LGBT contents in games!"
That's the truth and it's pure crystal prejudice!
LGBT community wants to be represented in RPG games. Enough playing white hetero dudes or being stuck with a douchebag-only interest-love when playing a woman!
Thumbs up Beamdog and please continue adding LGBT contents on your games!
I've been a fan of BG since the original, and I own BGEE and BG2EE on PC and on Android, so I guess that makes me a bit of an outlier or a fanatic.
Anyway, so a few days ago I was checking out GOG and I was like "wow, a NEW expansion of BG?!" and immediately went to google to see what this was all about. What I found was... upsetting to say the least.
Baldur's Gate for me is escapism. In playing it I get to leave behind all the stupid politics that I have been afflicted with in school and then work. I got so sick of what I feel are attacks on my identity that I ultimately threw away the TV and haven't watched TV in 15 years. Now I see that this politics has invaded one of my favorite games so the game designer can score a few points against people like me.
I will be frank. I do not like the idea of a transexual character, but I could probably live with it as long as it wasn't the main character. I could have lived with Mizhena as an 'insertion' except that it was handled so insultingly ingame that I couldn't possibly support it with my money.
Why insulting? Because in Baldur's Gate and in RPGs generally you have as a rule a variety of potential responses, often following the pattern of positive, neutral, negative, or sarcastic. In the main character's encounter with Mizhena, only positive responses are available, thus forcing your character to effectively endorse Mizhena. Basic RPG principles were violated to shove this down the throat's of your customers and to force your customers to affirm Mizhena's transexuality ingame. Had you given the option of a negative response, and not just a negative response that makes your main character look like a fool, then you would not be suffering this blowback.
But lets get to the core of the inappropriateness of a transexual, post-op or pre-op in a fantasy setting in which there is magic to easily remedy these issues. Magic can be used to change the gender, for real, of someone like Mizhena, and thus Mizhena would no longer be transexual. Alternatively magic could be used to resolve Mizhena's gender dysphoria, and make Mizhena's feelings of gender identity match his biological sex. Either way there is no reason for someone like Mizhena to have unresolved gender dysphoria issues unless Mizhena didn't have access to appropriate clerical magic, which is unlikely since Mizhena also happens to be a Paladin.
Perhaps after reading this some of you may feel that people like me shouldn't be allowed to exist. I mean, how dare I go against the zeitgeist and right-thinking? I see that there are millions like me, however, and most of them are game buyers, especially buyers of RPGs. A little bit of consideration would go a long way.
I am a radical leftist and a HUGE Baldur's Gate fan. First off the main story was good, I found your new nemesis interesting and puzzling. The voice actors that came back did a great job. They did some amazing things with the infinity engine. The bugs were not too bad, but definitely brought my score down. Kahlid was never to be found in the game, I found out later it was due to a bug. I could not finish some of the side quests, don't know how much of this was me screwing up or bugs. The new UI was ugly and some parts were confusing and unnecessary. The writing of the main story is done really well. The rest of the writing is so bad I groaned out loud a few times. They fully voiced a Southern California stoner dude from the 80's. I have no problems with transgender, gay or strong women in gaming. I do have a problem with bad writing though. Too many modern terms, words and slang did not feel like Baldur's Gate at all. Safana's character was redone because they did not like her. having her in my party really hurt my immersion in the game. They left so many NPCs out, why not leave out what you did not like Beamdog? Now if you play through the whole series. You get one Safana, then a different one in the middle and then at the end back to the original one. How stupid it that! I am also disgusted by all the racism, homophobia, and misogynistic hate that was thinly veiled and not so thinly veiled spewed by Gators. In the end I realize that I am disappointed by Beamdog, especially the writers at Beamdog. You should not work on "Most beloved RPG of all time" (your words not mine) and then trash the game. The things that have been said by a few employs in interviews and on Beamdog boards made me realize they had not understood the deeper complexities of the characters and also may not be the best people to work on a game they seem to not like. Bad mouthing someone else "art" while being a caretaker of it was nothing short of moronic. The sad truth is some people worked really hard on this expansion to make it feel like Baldur's Gate and some worked at changing it. Though I agree with the social ideas badly presented in the game, working hard to make it feel like Baldur's Gate and then going out of your way to change the personality of characters and bring modernized words, terms and slang into a fantasy game seemed that not all of the people working at Beamdog had the same vision. Trent Oster, I hope you have learned from this experience. I really wanted this game to be great and I hate that some will think I am a Gator in disguise, but I cannot stay silent on this issue.
