Siege of Dragonspear

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Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear - Expansion Announcement Trailer


Can't wait

 

Yeah, this doesn't get me hyped in the least. Maybe if I keep my expectations extremely low, they might not disappoint me completely.

 

It's hard for me to make sense of it. My understanding of the events of BG-BG2 say nothing about any Dragonspear but quite a bit about getting jumped near Baldurs Gate very shortly after your victory. I sure hope it doesn't feel as much like a shoehorned in series of events for a quick cash grab when I actually play it.

 

I'm looking forward to this one. It will be "the" last IE game of our time. I've put a lot time into this game engine over the years. One last hurrah will do me just fine.

 

As far as I know, there's quite a stretch of time between BG1 and BG2. "Shortly," from an adventurer's standpoint, is actually a huge amount of time; Most epic adventures only last a few months at best.

Time is not the issue here, I think: It's the level difference. Level caps are hard enough to explain as it is, but you're supposed to start BG2 at a fairly low level and adding a whole adventure in between is gonna feel odd without any real progression. Of course, the progression could be lateral, but I haven't seen any evidence pointing in that direction.

 

So they did decide to make something in between BG1 and BG2.

I agree with Keneth, the issue isn't timing. It is never specified how much time passed between the end of BG1 and the start of BG2, though the fact that their levels didn't change, suggests that they at least didn't do much of import in between.

I suppose they could do something like was done for the Sword of the Coast expansion. Increase the level cap by maybe 40k to 100k xp (depending on the size of the expansion), keep the BG1 xp-scheme. It will eat a bit into the low level experience in BG2, but not too much. The nearly 40k xp you get at the end of chateau Irenicus is a really big chunk of the xp cap in BG1, but it doesn't really matter much in the BG2 scheme of things.

So it can be done, but I'm not entirely sure that they will handle it well. I always thought there wasn't much explanation about the whole transition from BG to Athkatla, precisely because they didn't really want to bother coming up with a somewhat far-fetched explanation. Sometimes, not explaining it is better than explaining it, because then it can remain a mystery.

 

The health bars looks effin' outta place. But all in all I'm looking forward to this one.
And hopefully this will pave the ways for BG3 - Black Hound- Or a similar story.

And lets be frank, even to this day I crave all the BG I can get. There is something immensely charming about the IE games.

 

Yes. Playing Icewind Dale 1 on a R9 290.

 

I'm pretty sure they'll tweak things like those healthbars, or at the very least give people an option to turn them off completely.

 

More info. I'll skip any editorial. Everyone can make up their own minds.





Re: the previous post, yes, the health bars can be turned off.

 

Meh, I'm not wasting an hour on that.

tl;dw version?

 

One of the "benefits" of having a commute, was I got to listen to all of this on my drive home from work last night.

A few quick highlights:
-New class - shaman
-CharName can be taken through the entire BG experience, starting in Candlekeep and on into ToB.
-Technically an expansion to BGEE, so presumably you will need to own this.
-Bigger than Tales of the Sword Coast and Throne of Bhaal combined.
-Cameron Tofer says it's a 25 hour expansion, but Trent Oster says he's already 30 hours in, and maybe 2/3 of the way through.
-They reportedly blew up their budget several times over in order to make this the best game possible.
-No release date announced. They will release when it's ready
-When pressed, Trent mentioned that they'd "like" to release later this year, but no promises.
-It's sandwiched in between the end of BG1 and the beginning of BG2.
-The level cap is 12. Reportedly, this will not create any balance issues in BG2.
-Improvements to pathfinding, and original bugs in this code have been resolved.
-A lot of the original voice actors have been hired on, including the person who voiced Minsc.
-(obligatory MCA endorsement) An early version of the game was sent to Chris Avellone, who reportedly loved it, and sent back several pages of feedback to Beamdog.
-Two new difficulty levels. A story mode similar to IWDEE, where I guess you can't die. And a super hard mode akin to IWD2's HoF mode.
-Many improvements to GUI.
-Many new enhancements to make the game more moddable.
-They plan on adding functionality to make it easy to switch weapon sets (i.e. no more manually unequipping your sword and shield so you can take up a bow!)
-Apparently you will control a large force for part or portions of the game. They didn't expand, but you will reportedly take control of a much larger force than has ever been possible in the Infinity Engine to date. I'm assuming you'll have a large force for the siege.
-All engine level updates will be patched into BGEE and BG2EE.

There were other tidbits, but I guess you can take a listen if you decide it's worth getting the rest.

 

Considering I already knew almost all of that, you've saved me an hour of listening to redundant info. Thanks.

 

Kudos for the selling-pints.

I loath having to listen to lengthly vids just to learn the most relevant stuff.

 

Good deal. A few other points discussed:
-there was a bit of detail about the story shared
-some details about Dragon Keep and its significance in Faerun.
-background on Beamdog, how and why they got into the EEs... Some of their design philosophies
-a handful of additional fan questions addressed during a q&a.

Those are the primary areas I did not recap, in case anyone wondered.

 

I wonder if a large scale battle will bog down the machine...

 

Frankly, their design philosophies are mind-boggling half of the time. It's like watching a bunch of chimps working on a space shuttle.

I suppose some of that is on account of budgetary constraints, but some things are just plain retarded when you look deep enough.

Still, I feel that way about almost any software project I see.

 

One would hope that if they're offering this, they are also optimizing the code so that it can perform reasonably well on PCs that are within the technical specifications... not to mention tablets. Time will tell.

 

it was worth watching at least the first video to the end just for this part :

 

When is this game supposed to be out?