Do you guys enjoy Siege of Dragonspear?

[Yovaneth]

3 hours ago, AL|EN said:

@Yovaneth Bending Weidu? Did you mean IE?

Oops

[Ardanis]

Bending the game to accommodate more "cinematic" approach to cutscenes also took some toll. Like parts of the script as "here player fights enemies, then dialog there triggers" that you can find in more modern RPGs didn't exactly translate well into IE, where you could cast invis, run away and scatter the whole party across the map. I do take some pride in having been able to compromise and resolve those, though

[Galactygon]

With all things considered, the BG series has absolutely benefitted from the SoD expansion imho. I'm also not without criticism either on the plot as others have already mentioned but then again it's the nature of capitalism to skimp on some corners to fulfill a budget/deadline, with Beamdog not being a particularly large company like Microsoft (i.e. Age of Empires 2) who can sacrifice incredible amount of resources for a devoted fanbase. The low-interest rate environment that was prevalent throughout the 2010s has evaporated and hit the gaming industry as well which means the future of IE development isn't certain going forward. Hopefully, BG3 will pique interest in the older games as well and give us a "third life" so to speak. But the Bhaalspawn plot is already quite saturated/complete so I can't think of any more expansion possibilities unless it's some standalone adventure that takes place in SoA/ToB or possibly a more fleshed-out ToB.

Something that slightly bugged me (and hasn't been really mentioned so far) were the names often were non-Germanic/Latin i.e. Korlazs which is clearly a Polish name. Most of the names in the original series were Germanic/Latin-derived fantasy names. I'm an ethnic Hungarian for the record, and I have no personal beef against central/east europeans but a Hungarian name in the BG series for the sake of inclusivity would feel off unless there's a good contextual reason in the plot.

Edited January 29 by Galactygon

[Yovaneth]

Have to admit, that name smacked me between the eyes a bit too.

[Incrementis]

3 hours ago, Galactygon said:

Korlazs which is clearly a Polish name. Most of the names in the original series were Germanic/Latin-derived fantasy names. I'm an ethnic Hungarian for the record, and I have no personal beef against central/east europeans but a Hungarian name in the BG series for the sake of inclusivity would feel off unless there's a good contextual reason in the plot.

I see no issue as

• Khalid, Jaheira (Jahira) names are of Arabic origin
• Tamoko is originally a Japanese name
• Sarevok is a fantasy name (as far as I know)

In addition, the city of Baldur's Gate is a seaport, so it is natural to see different names from different places of Toril here.

The only problem I see with Korlazs is that I don't remember ever hearing about her in BG1, so fighting her feels a bit sudden.

[Galactygon]

Tamoko is from Kara-Tur, so an exotic-sounding name feels like a good fit, especially since it sounds somewhat Japanese. Khalid/Jaheira are also somewhat exotic actors but an english speaker wouldn't have trouble guessing the pronounciation.

Korlasz is different because of the "sz" sound and now I see that have misspelt the name in the above post as "Korlazs" (since in Hungarian the same sound is "zs" rather than "sz"). Unless you know that in Polish "sz" is pronounced as "ge" in english (i.e. Garage) you'd have trouble reading that name.

[Thacobell]

Toril is a melting pot of quite literally everything. Complaining about a name sounding too foreign is silly.

[Frenzgyn]

Probably this is an aspect that's not nationality-agnostic:
being italian ALL the names in game sounds more or less "foreign" to me, a few I could in a very superficial way identify "thematically",  Tamoko as a "japanese" sounding name or the various Djinns names as something "arabic" are good examples, but nothing more: Sarevok, Gorion, Korlaz would have not ringed a bell until pointed in the right direction.

On the other hand, with an NPC named "Gianni" I would have surely went "WTF!?!" , but that is not even true with the actual "Angelo":  both are very common italian names, but Angelo probably is much more common in english speaking countries and very similar to "Angel", so it may seems less "out of place" but WHY an Italian/Italo-American/hispanic name should be ok for an half-elf in a fantasy world?

It's all a matter of perspective, context and habits, I guess.

OT: My nickname comes from "Frenzgyn Esposito" that was the name of the first PC i created in NWN back in the day: an half-elf shadowdancer, where "Frenzgyn" was (in my mind) a name that sounded "elfish" and "Esposito" the surname from the human side, very common in Naples (where I was living at the time) .

Edited January 29 by Frenzgyn

[Galactygon]

5 hours ago, Thacobell said:

Toril is a melting pot of quite literally everything. Complaining about a name sounding too foreign is silly.

It's more of a matter of consistency imho. Original games went with fantasy names that are easy for an English speaker to pronounce/decipher which are consistent with the canon material which often times played up to real-world stereotypes i.e. arabic sounding names for genies. I guess if there's a subgroup in Faerun that uses Polish names it makes sense to give those characters such names? Polish names are a bit hard to decipher for a non-Polish speaker due to how many consonants can build up a single "sound" like the "sz". Speaking of which I think I got the pronounciation of the Polish "sz" wrong again. Now I'm not sure if it's pronounced as "Korlash" or "Korlage"?  

[Connelly]

I don't care that much so I don't have a problem with it. But I think if anything, the biggest point with Korlasz is that it's her family dungeon. So there must have been a family with Polish sounding names in Baldur's Gate for long enough time to own lands where to dig a big family crypt that also had research chambers and temple grounds for three different gods. I'm guessing the trouble people have is that this wasn't seen before in either BG1 or PnP books, and it comes as a bit of a surprise, at the very least.

[jastey]

15 hours ago, Incrementis said:

The only problem I see with Korlazs is that I don't remember ever hearing about her in BG1, so fighting her feels a bit sudden.

I second this and what @Connelly said.

SoD starts and it's like "oh, here is this very wealthy, high ranking follower of Sarevok with a crypt beneath BG city which I never heard of" and it takes me right out of the immersion. That, and

Spoiler

Imoen the tourguide

, which is so out of character imho.

[lefreut]

The premise of SoD was to fill the gap between BG & BG2, but for me it does not work as they (I think) were not allowed to add references to SoD content in BG & BG2. You discover new things in SoD that you never heard of in BG. And in BG2 nobody remembers SoD.

I understand that they really wanted to make a new IE game and that the timeframe was imposed but in the end I'm not sure it was a good idea.

*Insert Ian Malcolm quote*

Edited January 30 by lefreut

[Thacobell]

18 hours ago, Galactygon said:

It's more of a matter of consistency imho. Original games went with fantasy names that are easy for an English speaker to pronounce/decipher which are consistent with the canon material which often times played up to real-world stereotypes i.e. arabic sounding names for genies. I guess if there's a subgroup in Faerun that uses Polish names it makes sense to give those characters such names? Polish names are a bit hard to decipher for a non-Polish speaker due to how many consonants can build up a single "sound" like the "sz". Speaking of which I think I got the pronounciation of the Polish "sz" wrong again. Now I'm not sure if it's pronounced as "Korlash" or "Korlage"?  

Thaxllsyllia, Nizidramniyt, whatever that other other dragon's name was. BG was never a stranger to made up or none germanic names. Or names hard to pronounce, for that matter.

[Frenzgyn]

18 hours ago, Connelly said:

I don't care that much so I don't have a problem with it. But I think if anything, the biggest point with Korlasz is that it's her family dungeon. So there must have been a family with Polish sounding names in Baldur's Gate for long enough time to own lands where to dig a big family crypt that also had research chambers and temple grounds for three different gods. I'm guessing the trouble people have is that this wasn't seen before in either BG1 or PnP books, and it comes as a bit of a surprise, at the very least.

Good point.

[DavidW]

11 hours ago, jastey said:

I second this and what @Connelly said.

SoD starts and it's like "oh, here is this very wealthy, high ranking follower of Sarevok with a crypt beneath BG city which I never heard of" and it takes me right out of the immersion

Possibly someone's done this already or it messes up some other bit of SoD (I still haven't played it!) but a simple minimal fix would be to replace Semaj, the mage in the final fight with Sarevok in BG (who has no backstory at all as far as I recall and is probably a self-insert of some developer called James), with Korlasz, give her a min-hp ring, and have her dimension door away when reduced to 1 hp. (It would require a bit of care to synchonize with SCS's final Sarevok fight but that could be done.)