Board Thread:General Discussion on Baldur's Gate Game/@comment-34236415-20200212092816/@comment-8506165-20200212122632

Personally I thoroughly enjoyed Siege of Dragonspear. I'm inclined to believe that most of the negative reviews are just from people who read about Mizhena and decided to drop a rant about "SJWS RUINING GAMING" without even having played it. Having gone through the entire campaign myself multiple I can't say I saw it as a "massive SJW-fest" or whatever they're calling it.

I'll try and divide it into pros and cons...

Pros:


 * Provides a stepping stone between BG1 and BG2 that explains the gap between the two games and even why you ended up with the "canon" party at the start of BG2


 * All the original voice actors/actresses have returned for their parts, with the exception of Jaheira's.


 * The fights that play out are larger scale than any you saw in either BG or BG2 by some considerable margin


 * On the note of the fights, the AI is better in SoD. I tried to cheese a mage fight with the old Mustard Jelly trick and he actually started lowering my resistance instead of emptying his spellbook into the 100% MR jelly!


 * New items are pretty nice. Some of them can be found in BG2 if you import a SoD game in which you have them, and they're fun but not game breaking.

Cons:


 * It's pretty linear. You go from one chapter with a few locations in it to the next chapter with a few locations in it, and you can't ever backtrack. If you're not a fan of that then you're a fair bit less likely to enjoy this.


 * I've had it lag or crash on a couple of occasions. Probably related to the fights being so much bigger, as I said, it only really tended to happen in the really massive fights.


 * If you don't like feeling overpowered, the fact that you start BG2 with an extra 339k XP from SoD's higher XP cap might bother you. Doesn't really bother me too much because XP values in BG2 are so much higher you actually make up that difference pretty quickly but I know it bothers some people.


 * A few of the fetch quests are a little boring. But then original BG and BG2 had boring fetch quests in them too, so...

Subjective:


 * The story and writing overall. Personally, I enjoyed it and thought it was well done overall, but I'm sure you've seen that there are endless complaints there from a lot of people, and not all of them are just "anti-SJW" types with an axe to grind. I personally enjoyed it, you might not. I'd say get a feel for what it's like from some of the Let's Plays you've seen and form your own opinion, I can't tell you for sure whether or not you'll enjoy it.
 * On a related note I've seen some people complain about the new NPCs. Personally, I like most of them and I'm okay with the rest but again, it's a complaint I've seen some people raise.
 * Overall, I'd say it's a bit more difficult than the average BG/BG2 experience. If you find BG and BG2 really difficult then you might find SoD obnoxiously hard. If you find them relatively easy and you'd like an extra challenge then SoD might help scratch that itch for you.

Hope at least some of that was helpful. Tried to be as "objective" as possible even though I personally enjoyed Siege of Dragonspear. I think I approached it with a relatively open mind myself, and I ended up being a fan, but some people really don't like it, so I'm not going to tell you that you'll definitely 100% love it if you end up installing it.