Siege of Dragonspear game

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Do you have to have BGEE to make this game work or is it a stand alone expansion?

 

They've decided to make it an standard expansion and as such it requires BG:EE.

 

When does it start? After you kill Seravok?

 

Yes, it continues right where BG left off.

 

Are there a lot of bugs they are working on or should I wait a while?

 

You can view a list of currently known bugs in the siege of dragonspear expansion here : http://redmine.beamdog.com/projects/bg-sod-bugs/issues?set_filter=1&tracker_id=11

and a list of which bugs will be fixed by the upcoming 2.2 patch here : http://redmine.beamdog.com/projects/external-bugs/issues?per_page=100&query_id=126


the 2.1 patch that was released fixed at least the big issues that made the game unplayable - but you might want to hang on until 2.2 gets released, it should smooth out the experience a bit more.

 

WOW! That's a lot of bugs. I think I'll take your advice and wait for 2.2
Thanks xosmi.

 

Well... it's a computer game. All computer games have issue lists a mile long. Why do you think fixpacks exist?

 

Keep in mind that some of the bugs listed concern the adventurer's guide (so they are not in-game bugs.)
Still, some of them are quite bad or even game breaking ones (for example ambient sound randomly stopping mid-play, game freezes that stop you from progressing, game crash on save, area transitions not working at certain zoom levels.)

 

Are there bugs in BGEE and BG2EE now that it has updates/changes that come from SoD? Like the shaman class or anything else?

 

The problem is that I remember the era before fixpacks when game companies actually had to debug the games before selling them.
Most games were relatively bug free or only had minor bugs that were more annoyances. There were exceptions, but that was the exception rather than the rule.

I don't see the abuse of fixpacks and internet patching to use end users as beta testers as an improvement.
Sadly, Microsoft started the ball with that with the release of Windows 95, and everybody else started jumping on the bandwagon as the internet became commonplace in the 21st century.

 

You're wearing nostalgia glasses. Games have always had a myriad of issues. IE games were released 15+ years ago and they were positively riddled with them. So were earlier games. So were console games. It's really just a question of how disruptive the bugs and glitches are to the actual gameplay. Players are often willing to overlook a lot of them as long as they're not game breaking. Some of them even develop into tropes and identifying characteristics over time (like Gandhi nuking everyone in Civ games). Plus, you have to take into account that the complexity of computer game systems increases at an alarming rate and with it the likelihood of issues. It also makes debugging them a non-trivial problem.

I'm not saying that paradigms haven't changed and that developers aren't less concerned with getting everything perfect these days, especially on the PC. Broadband internet and continued development post-release have certainly changed a lot in both how we develop games and how we approach them as consumers, but perfectly working computer games have never been a thing. Well, not since the very early years of game development anyway.

 

Exactly, there was almost always some minor bug or glitch, but nothing like the way things ship today with major bugs, especially game breakers.

 

I remember plenty of game-breaking bugs, even in games from the last century. There may have been fewer of them before (or maybe you were just more willing to overlook them), but on the other hand, they hardly ever got fixed, especially on consoles. There never comes a point in development where the team says, "Ok, we're just gonna ignore the rest of these class A issues and ship the game anyway. Cross your fingers and hope for the best, lads!" That only happens when all major and game-breaking issues have been dealt with, as far as the team is aware anyway. The small group of testers who hunt for bugs has zero chance of catching everything. Player input is simply an infinitely complex variable in an already stunningly complex software system, which is why we keep finding bugs in games even decades after they get relased. Game testing isn't free and studios would run out of funds long before they managed to test the system as rigorously as some armchair developers expect that it should have been.

 

Does it have to start where BGEE left off or can you start a new game like you can with BG2EE and ToB?

 

You can start a new SoD game afaik.

 

You can. You will be missing out on some unique gear from the base game, though you do get loaded out with a 'default' set of magic items you'd have been able to grab.
One thing you will have to do without are the tomes that give you +1 to your stats though, so that alone might make it worth playing through the base game as well, if you plan on taking the char into bg2.

 

If all you need is a few items, it's better to just use the console/keeper...

 

I take it you don't like the SoD part eh?
I'm still debating on getting it or not.