Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear

There's just so much wrong with Dragonspear I don't know where to start. Apparently almost 20 years after Baldur's Gate, Beamdog, the studio that remastered Baldur's Gate and acquired the rights to most of the classic 90s isometric RPGs, decided to create a new expansion to Baldur's Gate II, which is kind of pointless considering the games were nearly perfect back in their day and II already had a pretty good expansion in Throne of Bhaal. Apparently one of the writers for this said the older Baldur's Gates games were problematic and had issues with the way it presented women and some of its humor, which is kind of funny considering Jaheira and Viconia were some of the greatest female characters and were written incredibly well and were just as badass as all the male companions in the games.

The problem with Dragonspear is the writing is just super weak, the plot, dialogue, new characters, setting, story progression are all just so bland. Nothing stood out, none of the areas stood out. The writing is a bit odd and inconsistent too, like in Baldur's Gate II, it is established there is a magic spell that can change you into the opposite sex, which is done hilariously in Edwin's quest where he is accidentally turned into a woman and you have to find a way to turn him back. So in this World there would be no need for anyone to be transgender because they could just use that spell to change into the opposite gender, but the writer of this decided to include a character just because she felt the older games weren't inclusive enough. Like I have nothing against transgender characters in games if they are well written, but this game's World already established that you can change your gender with magic so including this character contradicts the lore of this series. There are other things that also contradict previously established lore. The writing of the previous games were excellent, and I feel the writers of this wanted to play incredibly safe and try hard not to offend anyone, so instead of a game with interesting writing and risk taking we got an incredibly bland and safe story with bland and safe characters.

The other thing is the game just doesn't have anything interesting, I could forgive the bad story and characters if it had good gameplay and atmosphere, but it just doesn't have memorable areas, and the gameplay just is dull without an interesting story to keep it going or interesting areas. I'll admit, I'm not a huge Isometric RPG fan, but I loved Baldur's Gate II, because despite the gameplay not being incredible, I loved the story, the characters, and the different locations. This just felt incredibly pointless and like it was just made to give the finger to fans of the older games. Sure the older games might have not aged perfectly and some of the humor and writing might not be 100% politically correct by today's standards, but the older games just had something with the writing and characters that kept you in, even if you are not a fan of the genre, where this just makes you want to rush through as fast as possible because you're so bored, and this isn't even a long game, so its even more sad that I wanted to rush through this when it was so short. Luckily I think they learned their lesson when this game was heavily criticized by fans of the series, and I hope Baldur's Gate ends up not succumbing to the problems and poor writing this game has, but I have high hopes because Moonbeam isn't behind it and Larian Studios gave use Divinity, which are great games.