There are few games I love as thoroughly and completely as Baldur's Gate 2. It still looms large in my past, a fixed
point in a lonely and hostile series of high school experiences, a book I would
return to again and again. Baldur's Gate 2 represents an object, a
kind of object, a class or taxonomy of experience, that I love with a
thoroughness and passion that dwarfs the majority of my human
interactions. They really don't make
games like BG2 any more, but the
presence of multiple Kickstarters for titles echoing its style and play, as
well as a refrain of community notes fired off at Bioware to "make Dragon Age: Inquisition more like Baldur's Gate" with regard to
character generation and open play illustrates that I'm not alone in wanting to
revisit that kind of top down, isometric RPG goodness. What's more, Beamdog's Enhanced Editions, slight spruce-ups of the Baldur's Gate series with small amount of new content and heaps of
classic game flavor, served as a sort of proof of concept that the games
themselves, clunky and dated, could still prove viable in today's
marketplace. Their reboots, while not
enormous successes, were significant enough that Atari decided to sue Beamdog for
potential losses incurred from just one of Beamdog's many distribution
methodologies.
And heck, I've even had a good time playing Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition, so
much so that I've sunk more hours into it than many other, contemporary games -
I'm still on my first full playthrough, and my time-stamp stacks over 100 hours
now, no mean feat given the raw influx of titles cluttering my Steam
library. So when I say "I fucking
hate Beamdog's Baldur's Gate 2
reboot," I want to be sure that you don't think I'm demeaning the game, or
the effort to resurrect it, or the genre, or anything else. I want you to understand that what I mean,
specifically, is that Beamdog's iteration of Baldur's Gate 2 has effectively reminded me why I loved the game in
the first place, fixed a number of problems the game had long, long ago, and,
in doing so, introduced a bevy of new issues that actually make aspects of this
amazing game unplayable. They took
something I loved, gave it to me, and took it away. Like the ex-girlfriend you hate for years for
breaking your heart, it's not that the things they did wrong were so tremendous
or so severe, it's that they're offset against some truly amazing moments which
make the sting of betrayal into something far more than it ever needed to be.
Let me get specific.
I've encountered two states in Beamdog's reboot, both of
which are encountered during the course of routine play. Simply by playing through their game, as
intended, I consistently reach a set of states wherein the game cannot progress
or, in each case, function at all. The
first of these fail states occurs when I play through one of the bits of
additional content Beamdog has attached to their game. While accompanying a character through an
epic end-game quest, through numerous glitchy conversations and bugged out
events, the game freezes out all inputs, makes my party completely stationary,
and and removes the user interface.
Imagine the way Baldur's Gate
starts off its in-game cutscenes, except nothing ever triggers: the scripting
language takes control of the game, but it never fires. You can work around some of these events, but
eventually one of them will cut off your ability to complete the events in the
quest sequence. This has been occurring
with such reliability that Beamdog has repeatedly posted recommendations that
players use a Save State editor or console commands to bypass the quest
altogether, or to trick the game into perceiving a positive result where none
exists, which is akin to an automobile company whose car seizes up that they
should get out of the vehicle and push.
The second issue is a little more personal, but also pretty
prominent: the Multiplayer function included with the game doesn't allow
players to play games together. At
least, it doesn't let me and my friend play games together. Every time we try, his game crashes a few
seconds in. I looked around a little
online and found out that this has been a known issue with Beamdog's reboots
for over a year, and that no fix exists.
What's more, I found that posts about both issues, which Beamdog
promised to fix via patch at some indistinct future point, were actually being
deleted by forum moderators "to prevent duplicate entries on the
issue." That is to say that the
discussion of these problems had grown so prominent and demanding that it
necessitated policing.
Launching games with performance issues that partially or
wholly prevent players from accessing game content is hardly new. Hell, Blood
2 was immortalized by Penny-Arcade not for its game content, but for
crippling systems that just installed the game, and that dates all the way back
to 1999. Here, fifteen years later, I'm
hardly surprised by unplayable products.
But I am incredibly disappointed by them still, and Beamdog's response
is illustrative of a larger problem: developers, even small studios with only a
handful of projects reliant on small communities of closely knit fans for
support, are now willing to turn a blind eye to this sort of thing, even
actively curtail its discussion to make the problem seem less prominent than it
actually is. It's indicative of a kind
of impersonal approach to game development that dissociates developers from
both product and consumer in a way that seriously problemitizes the whole
development schema. Again this is hardly
a new thing, but more often than not this sort of ambivalence is obscured by
the apparatus of large developers and publishers. Launching products that don't work has, for a
long time, been the domain of people who can afford to alienate portions of
their customer base, people who work on a series of rotating projects, years in
development, who rarely, if ever, have time to reflect on the objects they've
made The expectation has been that
smaller developers and studios aren't capable of this kind of apathy, by merit
of their relationship with players. A
small developer who releases a broken game and doesn't fix it won't inspire
confidence, and most developers, as a result, bend over backwards to make sure
that the games they release are up to snuff.
In one of the more prominent examples of solid best practices, Ironclad
Games gave a free copy of a $60 game to everyone who bought Elemental, so fearsome was their shame
at the state of the product they originally released. That kind of behavior made Ironclad a big
figure in the pantheon of minor game developers, and it established a sound
precedent for designers: that paying attention to your community and treating
them right will help you get ahead in the world.
The expectation now is that indie games are, by merit of
their apparatus, artisanal games: hand crafted in small batches by people who
give a shit, people who actively communicate with their communities and want to
make sure that players have an excellent experience. Beamdog demonstrated that this isn't the
case. They showed that an indie
developer can and will release content that is literally unplayable given an
opportunity to do so. It's tragic, in
large part because I cannot finish Baldur's
Gate 2's content and Rasaad's brother will forever go unavenged, but also
because it has eroded my trust of small developers. Even as I Kickstart and purchase Early Access
games, even as I play partially finished content with the hope that it will
soon become something spectacular, one experience like this makes me question
my belief that Indie game structures permit designers to do something better. I won't stop buying Indie games, that's
certain, but I won't be buying anything from Beamdog again.
Perhaps that's the lesson here: that accountability for
indie developers is very, very real.
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