vsommers12: It's not political. It's hatred. Some people hate the idea of a person being different so they go on the interwebs and cause a ruckus. Nothing but rabble rousers I tell ya.
A spot on description of Beamdog's and Amber Scott's current behaviour on the Internet. Kudos.
It's sickening to watch them trying to turn everything round and blame everything but themselves for their lack of competence, skill and lack of sanity. There's a campaign run by them and people who don't even know what Baldur's Gate is to troll rating sites.
The issue is not that there objectively are some controversional themes and topics, they're not the problem themselves! There're tons of games with such themes implemented in. There's gay flirting and marriage in original Fallouts, there are lesbians in Wasteland 2, there's a God damned gay Crassius Curio who wants to fuck every man around in Morrowind (and more, but most of this stuff is not obligatory, including incest and zoophila WHAT). In fact CC is one of the most recognizable characters in the video game history, right after Lifts Her Tail (which is a rape story). But for some reason nobody erupted with outrage on the very same themes that are present in Siege of Dragonspear. For fuck's sake, there were gender change belts in D&D since, like - forever, right!
Beamdog's scandal is caused by one fundamental difference between SoD and other games who implement exactly same topics and themes. It's the goal of the developers. Previous games were done for the sake of making a good video game and were written with this in mind. You can find a full cross section of social commentary in games like Morrowind or Fallouts (and a truck load of other titles I've probably never heard of) where certain themes can be represented in really controversional forms. But they were never the essence of any game. Nobody gave 0/10 rating to Wasteland 2 for the lesbian couple bit.
With Siege of Dragonspear we have the opposite. The game itself is really just a placeholder done in a lazy way, which wasn't even basically tested before releasing it. It's bug riddled, there are basic problems with importing charactrs, equipment issues, spells can crash the game, the UI is just plain worse than the previous one, the very game's structure is a simple linear go from this location to this and fight trash mobs. The combat content is mostly fake and bloated, it's an illusion of an expansion.
The game is holding a place for the blatantly shameless political message shoved down your throat whether one likes it or not with FORCED reactions of cringe-inducing admiration from player character towards these themes. The player can't react how he wants, he's just given a premade cookie-cutter reaction that fits the obvious agenda of the obviously aligned writer. The writer who begins her work on the game with slandering the original material for being sexist and bigotted and if someone doesn't like her agenda, well that's too bad. Oh boy, with that level of tolerance, nothing can't go wrong, can it?
The themes are presented in a really obnoxious, tiring way. They are laughably stereotypical and "progressively" limited just to sexuality - transgender character (which simply doesn't make any sense in D&D! - gender change belts anyone?) is nothing more than sex speaker. It's mary-sued to the point when the game gets negative reviews written by trans people themselves! (just check out the gog store!). The writing is abysmal in general, everyone sees it's really poorly executed on a level of some fanfiction net novel. The writer can't hold herself from assaulting the player with her unfunny memes, jokes and really out-of-place current political commentary (migrant crisis) with locking the player with possible reactions that strictly fits her own beliefs. The lack of faithfulness to the original material is so huge from the writer, that she decided to REWRITE main female personas, because she personally didn't like their originals. It's the fanfiction's pretentiousness and lack of respect to the readers in its finest.
Which brings us to the main issue: the game treats the playerbase as a DUMB MASS, which needs to be EDUCATED, LECTURED and PATRONIZED to finally accept the one's current political and ideological agenda.
So at the end we have a poorly executed piece of game, troubled mith many important issues that constantly spoil the gameplay itself, that doesn't expand the original content, which is just a set of poorly made new locations (with jarring spawn mechanic) where the story is hamfisted to you in poorly written segments. It's just an excuse to deliver cringe-inducing ideological propaganda that's almost a parody of itself provoking the worst reactions it could receive. The original material was treated as A PROBLEM by the writer.
That's bad enough already, but what's the reaction of the developer and the writer? God forbid they recognize their own faults that led to this poor reception of their latest product. Let's capitalize on the proffesional victim card! Bad reviews? Let's declare it's an organized trolling campaing of patriarchal Gamergate community (Gamergate is not really a thing anymore, but thanks to Beamdog's evergrown ego lunacy it will be revived*, because it's like Gamergate most primitive propaganda come true!). Also, let's start a pathetic campaign on our forums and SJW sites begging people to "balance" the reviews with troll 10/10 scores. Because you know, it's not trolling when WE do it.
The bad reception is perfectly explainable with poorly developed title, which strongest point is nostalgia blackmailing (HOLY SHIEEEET, A NEW BALDUR'S GATE 1 EXPANSION?!), which at the end is just a quickly put together cash-in with free advertisement (you really don't have to spend a dime to advertise a BG title, it's a cult classic) but which treats the original material with no respect at all, where the lead writer blatantly states that the original was sexist and it needs fixing along one's POV. In the process, we got a batshit badly written fanfic excuse of a story, with hamfisted political commentary delivered in demeaning way to the receiver that mostly makes no sense if put in the context of the original lore and rules of conduct (what sense makes a stereotypically laughable mary-sued trans person in a world that has gender change belts?). The developer fails to see its fault and the writer plays a proffesional victim card and slurs anyone daring to criticize her.
The whole Siege of Dragonspear scandal (which it is) is a really shameful display both for the developer and part of gaming media. My second review got deleted on Metacritic again with no information whatsoever, and I didn't even pandered towards SJW.
*I had no idea what "Gamergate" really was up to December 2015. I despise social media, I use a load of additional apps blocking it (ghostery and adblock for example) so my Internet surfing experience is both ad and cancer free. I occasionally read some bits where a term "gamergate" appeared, but mostly out of context, so it didn't help. Only recently one person linked me a videos to some youtube commentators (I hate those) explaining the Gamergate issue in detail.
