Hello everyone!

I have a thing for digging into cut or potential content in games and movies.I already made a topic about the PS1 game.

http://www.gog.com/forum/baldurs_gate_series/baldurs_gate_on_ps1

I came across this on the Baldur's Gate wiki:

"An examination of unused dialogue and creature files (EldothD.dlg and EldothD.cre) reveals that he may have been originally intended to be the captain of the guard at an unnamed keep. At some point he was put under the influence of "evil tentacles" under the direction of "Krotan", an ogre mage of "considerable power." The players party would have rescued him from this fate."

That's pretty interesting - at least to me. I thought Eldoth's schemes entirely revolved around Skie's kidnapping and nothing else. If he had that quest I would've picked him up a couple of times. It sounds it would be fun.

It's kind of a shame that TCRF doesn't have a page for the original Baldur's Gate. You could put a few paragraphs of material on there; and I've seen pages with less content. I'm aware they have pages for the Baldur's Gate Diablo clone.

Except that it wasn't Eldoth as we know him. It was a character that was cut from the same story angle that the voice of Imoen was cut from. Imoen's voice (NOT Imoen) was from a character named Pique, who was a guard under the captain 'Eldoth', who was not the bard Eldoth. Imoen was a late addition to fill a need for a support rogue, and they had no voice prepared, so they cobbled up her voice from Pique's -- ever notice how Imoen's voice is completely different in BG2? Be careful what you believe.

Wow, that made my head spin!

The Imoen story always fascinated me. The primary reason they added her was due to playtester outrage at how absurdly difficult the first few areas were without a ranged attacker and/or thieving skills. (Low-level D&D, man, that stuff is ROUGH.) This begs the question, however, of why the devs managed to get so far into the design process without playtesting for such a (seemingly) obvious problem.

You can see other similar design quirks if you look closely. In BG2, for example, all of the healer-NPCs are potential love interests, to maximize the chance a first-time player will encounter the romance scripts. (Except for Cernd, of course, but he tends to spend a lot of time shapeshifted or, more likely, not used at all.) Also, virtually all of the mages and thieves are actually mage/thieves, presumably to make party composition easier.

Eldoth as the guard captian appeared in the unreleased demo, in which the player was supposed to control Ajantis investigating the keep. Some parts of this demo got restored and incorporated in the Northern Tales of the Sword Coast mod. The location Northern Citadel is based on that cut content.