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Wizardcorp
Apr 11, 2015
I started reading this thread about a week ago and have just caught up with it. Thank you Vichan for the effort you're putting into this, and if you're worried about people dropping off, I guess you are also picking up some new readers over time. Although I will admit I did skip some of the heaviest dialogue parts along the way...

I've been into the Infinity Engine games and modding them pretty much since release - I actually made a couple of small mods for the original Baldur's Gate in the pre-Weidu days, using some of the basic tools available then and some hex editing. If anyone is wondering, the only one that got any sort of attention was the Wand of Identification, but mostly from other modders wanting to include it in their own projects that probably never got released. I dropped out of any involvement when the old Bioware and Black Isle Studio forums were killed, mostly because I was in my late teens at that point and I became sort of embarrassed by it, even though I kept on playing the games and downloading mods, if not really making any more.

I didn't really get back involved in the community side of it until I heard about the Big World Setup tool, the more communal precursor to the EET Install Tool Roxanne now maintains. I'd never had much luck with mega-mod installs before that, and I liked the fact it showed you available mods without having to seek them out on various forums. I submitted a few bug reports and suggestions, and remember Roxanne being one of the very active community maintainers. She seemed quite sensible, to be honest, in her suggestions and responses, for the most part.

So I decided when I was putting together a kitchen-sink mega-mod install, knowing it was going to be messy but might be a fun experience if I didn't take it too seriously, I was going to try her mod. After all, she seemed reasonable, and it seemed to have an active and overall satisfied player base, from the number of posts asking questions around it. I setup and ran an install using it, which failed, and that was what saved me, because I went to report the issue, but ended up seeing some posts I hadn't seen. This was a bizarre argument Roxanne got involved in, where another mod had moved or otherwise altered a character that Sandrah relied on, as a result meaning that while the two mods installed without error, the Sandrah mod progress was broken.

Probably not surprising considering the amount of things her mod changes, but she was absolutely incensed by this - she was it as some unforgivable breach by a mod to alter a character that another mod uses, like it was a personal insult. The BWS tool could easily handle this case by marking the two mods as incompatible and warn the end user if they tried to install them together, but she felt that this didn't go far enough, the offending mod should be removed from the tool. People were telling her, with varying degrees of niceness, that her position was unreasonable. It was bizarre and her stance so weirdly intransigent that I decided to not try her mod after all. The mega-mod install actually turned out alright once it was removed and a few other tweaks were made. Although came off the rails mid-BG, it actually got me back into the games and using mods more adventurously in a big way.

I didn't really mean for this to turn into an essay, I guess I was originally trying to say is that Roxanne's bizarre behaviour does have a real potential negative effect. While in retrospect, the alt thing seems obvious, I was genuinely fooled, not really being part of the community, to believe that Sandrah was a popular mod, long enough for it to do what it needed to do. While I hope others are smarter than me, I could have been turned off the games for good if I'd sat through this and believed this was the apex of the BG modding community at the time, instead of getting back into them.

Now that I've got that off my chest, a few things that I've noticed from reading through the thread:

- The lack of epilogue for Sandrah if you reject godhood at the end of ToB just feels like the worst kind of disrespect for the player. I know it is abundantly clear by now that this story is now about Sandrah, not the Bhaalspawn, but at the very least make an epilogue that rounds the story off and tells the player that if they choose godhood they can continue.
- Maybe I'm being unfair as it's clear she's not a native English speaker, and there are plenty of other spelling, grammar, and worse errors, but I find the use of "troupe" for "troop" completely jarring every time - even when I was just scanning over dialogue quickly this jumped out at me every time.
- I feel bad for Haiass. I'm pretty sure this was originally a standalone mod that never got updated for EE by the original authors, so the Sandrah version is the only one available on newer editions. I guess now he can get it on with whatever Pelligram is...

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Wizardcorp
Apr 11, 2015

RelentlessImp posted:

Actually, Haiass is being actively maintained by Miloch over on SHS, with the last non-Sandrah update being April 6, 2020.

Thanks for letting me know - I have a real soft spot for him so glad to see I can bring him on a future playthrough.

So as Goddess of Magic, Sandrah decided to deal with her dislike of necromancy by basically ignoring it to the point that she seems unaware that Velsharoon is actually her underling, even if it's only nominal... I'm not an expect in the cosmology of the Forgotten Realms, but this does feel like a lapse of duty that verges on the ragingly incompetent.

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