Beamdog is tapering off on their Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition patches, for the most part, and I got picked to do some beta testing for that last big patch before things go mostly silent. It was a, uhh, weird. Decade!
I mean, in 2011, a friend of mine from DeviantArt told me about the Enhanced Editions, which had just been announced. I was stoked! Pre-ordered as soon as I moved to Illinois and got a job, and played the hell out of the game. Still do. The community was pretty solid, mostly "veteran" players, and some newcomers. A few newcomers were really into things, but some of them were whiny shitheads about it all. "BUT WHAT ABOUT ACHIEVEMENTS" "EVERYTHING IN THIS GAME IS ARBITRARY I HATE IT" -- stuff like that. I mean, you're bitching about a ten-year-old (at the time) game that's based on twenty-year-old (at the time) Dungeons & Dragons rules. And, it was made using an at-the-time outdated engine. Things are gonna be weird.
I'm not gonna lie, some of the newer faces in the community were a little irritating. There was one person who became a moderator at the forums who'd shit up the Skype chat by talking about their turtles and then whine when everyone stopped talking, and we had some other, uhh, types on the forums. One dude got dragged for making shitty jokes and then doubled down until he got banned. I also saw this one person get banned for completely arbitrary shit. Moderation team, not gonna lie, sucked there. They'd just coddle shitheads when you'd call them out. Stuff like that. Made me really miss the "Wild West" days of the internet, when you could just drag someone for saying something fucked and get away with it.
Modding community got bigger, which is great because there are still great mods coming out. And older mods continued to get support!
Come 2015, Siege of Dragonspear was announced. Great! I pre-ordered the hell out of that! Then, shit hit the fan when Beamdog went comm silent when it came to communications on that. Like, we didn't hear anything for months at a time. People pitched a bitch, and even I complained at one point, and I never really bitch! Finally, they shelled out the copies of the game, and boom. I got my copy with feelies. Sweet deal.
Patches came out sporadically, which was cool as hell. Now, we're at the last, currently planned patch. Beamdog has moved on to other projects, which is sad, but, well, whatever keeps them in business. I can't say that I like some of their business practices, and actually find their forum moderation team to be a joke, but, well, it was great!
