Beamdog Issues Statement Regarding Siege of Dragonspear Controversy

Whether or not you support or are dismayed by the content that’s bubbled up into an apparent controversy following the release of Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, it’s pretty easy to well up a substantial amount of respect for a developer who listens to their fans and takes action when needed. Such is the case with Beamdog who, according to a newly posted statement from CEO Trent Oster, will be pursuing something of a middle ground that should go a long way in satisfying all parties involved.

In short, Trent reveals that they’ll be putting some additional development efforts into the NPC Mizhena to improve the interaction and will be removing what some perceived to be an out-of-character line from Minsc regarding Gamergate. He also praises the team for the enormous amount of effort they put into the add-on, which has unfortunately been clouded over by these two items, and calls out the absurdity that has unfolded with some fans actually issuing threats over the situation. It’s extremely unfortunate that things have come to this in the first place, but I’m glad that they’re addressing it head-on rather than letting this drag out any longer:

I’m Trent Oster, CEO of Beamdog.

First off, everyone here is ecstatic to have shipped Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear. Siege represents years of hard work by a dedicated team that we grew from a combination of home grown talent, original Baldur’s Gate modders and former Bioware developers. Siege of Dragonspear represents more than 25 hours of new Baldur’s Gate gameplay, and more than 500,000 words of writing. I’m proud of our team for launching this great expansion.

We’ve received feedback around Mizhena, a supporting character who reveals she is transgender. In retrospect, it would have been better served if we had introduced a transgender character with more development. This is a lesson we will be carrying forward in our development as creators and we will be improving this character in a future update.

The last few days have showed us how passionately many of our fans care for our games. We’ve had a lot of great feedback from players who love the expansion and are having a great time experiencing the first new Baldur’s Gate story in 15 years.

While we appreciate all feedback we receive from our fans, both positive as well as negative, some of the negative feedback has focused not on Siege of Dragonspear but on individual developers at Beamdog — to the point of online threats and harassment.

I just want to make it crystal clear that Beamdog does not condone this behavior, and moreover that it will not have the desired effect as we stand behind all our developers 100%. We created the game as a group, and moving forward we’ll work on the game’s issues as a group, which I believe is exactly as it should be.

We’ve received valuable feedback around some bugs we failed to catch for ship. We’re hard at work right now patching up the issues that slipped through and we’re striving to ship fixes and improvements quickly. We will provide a complete list of the issues we plan to address in our next update. Issues of note we are addressing are:

Multiplayer We are acting on reports of multiplayer issues and hope to have this fixed in the next update.

Minsc Minsc has a line which generated controversy. Looking back on the line, we agree with the feedback from our community, it has nothing to do with his character and we will be removing the line.

We hope all our players continue to enjoy Siege of Dragonspear and we look forward to providing an update in the near future.

Regards,
-Trent