Customer Reviews

Baldur's Gate Expansion: Tales of the Sword Coast

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

In Tales of the Sword Coast, you are taken back to the land of Baldur's gate prior to the end of the game. You are placed in the city called Ulgoth's Beard.

Once in this city, you are immediately sent on a quest to an ice island. This scenario is realitively easy to complete. Following this completion, you can be sent on two more major missions. The first one sends you in search of Balduran's ship and a forgotten island. This scenario is intriguing due to the new enemies that are werewolves. The climax of this part of the game can be difficult, but has some nice game play.

After completing this scenario, you go for the last scenario that sends you down to Durlag's tower. There are numerous levels found in the tower, in which a few levels can be quite confusing. There is excellent images on the one level in which a skeleton of a greater wyvern surrounds the floor. In order to complete the tower, the party must defeat a demonknight, which is not too simple.

Following the completion of the tower, the party must complete one or two minor scenarios before the final task of facing Sarovek.

Overall, this game is just a mere minor extension of Baldur's Gate. Yes the play can be fulfilling, but there is not enough depth the game in order to justify the price. In my opinion even though it is adequate, there is no real need or desire to play this game.

In this expansion pack you basically get three main subquests, two of which are long and difficult. You get to raise your characters to level 9, and 10 for your thief(You will need a thief to disarm traps and pick locks so make sure you keep a thief for this expansion set). My main dislike of this game is how poorly it ties in with the orginal Balder's gate. The story lines do not connect at all. If you imported your character from the main balder's gate the expansion pack drops you off in a new town just before the epic battle with Saverok. But in the subquests you do come across many different villains, puzzles, and creatures to kill. Plus you will be able to equip your party members with fancy armor and powerful weapons. If your number one reason in liking the orginal Balder's gate was to follow the storyline than I do not recommend Tales of the Sword Coast. However, if you loved killing exotic monsters and boosting the strength of your character's than this is the perfect set for you. Your characters will become much stronger and gain more spells, and weapons. Interplay did a great job in creating a chance for players to boost up their characters, however the storyline is weak and doesn't connect too well (or not at all) with the orginal Game.

I'm surprised at the number of reviewers who found this game disappointing. I found it to be a challenging expansion pack that significantly raises the difficulty level over that of the original. No, Tales of the Sword Coast doesn't extend the story line of BG, and, no, the story line doesn't even FIT comfortably within the original BG plot. And yes, Tales IS basically an add-on that simply allows your characters to increase their experience points and find new items in the process.

Still, I think it is a fault to criticize the game too much (as many customer reviewers have) on issues of story line. If you want a great, involved story, well, buy Planescape: Torment (my vote for greatest RPG title ever). Even though Tales of the Sword Coast's game objectives may seem completely out of whack with the BG main plot, think back to BG and I think you'll recall LOTS of areas that didn't have anything to do with the iron shortage or Saverok For instance, did the Firewine Dungeon "really" play a crucial role in terms of story line? Did helping Drizzt fight off those hordes of baddies really advance the plot? How about all the random quests?

In other words, I think one should evaluate TOSC using one simple maxim as a guide: namely, are the new areas fun to play? In my opinion, the new areas in TOSC are both challenging and enjoyable. One of the levels (***BEWARE, SPOILERS HERE***), the ice island is a throwaway, but the other two, Werewolf Island and Durlag's Tower, are impressive. Werewolf Island does have a captivating plot, and although it's size in terms of area isn't large, the battles are numerous and semi-difficult. Durlag's Tower provides players with something that BG kind of lacked: a decent dungeon crawl. I found Durlag's Tower very involving and moderately difficult. Unlike the ridiculous monster count and borderline unplayability (in terms of difficulty) of Icewind Dale's dungeons, Durlag's Tower strikes a nice balance between being difficult but not too difficult; it knows how to challenge players without forcing them to die, reload, die, reolad, die reload, ad infinitum.

Lastly, I found this game a decent value in terms of length. TOSC is now a bargain bin purchase, and although some customers here like to brag (lie???) about how the game only took them 10 hours to complete, Tales took me betwen 1 and 2 weeks to finish. I admit that I may not be a master AD&D player, yet I did successfully complete BG and felt that my party was very much up to the challenge of the expansion pack.

This game does get docked a notch, however, for some small problems: 1) Pathfinding is still troublesome. 2) Inventory juggling is still a nightmare. I truly believe that about 50% of Baldur's Gate (and this expansion) is spent juggling inventory items. 3) The puzzle element introduced in Durlag's Tower is more annoying than fun. 4) The next-to-final battle against a monster summoned with Durlag's Blade is insanely difficult and convoluted. But basically, if you enjoyed the original you should probably enjoy this expansion.

If you liked Baldur's Gate you will love the expansion pack. Don't be fooled by some of the other reviews, some people find fault with the Mona Lisa too. The additions in terms of abilities, areas, and other features are worth the price and add hours of enjoyment to playing the original game.

This is an expansion pack to Baldur's Gate, it is an add-in, and it does not expand the original plot. There are three new areas that your party can explore. The experience point cap is also up to 161.000 in this game, making it possible to gain 1 or 2 more levels, depending on your class.
The three add-in areas are: Ulgoth's Beard, a small town north of Baldur's Gate where more or less all the expansion adventures take their start from, an...island(trying not to reveal too much), and Durlag's Tower. Of these Durlag's Tower is the most challenging and interesting. Durlag's tower is the biggest dungeon in the entire game, and can be a challenge for even experienced parties. The other areas, offer some interesting information, but are less exiting to play through. All in all it is an interesting expansion, although not an expansion in the true sense of the word. But since you can sometimes find both Baldur's Gate and Tales of the Sword Coast in one package at a good price there is no excuse not to get it.

More baldurs gate? This expansion adds a higher xp cap, more areas, more weapons, and more baddies. If you were a fan of the original, then you will definitely find more gaming goodness here. This adds around 20 hours of gameplay, as well as making the original game more of a challenge, which is always a plus. If you liked the original, get this now!

When I played Baldur's Gate, it was a wonderfully long experience of exploration and balanced encounters. If you ran into an over-powering encounter, you knew your party had ventured into the wrong place at the wrong time. This expansion is a bucket of cold water in the face. It's short, just four areas with a dozen or so levels, and brutally hard. Maybe I didn't level-up correctly in Baldur's Gate, but I found every step a struggle of high-level encounters, traps my their couldn't disarm and, worst of all, key puzzles. Additionally the expansion didn't have of the story elements of the original game. The game itself had almost no changes although there was a new auto-pause feature that was very helpful. Hard-core Baldur's Gate fan with a high-level party (10+) will love Sword Coast but other should probably skip it.

There are three kinds of expansion packs. Some, like Starcraft: Brood War and the Wing Commander 1 Secret Missions, are like mini-sequels and can actually be better than the original. They contain all the good ideas from the original that didn't make the initial release. The typical expansion pack increases functionality of the product a little bit with a few new features and adds on a decent amount of new content. The last type of expansion pack is where a lower design team comes on to take stuff in the original, change it around a little bit, add a few new levels, and call it an expansion pack. TOTSC is squarely in the third category. It's only reason for existing is for people who like to get more stuff and get more experience. If that's exciting to you then the game will be perfect but personally I found that the most tedious part of the game. I also like stuff making logical sense. In this game I recall a +3 Plate Mail just basically sitting around! Why would anyone leave that behind, seriously?

It's not just that the quests don't tie into the plot, but that they don't fit ANYWHERE. Unless your party is a bunch of treasure hunters it doesn't really make sense that your character would put the iron crisis on the backburner and go off on a boat ride that might take months.

Finally, it's meant to be played out of order. If you try to play it in order as I did, you will find the expansion quests too difficult at first and then the end of the game too easy.

So basically, I cannot recommend this. Don't get it!

You get a lot of interface improvements with expansion pack. Ctrl-Tab is the best one. So get both before you play Shadows of Amn.

I recently purchased the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion for the Original Baldur's Gate. Even after just a short time playing it, could tell it was worth it. Noticed these benefits almost immediately:

1) Magical, unidentified items are marked in blue shading. This way you won't forget to identify them and also if it's loot in a chest/creature you won't forget to loot them in the first place.
2) When moving or looting items, if they are stackable then they are automatically stacked for you. The original game doesn't do this so this is quite a time saver.
3) Experience cap raised from 89000 to 161000. This allows another 1-2 levels depending on class. This is quite nice as before I would get to the cap before I was done with the game and then the fights became irrelevant, so just did the main storyline. Now there's a point in doing more exploration.

I actually haven't had a chance to explore the new areas yet (werewolf island, Ulgolth's Beard, Dulag's Tower) but doesn't matter. This purchase has been worth it for these features alone for me.