I replayed Baldur's Gate 1 recently on Switch, and continued on in Siege of Dragonspear, which I had already previously replayed.

Like the first BG on Switch, SoD on Switch is pretty crash-prone, especially when saving the game (which, when it happens, also deletes the save you were overwriting). With the first BG I enjoyed the game enough that I toughed it out. Unfortunately, with Siege there are other worse bugs. I made it as far as the Repository of Undeath when, about 3/4 through the dungeon, loading my save erased my dungeon progress. Like, my party was in front of the four seasonal pillars, but my map was unexplored, all the enemies had respawned, the Essences of Clarity were back on their shelves, etc. I toughed it out and started redoing the dungeon from the inside out.

Eventually I realized that my Bag of Holding, which had held my Troll Ioun Stone among other things, was empty. And that was true on every save file I had that wasn't 3+ hours old (the Switch port only has 5 save slots total, and the game's aforementioned tendency to crash means it's not realistic to keep a robust set of backups). At that point, I just gave up.

Speaking on Siege's quality from memory, I did like my initial playthrough, especially on the strength of the Icewind Dale-ish dungeon crawl escapades (I had been looking forward to the Repository of Undeath on my replay, right up until it bugged out on me and wasted three hours of my time), even though the writing is conspicuously worse than the original entries. I'd still recommend it on PC, but severely regret putting time into the Switch version and emphatically do not recommend it.

Reviewed on Mar 03, 2024


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