From the Black Isle Studios Board

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Apparently Desslock's review has sparked a few flames. The Black Isle Studio developer boards are jumping! Read what J. E. Sawyer had to say about the review.

Desslock's review states that we didn't have enough canonical monsters in the expansion, because we relied on "generic" monsters.

The review at Bubble Dream states that the monsters are mostly forgettable since they're all "just basic fantasy fair".

Christ, why did I even make burial isle? Why did Rich and I even go through the effort to expand the spells and items in the expansion?

I've seen plenty of critcism for HoW, and I accept a lot of it as valid. Thanks for the cheerleading, but it's not necessary. There have been a *lot* of negative reviews of HoW. While most of them say the same thing, I think most of the things they criticize are quite understandable. I don't think Desslock's review was even-handed, especially in its comparisons to BG2. There are a lot of things you could compare between IWD/HoW and BG2. In many of those comparisons, you could come away justifiably saying that BG2 is a better game than IWD/HoW. However, when I see a review that slams HoW because it deviates from canon, unlike BG2, I feel kind of annoyed.

There are a whole bunch of spells in BG2 that don't appear in anything I've ever seen. There are about four in IWD:HoW that don't appear anywhere, or are so modified that they are unrecognizable. Is that bad? No. Some of the spells and items that BioWare added to BG2 were great, and a large number of people loved them. However, a lot of those items and spells were made up. Whoop-ti-do. Almost every module I've ever seen has one or more of the following: new monsters, new spells, new items. I could rant about this for a long time (as I did in a rambling letter to Desslock), but I don't think I'd really be arguing as much as venting.