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

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/51161/beamdog-statement-on-siege-of-dragonspear/

The criticism is just because of the character being trasgender? Because if that's the case, fuck the world.

Theres a lot more to this story than what the title suggests. This is not a shitstorm due to the inclusion of a transgendered character, it is more of a shitstorm due to comments made by the writers, silly jabs, large changes to developed characters and poor writing.

As usual, the media is largely missing the point.

(Boogie's video that was posted earlier explained it very well)

There's a gender changing belt in the first Baldur's Gate. I guess it's a-okay if played off as a joke or something?

Considering this game world has clerics for gods that range from "always be a good person" to "I demand human sacrifice daily!", it doesn't really strike me as an issue to be honest.

Well I think it's fair to say most hated the changes to the Sansa storyline.

Sheik isn't transgender. She was supposedly a transvestite, but 1) women dressing as men to fight is a very old trope and 2) it was hardly a shock when her real identity was revealed.

Wait, there's a new Baldur's Gate expansion!? I really need to check PC gaming news more often; it was bad enough when Deponia Doomsday was released and I had no idea it even was a thing.
And I really hope the complaints are about poor writing more than the inclusion if a transgender character, because complaining about such things is so 20th century.

This is absolutely ridiculous. Anybody criticizing a fantasy game as varied as Baldur's Gate for developing the world even more openly, over a transgender character, should be ashamed of him or herself.

BG (along Planescape: Torment) sits at the throne of CRPGs...it's no wonder fans are upset that B grade developer is messing the legacy with what appears to be "fill the SJW quota" bollocks.

What a dumb thing to complain about, really.

Some people REALLY REALLY care about genitals.

I mean, what is the damn big deal? Why do people HAVE to have a problem with it? Don't they realize this is exactly the kind of thing that will make transgender people afraid to bring up their sexuality at all? Look at how unnecessarily HATEFUL people can be for no reason.

I mean, how is it any better than hating someone for their skin color, religion or what country they're from? Just PRETEND like someone's genitals doesn't matter...you know, since it really doesn't anyway.

That title is just insulting to reaction that the game has received.

The backlash stems from an interview with the writer of the game who just was completely antagonistic about it, getting down to "if you don't like it, well that's too bad". To sum it up as the oppression of LGBTQ is outrageous in its right.