Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition Revealed

I saw a note on Trent Oster's Twitter account that Enhanced Edition will remain with the 2nd Edition Ruleset.

 

It is a little bit a revival of old school, first the immense success of the Kickstarter projects
Double Fine Adventure and Wasteland 2, then there follows BG Enhanced Version.
All three game projects are led by veterans of game design.

I like it ^^.

edit:
Oh, and thankfully no IPad port.
A lot of worries gone

 

Cant wait for those promised screenshots honestly. Those will be the defining hurdle for these games.

 

I can deal with where this is going. It's going to be our beloved games as we remember them, but updated and expanded. Can't wait to learn more.

Thank god it isn't the BG3 MMORPG work of evil and blasphemy!

I hope for some new companions. New areas. BETTER PATHING!! Cool visual updates will be welcome. All the stuff modders couldn't do without source code access. Some expanded voice acting. This could be huge.

 

If its half-decent, I'd pay a hundred bucks for it. Seriously. A hundred. Easily.

Now for my ramblings of hope.....

New NPCs, but the old ones included as well. I couldn't play w/out Minsc n Boo.... oh boy... maybe a revised Boo, w/ Giant Space Hamster powers! Definitely more evil Clerics. And more good-aligned Mages... oh yeah, almost forgot... an enhanced IWD game as well....ok, I need to log-off or I won't be able to stop thinking about this....

 

I'm surprised WotC is letting them get away with leaving the game in 2nd Edition D&D. This feels more like an ambitious mod project to me than an actual, legit re-release. But man I hope to be proven wrong.

I'd like to think that based on the success of these they'll pitch themselves (credibly) as deserving the green-light for a Baldur's Gate III.

Skull Cap of Skepticism +3 is currently equipped. (protects from criticals!)

 

I would like to emphasize this one update:

@qmichaelr We want #BG3 as well. #bgee is a part of the master plan.

OMGOMGOMG

 

I think that a lot of people who want to see BG3 happen realize that they are going to need to demonstrate that the series can still be a huge seller, hopefully, without breaking the rules of the original game to the point that the old school fans are alienated.

So someone smart over at WotC, seemingly, realized that some concessions needed to be made on the usual WotC rules about using the current version. Get something out there that reuses as much of the existing as absolutely possible, which is sure to require a very low cost compared to an actual new game development... then prove that the formula for BG can actually work to bring in major, major bucks. Then the executives, hopefully, will be falling over themselves to see a BG3 made, and should give the developers strong creative license to make it what it needs to be (as opposed to applying the formula that sells best currently - e.g. console heavy, dumbed down games with over the top action and enemies that explode when they are hit with a broom handle).

I think that this is the general strategy, based on what I'm seeing and my own intuition.

 

Quoted because I was gonna say the same thing.

 

The list/updates are quite a stimulating read!

Would make my life complete if they enhance all infinity engine titles!

PS, SP having server-woes as well?

 

This is almost too much win for my brain to handle. Almost - it could have been 3D. Ah well.

Just thinking out loud:

- It'll be released Summer 2012
- It's based on the latest BG2:ToB codebase. From what I understand it's not a new engine at all, it's merely a few improvements to the original. The old save games are going to be compatible so that's a huge tell. Based on that, I'm very curious what technical enhancements it will bring. What I'm most looking for here is technical enhancements personally, so the fact that they would take the Infinity Engine as a base sounds somewhat limiting (it's 11 years old for pete's sake). We'll see screens next week so that should answer that.
- Following his Twitter right now you get a feeling that this is really the same game. Same rules, same classes, same engine... I'm actually a bit worried that it's not going to improve much of anything.
- Latest tweet : "100% chance of new voice actors for new characters". So, at least there's new content. Hmmm... so this is basically the same game from a technical perspective, but with some additional content?

Anyway, I can't wait for the damn screenshots.

 

The following link has a screenshot of the bgee website before it went down:

PC Gamer

 

Hey, even without a 3D overhaul, there's still plenty of room to make characters look a whole lot better and more detailed. Really, part of the charm of BG, for me, always has been that it is 2D. I'm betting that the game will get a nice visual makeover in spite of the fact that it's still 2D isometric.

Improvements to the engine, new content, visual updates... but still essentially the game we know and love... it's like, the dev team would really have to screw things up badly for this not to work out well.

Us long time, die hard fans will get to reexperience BG and BG2 over the next year or so in a way that we never thought possible, and a whole new generation will be exposed to the franchise.

Then, sometime after that we perhaps have a pretty good hope and a prayer to see BG3, and more than likely this is where we will see more significant changes made (3D, 4ED rules, etc), hopefully for the better and not for ill.

I'm feeling surprisingly optimistic about all this, actually.

The only issue I see for you Dr_Asik, is that your fans will be probably be looking for a new Baldur's Gate Let's Play!!

 

I have a hard time seeing how it could look significantly better without significant engine changes, which would require re-drawing/rendering mostly everything - which they likely won't do... One can always hope, but... I sincerely doubt it's in their budget, that would be a huge task.

Anyway, my point is there's only so much you can do when everything is designed for 800x600 resolution. You can increase the resolution, but that just makes everything smaller, it doesn't add detail - which is the one of the fundamental problems with 2D games. If you want more detail, then you have to go higher res, but unless you want everything to look smaller you have to re-render everything and that's prohibitively expensive. So you're stuck.

https://twitter.com/#!/TrentOster/status/180398854049509377

I know... Not sure I'll actually LP anything else after what I'm doing now. Too many other projects requiring my time and dedication.