More news from the BG2 board

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(Originally posted by NightKin)

Hey everyone, here comes another load of news from the Baldur's Gate II board. Hope you enjoy it.

From David Gaider, BG2 Designer

Diversity in portraits:

My only comment on this is the insinuation that we at Bioware or Interplay 'refuse' to respond to this line of questioning. There is no problem talking about this, and we've done it before on the old boards.

As far as design goes, we're not here to accurately reflect North American demographics or ensure our political correctness or anything of the like. We did take the comments on having non-white characters into account... we wanted strong female characters as well as characters that weren't necessarily white. Why not? It was interesting and we wanted to do it, as well as acknowledge that the Forgotten Realms is not solely populated by fantasy archetypes.

You say that Valygar, Yoshimo and Cernd aren't enough? Or weren't what you wanted? What amount, then, would be? 25%? 50%? What criteria besides what we find interesting and creative do you think should be most important when we create a character?

Or is the problem that the portrait selection, itself, is not racially diverse? If that's the case, then you do have a point. If we had the ability and time to include a lot more portraits, we could take the time to put some more variation in the human portraits (because keep in mind that we have to deal with the fantasy races and classes, here, as well). Without time constraints, we have mostly in both BG's ended up doing primarily portraits for the NPC's only. Add that to the fact that you can grab a portrait for your PC from a huge selection on the internet and it doesn't seem as big a deal.

However... none of this is meant to imply that your opinions are invalid. Like I said, if we had more portraits to offer, perhaps this wouldn't even be an issue. We've attempted to address as many of our fans' issues as we can.

I'll pass on the comments, here, to the rest of the team and we'll try to keep it in mind. I would also suggest to others who have said this topic is irrelevant to think for a moment. Many of you who say that it doesn't matter if there is some racial representation would probably agree that the depiction of women in fantasy as trollops who expose their breasts even when in armor, etc., is a bad thing, right? Why, then, would it be so difficult to put yourself in someone else's shoes and want to see, say, a black or asian hero (or heroine) in a fantasy game that you like a lot? Something you could identify with?

BG2 is obviously not going to make everyone happy (nor could it)... I just hope this shows that, as far as this issue goes, anyway, we have taken it into consideration and are not devoid of some selection.

Always room for improvement, though, right?

Players not being able to use NPC portraits:

That was the plan, and in a perfect world that's what we would have ended up doing. I think the art department had wanted to do an additional male & female portrait for each race. It just didn't happen, though (not enough time) which is unfortunate. The fact is, though, that most people seem to prefer finding their own portraits for their PCs, anyway. I suppose we still would have liked to do them, but compare that to the other jobs the art department still had to do and it just had to be weighed in. This will just have to do, at least for now. Like I said earlier, can't be perfect. I think we'd like to get it out the door, too.

From Nathan Plewes, BG2 Line Producer

Release date:

While we were at E3 there was a marketing release stating that lovely BG2 would be on the shelves by Sept.1 Thing is that we (BioWare) hadn't even told ANYONE a date, and since we're the ones that make the game someone pulled that date out of their butt.

On his job:

Lol.. me? a writer? teehee. No I'm the line producer for BG2. Don't ask what that means because I really couldn't tell you. I'm the lucky fellow that keeps the bug list flowing between Interplay and the departments at BioWare. It's not a glorious job but someone has to do it I am also responsible for keeping the troops fed. After only a few short months I have them responding to the beep of the overhead page. Plewes' Dogs I suppose you could say..hehe. It also falls under my title to answer the emails relating to BG.

Derek French, MDK2 Line Producer

More on release dates:

The simple fact is that retail stores do NOT know the release date. Period. End of story. I worked software retail, and the only dates that we got came from our distributors. They, in turn, got their dates from the publishers. Retailers only know what their distributors tell them. From there, the retail stores can decide what release date they want to publish.

If any retail store contacted BioWare directly and asked for a release date, we would tell them to contact Interplay. We would never comment on release dates to any retailer directly; that is up to the fine folks at Black Isle and Interplay.

From my experience with MDK2, going gold was an interesting experience. We would submit a build that we thought was gold to Interplay. QA teams from Interplay and BioWare would test the build and get back to us. If they found something, we would go back and work on it. Then submit again. And fix something else. This process continues until both parties agree that its gold. Then its off to duplication. From this process, you can see why pinning down a release date is a murky process.

3D:

"Does anyone know how BG2 is going to handle the 3D part of it. Incidentally, I have a SiS 6326 8 MB video card that came as part of the motherboard when I built my system."

BG2 uses DirectX in 2D and OpenGL in 3D. There is no OpenGL driver for a SiS 6326 video chipset. You will only be able to use 2D.

"As far as I know, BG2 uses the Direct3D API not OpenGL, so you should be fine as long as you have a recent enough version of DirectX, which is available from Microsoft's site if you need to update."

BG2 uses OpenGL for 3D, not Direct3D.

More on 3D:

There is no such thing as a "gforce" engine in terms of rendering APIs. There is OpenGL, Direct3D/DirectDraw, and Glide (3Dfx only). There are full OpenGL drivers for all 3Dfx video cards. I am pretty sure that IWD uses OpenGL, so there really isn't any type of card-favouring that you can do. Kinda. Sorta. I guess. =]