Interview Beamdog's Phillip Daigle and Amber Scott interviewed on Shane Plays

[Infinitron]

Tags: Amber Scott; Baldur's Gate; Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn; Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear; Beamdog; Phillip Daigle; Shane Stacks

Phillip Daigle and Amber Scott, the Beamdog duo, were interviewed on Shane Plays on Saturday, right before their Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear Twitch stream. Last night it was made available on YouTube. Despite the title, it's actually more of a general interview. In the first half, Phillip and Amber talk about their careers, about Beamdog and about the state of the RPG industry in general. Then there's some talk about the development of the Baldur's Gate Enhanced Editions, and in the end, there are barely ten minutes left to talk about Siege of Dragonspear.

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Still, there are a few interesting tidbits to be had. Did you know that the reason Beamdog were unable to do an HD version of Baldur's Gate is that the original art assets were lost in a flood? When asked what kind of numbers they're looking to sell with Siege of Dragonspear, Phillip says they'd be thrilled to reach one million, which he feels is doable. We'll see how true that is in three days.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Interesting about the art assets, didn't know about the flood. This is what Trent had said in his postmortem:

We had drafted the original deal in the context of a Baldur's Gate: HD. Our plan was simple: grab the original artwork, clean it up, re-render it at higher resolutions and with better materials, thus creating stunning versions of the areas everyone remembers. We planned to take the character models and re-render them with many more frames of animation and add new orientations to the movement to make the game smoother. We nailed down the core terms, got everyone on the same page and we got our first drop of the assets from BioWare.


A few days later we noticed a large hole where the source art should be -- stuff like 3DS Max files and texture images. "No problem," I said; I contacted Derek French over at BioWare and he dug further and sent us more data. We again dug through and failed to find the source art. I made arrangements to visit BioWare with a removable drive and work with Derek and the IS department to find the assets.


After two days of searching we came to the horrible realization that the source artwork was stored on a departmental drive and not a project drive, and as such was not frequently backed up. We dug through tape backups to no avail. The source art was lost.


At this point we brought the information back to Atari and the deal was dead in the water. Cameron and I spent a few weeks re-thinking the concept and we re-pitched Atari with an "Enhanced Edition" as opposed to an "HD" version. We discussed the implications of a non-HD version and we had to renegotiate royalty terms to get the deal back on track. We basically had to completely discard our plans and start anew after almost a year of negotiation.


The end result is a little less graphical flash for launch than we had initially planned, but we actually had a bit more time to make more widespread improvements as a result, so the project is different; in some ways larger, but still pretty awesome. The key learning here is: don't panic and always have a towel, because you never know when you are going to be surprised... and towels can be very useful.

 

[Infinitron]

Interesting about the art assets, didn't know about the flood. This is what Trent had said in his postmortem:

the deal was dead in the water.

Haha.

 

[sstacks]

Tags: Amber Scott; Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition; Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition; Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear; Beamdog; Phillip Daigle; Shane Stacks

Phillip Daigle and Amber Scott, the Beamdog duo, were interviewed on Shane Plays on Saturday, right before their Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear Twitch stream. Last night it was made available on YouTube. Despite the title, it's actually more of a general interview.

Infinitron Thanks for posting this as a news item good sir.

If anyone wants the mp3 version instead of the youtube version, you can find it here:
http://shaneplays.com/shane-plays-radio-and-podcast/

A couple of the things that were interesting to me in this interview was the extremely friendly working environment at Beamdog and the discussion of friendly relationships with other RPG devs, including sharing early versions of games to check out. And of course the big reveal on Boo! (kidding not kidding)

 

[Delterius]

Tell you what, those ads sometimes make this feel like the D&D version of Deb of Night.

 

[mindx2]

Truly a shame how this industry treats it's creations unlike film, photography, etc. just shameful

 

[oldmanpaco]

The key learning here is: don't panic and always have a towel, because you never know when you are going to be surprised... and towels can be very useful.

Douglas Adams reference?

 

[Gay-Lussac]

How does this thing with 35 hours of gameplay manage to not completely disrupt the leveling experience in BG 2?

 

[ArchAngel]

How does this thing with 35 hours of gameplay manage to not completely disrupt the leveling experience in BG 2?

Because AD&D had such fun high level XP tables that went up exponentially.

 

[Bubbles]

Also, level scaling.

 

[Azrael the cat]

The absolutely slamdunk simplicity of Beamdog's original idea really brings home how badly Bioware underestimate, and under-respect, the appeal of their most beloved franchise. Even after the Beamdog guys walked in and told them a way in which Bioware could cash in and make tons of near-guaranteed sales for something that they could just have assigned a few junior and mid-level techies to do themselves in short time, Bioware still didn't respond 'Hey great idea! You know, we'll need some more janitors to mop up after all the hookers and blow we're going to get with all that easy cash, send us your resume'.

 

[Delterius]

Hell, BioWare didn't even keep track of the game's original assets. That's crazy. I'd stuff the building of copies of that shit.

 

[Immortal]

Did you yell at them demanding my every whim?

:mrpresident:

 

[Jarpie]

Truly a shame how this industry treats it's creations unlike film, photography, etc. just shameful

Well...there are numerous films which are completely or partially lost because they were lost (London After Midnight, 4 Devils), destroyed fully or partially (Greed, Magnificent Ambersons, etc.) so they're (or weren't) not any better.

Given how much newer media games are, they should've known better though.

 

[Zetor]

How does this thing with 35 hours of gameplay manage to not completely disrupt the leveling experience in BG 2?

I think the new difficulty settings are supposed to deal with this... larger spawn sizes of higher-level enemies and whatnot. The original level scaling from BG2 won't cut it -- sure, in some areas like the shade temple it works OK for the trash battles, but the actual interesting encounters aren't level-scaled anywhere as far as I know. The Warden fight for example would probably turn into a cakewalk, even if it was the first major sidequest the Dragonspear party did after Chateau Irenicus. Iconic battles like the Den of the Seven Vales adventurer party (that everyone tries to beat shortly after finishing the prologue) would also turn into trash encounters. etc.

 

[ArchAngel]

How does this thing with 35 hours of gameplay manage to not completely disrupt the leveling experience in BG 2?

I think the new difficulty settings are supposed to deal with this... larger spawn sizes of higher-level enemies and whatnot. The original level scaling from BG2 won't cut it -- sure, in some areas like the shade temple it works OK for the trash battles, but the actual interesting encounters aren't level-scaled anywhere as far as I know. The Warden fight for example would probably turn into a cakewalk, even if it was the first major sidequest the Dragonspear party did after Chateau Irenicus. Iconic battles like the Den of the Seven Vales adventurer party (that everyone tries to beat shortly after finishing the prologue) would also turn into trash encounters. etc.

I doubt 2 more THACO and few extra spells are going to change it so much. Most of the power at those levels come from magic items and you will not have more than you did in Bg2 since you lose all you have at end of SoD.

And it might be even any difference because you might be same level when you exit first dungeon due to how XP tables work. You will be closer to next level up than if you didn't play SoD but as far as levels go you might be same or only 1 level difference.

 

[PatataFamilia]

How does this thing with 35 hours of gameplay manage to not completely disrupt the leveling experience in BG 2?

I think the new difficulty settings are supposed to deal with this... larger spawn sizes of higher-level enemies and whatnot. The original level scaling from BG2 won't cut it -- sure, in some areas like the shade temple it works OK for the trash battles, but the actual interesting encounters aren't level-scaled anywhere as far as I know. The Warden fight for example would probably turn into a cakewalk, even if it was the first major sidequest the Dragonspear party did after Chateau Irenicus. Iconic battles like the Den of the Seven Vales adventurer party (that everyone tries to beat shortly after finishing the prologue) would also turn into trash encounters. etc.

I doubt 2 more THACO and few extra spells are going to change it so much. Most of the power at those levels come from magic items and you will not have more than you did in Bg2 since you lose all you have at end of SoD.

And it might be even any difference because you might be same level when you exit first dungeon due to how XP tables work. You will be closer to next level up than if you didn't play SoD but as far as levels go you might be same or only 1 level difference.

Who wants to play for 35 hours with one or no level ups? Tales of the Sword Coast added 2. They could conceivably get away with adding 10 & 11 for mages, thus not granting level 6 spells right away. That's still pretty strange, releasing a game where your character gets no new abilities as they play the game. I think it's more likely they suck it up, unbalance the game some more and get your character up to level 12. One use of contingency, protection from magical weapons, or true sight isn't that game-breaking. Those poor goblins in Irenicus' dungeon.

 

[Infinitron]

Who wants to play for 35 hours with one or no level ups? Tales of the Sword Coast added 2. They could conceivably get away with adding 10 & 11 for mages, thus not granting level 6 spells right away. That's still pretty strange, releasing a game where your character gets no new abilities as they play the game. I think it's more likely they suck it up, unbalance the game some more and get your character up to level 12. One use of contingency, protection from magical weapons, or true sight isn't that game-breaking. Those poor goblins in Irenicus' dungeon.

You don't need to wonder what's likely or not. They've said the experience cap is 500,000. Look at the AD&D experience tables and do the math.

The Familiar magazine says they realize there's not going to be a lot of levelling, which is why they added lots of items instead.

 

[Anthedon]

Is there another pronunciation of siege or did you say Sage of Dragonspear every single time?