Interview Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition Interview at TabTimes

[waywardOne]

EA just want to test the waters with an well established and highly regarded game for the iPads lovers out there. Nothing is done in the interests of the players, but for their NASDAQ numbers...and the numbers are way down.

EA isn't involved. The rights to make a BG game are controlled by Atari and WotC first and foremost, with some residual stuff leftover to Bioware.

 

[Jaesun]

EA just want to test the waters with an well established and highly regarded game for the iPads lovers out there. Nothing is done in the interests of the players, but for their NASDAQ numbers...and the numbers are way down.

EA isn't involved. The rights to make a BG game are controlled by Atari and WotC first and foremost, with some residual stuff leftover to Bioware.

BioWare/EA Own the rights to Baldur's Gate (any video game using that name). They are involved. I do not know the specifics in how HASBRO/WotC are involved. It is their setting, so I am sure some approval's on content are required.

 

[waywardOne]

BioWare/EA Own the rights to Baldur's Gate (any video game using that name). They are involved. I do not know the specifics in how HASBRO/WotC are involved. It is their setting, so I am sure some approval's on content are required.

Lemme see if I can clarify.

EA owns Bioware, who owns the Infinity Engine. Using IE would require permission or license.
Hasbro owns WotC, who owns the D&D licensing rights.
Atari somehow owns the electronic publishing rights to the Baldur's Gate franchise; the Interplay/Titus/Hasbro/Infogrames clusterfuck is indecipherable.

At best, EA is a 3rd party vendor to this and Bioware is still just their bitch.

 

[.Pixote.]

I thought Atari had sold all of its interests in D&D back to Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro). So that leaves Atari out of the equation - I can't imagine they can publish anything related to Baldur's Gate.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

ITT we learn that in the ancient land of Lithuania there still live people who don't know that both BG games allow you to easily create all six characters with no additional mods required.

This is only possible by controlling all six characters in multiplayer, so THIS IS CHEATING AND DOESN'T COUNT!!!!!111

Bro, right after you create the characters and start the game you can just copy the save from mpsave folder to the save folder and play it 100% like normal sp game.

 

[Johannes]

ITT we learn that in the ancient land of Lithuania there still live people who don't know that both BG games allow you to easily create all six characters with no additional mods required.

This is only possible by controlling all six characters in multiplayer, so THIS IS CHEATING AND DOESN'T COUNT!!!!!111

Bro, right after you create the characters and start the game you can just copy the save from mpsave folder to the save folder and play it 100% like normal sp game.

Bro, right after you create your character you can just download this thing called ShadowKeeper and give your character 3mil xp and 25 in all stats and play it 100% like a normal sp game. BU TITS CHEATING AND DOESNT COUNT!

 

[Infinitron]

I wouldn't call it cheating, but it's clearly not the way the game was meant to be played. It's in the same category as save-scumming.

 

[felipepepe]

it's clearly not the way the game was meant to be played.

Why? The game has multiplayer, whats the difference between playing with 5 bros or just creating the 6 characters? I used to only play single-player, but the last time I played I went for a full cutom party, it's way better to test different classes and team work combos...

Besides, if I can only create 1 character I always create a mage.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

I wouldn't call it cheating, but it's clearly not the way the game was meant to be played. It's in the same category as save-scumming.

It's the only good way to play BG2 imo. If you pick max hp for all creatures when installing BG tweaks and move the difficulty slider to the right the game will still be pretty challenging even with optimal party (much more so than on normal with shitty braindead biowarian npcs).

 

[Stabwound]

I wouldn't call it cheating, but it's clearly not the way the game was meant to be played. It's in the same category as save-scumming.

How is creating all of your party members in multiplayer not the way the game was meant to be played? It even suggests doing this during one of the loading screen tips.

 

[tiagocc0]

I think the real question about the Enhanced version is.. are they going to include all the non official fixes, patches, released that made the game playable?
If not then there's no point in doing an Enhanced version that has the same bugs as the old version.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

How is creating all of your party members in multiplayer not the way the game was meant to be played? It even suggests doing this during one of the loading screen tips.

Someone wanting to play single player would normally choose "Single Player" instead of "Multiplayer by Myself".

 

[tiagocc0]

All this catfight about whether BG should be played as singleplayer or multiplayer alone as to be able to builld all 6 characters, my 2 cents:
A game is meant to be played however the player would like, I myself played a lot using just one character, then I got bored and started playing using 2 since I got bored of all the drama with the thieves in the game (in BG2).
One has to admit that playing the game over and over makes you tired of the same NPCs you find in the game.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Yeah ultimately it doesn't matter since it's SP and not that hard to begin with, I was just commenting on what seems to be the intended way (which does not mean "correct").

 

[tiagocc0]

Yeah ultimately it doesn't matter since it's SP and not that hard to begin with, I was just commenting on what seems to be the intended way (which does not mean "correct").

Yeap, the player will lose a lot of quests (and dialogue) if he plays with 6 custom characters.

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Yeah ultimately it doesn't matter since it's SP and not that hard to begin with.

I always thought that BG2 was a pretty difficult game when you play it for the first time and even for experienced players it's still possible to make it challenging like I said above.

Yeap, the player will lose a lot of quests (and dialogue) if he plays with 6 custom characters.

Missing the BG2 dialogue, especially the one with "funny" and "flirty" npcs, is one of the main reasons I play with 6 pre-generated characters.

As for the quests it's not really true - the quests you miss on are all of the shitty filler "run from location to location for no purpose" variety (and there is only few of them) and the only good item you miss is the wizard ring from the first harper fight when you have Jaheira.

 

[marooned]

Yeah ultimately it doesn't matter since it's SP and not that hard to begin with.

Missing the BG2 dialogue, especially the one with "funny" and "flirty" npcs, is one of the main reasons I play with 6 pre-generated characters.

As for the quests it's not really true - the quests you miss on are all of the shitty filler "run from location to location for no purpose" variety (and there is only few of them) and the only good item you miss is the wizard ring from the first harper fight when you have Jaheira.

It's funny because all those thing you want to avoid is what bioware really promoted to their fans from BG2 on. And boy did they succeed.

 

[Azrael the cat]

Yeah ultimately it doesn't matter since it's SP and not that hard to begin with.

I always thought that BG2 was a pretty difficult game when you play it for the first time and even for experienced players it's still possible to make it challenging like I said above.

Yeap, the player will lose a lot of quests (and dialogue) if he plays with 6 custom characters.

Missing the BG2 dialogue, especially the one with "funny" and "flirty" npcs, is one of the main reasons I play with 6 pre-generated characters.

As for the quests it's not really true - the quests you miss on are all of the shitty filler "run from location to location for no purpose" variety (and there is only few of them) and the only good item you miss is the wizard ring from the first harper fight when you have Jaheira.

Difficult the first time? Depended entirely on whether you were familiar with the infinity engine by then. From memory, I had played BG1 and PS:T to death - maybe IWD (I played them in order at the time of release - can't remember whether IWD came out before or after BG2) - and so already knew how to 'beat' the game - standard game design at that point encouraged you to try to do as much content ahead of level/time as possible, (in BG2's case, that meant doing all the world quests and the whole under-Amn section in the 2nd/3rd chapter) making the rest of the game quite easy even if you were learning the 'new tricks' on the fly. I remembered the reflecting shield as soon as I saw my first beholder, so trecked all the way to the surface and purchased that before cheesing the beholder section in the same way as the basilisks in BG1 - send one immune character out to kill them all and get mass experience (this time easier as they would shoot themselves to death if you had the reflection shield on).

Admittedly, I do remember being challenged the first time in the vampire-prone sections of the city (to the point where I stuck to daylight adventuring until my cleric levelled up) because I went on to chapter 3 too soon (same region/content as 2, so I didn't realise there would be environmental changes in the form of out-of-level vampires spawning). And the mage battles were quite specific to BG2 - no real equivalents in BG1, PS:T or IWD - so that meant learning a couple of new tricks in terms of what spell combos your casters should learn to be able to deal with sequenced-protection-from-freaken-everthing spell-casters.

I'm guessing that most people had a similar experience - I remember that at the time the game's combat was known mainly for those mage battles, so they must have stuck in peoples' heads.

 

[SCO]

Level 1 npcs

look it up

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Difficult the first time?

Yes, pretty difficult for the first time.

- mindflayers
- dragons
- golems
- high-level mages
- vampires
- beholders

They can be easily beaten with cheese, but again, I assumed first play trough + no cheese. If you use the settings I mentioned above, they will be tough even with cheese. I recently tried to replay BG2, got bored pretty quickly, but the bigger golems for example were a nightmare if the slow effect from flail of ages didn't kick in quickly.

PST, BG1 and IWD all have very straightforward combat so I don't see how it helps much with more difficult encounters from BG2. They do get you prepared for normal shit of course, but that's not really the point.

Again, BG2 isn't one of the most difficult crpgs of all time, but it's imo definitely more difficult than comparable iso crpgs from the same period like abovementioned IE games, Fallouts, Arcanum. Just avoid the shitty addon as the epic level skills get you stupidly overpowered, that much is true.

 

[VentilatorOfDoom]

I dunno, the first time BG2 was pretty hard. I stumbled into the Astral Prison without a single +3 weapon (Golems). Nightmarish.

 

[Johannes]

Yeah, it's not a simple game so the first go will likely be quite rough for almost anyone. You pretty constantly encounter new kinds of enemies (mages, vampires, illithids, beholders, drow, kuo-toa, lich, dragon etc etc) so if you'll have a hard time before you've experimented a bit on what works on what. It's ultimately easy once you're familiar with the encounters, but that's pretty universal for singleplayer games.

Though a lot of the difficulty does depend on how many of the optional quests you do. If you rush to Underdark, the game'll be vastly tougher. Which you might or might not realize on the first run.


Then you can try some AI/tactics mods (SCS2 being the best), and have a difficult run again. Then do it again with a different party (and possibly a different mod setup) and you'll have to think and adjust again, both for how to deal with the individual battles and on which order you'll deal with the different quests.

I remembered the reflecting shield as soon as I saw my first beholder, so trecked all the way to the surface and purchased that before cheesing the beholder section in the same way as the basilisks in BG1 - send one immune character out to kill them all and get mass experience (this time easier as they would shoot themselves to death if you had the reflection shield on).

Except you can't waltz to the surface from the Underdark for the shield like that. The shield was really shit design though, even if you'd get something to adjust the AI to not make beholders suicide on it, they still can't really touch the character with it at all.

 

[taxalot]

It is going to be an enhanced bioware game. The new character will probably be gay, right ?

 

[Roguey]

Except you can't waltz to the surface from the Underdark for the shield like that. The shield was really shit design though, even if you'd get something to adjust the AI to not make beholders suicide on it, they still can't really touch the character with it at all.

It's a cheat-item for noobs playing for the story. Deidre was initially only available in the collector's edition; these days she'd be DLC.

Now the cloak of mirroring you can get following the critical path, that was a bizarre choice.