Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition "AMAA" Reddit Q&A
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Here's an excerpt:
Obviously some form of save import from BG:EE to BG2:EE will exist, but do you have any plans to support a transition similar to what BG Trilogy provides? If not a full transition, do you plan to better support decisions and/or NPC stat changes made in BG:EE (so the tomes are not purely PC boosters)?
We are still pondering our exact plans for the BG2:EE transition. I like the idea of opening it up a bit, but I also want to respect the reasons the original design team had for restricting the usage of stat boosts for NPCs and the choice of starting NPC's.
Will the final battle still end the game for good? That is, can we choose to go for Sarevok before Durlag's Tower? I could see that making future DLC easier to implement.
When Sarevok dies, the entire BG world would need to change to account for his death. Before he dies it makes sense for every npc to talk about the iron shortage or the problem with bandits. Without a massive effort to ad new dialogue to almost every character in the game, once Sarevok dies, the world really looses its' plausibility, so we'll cut it off at the death of Sarevok, as the original.
While on the topic of DLC, you have mentioned plans for future DLC. Will there be future DLC NPCs, or are they only being added in the main BG:EE and BG2:EE releases?
We still haven't decided on this. Right now we're committed to the three we've added to the BG:EE release. If the interest is high we might add more.
Also on DLC, will future adventures be standalone like The Black Pits or integrated with the story? A mixture of both?
Both. I drunk-tweeted about an Adventure Y which is linked to the story, but we're not going into detail on Adventure Y for a while.
How will party creation for The Black Pits work? Can we use our main plot party with NPCs or is it completely standalone, fully player-made (like IWD)?
Like IWD, but you can import the characters from a save game.
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You have said that modding should be simplified a bit with BG:EE. Are you planning on any sort of offical API or tools, or will it just be easier to do what is already being done? I am really looking forward to start modding this and seeing what I can come up with.
We're working with a number of the modders to open things up. The Infinity Engine is a little complicated in a number of areas which make modding difficult, but we're trying to make things better. I don't think it will ever be NWN easy to make a BG:EE mod.
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The pathfinding is somewhat...atrocious in BG1/2. Have you addressed any pathfinding issues? Has increased memory availability itself fixed this?
Increasing the number of pathfinding nodes has helped this somewhat. The major problem is each party member doing an independent pathfind, which takes into account all the other party members in terms of blocking. I don't think we'll be done improving the pathfinding ever. We do plan to keep looking at ways to do better.
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What's one minor change that you think has improved the game the most, that's not been part of a press release?
For me, I'd think it's the overall efficiency of the game. The game is now being rendered in OpenGL and as such suffers no extreme slowdowns from spell effects and items on-screen, and Scott Brooks (@Blaze74 on here) our resident code guru has made some major improvements to loading times. Basically everything in the game is instantaneous now in terms of transitions, auto-saving, the like.
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What kind of sales figures are you hoping for? What is the basis for success so that we see a BG2 remake and even a BG3?
I'm really hoping to break 500,000 copies across all platforms. It is a great game at a low price. I'll speculate with those numbers we could persuade the parties involved to do a BG3
Regardless of sales we are doing a BG2:EE. We've committed to it contractually. It might be three of us working out of a cardboard box, but we're committed to making it happen.
And for those of our readers who are interested:
What do you know about Black Isle rebirth? Who's involved? I'd love to play Icewind Dale III! (IWD1 and IWD2 EEs would be great too.)
I know it is Interplay behind it and I have yet to hear of any developers associated with it.
Thanks RPGWatch.
