The Broken Hourglass Interviews
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And a snip from Four Fat Chicks' Q&A:
Q: It's been awhile since I heard from him [Westley Weimer], so I was kind of surprised to hear that he's hooked up with you folks now.
A: Yeah, well, the conversation that got this started took place about 18 months ago. People who followed the Infinity Engine modding might remember the Icewind Gate project that Wes started right after Icewind Dale 2 came out because he saw the Icewind Dale 2 engine, which was a version of the Infinity Engine which implemented Third Edition D&D rules. And he really liked the use of the Third Edition D&D rules in the Infinity Engine context in that kind of game, but he wasn't really thrilled with the Icewind Dale 2 storyline, so he said, "well, wouldn't it be nice to be able to play Baldur's Gate 2, having this rich story, in a ruleset that made more sense like Third Edition D&D," and I remember we had a conversation about this, and he said, "well, I thought about it and I figured I could do one of two things: I could just write a new engine that would play Baldur's Gate 2 content but use a ruleset that I liked more, or I could just write something that would just port everything over to Icewind Dale 2." And he did some work on the project and it hit some roadblocks simply because the two editions of the engine were pretty different, so he put out the public beta and you can mess around with it, but it doesn't work 100%. So sometime after that had happened, we were talking and I had something in mind, but I said, "So Wes. You remember when you said that you thought about making your own engine to do this, but you decided to do the porting and figured that was the better move. Do you think you made the right decision?" And he said, "No, I think really with the amount of time and energy I put into it, I probably could have just written my own game engine." And I was like, "Well. Well now, if that's the case ... ," and so then I said, "well, why don't we do this? We're interested in this type of game. By and large, the game companies out there are not making this type of game anymore they're really not."
