The latest interview with the Devs: "We move from custodian to creator.”
JuliusBorisov
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“We started talking about it as we were working on the first Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition and we actually started working on it before [the Enhanced Edition of] Baldur’s Gate II shipped,” says Oster. “Then we were going to try and ship it before we shipped Baldur’s Gate II, but Atari really started ratcheting up the pressure on us they and were exceptionally firm on the release date, so we just had to put it aside.”
And here we return to that idea of compromise, or at least of obligation. One of the things Oster and his team are happiest about now is being free and independent, not being compelled to hit a release date by an inflexible publisher nor, he adds, having to argue the value of a property with them. Their sales figures, he says, tell that story, and he’s clearly endured frustrations with pushy publishers in the past. While Oster hopes that Siege of Dragonspear will see release some time this year, he says there’s no need to rush and is adamant that “A game that ships on time and is not great is not remembered. A great game that ships late is still a great game.”
“What’s hilarious is how much of the [Infinity] Engine is really left. When we started, we deleted about three hundred thousand lines of code and replaced them,” he says. “A lot of it was written around Windows 95, a lot of hacks and workarounds that would allow it to work well on Windows 95. Computing has changed a lot since Windows 95! Baldur’s Gate was built around the idea of having a lot of hard drive space that was huge and slow, as well as very limited real-time memory.” Part of the Beamdog’s re-write was performed in order to get the game functioning on devices like the iPad, but Oster says it has also mades for a slimmer, more efficient game, even if it took a little while to get there (and Oster is no stranger to radically rebuilding things to try and get them to run better, as his racing blog testifies).
“There’s even more new items in Siege than there were in either of the original expansions,” Cameron Tofer, Beamdog’s other co-founder, tells me afterwards. He then checks with Oster the current estimate of the game’s word count and his partner casually estimates that conversations, item descriptions and flavour text bring to about the half-million mark. “We said we’d do about two hundred thousand words of dialogue,” Oster says. “It’s about three hundred thousand now.”
In an interview after the event, Daigle said that the biggest challenge wasn’t creating new adventures or designing new dungeons, but “Getting all our voice acting in a row. Getting all those people together was a big deal.”
“For the Enhanced Editions, it was just us directing it locally, handling the casting and all that,” he explains. “For Dragonspear, we really wanted to do a better job, so we reached out and we outsourced it to the pros. Once everything came together it was awesome, but the process of getting there was a long, long, arduous trek. It took us about a year to arrange.” The problem, he says, was tracking down all those wayward adventures of old.
“Some of those actors are out of the industry now. To get those people together and to have them jump back into their characters was hard,” he says. “Some of them could pick it up right away, it was like they’d never left the booth, but for some of them it was a case of ‘I don’t quite remember that voice.’ Luckily, we had Ginny McSwain, the voice director for the original Baldur’s Gate, and she ended up pulling these incredible performances out of them.”
Daigle’s words echo something that runs through the whole Beamdog team, that being an awareness of both how loved the Baldur’s Gate games are, but also how aged. Returning to such an old series after so long is not something they’ve found easy. There are organisational challenges, there are technical challenges, there are writing challenges and there’s a legacy that, they say, absolutely has to be respected. Writer Amber Scott, who is teaming up with Enhanced Edition veteran Andrew Foley, describes her job a “fiction/non-fiction” crossover, because there’s so much established plot and history that has to be carefully researched and then written around.
“Obviously, none of it really happened. There was no Faerûn, no Elminster, they’re not real,” she says. “But there is still that canon that has to be respected. We’ve worked really hard to make sure that the plot of Siege of Dragonspear matches the canon of Second Edition.” Scott and Foley’s job is further complicated by the fact that the Forgotten Realms of today, of Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, is a very different place to that of the Second Edition, its heyday two decades past. The timeline has leapt forward an age, cataclysms have reshaped the world and Scott‘s job is comparable to carefully, surgically inserting new details into Roman history, making sure they don’t conflict with other concurrent events, nor anything that happened since. “We had to be careful that the stories and the characters that we created slotted in to all this,” she says. “We actually had to work extremely hard to make sure.”
“That writing was also complicated,” Scott says. “We had to take into consideration how the characters would change, even how they would look, to create an experience where, if you played through Baldur’s Gate, Siege of Dragonspear and then Baldur’s Gate II, it was totally seamless. It’s a difficult job in that they’re beloved characters, that people love them, but it’s easy in a sense that we also love them. Having the opportunity to bring some ideas into an entirely new chapter of Baldur’s Gate? I can’t imagine anything that’s more amazing than that, than someone saying ‘You get to write dialogue for Imoen, for Minsc, for Dynaheir.’ I loved Baldur’s Gate and I loved those characters.”
While the focus of Beamdog’s reveal was the news of Siege of Dragonspear, perhaps almost as remarkable are their plans to also introduce substantial, sweeping changes to all of their games. A great deal is being tinkered with, updated or rebalanced. For a start, the levelling across the Baldur’s Gate series now has to be adjusted to account for the new addition. “You’ll come out [of Siege of Dragonspear] about three levels higher,” is Oster’s estimate. “So we’re going to go in and tweak some stuff in Baldur’s Gate II. Though [the original version of the game] already power-levels you pretty quick after the initial Irenicus dungeon, just so you won’t get murdered as you start to wander around Athkatla.”
“What’s hilarious is how much of the [Infinity] Engine is really left. When we started, we deleted about three hundred thousand lines of code and replaced them,” he says. “A lot of it was written around Windows 95, a lot of hacks and workarounds that would allow it to work well on Windows 95. Computing has changed a lot since Windows 95! Baldur’s Gate was built around the idea of having a lot of hard drive space that was huge and slow, as well as very limited real-time memory.” Part of the Beamdog’s re-write was performed in order to get the game functioning on devices like the iPad, but Oster says it has also mades for a slimmer, more efficient game, even if it took a little while to get there (and Oster is no stranger to radically rebuilding things to try and get them to run better, as his racing blog testifies).
This is from the latest interview ,http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/07/17/baldurs-gate-3/ , published several hours ago
And here we return to that idea of compromise, or at least of obligation. One of the things Oster and his team are happiest about now is being free and independent, not being compelled to hit a release date by an inflexible publisher nor, he adds, having to argue the value of a property with them. Their sales figures, he says, tell that story, and he’s clearly endured frustrations with pushy publishers in the past. While Oster hopes that Siege of Dragonspear will see release some time this year, he says there’s no need to rush and is adamant that “A game that ships on time and is not great is not remembered. A great game that ships late is still a great game.”
“What’s hilarious is how much of the [Infinity] Engine is really left. When we started, we deleted about three hundred thousand lines of code and replaced them,” he says. “A lot of it was written around Windows 95, a lot of hacks and workarounds that would allow it to work well on Windows 95. Computing has changed a lot since Windows 95! Baldur’s Gate was built around the idea of having a lot of hard drive space that was huge and slow, as well as very limited real-time memory.” Part of the Beamdog’s re-write was performed in order to get the game functioning on devices like the iPad, but Oster says it has also mades for a slimmer, more efficient game, even if it took a little while to get there (and Oster is no stranger to radically rebuilding things to try and get them to run better, as his racing blog testifies).
“There’s even more new items in Siege than there were in either of the original expansions,” Cameron Tofer, Beamdog’s other co-founder, tells me afterwards. He then checks with Oster the current estimate of the game’s word count and his partner casually estimates that conversations, item descriptions and flavour text bring to about the half-million mark. “We said we’d do about two hundred thousand words of dialogue,” Oster says. “It’s about three hundred thousand now.”
In an interview after the event, Daigle said that the biggest challenge wasn’t creating new adventures or designing new dungeons, but “Getting all our voice acting in a row. Getting all those people together was a big deal.”
“For the Enhanced Editions, it was just us directing it locally, handling the casting and all that,” he explains. “For Dragonspear, we really wanted to do a better job, so we reached out and we outsourced it to the pros. Once everything came together it was awesome, but the process of getting there was a long, long, arduous trek. It took us about a year to arrange.” The problem, he says, was tracking down all those wayward adventures of old.
“Some of those actors are out of the industry now. To get those people together and to have them jump back into their characters was hard,” he says. “Some of them could pick it up right away, it was like they’d never left the booth, but for some of them it was a case of ‘I don’t quite remember that voice.’ Luckily, we had Ginny McSwain, the voice director for the original Baldur’s Gate, and she ended up pulling these incredible performances out of them.”
Daigle’s words echo something that runs through the whole Beamdog team, that being an awareness of both how loved the Baldur’s Gate games are, but also how aged. Returning to such an old series after so long is not something they’ve found easy. There are organisational challenges, there are technical challenges, there are writing challenges and there’s a legacy that, they say, absolutely has to be respected. Writer Amber Scott, who is teaming up with Enhanced Edition veteran Andrew Foley, describes her job a “fiction/non-fiction” crossover, because there’s so much established plot and history that has to be carefully researched and then written around.
“Obviously, none of it really happened. There was no Faerûn, no Elminster, they’re not real,” she says. “But there is still that canon that has to be respected. We’ve worked really hard to make sure that the plot of Siege of Dragonspear matches the canon of Second Edition.” Scott and Foley’s job is further complicated by the fact that the Forgotten Realms of today, of Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons, is a very different place to that of the Second Edition, its heyday two decades past. The timeline has leapt forward an age, cataclysms have reshaped the world and Scott‘s job is comparable to carefully, surgically inserting new details into Roman history, making sure they don’t conflict with other concurrent events, nor anything that happened since. “We had to be careful that the stories and the characters that we created slotted in to all this,” she says. “We actually had to work extremely hard to make sure.”
“That writing was also complicated,” Scott says. “We had to take into consideration how the characters would change, even how they would look, to create an experience where, if you played through Baldur’s Gate, Siege of Dragonspear and then Baldur’s Gate II, it was totally seamless. It’s a difficult job in that they’re beloved characters, that people love them, but it’s easy in a sense that we also love them. Having the opportunity to bring some ideas into an entirely new chapter of Baldur’s Gate? I can’t imagine anything that’s more amazing than that, than someone saying ‘You get to write dialogue for Imoen, for Minsc, for Dynaheir.’ I loved Baldur’s Gate and I loved those characters.”
While the focus of Beamdog’s reveal was the news of Siege of Dragonspear, perhaps almost as remarkable are their plans to also introduce substantial, sweeping changes to all of their games. A great deal is being tinkered with, updated or rebalanced. For a start, the levelling across the Baldur’s Gate series now has to be adjusted to account for the new addition. “You’ll come out [of Siege of Dragonspear] about three levels higher,” is Oster’s estimate. “So we’re going to go in and tweak some stuff in Baldur’s Gate II. Though [the original version of the game] already power-levels you pretty quick after the initial Irenicus dungeon, just so you won’t get murdered as you start to wander around Athkatla.”
“What’s hilarious is how much of the [Infinity] Engine is really left. When we started, we deleted about three hundred thousand lines of code and replaced them,” he says. “A lot of it was written around Windows 95, a lot of hacks and workarounds that would allow it to work well on Windows 95. Computing has changed a lot since Windows 95! Baldur’s Gate was built around the idea of having a lot of hard drive space that was huge and slow, as well as very limited real-time memory.” Part of the Beamdog’s re-write was performed in order to get the game functioning on devices like the iPad, but Oster says it has also mades for a slimmer, more efficient game, even if it took a little while to get there (and Oster is no stranger to radically rebuilding things to try and get them to run better, as his racing blog testifies).
This is from the latest interview ,http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/07/17/baldurs-gate-3/ , published several hours ago
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Bigger Dungeons Development Tools Bigger maps and battles than we've ever seen? dev tools? Woohoo!