When will Icewind Dale 2: Enhanced Edition comeout ?
Sheennoobi
Member Posts: 9
in Off-Topic
Hey guys!
I've read an article somewhere that one of the main reasons why ID2:EE isn't coming out yet is because of the ruleset.
I was wondering how long would it the awesome team at beamdog to "recreate" the engine for the ruleset?
As far as all the things and interviews i saw online the president had like a screen burn from the original version of the game.
So my guess is a good couple of years.
Maybe 5 years from now?
I know im being very impatient here and i know the developers are still working the kinks out of BG:SoD
But in your opinion when do you think will ID2:EE come out?
I've read an article somewhere that one of the main reasons why ID2:EE isn't coming out yet is because of the ruleset.
I was wondering how long would it the awesome team at beamdog to "recreate" the engine for the ruleset?
As far as all the things and interviews i saw online the president had like a screen burn from the original version of the game.
So my guess is a good couple of years.
Maybe 5 years from now?
I know im being very impatient here and i know the developers are still working the kinks out of BG:SoD
But in your opinion when do you think will ID2:EE come out?
0
Comments
They said if they are going to make another enhanced edition it will be easier to do Planescape:T instead IW2.
http://blog.beamdog.com/2015/01/beamdog-in-2015-year-ahead.html
http://www.pcgamer.com/nightmares-abound-for-icewind-dale-ii-enhanced-edition-beamdog-boss-says/
It's probably my favourite infinity engine game, and I would really love it if they would remake it. But, if I was the head of Beamdog, I'm not sure I'd remake it either. You're talking about investing a lot of money in a game that was never very popular to begin with. The effort/reward ratio is not great. Lots of work needed to make it good enough to be called an Enhanced Edition, and a lot of people have flat out either said they don't like it, or would only buy it if it was ported to 2nd edition rules. So, your market is limited.
Planescape: Torment, on the other hand, is regarded by many as being one of the best games ever made. Its massively popular, even today. That would be a much easier sell, but even then, as they have said, it takes a bit more work than IWD:EE did.
You will probably also find that the team is sick of just doing remakes the whole time. I gather they want to do something new and exciting, hence the reason for Siege of Dragonspear and Adventure Z, whatever that is. Everybody loves working on new things!
Really hoping Adventure Z will be some new project like Pillars of Eternity or Divinity Original Sin.
Joshua Sawyer said IW2 development was rushed and the game could be even better if it had longer production time and final touch. So, enhancing it with new engine could take quite long.
That is my one little bit of hope for IWD2, is that perhaps they would like to release the game the way they would have liked to release it. I mean, I'm sure there was a lot of stuff they had planned that they just did not get to do, because of time and money constraints. So perhaps an IWD2:EE would allow them to finish their unfinished business with IWD2. Make a game they can feel proud.
Perhaps they could put a bit more creativity into IWD2:EE and make more drastic changes in order to achieve their vision of what the game should have been?
This will be easier to understand if you have a background in software engineering.
The basics of it is that Beamdog invested in a common shared platform - the Infinity Plus Engine. The core components of the engine are shared across BG:EE, BG2:EE, IWD:EE and BG:SoD. The development cost of the engine was probably paid for by BG:EE, and now titles made using it are fairly profitable. This is standard practice in software engineering - development a common reusable platform because it can help save costs.
I'll use an example. You are the manager of a car manufacturing plant. It cost a lot of money to build, but at last, you can make red cars (BG:EE). Everyone is happy, and eventually you make enough red cars to recoup your investment in the factory. Then you reveal the next phase of your plan - blue cars (BG2:EE). The only difference of course is the paint, so only one step in your factory needs to change. It costs you much less to produce blue cars than it initially cost you to produce red cars, so are happy.
The same thing with green cars (IWD:EE). Since your factory can produce red and blue cars, making it produce green cars is not challenging. You even get to reuse work done on green cars by another factory, and just need to put their green car design in your factory.
Your designers want to work on something new and creative, so you come up with zebra striped cars. These are a little more work than blue or green cars were, but not as much work as red cars were. Your team is happy that they can be creative, and your accountant is happy because the factory is still in use.
But then someone comes along and asks you to build a pink pick-up truck (IWD2). You take the plan to your lead engineer, who groans. He explains that, in order to build pink pick up trucks, you need to modularise a lot more of the factory (Infinity Engine) than you do.
Right now, if you improve anything in the factory, its very easy for those changes to apply to all cars made. Some of the work done for zebra striped cars will easily apply to red, blue and green cars. But, your engineer explains, work done on pink pick-up trucks will only apply to pink pick-up trucks. And, in order to support pink pick-up trucks, you need to do a lot of work to the factory that would make it needlessly complex. The work won't benefit red, blue or green cars at all, and if pink pick-up trucks aren't profitable, then the entire effort is a waste. Compare that to the effort to build the factory in the first place - even if you lost money with red cars, you knew you would eventually make it back with blue and green cars.
So, your engineer gives an estimate of how long it would take to do the work necessary for pink pick-up trucks. You give it to your accountant, who flips his lid when he calculates how many pink pick-up trucks you would need to sell for you to make any money.
In summary, the problem is right now that building IWD2:EE would either require them to make the code super modularized (which comes with its own set of problems), or split the codebase. They won't be keen to do option B at all, and option A is still very difficult. It makes code reuse harder, and will make maintenance more challenging.
This is not to say it won't happen. I truly don't know if it will or won't. These are just my personal ramblings on why I don't think it likely that it will happen.
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