Yes, Im sure all the Beamdog employees are sitting in there office now, cackling and chuckling about how the have decieved and scammed the old BG fans of their precious money and gave us a bug fest (for EVERYONE, apparantly) and did next to no work on their part, and wont bother supporting us in the future... No, its not some scam, they will fix the bugs given the time, and add new content and features.
Chill out, go do/play something else for a few weeks, come back, see what the games like then.
wow...this sounds awful. i think the whole point for them to make these "enhanced editions" is so they can get the approval to do a Baldur's Gate 3. Why does anyone need approval, though? WHAT THE HELL PEOPLE?! EVERYONE KNOWS THERE IS A HUGE DEMAND FOR THE GAME TO CONTINUE IN THE WAY IT HAS BEEN - WHY DON'T COMPANIES STOP CREATING WoW TYPE CRAP AND FOCUS ON SOMETHING WE KNOW WILL WORK?!
They need "approval" because fans would want BG3 to be a good game and investors would want BG3 to be a successful and profitable game. I for one wouldn't want Beamdog / Overhaul to touch a new BG title. Nothing they've shown me in the EE is any indication that they'd be able to handle a game of that magnitude -- quite the opposite in fact.
I appreciate their passion for the series and I'm sure they put a lot of hard work into this project but the result is utterly underwhelming. Basically, when you purchase this game, you're paying for convenience. There is nothing they've done to the core game experience that cannot be achieved through mods and the new content they added, both cinematics and NPC's / quests, is no better than anything the mod community could come up with. So you're paying for not having to download and install and set up the various mods... Which is fine for people who are willing to pay for that. But IMO it's not worth the price tag, especially when countless people are suffering bugs that were never even in the original to begin with.
Not having to install Baldur's Gate from those crappy CD-ROMs ever again is worth my 20 euro. I'm a windows user and the game runs without problems for me. Yes the graphics are blurry and pixelated but anyone expecting to see 2012 graphics on a 1997 remade game of which they also lost all art assets was simply expecting way too much.
First and foremost this BG:EE is reaching an audience that never got to play the orginal BG1 and BG2. People, like the poster above me, also keep forgetting that Overhaul was not allowed to change anything to the story, and was very limited in the scope of the changes they could actually make.
I couldn't play the game on launch day because of work, but I went to the forums and got worried about the game judging from people's comments about bugs, movies' quality, UI etc. So I managed to start the game last night (only had time for 15 minutes) and I don't know what people were talking about. The intro was OK. Not amazing, but good enough. I wasn't expecting anything Blizzard-like from the movies anyway, and going 2D comics-style was a good choice. Could have been done better, but nothing to complain about.
UI is simply better (dare I say: enhanced)
Bugs - I'm sure I'll find them when I start playing during the weekend, but the damn thing works, and it works on a WinXPx32 Virtualbox instance on a Linux host which means experimental 3D acceleration and max 128 MB of video memory.
I only have a couple complaints so far: 1. Some occasional micro-stutter in the sound (probably fixable either by update or tweaking some settings or it may be virtualbox-related) 2. Tooltip text is small-ish and blurry-ish (dialog text is OK) 3. Spell icons are too hard to distinguish
So, everything that I find wrong atm is fixable meaning that the design is fine, just needs bug-fixing. Hopefully, they will reconsider the spell icons or at least improve them somehow (I'll give proper suggestions after I've played the game more)
Fix the bugs and the game will be awesome IMHO.
PS Check my previous posts on, say, the launch delay, and you'll see that I'm NOT a fanboi, and, in fact, hate any form of fanboism as such.
If it's CD's you're worried about then why choose the EE over the GOG.com version? It is half the price (and has already been discounted several times through various promotions on the site), it is completely DRM free, and it is guaranteed to continue to work on modern OS'es -- heck, it's already officially supported to run on Windows 8... And with the recent addition of Mac support on GOG.com you can count on them adding a Mac installer to it sometime in the future. For free.
I am not forgetting the imposed limitations but I feel that, between those limitations and the fact that they didn't have access to the original art assets to actually enhance the graphics and animations, there is very little their version offers over a modded GOG.com version of The Original Saga, aside from convenience. A case can be made for bringing the game to tablets and "enhancing" it for that platform, but I don't see the worth in the PC version.
They need "approval" because fans would want BG3 to be a good game and investors would want BG3 to be a successful and profitable game. I for one wouldn't want Beamdog / Overhaul to touch a new BG title. Nothing they've shown me in the EE is any indication that they'd be able to handle a game of that magnitude -- quite the opposite in fact.
I appreciate their passion for the series and I'm sure they put a lot of hard work into this project but the result is utterly underwhelming. Basically, when you purchase this game, you're paying for convenience. There is nothing they've done to the core game experience that cannot be achieved through mods and the new content they added, both cinematics and NPC's / quests, is no better than anything the mod community could come up with. So you're paying for not having to download and install and set up the various mods... Which is fine for people who are willing to pay for that. But IMO it's not worth the price tag, especially when countless people are suffering bugs that were never even in the original to begin with.
1. Creating a game from scratch with a new engine is easier than fixing a game with already finished 14yo code, try for yourself writing a block of code and after that try fixing a code,that does the same thing, of someone else which was written way back.
2. In order to make a game at the scale of BG3 you need solid foundation and an appropriate budget, Beamdog worked on BG:EE with very limited budget and sacrificed their own salary for that, With revenue from BG1:EE/BG2:EE+hopefully IWD/PST:EE they are building their foundation and get a budget (more budget--> more employees to work on a bigger scale projects. )
If Beamdog/Overhaul, which consist people who truly love the game and even some of them worked on the original BG, won't create Baldur's Gate 3 - NO BODY WILL(Ever)! Why???? because cRPG/old-school RPG is a niche in gaming industry, its much more profitable to make DA2.
P.S vBG1 + mods is alright and great, but in a few years from now it won't be playable/work on new OS that will come out and will become standard - While BG:EE will - Thats why they have cleaned the code, and made it more modding friendly.
Soon enough more and more patches, hotfixes and new content will come out (plus new mods compatible with BG:EE) and BG:EE will become standard - and thats their ultimate goal.
Sometime you need to look further than the present.
I would really prefer the game to be redone in NWN2 Engine, or hell, even in DAO engine. But who am I kidding - they simply don't have resources to do that.
At the current state, there are too few enhancements to speak of. But I consider price tag of $20 to be fair for saving me time to apply all the mods and fixes to original BG.
I really hope the team will work on Planescape:Torment as their next EE game
Sorry, but I strongly doubt BG:EE will become the standard over all other versions of the game. For some people? Sure. But GOG.com will continue to support their version of The Original Saga and I guarantee you that there are a ton of people who will keep going back to that whenever they want their BG fix. As I've been trying to illustrate in my last couple of posts -- what BG:EE offers is convenience. And people who buy it make a conscious choice to pay for that convenience. Which is fine, and it's nice to have that choice, but it's not for everyone and as long as the original will be available in a perfectly playable state (which it will -- those guys at GOG.com are awesome at their job) it will just be one of the options out there for ppl who want to play the game.
Edit: as for BG3... Tbh, I think the whole BG3 thing is a pipe dream anyway. If we ever get it, it is more likely that it'll end up like a cross-platform DA2-like title than anything resembling the originals. I've never understood the massive interest for a BG3 anyway -- the story received a very satisfying and complete conclusion in ToB. It doesn't need to be revisited. A game like BG however? Yes, I'm definitely there, sign me up! And thanks to Obsidian and Kickstarter we will be getting just that in a few years from now. Which is amazing and I can't wait.
Sorry, but I strongly doubt BG:EE will become the standard over all other versions of the game. For some people? Sure. But GOG.com will continue to support their version of The Original Saga and I guarantee you that there are a ton of people who will keep going back to that whenever they want their BG fix. As I've been trying to illustrate in my last couple of posts -- what BG:EE offers is convenience. And people who buy it make a conscious choice to pay for that convenience. Which is fine, and it's nice to have that choice, but it's not for everyone and as long as the original will be available in a perfectly playable state (which it will -- those guys at GOG.com are awesome at their job) it will just be one of the options out there for ppl who want to play the game.
Edit: as for BG3... Tbh, I think the whole BG3 thing is a pipe dream anyway. If we ever get it, it is more likely that it'll end up like a cross-platform DA2-like title than anything resembling the originals. I've never understood the massive interest for a BG3 anyway -- the story received a very satisfying and complete conclusion in ToB. It doesn't need to be revisited. A game like BG however? Yes, I'm definitely there, sign me up! And thanks to Obsidian and Kickstarter we will be getting just that in a few years from now. Which is amazing and I can't wait.
And simultaneously Beamdog will support BG:EE in the near future and continue updating it/fixing it, doubts are good, but only the future will tell.
Obsidian kickstarter is a great thing, I personally also supperted it - But I don't sure if the hype around BG:EE didn't contributed its success with the fund raising - but thats a pure speculation.
As for "I've never understood the massive interest for a BG3 anyway -- the story received a very satisfying and complete conclusion in ToB" there are numerous threads about this topic - But in the end, any cRPG like BG that its setting is in the Forgotten Realms, cannot be created by kickstarter due to IP etc. Many people here love and connected to Baldur's Gate among others because of the Setting which they grew upon/read books about.
P.S
It is totally possible that in the future BG:EE will be sold on GOG.
If you are playing the game and it is as good as the original + mods then that is what I would call enhanced based on the original. Not sure why you guys thought it would be like a fully modded version with a bunch of extras on top of all that. When you start talking about modded games that could mean anything. Different people choose different mods and have totally different experiences. They couldn't stray too far from the original material or people would have gone into an uproar over it. The title doesn't say HD so I'm not sure why you expected all these sharper textures and a modernized interface. It just says "Enhanced" and from all I've seen and read it is exactly that. It's not some mind boggling change like some of you seemed to expect. It's an enhancement to the original. And there is some added material along with that which you should be thankful for instead of complaining like spoiled children which is what a lot of gamers seem to be turning into these days.
As far as users with issues go yes you will see more of them on the forum than you will people saying it's ok because this is where people with issues go. Most of the people having no issues will never come here so unless you have exact values on the number of end users of the software you can't give realistic percentages of the number of people having issues. That's just a number based on a poll on a forum where many of the users come to solve problems. Every single game in existance has a forum full of people complaining about issues with the game in question. This one isn't any different and it doesn't mean that it is a total mess.
The only real criticism I have about BGEE in its current form is that it was billed as a simpler to install/less buggy experience (that was the bulk of the 400 improvements) yet many players are having trouble installing/playing because of bugs. I do believe that these issues will be sorted out in time, it's just unfortunate that the game released this way. I shudder to think what would have happened if they gave us the build they had on the original release date.
As far as a lack of improvments in an 'enhanced' edition, let me tell you a story about Leisure Suit Larry 6: The 'Talkie' Edition. Briefly, the LSL series is a raunchy point-and-click adventure series, and an enhanced port was released with improved graphics and voiced dialogue for LSL6. To my knowledge this game is such a buggy mess it cannot be completed to this day. Clicking on certain things would crash the game. Letting certain cutscenes play through to the end would crash the game (fortunately those were skippable). However, performing a required action to get an item you need to finish the game... crashes the game; period. As far as I know this has never been corrected. I tried a fan-patch once that started you in a room with the item, but the game still crashed if you tried to leave the room or click on anything.
So things could have been worse: they could have had Sierra-On-Line in charge. :P
And with the recent addition of Mac support on GOG.com you can count on them adding a Mac installer to it sometime in the future. For free.
Uh, no you can't. Their "Mac ports" are nothing more than dosbox or scummvm wrappers. The only exception are games that already have native ports.
So what? They work. I can install and play my GOG.com versions of Fallout, Crusader: No Remorse, Little Big Adventure, Beneath A Steel Sky and all the Ultima games on my MacBook Air now without having to do a bunch of research and jumping through all kinds of confusing hoops to get them to work. And it didn't cost me anything -- they made the announcement, I logged in, and the installers were there. For free. And they just added Mac support to a dozen more games this week and will continue to add more, with the next batch coming in December.
So why wouldn't or couldn't they release a Mac installer for their BG:TOS? As I said -- these guys are very good at what they do and have gotten games that nobody had been able to play for years to run on modern OS'es without problems.
Just my 2 cents on a Baldurs Gate 3. If Overhaul has already gained the rights to this series then they do NOT need to prove anything to Atari or whomever if they use KickStarter.
Al Lowe bought the rights back for Leisure Suit Larry and is remaking the 1st game through kickstarter. Additionally he is making an entire new Leisure Larry game as well because he now owns the right to, etc. This came from his direct reply department from a question I e-mailed him.
My point is if BGEE was about proving people want a BG3 then just start a Kickstarter and watch what happens. As it stands BGEE is not even close to Enhanced. It did not meet my expectation but I hope that improves with time. There simply is not enough improvements esthetically to warrant the use of the word Enhanced to me.
I like the game. Alot. I realise I am not beset by alot of the glitches and bugs that are bedevilling other people, and I really do sympathise with them, but this game allows me to load up BG and play it on my modern widescreen comp without bothering with mods or spending time adjusting a myriad of variables just to get it to work.
And before people say mods aren't complicated and don't take much time, I am not in the least bit tech savvy, and have no interest in being. I like to load a game and play it. I don't have the time or inclination to go looking for programs to download and faff about with. And that is what BGEE gives me. The ability to play the game, with additional content. And all for around £11. For me thats a bargain. And with the promise of DLC and possibly new content, all managed from within the game (for tech idiots like me)..... that is even better!
I hope everyone currently beset by problems can get them sorted, and I just want to say a big thankyou to the developers. Thank you!
I'm not sure if I want this company to have any hand in development of Baldur's Gate 3 if, from what I've read, one of the lines you can say to Neera is "Give me some sugar, baby". I was planning to pick this up, but I haven't yet, so I can't confirm if that's true or not - I'm sure there are a bunch of people that can do that for me. That line really killed a lot of my anticipation for this (not that I have anything against Army of Darkness references - just not here).
But still, I'll probably pick this up eventually, after it has been ironed out a bit and made a little more stable. I doubt I would even have issues since I rarely do, even with older games, but I'd just assume wait with what I've been hearing. If I really want to play this again, I'll just stick with tutu for now.
Anyway, I think I'll just stick with my first love in the interim - Icewind Dale 2.
@Madae Army of Darkness doesn't have a patent on "Give me some sugar, Baby".. That was in common usage before the movie, although the delivery of the line is absolutely brilliant, and the reason why we now often think of that movie. Thank Helm for actors like Bruce Campell.
Hell, even if it was meant as a reference to the movie, it's not a crime, and it wouldn't break the game for me.
@Madae Army of Darkness doesn't have a patent on "Give me some sugar, Baby".. That was in common usage before the movie, although the delivery of the line is absolutely brilliant, and the reason why we now often think of that movie. Thank Helm for actors like Bruce Campell.
Hell, even if it was meant as a reference to the movie, it's not a crime, and it wouldn't break the game for me.
Name something else in media that used that line then. I would guarantee more people have heard it because of Army of Darkness than for what you may say. But, whether or not the "chicken came before the egg" is really not the point. The quote is a crime to me, because pop culture references in a game with a serious tone just don't mix unless the game is trying to set that mood from the very beginning, and we all know BG did not go there. It's like having a narrator of a book constantly talking in different point of views, or breaking the fourth wall consistently while trying to maintain a serious attitude about the story.
Zoom isn't "broken". It just wasn't designed worth a crap. It's implimented exactly like they designed it.
The big advantage was that they had the rights to distribute and package the game with their mods. Otherwise any other combination of mods already in existence would pretty much equal what we have now - except it's free. If mod makers had the ability to package and distribute the original game with their mods we would have been better off - of course it wouldn't have been free because they would have had to pay a licensing agreement but I still think it would have been cheaper because most mods were free and you would have only been paying for the original license bundle, as opposed to now paying for the mod development AND the origianl license bundle.
@Madae Army of Darkness doesn't have a patent on "Give me some sugar, Baby".. That was in common usage before the movie, although the delivery of the line is absolutely brilliant, and the reason why we now often think of that movie. Thank Helm for actors like Bruce Campell.
Hell, even if it was meant as a reference to the movie, it's not a crime, and it wouldn't break the game for me.
Name something else in media that used that line then. I would guarantee more people have heard it because of Army of Darkness than for what you may say. But, whether or not the "chicken came before the egg" is really not the point. The quote is a crime to me, because pop culture references in a game with a serious tone just don't mix unless the game is trying to set that mood from the very beginning, and we all know BG did not go there. It's like having a narrator of a book constantly talking in different point of views, or breaking the fourth wall consistently while trying to maintain a serious attitude about the story.
Well, I can't find any references, and don't have time to try, but maybe I'm wrong, I was sure I've heart it in old jazz and blues songs before 1992 and the movie, but I can't remember.
No matter, I understand you concerns, but I would still only take the line as a little wink from the developer back then, but I know what you mean,
I am pretty damn disappointed considering how long I've waited for BGEE - I really didn't expect it to be like this. I have all kinds of bugs that I never had in the original.... that's the f*cking opposite of what was supposed to happen! My sound is constantly glitching, I can't run the cutscenes....and the list goes on. Disappointed.
Biggest problem is that the developers changed nothing on this game. The scrolling problem are the same as in the older BGs. Jumpy crap, with screen tearing. Its not improved engine. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME
For everyone says that the BG:EE doesn't give you anything the BGT didn't give you...
Yousa crazy!
Auto-scaling UI that actually works at a modern resolution? The ability to even ENTER the multiplayer screen? (BGT consistently crashed when I tried that, making a 'custom party' impossible) Take a look at the actual UI -- they've spent some time cleaning it up and tidying up after themselves. I'm not 100% certain what every single item there is, but I'm sure I'll figure out a few of the new items given time. A hassle free install. Better performance -- much less time spent flickering around, waiting for things to wait for things to load, etc etc.
My own perspective on the condition of BG:EE is ultimately simple: the game experience, in overall aesthetic terms, is inferior to both my original experience playing the game in 1998, and a more recent experience with Tutu.
The game has been stable for me and loads lightning fast, which is an unalloyed good. The new 2D videos are more timeless and visually acceptable in 2012 than the crude CGI of 1998. This is also good. Installing the whole game as a single package, with no fuss necessary, is another good.
However, when I actually get into the game, my experience is inferior. I am not upset at the relative lack of new content, nor the fact that the game isn't fully rendered in 3D, nor any such nonsense as that. In fact, I originally expected that Beamdog and Overhaul would make as FEW changes to the original game as possible, and allow me my nostalgia. However, many of the changes--such as the new font on journal and item description text, and the the appallingly ugly spellbooks--are not just "not updated", they are visually jarring and aesthetically inferior to the original fonts and icons. Not to mention all the new bugs, of which I gathered a long list from just an hour or two with the game. Why can I play BGTutu in widescreen where everything looks as it should (by which I mean, exactly as I remember it from 1998), but this professional redesign has all the hallmarks of reckless amateur part-time mod?
Beamdog and Overhaul deserve the benefit of the doubt for now; the challenges in revamping a 14-year-old game without any of the original assets were made clear at the outset. However, that doesn't quite answer why amateurs can produce a better "enhanced" edition than paid professionals selling their work as a product on the market. One would expect it to go the other way around. The people responsible for BG:EE deserve an opportunity to correct their mistakes, as all men do--and if they do, we should let bygones be bygones--but unless and until that happens, there is little to recommend enthusiasm for BG2:EE or BG3.
The GUI is very bad. I hope Kwiat can get to it asap.
Main game indeed looks and feels better. Shaders work nice. Small areas no longer feel like islands in the sea of black. Zoom is nice, although i'd like to reassign it to keyboard keys.
Absence of gamma and brightness adjusts is a pain for my new and horrible Benq monitor, who needs dark tones on desktop and bright ones inside games (tip - never buy 120hz Benq monitors).
I'm not used to playing with H button being pressed, I need the good-looking UI. BGEE doesnt have that at the monent.
WHAT THE HELL PEOPLE?! EVERYONE KNOWS THERE IS A HUGE DEMAND FOR THE GAME TO CONTINUE IN THE WAY IT HAS BEEN - WHY DON'T COMPANIES STOP CREATING WoW TYPE CRAP AND FOCUS ON SOMETHING WE KNOW WILL WORK?!
They do, thats why we are getting Project Eternity
Comments
Chill out, go do/play something else for a few weeks, come back, see what the games like then.
I appreciate their passion for the series and I'm sure they put a lot of hard work into this project but the result is utterly underwhelming. Basically, when you purchase this game, you're paying for convenience. There is nothing they've done to the core game experience that cannot be achieved through mods and the new content they added, both cinematics and NPC's / quests, is no better than anything the mod community could come up with. So you're paying for not having to download and install and set up the various mods... Which is fine for people who are willing to pay for that. But IMO it's not worth the price tag, especially when countless people are suffering bugs that were never even in the original to begin with.
First and foremost this BG:EE is reaching an audience that never got to play the orginal BG1 and BG2. People, like the poster above me, also keep forgetting that Overhaul was not allowed to change anything to the story, and was very limited in the scope of the changes they could actually make.
The intro was OK. Not amazing, but good enough. I wasn't expecting anything Blizzard-like from the movies anyway, and going 2D comics-style was a good choice. Could have been done better, but nothing to complain about.
UI is simply better (dare I say: enhanced)
Bugs - I'm sure I'll find them when I start playing during the weekend, but the damn thing works, and it works on a WinXPx32 Virtualbox instance on a Linux host which means experimental 3D acceleration and max 128 MB of video memory.
I only have a couple complaints so far:
1. Some occasional micro-stutter in the sound (probably fixable either by update or tweaking some settings or it may be virtualbox-related)
2. Tooltip text is small-ish and blurry-ish (dialog text is OK)
3. Spell icons are too hard to distinguish
So, everything that I find wrong atm is fixable meaning that the design is fine, just needs bug-fixing.
Hopefully, they will reconsider the spell icons or at least improve them somehow (I'll give proper suggestions after I've played the game more)
Fix the bugs and the game will be awesome IMHO.
PS Check my previous posts on, say, the launch delay, and you'll see that I'm NOT a fanboi, and, in fact, hate any form of fanboism as such.
If it's CD's you're worried about then why choose the EE over the GOG.com version? It is half the price (and has already been discounted several times through various promotions on the site), it is completely DRM free, and it is guaranteed to continue to work on modern OS'es -- heck, it's already officially supported to run on Windows 8... And with the recent addition of Mac support on GOG.com you can count on them adding a Mac installer to it sometime in the future. For free.
I am not forgetting the imposed limitations but I feel that, between those limitations and the fact that they didn't have access to the original art assets to actually enhance the graphics and animations, there is very little their version offers over a modded GOG.com version of The Original Saga, aside from convenience. A case can be made for bringing the game to tablets and "enhancing" it for that platform, but I don't see the worth in the PC version.
1. Creating a game from scratch with a new engine is easier than fixing a game with already finished 14yo code, try for yourself writing a block of code and after that try fixing a code,that does the same thing, of someone else which was written way back.
2. In order to make a game at the scale of BG3 you need solid foundation and an appropriate budget, Beamdog worked on BG:EE with very limited budget and sacrificed their own salary for that, With revenue from BG1:EE/BG2:EE+hopefully IWD/PST:EE they are building their foundation and get a budget (more budget--> more employees to work on a bigger scale projects. )
If Beamdog/Overhaul, which consist people who truly love the game and even some of them worked on the original BG, won't create Baldur's Gate 3 - NO BODY WILL(Ever)! Why???? because cRPG/old-school RPG is a niche in gaming industry, its much more profitable to make DA2.
P.S
vBG1 + mods is alright and great, but in a few years from now it won't be playable/work on new OS that will come out and will become standard - While BG:EE will - Thats why they have cleaned the code, and made it more modding friendly.
Soon enough more and more patches, hotfixes and new content will come out (plus new mods compatible with BG:EE) and BG:EE will become standard - and thats their ultimate goal.
Sometime you need to look further than the present.
At the current state, there are too few enhancements to speak of. But I consider price tag of $20 to be fair for saving me time to apply all the mods and fixes to original BG.
I really hope the team will work on Planescape:Torment as their next EE game
Sorry, but I strongly doubt BG:EE will become the standard over all other versions of the game. For some people? Sure. But GOG.com will continue to support their version of The Original Saga and I guarantee you that there are a ton of people who will keep going back to that whenever they want their BG fix. As I've been trying to illustrate in my last couple of posts -- what BG:EE offers is convenience. And people who buy it make a conscious choice to pay for that convenience. Which is fine, and it's nice to have that choice, but it's not for everyone and as long as the original will be available in a perfectly playable state (which it will -- those guys at GOG.com are awesome at their job) it will just be one of the options out there for ppl who want to play the game.
Edit: as for BG3... Tbh, I think the whole BG3 thing is a pipe dream anyway. If we ever get it, it is more likely that it'll end up like a cross-platform DA2-like title than anything resembling the originals. I've never understood the massive interest for a BG3 anyway -- the story received a very satisfying and complete conclusion in ToB. It doesn't need to be revisited. A game like BG however? Yes, I'm definitely there, sign me up! And thanks to Obsidian and Kickstarter we will be getting just that in a few years from now. Which is amazing and I can't wait.
And simultaneously Beamdog will support BG:EE in the near future and continue updating it/fixing it, doubts are good, but only the future will tell.
Obsidian kickstarter is a great thing, I personally also supperted it - But I don't sure if the hype around BG:EE didn't contributed its success with the fund raising - but thats a pure speculation.
As for "I've never understood the massive interest for a BG3 anyway -- the story received a very satisfying and complete conclusion in ToB" there are numerous threads about this topic - But in the end, any cRPG like BG that its setting is in the Forgotten Realms, cannot be created by kickstarter due to IP etc. Many people here love and connected to Baldur's Gate among others because of the Setting which they grew upon/read books about.
P.S
It is totally possible that in the future BG:EE will be sold on GOG.
As far as users with issues go yes you will see more of them on the forum than you will people saying it's ok because this is where people with issues go. Most of the people having no issues will never come here so unless you have exact values on the number of end users of the software you can't give realistic percentages of the number of people having issues. That's just a number based on a poll on a forum where many of the users come to solve problems. Every single game in existance has a forum full of people complaining about issues with the game in question. This one isn't any different and it doesn't mean that it is a total mess.
As far as a lack of improvments in an 'enhanced' edition, let me tell you a story about Leisure Suit Larry 6: The 'Talkie' Edition. Briefly, the LSL series is a raunchy point-and-click adventure series, and an enhanced port was released with improved graphics and voiced dialogue for LSL6. To my knowledge this game is such a buggy mess it cannot be completed to this day. Clicking on certain things would crash the game. Letting certain cutscenes play through to the end would crash the game (fortunately those were skippable). However, performing a required action to get an item you need to finish the game... crashes the game; period. As far as I know this has never been corrected. I tried a fan-patch once that started you in a room with the item, but the game still crashed if you tried to leave the room or click on anything.
So things could have been worse: they could have had Sierra-On-Line in charge. :P
So why wouldn't or couldn't they release a Mac installer for their BG:TOS? As I said -- these guys are very good at what they do and have gotten games that nobody had been able to play for years to run on modern OS'es without problems.
Al Lowe bought the rights back for Leisure Suit Larry and is remaking the 1st game through kickstarter. Additionally he is making an entire new Leisure Larry game as well because he now owns the right to, etc. This came from his direct reply department from a question I e-mailed him.
My point is if BGEE was about proving people want a BG3 then just start a Kickstarter and watch what happens. As it stands BGEE is not even close to Enhanced. It did not meet my expectation but I hope that improves with time. There simply is not enough improvements esthetically to warrant the use of the word Enhanced to me.
And before people say mods aren't complicated and don't take much time, I am not in the least bit tech savvy, and have no interest in being. I like to load a game and play it. I don't have the time or inclination to go looking for programs to download and faff about with. And that is what BGEE gives me. The ability to play the game, with additional content. And all for around £11. For me thats a bargain. And with the promise of DLC and possibly new content, all managed from within the game (for tech idiots like me)..... that is even better!
I hope everyone currently beset by problems can get them sorted, and I just want to say a big thankyou to the developers. Thank you!
But still, I'll probably pick this up eventually, after it has been ironed out a bit and made a little more stable. I doubt I would even have issues since I rarely do, even with older games, but I'd just assume wait with what I've been hearing. If I really want to play this again, I'll just stick with tutu for now.
Anyway, I think I'll just stick with my first love in the interim - Icewind Dale 2.
Army of Darkness doesn't have a patent on "Give me some sugar, Baby"..
That was in common usage before the movie, although the delivery of the line is absolutely brilliant, and the reason why we now often think of that movie.
Thank Helm for actors like Bruce Campell.
Hell, even if it was meant as a reference to the movie, it's not a crime, and it wouldn't break the game for me.
The big advantage was that they had the rights to distribute and package the game with their mods. Otherwise any other combination of mods already in existence would pretty much equal what we have now - except it's free. If mod makers had the ability to package and distribute the original game with their mods we would have been better off - of course it wouldn't have been free because they would have had to pay a licensing agreement but I still think it would have been cheaper because most mods were free and you would have only been paying for the original license bundle, as opposed to now paying for the mod development AND the origianl license bundle.
No matter, I understand you concerns, but I would still only take the line as a little wink from the developer back then, but I know what you mean,
DO NOT BUY THIS GAME
Yousa crazy!
Auto-scaling UI that actually works at a modern resolution?
The ability to even ENTER the multiplayer screen? (BGT consistently crashed when I tried that, making a 'custom party' impossible)
Take a look at the actual UI -- they've spent some time cleaning it up and tidying up after themselves. I'm not 100% certain what every single item there is, but I'm sure I'll figure out a few of the new items given time.
A hassle free install.
Better performance -- much less time spent flickering around, waiting for things to wait for things to load, etc etc.
YES
The game has been stable for me and loads lightning fast, which is an unalloyed good. The new 2D videos are more timeless and visually acceptable in 2012 than the crude CGI of 1998. This is also good. Installing the whole game as a single package, with no fuss necessary, is another good.
However, when I actually get into the game, my experience is inferior. I am not upset at the relative lack of new content, nor the fact that the game isn't fully rendered in 3D, nor any such nonsense as that. In fact, I originally expected that Beamdog and Overhaul would make as FEW changes to the original game as possible, and allow me my nostalgia. However, many of the changes--such as the new font on journal and item description text, and the the appallingly ugly spellbooks--are not just "not updated", they are visually jarring and aesthetically inferior to the original fonts and icons. Not to mention all the new bugs, of which I gathered a long list from just an hour or two with the game. Why can I play BGTutu in widescreen where everything looks as it should (by which I mean, exactly as I remember it from 1998), but this professional redesign has all the hallmarks of reckless amateur part-time mod?
Beamdog and Overhaul deserve the benefit of the doubt for now; the challenges in revamping a 14-year-old game without any of the original assets were made clear at the outset. However, that doesn't quite answer why amateurs can produce a better "enhanced" edition than paid professionals selling their work as a product on the market. One would expect it to go the other way around. The people responsible for BG:EE deserve an opportunity to correct their mistakes, as all men do--and if they do, we should let bygones be bygones--but unless and until that happens, there is little to recommend enthusiasm for BG2:EE or BG3.
Main game indeed looks and feels better. Shaders work nice. Small areas no longer feel like islands in the sea of black. Zoom is nice, although i'd like to reassign it to keyboard keys.
Absence of gamma and brightness adjusts is a pain for my new and horrible Benq monitor, who needs dark tones on desktop and bright ones inside games (tip - never buy 120hz Benq monitors).
I'm not used to playing with H button being pressed, I need the good-looking UI. BGEE doesnt have that at the monent.