Indeed great, as it is backported to the pc version.
Good...but which will come out first? And how big is the release gap going to be?
If we get the console version first, then the console gets an intensive hotfixing tango and we have 2020 and there is still no definitive announcement of the PC version aside from "Hopefully soon"...then people might get angry.
Console version of nwn comes out in November. It was announced a few months ago.
iOS version was was announced over a year ago. No date. Any ETA?
Will the new renderer be done for the console version?
So many question with 0 answers
As have been mentioned a few times in this thread, it's an opinion that the games are "unusable", there are many voices saying the games are playable (yes, there are still bugs in them). And this is the main difference between that hypothetical situation and the current state.
Yes, there were livestreams and certain promises there. Then things happened, a myriad of things, some of them became public knowledge in July. Plans happen, plans change, especially when the publicly promised plan is "We will release X soon".
The 2.6 patch hasn't been shelved, but everyone related to Beamdog is very sorry this patch takes so much time. 2.5 was released in 2018, the previous patch was released in 2016. So previous patches "weren't 10 months behind schedule", but they took a lot of time as well. Also, what again is a schedule here. "Soon", "we want to release short-cycled patches" are hardly a schedule. They are expressions of intents based on the picture at that time. Then the picture changes and all the plans change.
Getting discouraged is the right of every customer.
But the games are still being patched. Not as quick as the majority wants. BG:EE was released in 2012, BGII:EE - in 2013. And the 2.6 patch is still planned.
Can Beamdog share some features/fixes that are positively making it into patch 2.6? Did something come out with enhancing the IE backgrounds via ESRGAN? What about the long overdue algorithms besides the currently present nearest neighbour scaling one?
Transparency like that is honestly long overdue. Especially in this case where it's questionable whenever there will be “a patch beyond 2.6“ or not.
Getting discouraged is the right of every customer.
So is picking up other games, when you eventually get fed up with what you perceive as sluggish developers. Not saying that applies to me specifically ( I have a BG run going as we speak), but that seems to be the underlying current in other statements.
How many of those can Beamdog afford to overhear in the long run, I wonder?
hi what are the chances of Beamdog doing Enhanced Editions for Baldurs Gate Dark Alliance 1 and 2 (ps2 and Gamecube), Champions of Norrath Realms of Everquest 1 and 2 (ps2) and Dungeons and Dragons Heroes (original xbox)? with ports for Nintendo Switch, XB1 PS4 and PC?
so is there some big community somewhere else, where masses of people are waiting impatiently for that patch, or is it the group of about 10 assembled here?
I just played through from candle keep to blood throne, with no real glitches, at least nothing I haven't seen in some variation in the many playthroughs since 1999 ...
I personally am no longer waiting for the next patch, but that's only because I no longer have any confidence(/hope) that Beamdog would ever fix the issues that make the current version of BG:EE one of my least favorite versions of Baldur's Gate.
Obviously, our perspectives differ, and I respect that. Really, I do—people's values are formed through their experiences and we don't live the same lives, neither do we care about the same things. But to complement your account of your experience, I'll share some of mine, in a much more verbose format.
When I play BG(II):EE version 2.5, I do encounter bugs, as well as many design choices that I find unfortunate, on a regular basis. Before I stopped creating characters in 2.5, my new game experiences typically started off with many such encounters, some of which were:
During character creation, I was reminded that 2.5 lacks a menu for selecting custom portraits from a list when I was forced to page through a massive portrait collection one portrait at a time.
When I started the game, I was reminded that custom soundsets don't work right in BG:EE 2.5 as my custom voiced character was incapable of making a selection sound.
When I browsed Winthrop's merchandise I was reminded that mouse wheel scrolling in the barter panel is excruciatingly ineffective in 2.5.
When I bought and put on a helmet and didn't see horns sticking out of my character's steel-covered head, I was reminded that Beamdog had failed to preserve several iconic visual aspects of the original game in their rerelease.
When I looked at my journal I was reminded that it had been redesigned so that it no longer resembles in aesthetics or function any of the other game menus, nor is it directly accessible from any of them.
Whenever the tooltip appeared I was reminded that the tooltip scroll lacks its animation.
When looking at an item's description, I was reminded that the description page lacks its classic fancy initials. As a bonus (?) I was also reminded that the UI is missing sound effects from many interactions.
Usually all of that and more would occur to me—and add to my building frustration—before even leaving Candlekeep. I could go on listing issues/gripes almost endlessly, but for the sake of brevity getting some sleep, I'll stop. Of course, the game has much larger issues than some small missing details here and there, but even small issues do add up when they impede your enjoyment of your favorite game. (Especially when there's a legion of them.)
Your feedback has been incredibly helpful and does not go unnoticed. While we cannot answer every single question, I read every single piece of feedback that's been given and pass it to the rest of the development team, and it's already helped quite a bit, including the 2.6 patch change list (which we still can't share)!
Any plan to enhance NWN2, IWD2, ToEE, or Pool of Radiance 2 in future??
Nope. They lost the license
Is there an official statement and explanation?
Beamdog doesn’t believe in communication
We have this thread, and we reply to what we can. We believe in communication: I believe in it, other team members do. It's impossible, however, to provide a substantial reply to a few questions, especially if they're formulated as: "When will the patch X be released?", "When will the iOS version of NWN:EE be released?", "When will the renderer work be finished?". Impossible because these are tasks which are being worked upon with no estimations, and with difficult obstacles on the way (eg., the renderer re-write has turned time and again a much harder issue than imagined).
That said, what @StummvonBordwehr says is something I and other moderators agree with - a few pages back we asked people in this thread to stay on topic.
Beamdog has been, at times, so open in communication that it becomes a liability if, for whatever reason, that previous level of openness cannot be attained.
Your feedback has been incredibly helpful and does not go unnoticed. While we cannot answer every single question, I read every single piece of feedback that's been given and pass it to the rest of the development team, and it's already helped quite a bit, including the 2.6 patch change list (which we still can't share)!
We have this thread, and we reply to what we can. We believe in communication: I believe in it, other team members do. It's impossible, however, to provide a substantial reply to a few questions, especially if they're formulated as: "When will the patch X be released?", "When will the iOS version of NWN:EE be released?", "When will the renderer work be finished?". Impossible because these are tasks which are being worked upon with no estimations, and with difficult obstacles on the way (eg., the renderer re-write has turned time and again a much harder issue than imagined).
That said, what @StummvonBordwehr says is something I and other moderators agree with - a few pages back we asked people in this thread to stay on topic.
Communication.
That's good.
Me, personally, and, I'm sure, few pals here, are for communication.
We have this thread, and we reply to what we can. We believe in communication: I believe in it, other team members do. It's impossible, however, to provide a substantial reply to a few questions, especially if they're formulated as: "When will the patch X be released?", "When will the iOS version of NWN:EE be released?", "When will the renderer work be finished?". Impossible because these are tasks which are being worked upon with no estimations, and with difficult obstacles on the way (eg., the renderer re-write has turned time and again a much harder issue than imagined).
That said, what @StummvonBordwehr says is something I and other moderators agree with - a few pages back we asked people in this thread to stay on topic.
The communication went from weekly streams (too much) to What we have now.
It was supposed to be a monthly q&a.
It was supposed to be blogs.
It was supposed to be a video of the new renderer.
Has this been communicated?
i really do feel that something is terribly wrong. Without anything substantial from someone in beamdog, it isn’t hard to start to become frustrated
I stand corrected on what I said. However, I really do wish we could return to the expectations set in the original post. It would do a lot for morale to communicate. We get there is an NDA but surely that doesn't prevent communication to this extent. Even if the nature of the communications had to change to stuff like office and community highlights like we had in the past. It'd be much better than the relative silence we currently have.
It, somehow, mentions all the same games that are on my mind:
"NWN2, IWD2, ToEE, or Pool of Radiance 2"
NWN2: it's made by Obsidian so there's a higher chance to get an EE by asking them.
IWD2: source code is lost thus a dead end.
ToEE & PoR2: (extremely) highly unlikely as Beamdog wants to move on to their own game
We have this thread, and we reply to what we can. We believe in communication: I believe in it, other team members do. It's impossible, however, to provide a substantial reply to a few questions, especially if they're formulated as: "When will the patch X be released?", "When will the iOS version of NWN:EE be released?", "When will the renderer work be finished?". Impossible because these are tasks which are being worked upon with no estimations, and with difficult obstacles on the way (eg., the renderer re-write has turned time and again a much harder issue than imagined).
That said, what @StummvonBordwehr says is something I and other moderators agree with - a few pages back we asked people in this thread to stay on topic.
The communication went from weekly streams (too much) to What we have now.
It was supposed to be a monthly q&a.
It was supposed to be blogs.
It was supposed to be a video of the new renderer.
Has this been communicated?
i really do feel that something is terribly wrong. Without anything substantial from someone in beamdog, it isn’t hard to start to become frustrated
All is well, all promises will be kept. Just not enough resources & time due to contracts and difficulties of the renderer.
About monthly blogs - the general feedback was that we hadn't been saying anything new, so we moved on from that. We posted a July update on one of the biggest issues.
Why are the console releases of the baldurs gate games and planescape+icewinddale being pushed back to the 29th of oct at eb games?
Every other store still lists the release date at the 15th of oct.
What is going on beamdog?
About monthly blogs - the general feedback was that we hadn't been saying anything new, so we moved on from that. We posted a July update on one of the biggest issues.
Or you know, you can talk about something new each month.
There can be a lot of things you can talk about in a blog, such as meet a developer Controlled Q&A, a community highlight (such as a new NWN or IE mod that has been developed for your games) or a feature update once it is ready to be announced.
Fluff like this can keep people distracted long enough until you have something solid to announce, keeps people looking at your blog every month and you can take back control of the conversation about the company.
Fluff like that is something everyone at Beamdog would be happy to do but they're fully focused on development. Trent managed to do an interview with Matt Barton, Luke did an interview for Nintendo Life.
I won’t freely fund or pay a poorly managed company. We can agree on that
But I am going to pay Beamdog again - although just the following titles:
nwn:we for iOS
Bg1:ee, bg2:ee, sod:ee and nwn:ee for a console I am yet to buy.
Speaking of the above: have the considerations about community made mods for iOS and consoles reached a conclusion or are they still being pondered on?
have the considerations about community made mods for iOS and consoles reached a conclusion or are they still being pondered on?
I have an answer to that, yes.
Apple and all the consoles (we know Xbox One is an exception, but it was impossible to take different approaches towards this or that particular console, engine-related) are against user-made changes, so our console versions don't support mods. As for the iOS - no change.
People managed to (partially) get mods on iOS to work for the IE:EE's. So I imagine similar unofficial work-arounds will happen with NwN:EE's iOS port as well.
As well as fan modules, portraits, voice sets, custom .tlk's and whatnot. Also most PW's that require CEP, PRC or other mods to work properly. It's likely though that future iOS NwN players will run into the same modding limitations that the iOS IE:EE modders faced. Only time will tell.
I don't have access to the iOS version of NWN:EE (it is still in development) so I don't know for sure, but at the moment I think @Kamigoroshi is correct.
People managed to (partially) get mods on iOS to work for the IE:EE's. So I imagine similar unofficial work-arounds will happen with NwN:EE's iOS port as well.
What do you mean partially? I have an older version of iTunes running on one of my work PCs so I am able to get the .ipa files from each game. From those I extracted a full install (at least in the eyes Weidu) of all my iOS versions on my PC which I use to install the addons. I'm then able to zip the updated files and send them to my iPad using Dropbox. From there it's simple to Export that file into the game.
I'm running NPC project, unfinished business, Ascalon's quest pack, mini quests and encounters, Romantic Encounters, critter parts, Extra expanded encounters, Northern Tales of the sword coast, Dark Side of the Sword Coast, Lure of the Sirine's Call, The Stone of Askavar, Sword Coast Stratagems, Simple XP Cap Remover and Portraits Portraits Everywhere on my iPad version currently. I think all told, once I was able to get the iPad versions on my PC, it took me an hour maybe an hour and a half to get these all set up correctly and transferred.
I just dread having to do it all over again when 2.6 hits.
* I said almost everything because there are some mods that may still not work... A couple of examples:
EET: well, this speaks for itself.......
Dragonspear UI++, Lefreut enhanced UI (for BG1EE/SoD): the problem here is SoD: unlike the desktop version (where BG1EE and SoD are combined into a single game), SoD is a standalone game on iOS ----> As a result, I don't know if they'll work properly on iOS.......
Comments
Console version of nwn comes out in November. It was announced a few months ago.
iOS version was was announced over a year ago. No date. Any ETA?
Will the new renderer be done for the console version?
So many question with 0 answers
+1 on getting that info.
Also, before Beamdog's change in priorities and general decline, there was to be a voice pack released?
Any word of that?
Unlike a couple of years ago, I only drop in rarely to check on their progress with non-A & A and console deliverables.
A very sad turn for a company I had previously admired ....
Yes, there were livestreams and certain promises there. Then things happened, a myriad of things, some of them became public knowledge in July. Plans happen, plans change, especially when the publicly promised plan is "We will release X soon".
The 2.6 patch hasn't been shelved, but everyone related to Beamdog is very sorry this patch takes so much time. 2.5 was released in 2018, the previous patch was released in 2016. So previous patches "weren't 10 months behind schedule", but they took a lot of time as well. Also, what again is a schedule here. "Soon", "we want to release short-cycled patches" are hardly a schedule. They are expressions of intents based on the picture at that time. Then the picture changes and all the plans change.
Getting discouraged is the right of every customer.
But the games are still being patched. Not as quick as the majority wants. BG:EE was released in 2012, BGII:EE - in 2013. And the 2.6 patch is still planned.
Transparency like that is honestly long overdue. Especially in this case where it's questionable whenever there will be “a patch beyond 2.6“ or not.
So is picking up other games, when you eventually get fed up with what you perceive as sluggish developers. Not saying that applies to me specifically ( I have a BG run going as we speak), but that seems to be the underlying current in other statements.
How many of those can Beamdog afford to overhear in the long run, I wonder?
The war game looks interesting, but it's not what Beamdog got famous for. I want dungeonssssssssss!
I personally am no longer waiting for the next patch, but that's only because I no longer have any confidence(/hope) that Beamdog would ever fix the issues that make the current version of BG:EE one of my least favorite versions of Baldur's Gate.
Obviously, our perspectives differ, and I respect that. Really, I do—people's values are formed through their experiences and we don't live the same lives, neither do we care about the same things. But to complement your account of your experience, I'll share some of mine, in a much more verbose format.
When I play BG(II):EE version 2.5, I do encounter bugs, as well as many design choices that I find unfortunate, on a regular basis. Before I stopped creating characters in 2.5, my new game experiences typically started off with many such encounters, some of which were:
Usually all of that and more would occur to me—and add to my building frustration—before even leaving Candlekeep. I could go on listing issues/gripes almost endlessly, but for the sake of brevity getting some sleep, I'll stop. Of course, the game has much larger issues than some small missing details here and there, but even small issues do add up when they impede your enjoyment of your favorite game. (Especially when there's a legion of them.)
We have this thread, and we reply to what we can. We believe in communication: I believe in it, other team members do. It's impossible, however, to provide a substantial reply to a few questions, especially if they're formulated as: "When will the patch X be released?", "When will the iOS version of NWN:EE be released?", "When will the renderer work be finished?". Impossible because these are tasks which are being worked upon with no estimations, and with difficult obstacles on the way (eg., the renderer re-write has turned time and again a much harder issue than imagined).
That said, what @StummvonBordwehr says is something I and other moderators agree with - a few pages back we asked people in this thread to stay on topic.
Communication.
That's good.
Me, personally, and, I'm sure, few pals here, are for communication.
So, if We are to communicate here
can You, please, comment a post from @SorcererV1ct0r ?
It, somehow, mentions all the same games that are on my mind:
"NWN2, IWD2, ToEE, or Pool of Radiance 2"
The communication went from weekly streams (too much) to What we have now.
It was supposed to be a monthly q&a.
It was supposed to be blogs.
It was supposed to be a video of the new renderer.
Has this been communicated?
i really do feel that something is terribly wrong. Without anything substantial from someone in beamdog, it isn’t hard to start to become frustrated
NWN2: it's made by Obsidian so there's a higher chance to get an EE by asking them.
IWD2: source code is lost thus a dead end.
ToEE & PoR2: (extremely) highly unlikely as Beamdog wants to move on to their own game
Beamdog has moved on to its own projects (not remasters or EEs), starting with Axis & Allies 1942 Online.
All is well, all promises will be kept. Just not enough resources & time due to contracts and difficulties of the renderer.
About monthly blogs - the general feedback was that we hadn't been saying anything new, so we moved on from that. We posted a July update on one of the biggest issues.
Every other store still lists the release date at the 15th of oct.
What is going on beamdog?
Check out the initial impressions here: https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/dempmf/baldurs_gate_is_here_overwhelmingly_large_and/
Fluff like that is something everyone at Beamdog would be happy to do but they're fully focused on development. Trent managed to do an interview with Matt Barton, Luke did an interview for Nintendo Life.
But I am going to pay Beamdog again - although just the following titles:
nwn:we for iOS
Bg1:ee, bg2:ee, sod:ee and nwn:ee for a console I am yet to buy.
Speaking of the above: have the considerations about community made mods for iOS and consoles reached a conclusion or are they still being pondered on?
I have an answer to that, yes.
Apple and all the consoles (we know Xbox One is an exception, but it was impossible to take different approaches towards this or that particular console, engine-related) are against user-made changes, so our console versions don't support mods. As for the iOS - no change.
What do you mean partially? I have an older version of iTunes running on one of my work PCs so I am able to get the .ipa files from each game. From those I extracted a full install (at least in the eyes Weidu) of all my iOS versions on my PC which I use to install the addons. I'm then able to zip the updated files and send them to my iPad using Dropbox. From there it's simple to Export that file into the game.
I'm running NPC project, unfinished business, Ascalon's quest pack, mini quests and encounters, Romantic Encounters, critter parts, Extra expanded encounters, Northern Tales of the sword coast, Dark Side of the Sword Coast, Lure of the Sirine's Call, The Stone of Askavar, Sword Coast Stratagems, Simple XP Cap Remover and Portraits Portraits Everywhere on my iPad version currently. I think all told, once I was able to get the iPad versions on my PC, it took me an hour maybe an hour and a half to get these all set up correctly and transferred.
I just dread having to do it all over again when 2.6 hits.