Baldur's Gate 2 - Enhanced Edition in 2013

Wait, are people going to pay for these?

It is truly shocking that people would pay for a professionally done upgrade with extra content to a game they love. What are they thinking?!?
 
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I'm sure this is a great money maker for them, but personally I'd rather see them work on Torment and leave the BG's alone. The BG's are perfectly playable with the current community mods in Widescreen/Hi Res and the interface is just fine. Torment I have running but it seems to have some stability issues with Widescreen/Hi Res.

I couldn't disagree more. I bought Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 a few months ago, before they announced the enhanced edition. Spent a lot of time trying to install BigWorldProject, BGTWeidu, EasyTutu and bgtutu etc., all those mods designed to make it so you can run both games together on the same engine, etc.

Finally I gave up and stopped trying because it was too much of a PITA. When I heard about the upcoming BGEE, I decided to wait and buy it again, mainly so it would be simple to install and stable.

On the other hand, Planescape Torment was a breeze by comparison, all I needed to do was install the high res mod and I was up and running, with no crashes whatsoever.

It seems Beamdog plans to release some DLC content after the launch, so apparently I will need to wait at least a few months to a year after the BGEE release date to buy some sort of Ultimate/GOTY edition with all the DLC. (Or perhaps I need to wait until 2014 to buy a complete BG1&2+all DLC version.)


I don't even know about this anymore. I'm not buying it on Beamdog, that's for sure. His statement about Steam there makes me wonder if they're going to push for a simultaneous PC launch on Steam now or if he thinks that we all mean we want to buy it from Beamdog and add it to the Steam client for no apparent reason. I'm figuring the latter, he doesn't seem to really get it. :/

It seems pretty clear he's saying you will be able to use the CD Key on Steam if you like. What do you mean by "he doesn't get it"?
 
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One thing I am hoping for is that this EE will really rejuvenate the mod community. There are of course lots of people still working on mods, but its certainly waned a lot in recent years.
 
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I highly doubt it. First of all, regardless of what beamdog have said about it, i can guarantee you, that EE will break the old mods, so that means the new and returning players won't have the current massive archive to fall back on. Then of course there is their shitty drm, that probably won't allow you to alter game content as easily.
 
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It seems pretty clear he's saying you will be able to use the CD Key on Steam if you like. What do you mean by "he doesn't get it"?

Uh, I don't think you are understanding just about anything. And that's sad.

If the game isn't distributed through Steam, which he's said it won't be, then there won't be a MAGICAL KEY provided to make it appear in their cloud and start being distributed to clients there.
 
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I highly doubt it. First of all, regardless of what beamdog have said about it, i can guarantee you, that EE will break the old mods, so that means the new and returning players won't have the current massive archive to fall back on. Then of course there is their shitty drm, that probably won't allow you to alter game content as easily.

Some mods will definitely break (like the widescreen) but unless they plan on changing all the base dependencies and data in the original games (which would seem pretty wasteful to do), most of the character/quest type and tweak mods should work just fine.
 
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Uh, I don't think you are understanding just about anything. And that's sad.

If the game isn't distributed through Steam, which he's said it won't be, then there won't be a MAGICAL KEY provided to make it appear in their cloud and start being distributed to clients there.

Ah, yes, I missed Oster's earlier tweet where he says the BGEE will not launch on Steam

The only thing I can think of is perhaps it launches on Beamdog for a timed exclusive window and goes to Steam later? Otherwise his comment about people "loving Steam more than kitties" makes no sense at all.
 
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Their MDK 2 remake is hitting Steam on July 30th, many months after the launch. If they're planning a Steam release 9 months later all it'll do is make people wait and not buy it at all until it's where they want it. Their exclusivity to Beamdog thing is going to bite them in the ass in the end. People don't like how EA tethered their games to Origin, nobody is going to like some upstart indie trying to follow the footsteps of The Man. :p

If the problem really is their license contract saying they can't sell it through Steam and that they have to attach ridiculous DRM schemes, it's time for them to re-negotiate that contract. It's not time to whine on twitter that their contract is binding them to doing a substandard job and telling us just suck it up because that's all we're going to get.
 
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Their MDK 2 remake is hitting Steam on July 30th, many months after the launch. If they're planning a Steam release 9 months later all it'll do is make people wait and not buy it at all until it's where they want it. Their exclusivity to Beamdog thing is going to bite them in the ass in the end. People don't like how EA tethered their games to Origin, nobody is going to like some upstart indie trying to follow the footsteps of The Man. :p

If the problem really is their license contract saying they can't sell it through Steam and that they have to attach ridiculous DRM schemes, it's time for them to re-negotiate that contract. It's not time to whine on twitter that their contract is binding them to doing a substandard job and telling us just suck it up because that's all we're going to get.

This is only natural, after all, why would anyone leave 30% on the table for third parties when it can go into your pocket and perhaps eventually result in some future sales on your own platform.

Even if it's only a timed exclusive window, this will help to drive some additional traffic to the Beamdog platform and certainly it will result in more direct sales than if it launched on Steam on the same date. Just the announcement alone has already helped a great deal to raise Beamdog's profile.
 
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Dhruin said:
He clearly said Beamdog will distribute a version that doesn't require the Beamdog client - what's wrong with that?

Why would anyone buy a version with a client when you can get one without? Also does "without the Beamdog client" mean DRM free? I'm not sure I understand the language here.
 
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I got all the infinity games running hi res and widescreen in just over an hour CountChoCula. BG1 is a bit more of a hassle, but the rest take minutes. The upgraded Torment interface is the only one off install like BGTutu. BG2 particularly is a piece og cake. What exactly were you struggling with? The only time I actually completed BG1 was with BGTutu. That mod community has done wonders so beyond the new content here it there isn't much to be excited about.... IMO. Torment however, runs but needs attention.
 
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You can get the IE games running in high-res with mods, but they're still limited by the way everything scales as you increase the resolution. Once you start going past 1024x768, some things start getting pretty hard to see.

As I've said before, it'll be nice to be able to increase the resolution without everything shrinking. That, and to be able to zoom in/out, is easily worth the $10 or whatever they're going to charge.
 
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I never could get in to torment. The dumb wise cracking skull, no death and encyclopedia's worth of boring story and dialog were a real turn off. I do hope they remake it though as I know many will want it, I just have no interest. I would guess they would go by popularity, with BG 1&2 then the iwd's and finally ps:t. Unless they get a green light for a new game then, who knows.
 
I would guess they would go by popularity, with BG 1&2 then the iwd's and finally ps:t.

I don't think so.. they've been very vocal about the fact that they want to give PS:T the EE treatment. Assuming BG & BG2 EE do well, I'd be willing to bet that PS:T EE would be next.

We shouldn't get too ahead of ourselves though. Afaik, Beamdog would still need to acquire the rights to do EE versions of either PS:T or the IWDs.

I recall reading that it took them 14 months of negotiations before they finally got the green light for BG EE. Hopefully IWD and PST:T will be faster when/if the publishers see the success of BG 1&2 EE.
 
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I don't think so.. they've been very vocal about the fact that they want to give PS:T the EE treatment. Assuming BG & BG2 EE do well, I'd be willing to bet that PS:T EE would be next.

We shouldn't get too ahead of ourselves though. Afaik, Beamdog would still need to acquire the rights to do EE versions of either PS:T or the IWDs.

I recall reading that it took them 14 months of negotiations before they finally got the green light for BG EE. Hopefully IWD and PST:T will be faster when/if the publishers see the success of BG 1&2 EE.

My bad, I just assumed they had the green light to do them if they wanted. Sometimes I forget about they legalities of gaming.
 
I don't think so.. they've been very vocal about the fact that they want to give PS:T the EE treatment. Assuming BG & BG2 EE do well, I'd be willing to bet that PS:T EE would be next.

We shouldn't get too ahead of ourselves though. Afaik, Beamdog would still need to acquire the rights to do EE versions of either PS:T or the IWDs.

I recall reading that it took them 14 months of negotiations before they finally got the green light for BG EE. Hopefully IWD and PST:T will be faster when/if the publishers see the success of BG 1&2 EE.

There's an not-so-old expression: Shit floats, money talks!

If BG:EE is successful, I think you'll see the others get greenlit quickly. Also, they do seem to really have an affinity for Ps:T, so I could see that next, especially since, IIRC, IWD was more of a Black Isle thing than Bioware (and aren't most of these guys ex-Bioware?).
 
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If they bring new tighter looking 3d models with kool looking animations then I am all in.if its a UI update and high resolution then I am out.I mean,the main reason I do not replay BG is due to when I start it up my mind no longer can handle the animation sprite character models.
 
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I never could get in to torment. The dumb wise cracking skull, no death and encyclopedia's worth of boring story and dialog were a real turn off. I do hope they remake it though as I know many will want it, I just have no interest. I would guess they would go by popularity, with BG 1&2 then the iwd's and finally ps:t. Unless they get a green light for a new game then, who knows.

I am playing through Torment right now. It's a mixed bag for me. I hate to admit it, but it seems my attention span isn't what it was a decade ago, and Planescape has a ton of dialog and response choices to sift through, sometimes making it feel like a slog. That said, I love the story so far (and that's without having come across any memorable "wow" moments yet, which fans seem to recall so fondly). I would love to see the world of Planescape re-imagined in full 3d with spiffy high resolution graphics and fully-voiced dialog — it just seems very conducive to a cinematic game experience, especially since there is not a ton of combat.

I know we won't be getting anything like that with the Enhanced Editions from Beamdog, but it would be nice!

Also, they do seem to really have an affinity for Ps:T, so I could see that next, especially since, IIRC, IWD was more of a Black Isle thing than Bioware (and aren't most of these guys ex-Bioware?).

Pretty sure that Ps: T was as much a Black Isle thing as IWD. They seem to have worked pretty closely with each other back then though.
 
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If they bring new tighter looking 3d models with kool looking animations then I am all in.if its a UI update and high resolution then I am out.I mean,the main reason I do not replay BG is due to when I start it up my mind no longer can handle the animation sprite character models.

Really? I'm somewhat of a graphics whore myself, but I think the IE games have aged very well.
 
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