Baldur's Gate - Announcement gets closer?

Trent Oster from Beamdog tweets he just met with Atari, so it looks like we are inching closer to finding out what is happening at BaldursGate.com:

Great meeting with #Atari at #GDC now we need to get all the ducks in a row for an announcement #baldursgate #bestthingever

More information.

Party based gameplay.
Tactical combat with an active pause (not AWESOME combat with pause a'la DA2).
Complex story, big amount of dialogues, memorable characters.
Tons of sidequests (but not like: "hey this is my questbag! drop an item you will collect on dead qunari and get a reward!!11!11". Rather side stories…).
Rewarding loot as important as rewarding writting

After so many years… nobody could make sth close to it. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THEM!
(As an act of mercy I do not mention "sth close to planescape")

Maybe it's Daggerdale's Gate.

Trent Oster: Hmm, 220,000 visitors to #baldursgate website in four days. I think this old game might still have some fans

An annoyingly obvious observation that any visit to forums and mod sites all accross the internet could have provided evidence for. It doesn't take any self-important raise dead:infinity message to tell me that! Gah! *casts prayer against disappointment rpgWatch radius*.

I'm 99.9% sure this is a "HD" remake - there's an obvious reason Trent Oster's studio is called "Overhaul Games". I'm assuming it's too much to redo all the art, so I'm thinking a built-in hi-res patch, remade interfaces to suit, new spell effects and possibly game tweaks and balancing.

Should be good but not revolutionary for those who already replayed with the hi-res patch and TuTu or whatever.

Yeah, that sounds realistic. Hopefully it'll still work with old mods, or the new version might actually be worse than the old one..

Or you could end up having new mods.
This can end up being a platform for appearing new mods.

Sure, if it sparks a big enough interest to get the modding community going again.

Truth be told, I mod BG1 more than BG2. BG2 is excellent right out of the box.

Please don't be just an iOS port. =[

And really, high resolution Infinity Engine with the current mods is really not that awesome. Everything is too damn small! Sure you can bump up the font sizes, but it doesn't change the fact that you're controlling little tiny ant-sized dudes. Running the game full screen with scaling is a solution, but it's not a good one. Re-rendering all the art in high resolution would do something amazing for these games.

I understand Trent's history with Bioware and that he worked on Baldur's Gate, but does anyone know what license, if any, does he have or would need to work on a new BG title?

I just feel that it would be cruel to us fans to build up hype only to do a basic HD remake or some ipad app game.

I love the infinity engine games, because it reminds me of playing D&D on the kitchen table with miniatures. Thats what I also find attractive about the upcoming Diablo III. I'd love to see a modern Baldurs Gate, but it must retain the isometric view. Troikas Temple of Elemental Evil had the graphics and game mechanics down, but missed on the story and quests. A combo of Baldurs Gate and ToEE would be my dream game!

I'd love to see the original Baldur's Gate enhanced with some nice HD graphics, at least bringing it up to the level of say… Titan Quest. Throw in the interface enhancements of BG2 and TuTu and this would be a must buy for me, despite owning the original.

Don't know how ambitious (or not) this will be, but it's certainly one to watch

As long as devs don't try to reinvent the wheel in terms of the gameplay, I do like this trend of giving classics a modern facelift. I'm still curious to see what Telltale does with King's Quest

Trent on Twitter: "Forgot to mention awesome meeting yesterday with the #WizardsoftheCoast guys. Great talking #d&d with them".

Originally Posted by spiraling69
I understand Trent's history with Bioware and that he worked on Baldur's Gate, but does anyone know what license, if any, does he have or would need to work on a new BG title?

I just feel that it would be cruel to us fans to build up hype only to do a basic HD remake or some ipad app game.

We know he has agreements with Atari and WoTC and he has already remade a BioWare game, so I doubt licenses any issue. On the other hand, I doubt they are making an entirely new game - it's a huge undertaking and the studio was created to do remakes. And why would they re-launch BaldursGate.com for a new game?

No, this is some sort of remake and you've only got yourself to blame if your expectations are any different. I'd hope for a HD overhaul but an iPad version is certainly on the cards with Trent already teasing about buying a Mac.

Originally Posted by Dhruin
I'm 99.9% sure this is a "HD" remake - there's an obvious reason Trent Oster's studio is called "Overhaul Games". I'm assuming it's too much to redo all the art, so I'm thinking a built-in hi-res patch, remade interfaces to suit, new spell effects and possibly game tweaks and balancing.

This or it will be a Face Book game - we've had a few of these highly-anticipated but greatly-underwhelming announcements before.

Originally Posted by Dhruin
I'd hope for a HD overhaul but an iPad version is certainly on the cards with Trent already teasing about buying a Mac.

This sounds very reasonable as well.

Plus, there are already several iGames out there with tiny graphics on iDevices. I mean, games like Prince Of Persia 1 (the early original, I mean) are already released on devices with tiny screens.

Facebook game using the Infinity Engine?? I doubt that's even possible.

Hoping for a iOS version, or BG3

Okay, you are right. But 3D browser games aren't uncommon anymore as well.

I'm sick of non-announcements.

They're toying with us ;-) I have no doubt I'll feel hugely disappointed when they announce…whatever it is they're going to announce.

There are browser games that are far more advanced technically then Baldur's Gate. I have played some browser based 3d mmorpgs and one I saw not long ago that is going to be released soon looks as good as some modern PC based 3d games. (actually at first I thought the game was client based until I read that it was actually browser based. With that it would be simple to make a browser based Baldur's Gate and they could make it look much better then the original.

I'll be happy with an HD remake of the type Dhruin describes. I'm not too worried about mod compatibility, as the only mod I use with BG is the "fixpack".