Beamdog have unearthed and restored five quests, which constitute four or five hours worth of material cut from the original game. With access to Black Isle’s design docs, they were able to determine which ideas were cut due to time constraints, and which Avellone and friends would probably prefer left buried.
“It’s like going in and finding Tolkien’s notes and trying to write the next book,” said Oster. “It’s really intimidating to start, but you’ve got most of his thoughts for the first third and you’ve just got to finish it up. At the end of it you get something you’re pretty proud of.”
There’s a sense that Beamdog are continuing a tradition that modders have engaged in for a decade - digging through the files of western RPGs and dredging up quests lost in hurried development cycles.
“Often it’s the same story,” agreed Oster. “You’ve got a lot of good plot ideas, you implement all of them, and late in the game you’re like, ‘We’ve only got time to fix 80% of the bugs. So 20%, we’ve just got to cut those off and bury them somewhere’. And that’s what you do.”
