Baldur's Gate - Enhanced Edition - Postmortem

Myrthos

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Trent Oster has written a postmortem on Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition for Gamasutra, talking about the development process of the game.
From the trenches, the development of Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition was an interesting journey. We had early moments of exuberance as we played the first tablet version and proved our theory that Baldur's Gate did indeed kick ass on tablets. We had great moments of insight when we brought people from the modding community in and shared work-in-progress versions with them. We had moments of despair, such as the lost source art and subsequent sacrifices to salvage the deal. We had moments of great distress, such as when we negotiated the September-to-November contract extension for the game. Every day that we had to wait for approval of the new deal terms so we could tell the fans was like torture. We worked incredibly hard to come to terms quickly, but until we had sign-off we couldn't announce the schedule slip.
We had some great moments as a team, such as the first time we saw the new UI scheme in the game and the first time Sam's new music played in an area. It has been a great journey for us and we've formed a strong core team of thirteen people who are capable of some great works. Along the way we had the opportunity to work with some great talents such as Mark Meer, John Gallagher, and Sam Hulick. We've had the opportunity to leverage all the great work from the original title as we try to build something better, something familiar, yet improved. In short, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition was a challenge, but we've all come out of the development with some sanity remaining and a great understanding of the game, the engine technology and what makes Baldur's Gate the legend it is.
More information.
 
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It would be nice though if they could do something with the avatars for BG2. The graphics are already sharper compared to BG1. If the art is missing for BG2, then I really hope they take the time to make new avatars. That alone would make the overhaul worth it!
 
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I honestly wasn't that impressed with the PC version. They added very little that wasn't already done in mods and added nasty DRM on top of it.
 
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I was happy to have a version that I DIDN'T have to heavily mod to get running well on a modern PC, but they didn't add a lot of content, which disappointed me. The DRM was no big deal, they basically just switched out the old DRM (CD check) with the new download/activation thing which was completely unobtrusive once done.
 
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I was happy to have a version that I DIDN'T have to heavily mod to get running well on a modern PC, but they didn't add a lot of content, which disappointed me. The DRM was no big deal, they basically just switched out the old DRM (CD check) with the new download/activation thing which was completely unobtrusive once done.

Not a big deal until the activation server goes down anyway. Online activation makes you a renter.

I'd much rather deal with a disk check, or even better, the GOG version.
 
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Quite a nice summary really. He seemed fairly honest about it.

By the way, what's the status on BG2: EE? I thought it was going to be released this summer, but given the general lack of information I doubt that.
 
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