Baldur's Gate - EE Edition - New Art Director

DArtagnan said:

You know what's strange?

All that has been available through easy modding - and you've been adamant that you only want the "pure" experience

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You know of a mod that offers native HD resolutions?

Please share.

Come on now, that's just weak

You can have any resolution you want, and you can scale fonts to match.

But but, I'm all out of stamina for this debate.

For pity's sake - go BUY THIS EE VERSION AND KNOW JOY!

No.. it's not. Show me a mod that increases the resolution while keeping the proper scale. As it stands now, I can't go higher than 1024x768 without things becoming too small for my liking.

It's a legitimate request. If there's really one out there that I'm not aware of.. I'd like to know about it.

Dartagnan said:

Since they're doing minor changes to already existing work - it's as opportunistic as if they hadn't been a part of it.

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Minor changes to already existing work" is opportunistic and "unappealing"…unless you like the game?

DArtagnan said:

I liked Dungeon Lords for some reason, and I think this could be interesting. It would make for a pretty unique cooperative experience - and I can't get enough of that.

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There's a widescreen mod and a font mod. There's no "scaling" mod - so if UI scaling and such is important for you, then I suppose EE will be what you want.

Usually, I just use the widescreen mod and play at 1280x720 - because everything looks pretty good and has an appropriate size for my monitor. It's slightly blurry - but the art was never meant to be displayed in high resolution anyway.

That said, I'd be fine playing it in the original resolution - but I can't deal with non-widescreen elements on a widescreen monitor - so I have to use the mod.

Dhruin said:

Minor changes to already existing work" is opportunistic and "unappealing"…unless you like the game?

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Do you really think I've never bought an opportunistic product? I'm very guilty of that, unfortunately.

I'm even considering getting this EE version for the sake of convenience. It makes it no less opportunistic.

But I'm glad you brought up Dungeon Lords, because it's the perfect demonstration of opportunism.

Why aren't you saying: "But how can you condemn this new Dungeon Lords, when you don't actually know what they're trying to do?"

Ironically, though I'm absolutely sure the new DL is a clear-cut case of opportunism, I expect it to have changed much more significantly than BG with the EE version.

It's called experience.

DArtagnan said:

Usually, I just use the widescreen mod and play at 1280x720 - because everything looks pretty good and has an appropriate size for my monitor. It's slightly blurry - but the art was never meant to be displayed in high resolution anyway.

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That's a good point about the art actually, and it's something that I hadn't really considered so far. It'll be interesting to see what modifications, if any, they make to compensate for the higher resolutions.

JDR13 said:

That's a good point about the art actually, and it's something that I hadn't really considered so far. It'll be interesting to see what modifications, if any, they make to compensate for the higher resolutions.

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They had made a strong point about how 'weak' they considered ToB in that it just took the same core engine and added more non-playable area to make it seem like higher resolution. They said they were addressing it, and since they would have access to the original art resources they could remaster at whatever resolution they chose.

In other words, the art assets are stored in a higher resolution format, then rendered down to something for the game. A decade ago, 640x480 JPG worked for graphics horsepower, memory and storage. Now we have infinitely more - the iPad is more powerful than anything you could have bought when the BG series came out, let alone current gen PCs.

You can't just render such ancient art assets to a higher resolution and expect good results. The textures are likely not particularly high res, as they would not have been needed. So rendering assets (assuming they can even dig up those ancient files) would mean using low res textures for high resolution renders. Without more modern stuff like bump maps/displacement maps and such things - it would look really bad as a true high resolution 2D game.

I have this magical feeling they're not going to find new textures and use advanced mapping for new renders.

Maybe I'm just pessimistic?