Company News Beamdog working on a Baldur's Gate interquel set between BG1 and BG2, and some other stuff

[markec]

I cant wait for this. These hacks made EE versions of games that main features were things fans already did for free years ago and managed to fuck it up royally. Seeing that this can only end up as a epic clusterfuck I have already bought year worth of popcorn, let the fail commence.

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Maybe you play someone on a quest to resurrect Drizzt after he was killed by a party of low-level unknowns in the wilderness...

 

[Jaesun]

Maybe you play someone on a quest to resurrect Drizzt after he was killed by a party of low-level unknowns in the wilderness...

 

[Diablo169]

But some suspected that you shared the same lineage as Sarevok. You departed soon after, under circumstances much darker than anyone could have imagined......... Filler content!

 

[Tigranes]

Apparantly you missed how I said the EE had actual negative implications. How can Adventure y possibly worsen anything Tigranes?

Oh, I don't really go for the whole "X game in series sucks, ruins the whole series" argument. It can sometimes hold some credence, but I don't think it's the most important factor.

As you say, EE had concrete negative implications - not only did it split the modding community, it also made some people ignorant to the series be tricked into paying extra money for an inferior version (or, at best, extra money for a meh version). Adventure Y wouldn't have those problems. I'm not criticising what they are doing because I think it 'ruins' the BG series - it doesn't. Someone like me will just continue to enjoy modded BG. I'm criticising it because what I see is an incompetent company announcing an RPG with a slim chance of being any good. i.e. I'm firing broadsides at it the same way I would if Activision announced a new EPIC SUPER RPG.

Bad first impressions kill. BG:EE came out half-baked and now, over two years later, people on this forum still won't let it go.

Of course, that hasn't stopped Harebrained Schemes from miraculously becoming one of the Codex's most beloved developers (wait for the GOTY results...)

I can respect Tigranes for being consistent here, though - he seems to dislike HBS too.

*shrug* I think you have this weird tendency to develop theories about each Codexer's opinions, but no, I don't dislike HBS. As I've always said, I enjoy Dragonfall and I also don't regret backing SRR. I just think it's strnage that everyone loves them, as you say, and says that Dragonfall has super wonderful writing. I think HBS are decent, not stellar, and that they should continue to have some measure of support as long as they keep trying.

As for Beamdog, not only do they have a history of incompetence / bare competence, they've also charged people double price for their mediocrity. What's there to like?

 

[Morality Games]

Maybe it could be good. I mean, it won't be, but if it has a different party and just focuses on a different aspect of the Bhaalspawn then maybe.

Perhaps this is like the final step before they get permission to make a 5th edition Baldur's Gate. Prove they can deliver straight original content that sells with the Infinity Engine.

 

[Athelas]

Baldur's Gate: The Imoen Years.

 

[Dorateen]

Party-based dungeon crawler, or piss off.

 

[Jaesun]

To be honest, the IE engine was terrible as dungeon crawler because of that fucking terrible Pathfinding AI....

 

[thesheeep]

I am pretty sure you will play as Boo.

 

[Dorateen]

To be honest, the IE engine was terrible as dungeon crawler because of that fucking terrible Pathfinding AI....

True. I suppose it depends how willing a player is to mircro-manage everything and turn off the AI. That said, I enjoyed several IE dungeon designs/encounters.

 

[Athelas]

The pathfinding issues had more to do with the ridiculously narrow corridors and pathways in many dungeons. There's no reason they couldn't make them wider.

 

[Viata]

Maybe it could be good. I mean, it won't be, but if it has a different party and just focuses on a different aspect of the Bhaalspawn then maybe.

I don't think so. Their intention is to make a game to link "the unknown parts" between BG1 and 2. If so, it's going to be some filler quest before your MC is caught by Irenicus.

 

[Melcar]

As long as it has romances.

 

[Infinitron]

EE engine has much improved pathfinding, I hear

 

[deuxhero]

I'm going to be contrarian here and say that, as BG was never that good in the first place, matching it isn't exactly a high bar.

Mind you they already failed at the horribly low bar of porting a game to smartphones with token extra content by adding new scripting bugs, so...

 

[Decado]

Agreed, bugs certainly didn't help BG:EE, it was definitely a factor. But I wouldn't say that was the only factor or that it was hypocritical of some here to criticise Beamdog and support Harebrained.

I can criticize Beamdog and support Harebrained because

1) Harebrained built from scratch, whereas Beambog was basically redoing shit someone else had already done
2) SRR doesn't suck donkey nuts, whereas the extra content to BG:EE was fucking garbage
3) This is a free country and I can do whatever the fuck I want.

 

[Melcar]

Hey, what happened to the edgy troll?

 

[MRY]

I played BG2 but not BG, so my views are skewed, but it seems to me that one of the few bold and neat things in the BG series is the gap between the two games, the marked shift in tone, and the way in which information about what happened in that gap comes in somewhat slowly and only by inference.

There is a fanboy impulse, one that I've certainly felt, that blanks in narratives are holes that should be filled, rather than negative space that is a meaningful part of the composition and must be left unfilled for the whole thing to come together. Recently, that impulse has been getting stronger and creators have given in to it more and more, whether we're talking about Star Wars prequels or comic book origin stories or spin-off series or whatever. This kind of fill-the-page mentality is probably bad for art. As a consumer of art, and a would-be creator of it, I'm troubled by the mentality (even though, or maybe precisely because, I'm susceptible to it).

I understand that people can say, "If you don't like it, don't play it, it's not like this is Lucas destroying the unenhanced versions of Star Wars." That's true -- I'm not even a BG fan to begin with, so I have no personal stake in what happens to BG, anyway. But these moves have spillover effects; if the game succeeds, it encourages similar behavior. Some new players who want the "complete" BG experience will probably buy the game and have their experience worsened as a result. This may shape them into worse consumers. Those who want this kind of filler material will become more insistent by having gotten it; I doubt even a crappy version of it will convince people these things are a bad idea. (See, for example, the Final Fantasy 2 sequel that Square made, twenty years after I dreamed how wonderful it would be if they made one; crap that begets crap.)

Finally, while the pool of gamer dollars and gamer hours is flexible, it does have limits, and some of the time and money that players devote to this won't go to original games like, say, Xulima. For someone concerned about the Vogelization of games, that is sad.

 

[AngryKobold]

The Rip- off: One And One Half

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Just give them a chance.... so we may with a clean conscience go extra hard on them when they screw up

 

[Scruffy]

let's hope this finally drains all their resources and they fuck off already

 

[Melcar]

I want to know who is the true evil final boss behind them.

 

[Gragt]

It won’t be Baldur’s Gate if it doesn’t feature metal pants.

 

[Notorious]

No.