Stabwound

'Miraz', on 18 Apr 2012 - 17:43, said:

'phordicus', on 17 Apr 2012 - 11:58, said:

The original is $10 and worth more compared even to its current peers. Whatever Oster is adding won't amount to 5% of the total content, content which is in no way different than that already freely available.

Apart from probably being better. New content made by proper game developers from the original BG team with access to the source code and dedicated artists > fan developed content. No argument.

That's a rather ridiculous statement. We don't even know who the "original members" comprise. It could be play testers for all we know.

If "upscaling" could make things look better, why hasn't it been done by a modder already? If they only have access to the final versions everyone else has, what's stopping Bill the Amateur Modder from doing the same batch thing they're talking about?

Of course, I'll bet that it's really just an excuse and they don't want to put the time/money into redrawing everything. Just do the minimum amount of work possible and sell existing mods.

Stat checks wouldn't fit into BG at all unless you completely redesigned the quests. Even then, there isn't exactly room for skill-based solutions to quests. Most of the time it's either "kill the person" or "give them an item."

As for BG3, I don't exactly have high hopes of these guys developing a worthy successor to the series. Overhaul Games has no original releases, so I think the doubt is warranted.

I guess that a new Infinity Engine game or D&D CRPG is better than none at all though.

This re-release gets more unappealing by the day. So now the original art assets are trashed, and we can only assume that by Oster's comment that they're on a shoestring budget and will probably disregard changing the art at all.

Very nice.

If they don't overhaul the UI then there is absolutely nothing here for a PC fan of the game.

It's sad that it seems as though the PC version is falling to the wayside in favour of marketing the game to iPad users. I'm not a modder but a fan of the game, and it's obvious to me how much could be done to better the game with access to the source code. It seems as though this isn't as "enhanced" a version of the game as I first thought it would be; recent screenshots look like BGT running on GemRB...

There is so much that could be fixed with the UI for one thing. While it's serviceable, there are a lot of annoyances, especially regarding bags and the spell-casting menu. Recent comments lead me to believe that this isn't going to be addressed at all.

The game could be made easier to use with mods, with a system like William Imm proposed. Is that going to happen? I doubt it.

At first I was lead to believe that this was going to be an "HD" facelift of the game. I didn't expect the backgrounds to be redone, but I thought perhaps the character sprites would be. It doesn't look like that's happening, either. Although the existing widescreen mod is great, I also thought that the "EE" version might make high resolutions work differently by upscaling the visuals instead of making everything tiny, not that it's a huge deal. Instead, all it seems to do, judging by recent screenshots, is do the same thing the Widescreen Mod does, except center the skill bar at the bottom.

As far as I'm concerned, when you concisder the above and since this will likely not be compatible like BGT or with any of the BGT fixes or mods, I have no real interest in it.