GB Feature: Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition Interview

It took me quite awhile to get the Q&A finalized, but I’m pleased to finally be able to bring you my interview with Overhaul Games’ Trent Oster about Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, the promising “overhaul” of the classic RPG that they’ll be bringing us later this summer. There are even a few details within that you won’t find in our lengthy Twitter-scavenged information dump, like a full list of ex-BioWare folks working on the project:

GB: Can you give us a quick rundown of all the ex-BioWare folks who have come on board?

Trent: So, Cam and I both put in some time on BG. I ran multiplayer testing for three months at the end of the project, Cam did some help with code and rendering optimizations. We also have Marcia Tofer, who did environment art on Baldur’s Gate and art directed Baldur’s Gate 2. Marcia is building the new area content along with another BG2 alumni, Russ Rice. Russ did area art and special effects for BG2 and he’s hard at work on area art for us right now. John Gallagher who concepted all of BG1 and BG2 has provided a ton of great area concepts for our new content. Keith Soleski is hard at work on scripting. Keith made a tour through QA, then technical production at Bioware. After Dragon magazine and writing some Forgotten Realms novels, Dave Gross did his time at Bioware, going through the James Ohlen design bootcamp and digging into the Bioware method of writing games. We’ve had some audio assistance from Dave Chan, former audio lead at Bioware. Mike Sass was there to help us early on with the updates “Enhanced Edition” logo and ongoing work. Mike was responsible for all the BG character portraits and a lot of the original promotional artwork. Since we’re a small shop, some people have already completed their work and have moved on. For example, John Gallagher is back doing movie / television concept work. We’re trying to plan again to ensure we can pull him back for all out future content needs. We’re also in the process of bringing another person on to help who people might recognize from another game, but we’ll talk about that later.