Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition Interview

RPGFan is offering an interview with Beamdog’s Trent Oster about the upcoming Enhanced Edition of Baldur’s Gate, which touches on subjects such as the iOS version’s controls, the length of the project’s development cycle, thew new music and more. Here’s a snippet:

RPGFan: Are there plans to do BG2 and, if so, how will you handle saved game imports from BG1? Will they be platform specific?

Trent Oster: Yes, we have plans for BG2 and the save games are still compatible and are not platform specific. We’ll respect the original design decisions in the game in terms of starting party members, etc..

…

RPGFan: How did the team go about adjusting the graphics, UI, and assets for a higher resolution? Were they stretched, or were you actually able to return to the source material? Is the new Retina iPad supported?

Trent Oster: We started with the BG2 UI graphics as a guideline and repainted every single UI screen by hand. For the background and character art, all the source was lost, so we were unable to return and were forced to improve on what was there. We’ve added the ability to play at much higher resolutions and added zooming support with Catmull-Rom Bicubic filtering to ensure the art still looks good as you zoom in and out. We created the UI with the Retina iPad as a target. Since we are having size issues, we’ll likely ship with the iPad 2 UI base and add the higher resolution assets down the road in an update.