Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition Interview

We’re less than a week away from the release of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, so I suspect that this interview with Overhaul Games’ Trent Oster is one of the final Q&As we’ll see with the designer prior to the revamped version of the RPG being unleashed unto the masses. Here are a couple of questions and their answers to get you warmed up:

RPGFan: How long did the entire update process take? Could this process be used on any of the other Infinity Engine games?

Trent Oster: What kind of game is this?If you count the legal wrangling, it is almost three years. Hard full time development is around 18 months. A big part of the work was learning the Infinity codebase and where the dragons were hiding. We did a number of major code passes where fundamental changes were wrought, including the re-working of the entire threading model, a replacement of the majority of the rendering code and a complete replacement of audio, movie and multiplayer code.

Yes, the process could be done on other Infinity games. We plan to use the same codebase for our upcoming Baldur’s Gate 2: Enhanced Edition. Further projects will depend on how similar they are to the BG codebase. Icewind Dale is very close, Planescape:Torment is less so and Icewind Dale 2 is pretty far out there.

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RPGFan: Has the multiplayer been updated in the new release? The original version’s multiplayer was a bit finicky.

Trent Oster: We’ve gutted the multiplayer, and it is better. We hope to continue to improve the multiplayer going forward with matching support, as it is currently just IP connection based.