Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition Interview

RPGamer is offering an interview with Trent Oster on Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, covering the reception of the original Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, the lessons learned during its development, how they were applied to the development of the Enhanced Edition of the sequel, and more. Here’s a couple of questions and answers to get you started:

JS: Did Baldur’s Gate:Enhanced Edition meet sales expectations? How do you feel about the game’s release and reception?

TO: Our initial sales expectations for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition were on target. And that was after we made some large errors early on, with an overly optimistic launch plan and then a hard push to meet a contractual ship date.

That hard push led to a number of bugs slipping through, and we shipped a game we were not 100% happy with. Even with that headwind, the sales were quite strong out of the gate and have stayed quite robust. The reception was very positive, with a few holdouts who stated a clear preference for spending many hours installing specific mods to the original title make their personal best version of Baldur’s Gate. With the upcoming patch, I’m certain even those stalwarts will re-evaluate their choice and agree that weve gone far beyond what the original title can offer from a graphics and feel standpoint. We’ve built the best possible version of Baldur’s Gate.

JS: What lessons were learned from the first title that will be applied to Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition?

TO: We learned a number of lessons during the development of Baldurs Gate: Enhanced Edition. The major lessons were around the complexity of the code and how even minor changes can be a huge challenge.

We’ve since grown to understand the entire codebase in a much deeper manner, and have understood a number of the underlying tech decisions made by the original developers which do not work well in the computing environments of today. At the time they made sense, but modern computing has changed drastically from the late 90s.

One of the biggest changes going forward is the addition of a group of highly talented and highly experienced members of the Baldur’s Gate modding community to our team. These experienced modders have become a core part of our team and allowed us to accomplish much more than we previously could.

We’ve also become much more diligent about testing. Our practices for testing, reporting, fixing, and regressing bugs has drastically improved, and has almost reached military-level precision. Alex, one of our lead testers, has started saluting me. A one hand raised salute, but a salute nonetheless.

JS: Have the modders been hired by Overhaul as members of the development team or are they just lending their expertise to the project?

TO: The modders we brought on are paid staff members and are in daily communication with our development team. They are an amazing group and we’re very happy to be working alongside them.