Baldur's Gate announcement imminent as ominous countdown appears
Developer of both HD remasters of Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II, Beamdog, is up to something. Looking at the official Baldur’s Gate website, one is greeted with a very cryptic countdown, signalling that the developers have something to announce come the end of it.
But what could it be? We’ve done some detective work to find out.
OK, so maybe there wasn’t that much detective work to be done.
Beamdog have already confirmed that they’re working on another Baldur’s Gate title, dubbed “Adventure Y”, which takes place between the events of the two existing games.
Inspecting the source code for the countdown page, the only snippet of information we can extract is that there’ll probably be a Twitch stream embed that will go live at the end of the countdown.
If you want to find out more, you’ll need to wait until July 3rd, at 03:00 BST.
I really wanted them to remake Icewind Dale 2, but for some reason it's not happening. Kinda odd considering that would be the obvious route to take after both baldur's gates and the original icewind dale.
I think it is because Icewind Dale 2 was made with a different engine.
I'm sure Beamdog have said something about it before.
Yeah I remember them saying it was a different engine, but why would that matter.
Trent Oster: "If Icewind Dale is a brother or sister to the Baldur's Gate games in terms of code and gameplay differences, Icewind Dale II and Planescape: Torment are more like third cousins. You can see the lineage, but the changes are deep. Icewind Dale II implemented the 3rd Edition rules and has a completely different UI scheme. We're really not sure how deep those changes run. The move to 3rd Edition rules would invalidate all the character classes and require a pretty thorough rework of the entire game to bring in the features from our Infinity Plus Engine. At minimum, nightmares abound."
Maybe I'm just not seeing where the problem. Yeah ok so they'd have to put in more work to remaster them, but now they're working on a new game which they'd have to make from scratch with presumably 2.0 edition rules, so fairly outdated at this point, which to me seems weirder than putting in the time and effort to make a glorious remake of one of the absolute pillars of the RPG genre.
But again, I'm probably just not seeing the big picture. It just seems to me that he's saying it's not convenient for them since they'd have to make an effort to do it.
If the effort is deemed on a par with creating a new game, it makes sense to do that, especially if it's for a bigger franchise - which we have to assume Baldur's Gate is.