Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition Interview

The weekend brings us a lengthy interview with Overhaul Games’ Trent Oster on Shacknews, with the topic of conversation being Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, the new characters it introduces to the game, how well pre-orders have been going, whether they might switch gears to Icewind Dale at a later date, and more. I didn’t realize that they scrapped their plans to raise the level cap:

Shacknews: You said you had gutted the multiplayer of the original Baldur’s Gate. Talk us through the changes and decisions you made to make it a better experience as co-op.

Oster: The original Baldur’s Gate made extensive use of Direct Play, which is no longer supported. The DirectPlay systems had a lot of performance and reliability issues in the original codebase and we were able to reduce the complexity and clean up the entire system by nuking DirectPlay from orbit. The BG reliance on DirectPlay required players to engage in a large number of odd work-arounds to get the game to connect up. Our approach was to clean up the networking system and lay out a larger plan for how games could connect up. With the tight demands on our time, we will launch with support for direct connections, with our game matching solution coming online in the near future. I’m most proud of how robust the cross-platform multi-player is. We’ve had a number of games running in the office across PC’s, Macs and various iPad versions. The cool factor of cross-device play is hard to convey, but when you are playing the same game on a tablet that your buddy is playing on a PC it is pretty amazing.

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Shacknews: What will the new level cap be?

Oster: In the interest of keeping BG2:EE balancing in line, we made the hard decision to leave the xp cap where it was, at 161,000 XP at the end of the Tales of the Sword Coast. When we did some play-through experiments, we found the fun of the game disappeared once you became too high level.

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Shacknews: Baldur’s Gate was already a huge game. Each of those characters should add a total of 12 more hours of game play. That’s a lot for a $20 price point. What was the reasoning behind pricing the game there and not higher?

Oster: We wanted to fix the price point at $10 for a stripped down version for the tablets and when we added all the content up $20 seemed a reasonable price to us. We believe in creating a good value product for our players and I think the low price will allow us to attract many more players than if we had gone too high. We also had to spec out the price early on in the process, before we had a real idea of how much work was involved. I think with the improvements we’ve made and are planning on still making this is going to be one of the gaming bargains of the decade.