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[Scatty]

Ah, now that's certainly great news. Which is quite rare to see, to be sure - a fan-oriented update to a more than 10 years old game and it's only less old successor, which keeps them pretty much as they are and adds a lot of new stuff.

[Pex]

Very interesting news... Sounds promising.

There were quite a few fan-made mods for BG series. I wonder if those would work with the new game.

[DarthHelmet86]

From what they have been saying in the quotes they are trying to ensure mods still work.

I would have liked a but more upgrade on the graphics, some of them were rather lack luster in spells and animations. But hey maybe they are in this engine, I never played much of Throne of Baal.

[Panthro]

The BG2/TOB spell effects are much better than BG1.

But there's already more than one mod that packages up all the BG games into the BG2/TOB engine, my personal favourite being Baldur's Gate Trilogy from Spellhold studios: http://www.spellholdstudios.net/ie/bgt

[Maxor127]

Right now, it sounds like it's a glorified fan mod that they'll want me to pay money for. The graphics are going to need to be redone to take advantage of HD resolutions for me to be interested. I'd also like to see 3D graphics that still keep the style and perspective of the original, and maybe a rotatable camera just because there's lots of "behind dithered buildings" crap in the originals. I don't think 2D sprites will cut it in this day and age, and anything less than a graphics overhaul won't feel worth my money. I also hope they tweak multiplayer to make the game more fun to play with other people. I tried playing multiplayer for the first time a couple months ago, and it was annoying how random dialog would interrupt the game for all players.

[hunvagy]

Originally Posted by Maxor127

Right now, it sounds like it's a glorified fan mod that they'll want me to pay money for. The graphics are going to need to be redone to take advantage of HD resolutions for me to be interested. I'd also like to see 3D graphics that still keep the style and perspective of the original, and maybe a rotatable camera just because there's lots of "behind dithered buildings" crap in the originals. I don't think 2D sprites will cut it in this day and age, and anything less than a graphics overhaul won't feel worth my money. I also hope they tweak multiplayer to make the game more fun to play with other people. I tried playing multiplayer for the first time a couple months ago, and it was annoying how random dialog would interrupt the game for all players.

Then don't buy it. Graphics isn't everything, and the Infinity Engine is still gorgeous even in this day and age. Can say that having played PS:T and BGT in 1920x1080. Only thing it needs is the font enlarge tweak. If it'll run natively in Win7, keep everything the old one had and add some fluff, without me having to wait 8 hours for Baldur's Gate Trilogy to compile with the new Worldmap, then I'll buy.

[DarthHelmet86]

I too would be expecting a bit more then repackaging it into BG2s engine for my money. I already own the games, if I wanted to do that I would use mods that are for free. If I am to buy the games again it has to be because it is better then its current best, since they seem to want to do BG2 as well then they must be planning on doing more then just a small graphics change but a larger one, which is worth people spending it on.

[Japo]

The only thing that the Infinity Engine needs is to get it back in development until it has group path-finding!

[Eagle of Fire]

Pathfinding is very relative. The vast majority of the time with old games the pathfinding suck simply because dedicating too much resource to that particular task would have bogged any computer down.

Take the original BG, boost the pathfinding algorith by 1000 and you'll have no problem anymore. Because you now have a PC which is a hundred of thousands more efficient than what was expected at the time of publishing...

[Japo]

It's not about resources at all, it's about a bad aspect of the engine. There are so many games 10 or more years older with good pathfinding. Talking about RPGs and groups, Darklands worked so much better. The problem with Infinity is that each character moves independently, unlike any actual person or insect would, as if he were alone in the world, instead of following the leader or keeping formation while moving, or in general being aware of anything. Since there are formations but they affect only the starting and ending points, it only means the characters will collide all the time, often fail to reach their destinations indoors, decide to go around dozens of city blocks because they stumbled on another character who has since continued moving forward, and in general act like blind, brain-damaged penguins. And of course every collision and re-planning will consume much more processor time than a decent algorithm from the 60s would.