Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Can Larian use any assets from the old BG games?

Wondering who owns the assets now.

Not sure if they'd want to, but it would have more of a 'Baldur's Gate' feel with the iconic sounds, UI textures, fonts, etc.

Hasbro owns the assets.

Anyway, why would they want to reuse old assets? They can just create new assets with the same iconic features from scratch.

(BTW, the assets for Baldur's Gate 1 were lost, which why Baldur's Gate EE was made instead of Baldur's Gate HD. Damn shame.)

Well, the 3D models were lost so they couldn't re-render them at higher fidelity. Clearly the artwork and sound effects in general weren't, though.

I agree that they could just emulate the old style with new assets.

Yeah, they'd have to buy the old assets from whichever company owns them. And audio quality & graphical quality has changed so much in 20 years, that doing so would be a waste of money.

I like to see the overall progression of all aspects of games. Back in the day, games came out successively in a short period of time whereas the advancement of the assets changed some. I personally do not want to see 20+ year old graphics in a modern game, even if they have been updated. I envision that someday games will be so realistic that people will be hard pressed to know the difference and for my reference the movie 'Existenz' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existenz ) is a good example of this.

It will probably not happen in my lifetime (I have maybe 60 years left, if I hit 90), but I dream of fully-immersive VR, where you lie in a chair and your mind goes into the game.

Then, instead of being a wheezy, out-of-shape adult, I can be a wheezy, out-of-shape wizard. :P

Not even Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition could use the Baldur s gate assets, they were lost.

Would love to see some buildings with different architecture, than they had in divinity, or something that is similar to the Pirate Island or Ust'Natha or Athkatla
but I think the game already looks really good.

For 3d, first they make the shape of objects, from simple forms like cubes, rectangles,... with a 3D computer graphics application like maya or blender,
then they add texture/color to it, which are usually 2d images.
The more detailed the asset is, the harder to make it in 3d and the more resource is needed to display it.

The graphical artist is also simulating detail on the texture, so the 3d object is not so complicated to make. With drawing you can also simulate, lights or darkness, so the game engine does not have to display calculate how the light spreads real time.

Actually only the source assets were lost; there's a difference.

I would consider losing the source assets to be the larger problem. Though I'm strictly a novice at modelling and so on, I know that even without the issues of low res in-game assets (by which I mean probably much lower detail than the originals) some things can't easily be reverse-engineered and it ends up being much less trouble to make them from scratch.

Well I was mainly thinking of iconic sound assets, like BG3 having BG1 & 2's 'level up' sound effect just as an example...

I mean they could but they won't.

I am sure they could use some assets from Pong. Would be nice to see those glorious white lines on black boards at some point during the gameplay!

God I hated Pong. And so did anybody who discovered burn-in on their TV!

actually, I think it's a very good idea to use some of the BG music in the new game. maybe a re-do of the main themes in key moments... that would be really awesome.

this is just my opinion.. larian possibly have the same DOS team working on BG3 especially graphics artists and designers. they are too accustomed to working on DOS. they have been working for both DOS and DOS2 for many years already. maybe they should hire an entire new designers who have NOT worked on DOS2 assets before. if they have done that i'm sure we won't end up having a DOS2 clone.

Definitely not because it is a different engine from 20 years ago. This is coding shit but two different engines are like two different languages. You can't create a sentence combining english and portuguese and expect it to make sense.

However what they can do as obsidian and "recreate" the BG world with updated graphics. Which is not what they did in the pre-alpha.

poe2 graphics looks really beautiful. the only thing i hated it was that it's 2D. i would have like it much more if it's fully rotatable 3D. but that's not the main problem. the main problem for me is that they don't follow basic core rules.

the game on day 1 is totally different 3 months later. every few months all they did was keep nerfing without adding anything. all the builds created by the community has gone to waste as it doesn't work anymore. what they did was just checking on the forums on veteran builds. then they just nerf them. every single time. up to a point that the game became a boredom for me.

I think that POE2 is the most beautiful CRPG ever made and one of the most beautiful games ever period. And yes, they tend to nerf stuff a lot, and I also don't like that.

Apparently it is Josh Sawyer who takes this decisions which he calls "balancing". For him strong builds are "unbalanced" and should be nerfed. I do prefer Larian's approach which is just to let players make the build they want.

I played PoE2 recently and I enjoyed it.
When the devs created all items, feats and abilities they could not predict every possible combination of them and how they work together.
Some players found combinations that are completely OP and obsidian reacted to it.

If players of BG3 find out that a combination of spell a, feat b and item c turn every battle into a cakewalk, I hope they change it too.

DnD is not balanced at all. In BG a high level fighter can hit things with a sword while a high level mage has time stop, chain contingency and so on.
This is also true for new games. Pathfinder Kingmaker ( I consider pathfinder as DnD 3.75) kept quite close to PnP rules (except flanking) and had more options than any other game before. Some hardcore players solo the game with godlike chars, while many players had problems to make good chars or beat some of the normal enemies. In PoE2 a few players made the ultimate (solo, hardest difficulty, no reload, beat all optional bosses, all optional challenges that make the game harder on), but almost any player can beat the game on normal if they put some commen sense in selecting abilities.

Some people may call DnD great for what it is. I play computer games since the mid 90s, and I have decided for BG3 and the new pathfinder to have a single class char who is focussed on doing one thing very well. My attempt to make a cool char in PK failed miserably.

Considering how difficult the highest setting in POE2 is, OP builds are kind of a necessity. I created a minmax MC and still needed to create minmax mercenaries to kill some of the megabosses. To me this is not good design.

I hope Larian just implements the PnP as it is and if players want to make OP builds (which I love) just let them do it.