Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Baldur's Gate Remake (with BG3 engine) : Would you be interested?

These are all just jokes Kinisatha, I know you may not be familiar with the concept, because self-awareness is not your strong suit...

What I actually want is them to focus on Multplayer and modding tools so that we all get what we want, including you, and then you can play the game you've been whinging about for the last 3 years.

Hey, hey, hey, let’s avoid the personal digs, folks!

No.

The originals can still be played just fine with patches such as widescreen, and running the monitor at most at 1280x720. They look still awesome this way, absolutely no problem.

The NWN "port" of BG1 and BG2 was already silly, dont need another such project.


I want Larian Studios and any other developer studio with talent to create new games, not remake old classics that at their core cant really be improved.

Second rate studios like Overhaul Games and Beamdog can create their ports of these old classics, but it would be nice if they didnt try to "improve" them.


Honestly all I want for old classic games is:

- Higher graphics quality

- Better stability

- Careful, incremental improvements in regards to UI etc, but nothing that changes fundamentals about the game

- Better modding support so people can change the game however they fancy, if they feel like it


Finally, about BG1 and BG2 on BG3 specifically, no I absolutely dont want to play BG1 and BG2 with D&D5 limited to maxlevel 12.

More importantly, Bioware is gone and only exists in name anymore, and has been for a very long time now.

Bioware was sold to EA because the owners felt they really needed to make a MMORPG and they wouldnt have the necessary funding.

The original owners of Bioware are gone and Bioware is really just a label EA puts on everything they like to put the label on.

Also it turns out MMORPGs have been a fashion of sorts and its basically over. Some old dinos like WoW or Eve Online struggle on, but most gamers, especially younger ones, arent going for them.

And Biowares Star Wars: The Old Republic, the MMORPG they lost the company over, AFAIK still exists, but never was much of a success.

It's not a question of "need". Nothing "needs" to be made. It's going to happen regardless assuming Larian releases tools for it. The real question is "would it provide a different experience or justify it's existence". In the case of a BG1/2 remake presenting its gameplay in 3D in a turn based nature would allow it to be recontextualized in a more cinematic way. Similar to BG3. Which would likely be more appealing to a wide audience.
I don't see Larian studios working on a BG1/2 remake primarily because it'd be an enormous amount of work. I'd rather see it done by modders similar to the NWN2 project.
That wouldn't be a concern for modders. Modders can already extend the level cap in BG3. It's not a hard coded limitation of the engine.
According to Bioware's employees they claimed the company was going to go out of business unless they were acquired.

I think people are really over estimating the value of the Divinity Engine.

Remember EA where it was possible to die in that fire surface near Gale's intro point? Remember failing to make the jump before meeting Lae'zel?

I'm not a programmer but to me it looks like the devs simply eliminated the problematic barriers and left the terrible pathfinding in place. The didn't improve the pathing, they altered the maps. Which means the toons are not going to like any map not specially designed for them to navigate. Anyone who tries to make a dungeon with this engine going to experience the same frustration EA players did.

Moving toons around in BG3 is a chore and the chain system simply sucks. If you ignore the superb graphics, companion interactions and voice acting and soley focus on the fundamentals of the BG3 engine we left with something inferior to any of unity engine games and indeed the infinity engine games.

This why no one played the NWN version of BG2. Why make the same game with an inferior engine? If people want to take another swing at that I'm not going to interfere but you don't need to be a diviner wizard to accurately predict the results.

"Hey dev, why does my toon keep walking into lava? What gives"

This. I've played the BG1 module for NWN for about an hour and really didn't see the point of it. While I appreciate the effort and passion put in those projects, I fail to see who is the target audience. Maybe people who never played those games and want to experience the story without having to buy another game, or something like that. But for those who already played, there's nothing fresh, nothing new, no surprises, nothing to look forward to. You're basically playing an arguably worse version of the game. And the same would probably happen in a port to BG3 engine. It would be "cool", but ultimately a futile endeavor.

These just sound like bugs that were fixed. RPGs are notorious examples of games that often have bugs. See: Skyrim. I remember Dragon Age Origins had a memory leak for about a year or two post launch that was only fixed in its final patch. Which caused loading screens to take 10+ mins to complete.
This is an assumption which you have no evidence for and are extrapolating a conclusion based upon it.

The Divinity engine operates on an AI grid. Most party based rpgs like this operate on a similar system.

What's notable about DOS1/2 is you could actually tweak where these squares were very easily. But that's besides the point as because all of BG1/2's maps were just static bitmaps and you'd need to reinterpret every space differently to make them in 3D. So building maps around the AI grid would happen regardless. This also assumes that pathfinding would suddenly be easier in other engines. Pathfinding is a notoriously difficult thing in any engine and a lot of developers do indeed modify the map as opposed to redesigning the pathfinding code especially if the game is already mostly finished.
The tools haven't released yet. It's entirely possible that Larian has made this system better in their official tools.
I don't really see this. You'd have to list some examples. As I can find potentially hundreds of examples of Unity shovelware games with awful pathfinding for example.
The Infinity engine games operated entirely on an XY plane and even then npcs would get stuck in doors or in hallways quite often.

Almost 400 thousand people is not "no one". I would love to see the reaction of the 12 people who painstakingly worked on this project for years that because they didn't break 1 million downloads their work is now retroactively considered meaningless and bad. The criticisms you're bringing up are largely nitpicks and to then insult the work done is frankly disrespectful. Exceptionally few projects like this get finished, and to call such a notable accomplishment not good enough because it didn't receive a subjective amount of downloads that you personally deem successful is ridiculous. What exactly is a "non inferior engine" and how do you expect a team of 12 people with 0 dollars in budget to make hundreds of thousands of assets on it?
"Make your own AAA quality rpg with thousands of assets, character creation, mocapped animations and game balance"
Gee I'll get right on that
You're speaking derogatorily about bugs as if they're not something to be fixed but mocked and ridiculed. Baldur's Gate 3 is an enormous game and as I mentioned earlier bugs are common in rpgs.
You can basically make this same argument about any remake. The purpose of a remake is to recontextualize the original in a new context.

I mean if this your passion, go for it. I'll admit that my experience with RPGs is largely related to DnD games and the spiritual successors to BG2 but I've never had the experience with "shovelware" games that you've had.

But from my limited experience of unity games with POE1+2, Solasta, Disco Elysium and WotR All the titles I mentioned have better party controls than BG3. * I just hate moving toons around in BG3 and DoS2. And these aren't nitpicks, they are reason I would stay away from game. BG3 is a game with truly stellar parts and some parts are complete trash. The chain mechanism is trash.

Not nitpicking part 2. I'm focusing on how they fixed those bugs. They fixed them by altering the maps, not improving the pathing. It's like covering your tracks. I mean we don't notice because it works -- so what's the problem, right? The problem I see - for you - is that you are going to lose hours and hours to making maps that work with the chain system. And that doesn't seem like time well spent. Ohh . . . need to alter where I allow people to make a fire surface.

I would be interested to see a comparison of downloads vs completion rates on the BG2 port . . . I downloaded, played for 15 minutes and stopped.

But, again, if you thought that was a worthwhile project and the devs time was well spent then you should follow suit. Good luck to you and have fun. Sincerely

* I do acknowledge that the Disco Elysium controls are nothing great. Not as bad as BG3 but not great.

You created an assumption based on no evidence "The developers at Larian were physically incapable of changing the pathfinding therefore they had to alter the map to fix it. Therefore a remake based on its engine = bad". This is a cascading number of assumptions. There's no evidence that they didn't just alter the map because it wasn't finished yet and it was always going to look like that, or because they had other concerns at the time and thought it would be faster to just move a model a few feet. In game development it's often easier to go for a simpler solution as opposed to a more complex solution because the more complex solution might invite another bug elsewhere. A good example being if they altered the navigational mesh in that level it could also break something elsewhere in the level.

Again these are not choices made specific to Larian or their development process this happens in every game's development. BG3 is unique in that we can observe how the game changed overtime as it was being made.
These feel like utterly subjective opinions and not ones worth trashing a potential mod project.
As I mentioned in my previous post editing the navmesh for AI isn't very difficult in the Divinity engine. Your entire argument is based on an assumption that the reason it was changed wasn't for any other reason.
So because you didn't finish a game = something doesn't deserve to exist. I'd recommend checking completion statistics of BG1/2 on Steam as the vast majority of players don't even leave Candlekeep or Jon Irenicus's dungeon.

I don't know who you are fighting with but it's not me. I never said that it doesn't deserve to exist, I said I wouldn't be interested and didn't think it would be a good expenditure of effort. I answered the the question the OP presented: would you be interested. Answer: No.

I also wouldn't be interested in seeing an angry birds port on the BG3 engine. Does that mean I don't think it should exist? No.

What the fuck does that even mean? Why are you being such a dick about this? I gave you an out an you decided to press on. My guess is that you wanted to fight someone and I just happened to show up.

Now it surprises me some since I've enjoyed most of your contributions to the forum but this is A big exception. Of course my opinions are subjective. Lol. And WTF?! and lol again.

I said go for it if you want. You could have left it there but you had to have the last word and you had to be dick about it, didn't you?

I should just leave it there but I'll comment on this:


I've read your words and seen that photo more than once. I think you believe you are saying something significant when you are saying something pretty trivial. Okay, it's a grid, okay it's easy to edit. Fine. But it still feels like a dog's breakfast when you are done. So what if it's easy to do? It's also easy to make a dog's breakfast. Moving toons in BG3 and DoS2 isn't much fun.

And it confuses me some that editing the map is soooo very easy and yet Larian had so much trouble with it. Are you really suggesting that they always wanted to remove parts of the map? I mean that would weird wouldn't it? Making something because you intended to remove it later? Yeah, we saw what they did. They made the gap narrower, they increased Tav's jump distance . . . And then they just gave up. And I don't blame them for spackling over the problem.

And come on! You don't have any information I don't. Perhaps they always intended to change the maps pfffft :p

So forgive me if I'm skeptical about how easy it will be if you include something like lava on your maps. We all saw how many times the fire surface near Gale was altered. Were it me I would just avoid gaps, surfaces etc but perhaps you won't experience the same trouble that the people who made the game did.

And don't believe me, just read some of the comments in the "BG3 Party Movement Mechanic" megathread. I'm not trashing the game AS A WHOLE. The game has some truly wonderful moments. Some of the writing is stellar. Some of the encounters are lots of fun. But the chain mechanism? It sucks. Moving toons around? That sucks.

The strange thing about BG3 is how much of this fantastic game is really awful. How the game succeed when so much of it is so bad?

But I get it, you want to build on the parts of game I dislike. You think it will easy and lots of people will appreciate it. I disagree but don't let me stop you. Have at it. Hope you prove me wrong

To this day I enjoy the classics. No EE remake, pure vanilla with a few mods. Still looks great, and most importantly plays like the end of 90s/2000s game. No hand holding and "quality of life" BS for everything.
Quite refreshing.
Hey look! Its dynamic night time in Baldurs Gate something BG3 engine cant even manage.

ThatDarnOwl and KillerRabbit, can we draw a line and move on? Or at least take the temperature down a few degrees if you want to continue discussing. Cheers!

And while I'm here, though I'd almost certainly try a BG remake in the BG3 engine if a decent one was created, personally I'm also in the camp that would much prefer new content and new stories, and I especially wouldn't want Larian to spend their time on this. Of course, if modders fancy doing it (or another studio without as much creative potential could be do it under licence), that's entirely their call!

I'm happy to move on. If ThatDarnOwl wants to recreate BG2 on the DoS engine I wish them the best of luck and I hope I will one discover that my skepticism is unwarranted.

Yeah it definitely feels like an old modder passion project.

The previous remakes of BG1 and Icewind Dale ( and as yet unfinished SoA/ToB ) were made for the NWN2 engine, which, like the NWN1 engine were explicitely designed to allow a community of modders and persistent world maintainers to create ( or in this case recreate ) their own stories and worlds.

There are thousands of game experiences made using these engines by creative individuals and groups, aimed largely at other creative people, along with those players who are prepared to enjoy non-professional, spare-time developed games, without being hyper-critical. These game engines are now 20 years old, so they are not that much newer than the original BG games. But they are also from a time before the widespread use of motion/performance capture, use much simpler assets ( fewer polygons, no layered models ), and are 32-bit programs which imposed limits to how sprawling you could make your stories.

The BG3 engine is not ( as far as I am aware ) designed with amateur game development in mind. There have never been any specific promises about how suitable BG3 tools will be to create a totally new story, or if this will even be supported. Without official tools, a great deal of BG3 added and changed content has still been possible, but the main thing that sets BG3 apart for many is the performance-captured dialog and cut-scenes, which are beyond the capacity of small amateur teams. Coupled with the need to create the many unique 3D assets that enable the previous stories in BG1/2, and the probability that some needed features cannot be added to the engine, I doubt that anyone is likely to try.

But if someone did succeed in remaking BG1/2 in the BG3 engine, and I am still alive ( BG1 took 7 years to remake in the NWN2 engine, in the BG3 engine it would probably be longer), then I would probably play them, if for no other reason than to acknowledge to effort put in.

I would be interested for sure but I’ve never played the other games so it would be new content for me so admittedly a bit biased.

Uh-hu.

Just for the record, the NWN1 editor was absolutely horrible, the worst game modding tool I've ever encountered. Literally EVERY dialogue was modal.

And if you wanted to have new models etc, you would still have to use the exact same external programs anyway. Personally I only dabbled in this and quickly found out that you need art training/talent for that part. So all I ever did in that regard was really taking other peoples stuff and changed the programming.



About new players wanting to play BG1 and BG2 with "newer" game engines: well if it was just the graphics, I could see your point. As pretty as these old handpainted backgrounds look, the routing of your party is a bit of a PITA, especially in narrow dungeons.

Other than that I dont see the argument that they would be ugly. Thats literally only happening if you zoom in.

And I think if you take away AD&D from BG1 and BG2, you will lose a lot. Newer systems just work too different. So you get the old game but without the charme, and it will just look bad in comparison to new games with all their newly invented features.

AD&D rules weren’t arbitrary; they were actually linked to the lore, so having the game run as 5E would not work.

Kind of like DC Comics’ “Crisis” events, the editions of D&D tend to have some kind of in-universe explanation.

On the face of it, my opinion is "Of course, sure, why not have a remake?" Even if it gets screwed up and isn't faithful to the original, it's not like it takes away my ability to play the originals. It's literally a no-lose situation: Either Larian will do a good job and introduce a bunch of people to these old games with updated graphics and 5e mechanics (which I don't care what anyone says, are vastly superior to 2e), or they'll do a bad job and I'll just play the originals.

If the question is "Could they DO a good job with a remake", well....

First, let's get the graphics question out of the way: I think the painted backgrounds of BG are many times gorgeous. I'd miss them if they were gone and replaced by the BG3 style, but it's not a dealbreaker for me.

Second, as to whether they could do a good job, well that depends on the BG in question. To me there is a HUMONGOUS difference between BG1 and BG2.

Like look, I loved BG1 when it came out, but it's rough. It's REALLY rough. To me, you can't really see the seeds being sewn that would influence WRPGs for decades until the second game. Companions are really quiet and for the most part non-interactive in BG1 (I have to assume because of the assumption that so many of the would be experiencing permadeath.) Combat is janky and cheesy as fuck, and especially early on so ridiculously unfriendly that you are basically outright encouraged to take advantage of the jank. Dungeon design is basic (until some of the expansion content) and sometimes notoriously bad (the final labyrinth come ON).

So yeah, actually, I think Larian could VASTLY improve BG1, especially when it comes to combat and gameplay, and I say this as someone who is a humongous critic of how Larian handled 5e in BG3, lol. BG1 really is that basic; it was a very different time, when frankly the standards of gaming were much, much lower. (Though the games were also much much cheaper to produce.) I think even if Larian changed a LOT of things - combat, reduced number of companions, fleshed them out with their own writing, added adventures, etc - it would be good. The ONLY thing I'd worry about them changing, and the one thing I definitely would not WANT Larian to change, and would really WORRY about them changing, is the core plot. Larian has a flaw in writing (to be fair, I don't think it's unique to them, but they are particularly bad about it) where, at least to me, it comes across as horribly immature, the way they try to make everything SUPER EPIC right away. Like compare the beginnings of BG3 and BG1:

BG3: You're on a fantasy SPACE SHIP and then DRAGONS ATTACK and then YOU GO TO HELL WHOOOOAAA all within the introduction cinematic of the game.

BG1: The intrigue of seeing your foster father murdered, fleeing, dodging assassins, and slowly getting drawn into a mysterious iron crisis in the region.

BG1 is exciting, but it's much more grounded - and to me that makes it more interesting. In the original series, when you actually got to GO to Hell eventually, it felt more special. In BG3 it seems totally mundane because you went there in the first thirty seconds of your adventure and then even when you left you had your own personal archdemon teleporting to you personally to chat with you at level 2. Going through the initial series, from the start of 1 all the way to the end of ToB, gives to me something that I think BG3 could never achieve, because of Larian's storytelling: A sense of epic progression. Going all the way from fleeing from wolves and worrying about the mundanities of what's going on in an iron mine, to having demigod levels of power and standing on equal footing with liches and dragons. So Larian can write characters, they can write sidequests (indeed I think some of their sidequest adventures especially in act 1 in bG3 were great!), they can update the graphics, they can update the combat, and I think they could do a good job (because frankly if we're being honest, the bar in the original is really low for most of these things.) But I would NOT want them to touch the core plot.

BG2 is where it gets tricky. Because to me, at least, there was a humongous, massive jump in quality between BG1 and BG2 in almost every aspect of the game. Even updating the mechanics from 2e to 5e becomes tricky (because a lot of the plot elements of BG2 actually reference or rely on the idea that high-level wizards are nigh-unstoppable and insanely dangerous in a way other classes are not - and this reflects a second edition reality, not a fifth edition reality.) But setting quibbles like that aside, I consider character and plot writing in BG2 to be far superior to BG3 (and it's not like I think BG2 writing is perfect, either. I am open to the idea some people could improve on it. But from what I've seen, I really do not have a lot of faith Larian could do this.) BG2 is also where the combat starts getting better, though it's not because jank no longer exists, but rather because your characters are now powerful enough that they don't have to rely on it and so combat does not feel so ridiculous. Overall I think the 5e system would still be an improvement if implemented in BG2, but less so than it would be in BG1. So for BG2 there's less room for basic improvements, I'd miss the background paintings more, and I'd worry a lot more about Larian's "personal touch" on the character and plot writing.

So in the end, BG1? Go for it. BG2? ehhhhhhhh...