Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General To those who played BG2…

Same. You'd think there'd be some sort of shader for that; while I'm not so keen on CRT Smudge-o-Vision for text, it often works well for graphics and I'm not sure there's anything that does stuff like the weird NTSC colour-blending unless specific emulation software handles it directly.

Well, yes and no.
While it may be part of the equation, I can promise you that even using the most "faithful" equipment out there a lot of these old beloved games would still look way less impressive to you today.
Our memory usually has that funny tendency to fill the gaps.

You remember that old gorgeous animated background scenario in pixel art from your childhood, then you back to it and you realize there were barely a couple of details actually moving, they had two frames of animations each and the whole thing was in 16 colors with pixels the size of a peanut.

I'd like to know how Vanilla WoW holds up so well - not even the updated WoW classic but the original played still on private servers across the world. It's like being inside a painting and that game came out in 2004.

My use of "a reason" rather than "the reason" has been very deliberate. I must mentione, that even as a youngster I did a lot of retroplaying. It is very recent development that I have access to fancy gaming rig, and a lot of my teen years have been spent retroplaying DOS games from 90s, while a lot of my peers where enjoying sevenths generation. In other words, when I played games like UFO defence or Sid Maier's Pirates! for the first time, they were very dated already - but soft edges of pixelated CTV could explain why they didn't feel so rough.


I feel that as long as one can keep the resolution up, an old 3d game with cartoon artstyle can hold up very well.

Nostalgia is undeniably a part, but I think there's more to it than that. Sure, early 3d can be particularly unimpressive (even worse without a crt to smooth out those polygons!) but a lot of sprite art holds up really well even today-there's a certain charm to handdrawn stuff that is just timeless, like that portrait shown earlier (with the crt effect)-looks better than what you'd see for a 3d portrait in say, NWN2, despite the gap in technology. In particular, earlier art styles often worked better with stylized art designs, like Fire Emblem or Advance Wars or when handling mediums that lean more on interpretation and abstraction. When graphical quality is slim, game design tends to be a bit different. You might get a narrative description of an npc you meet in an rpg rather than a cinematic for instance.

"CRT Smudge-o-Vision" - ha, that is a good word for it. CRT spots have a nice Gaussian bell-curve intensity profile, and when you overlap the raster lines slightly, it is a nice smoothing effect. Discrete pixels, on the other hand, will have aliasing artifacts which need filtering.

For BG III, I am more worried about my computer's graphics system which uses the internal main processor ... I do not have an external graphics card. Man, some of those new graphics cards have such big fans on them, I think you could probably tape a battery on there and fly them around as drones. I don't really care about Forgotten Realms lore, or the official Gorion's Ward story, or anything like that. I just want coin-on-edge, single-player D&D. And the City of Brass (expansion).

Example of a 1993 cart game, Spinmaster, playing on 1991 hardware (Neogeo). On a 1999 pro spec crt.
Pretty fabulous animations, super smooth, and sharp. Equivilent to 60fps if you played on a modern TV. Just as bright, blacks close to an OLED.

Just saying people have stranger idea of crts...I think because of 2005 and later is what is influencing everyone. Game content became smaller like text and crts just could not get any hire in resolution...and lcds arrived, destroying everything up to now in terms of weight and convenience...at the cost of incredible input lag, sup par-colors and making old games look incredibly bad (hence why now people are puzzled why older 90s games look worst they they had imagined...its not just nostalgia).

Sorry for rambling off topic I'm a big original hardware retro gamer nerd.
My current goal right now is to get a 17 inch crt Sony computer monitor to play classic DOS games, and of course BG2

Been around since before the ATARI 2600 days. Ive played EVERY ITERATION of a D&D game... Yes even ALL the gold box SSI games. Commodore 64, 128 and Amiga formats.

So I will go on the record and state the success of this game as a BG product comes down to one aspect, the quality of the NPCs.

If they don't create new Minsc and Boo type legendary... this game will be deemed a generic failure by many diehard D&D fans.

I hope they took the RIGHT LESSONS from BG 1 and 2 and did this right.



Pool of Radiance on a COMMODORE AMIGA 500 - OLD SCHOOL BABY!