OK well as long as we're coming to conclusion, I also would like to drop one more cautionary tale. So there was a game in 1998 called Baldur's Gate, and it had a certain art direction that I really love. Time was, I could get that game on Steam and just play it the way it was. It took some figuring but basically it was about as simple as downloading a hotfix or running the thing in an older version of windows. Able to experience the thing exactly as I remembered it when I first fell in love with it. Fast forward a bit in time and now trying to do that same thing, I'm instantly confronted with a bunch of stuff I find disagreeable that was added in like a dozen years later. For one very particular example, there are portraits included in the default set by an artist who I just don't dig at all.. Like we shouldn't go into it overmuch cause it makes me hella bitter, but the point is that those images were never there in the original game BG and Tales of the Sword Coast or any of the original BG 2 ToB titles. It was added way later. Legit stresses me out to see stuff by that guy suddenly appear in my all time favorite game, like every single time I want to roll up a new character? Gotta see that? No thanks. I have to play BG1/2 on GoG now and jump through a bunch of extra hoops just to avoid that. It's such a chore to just do what used to be easy to do and fire up the OG Baldur's Gate games. Or at least the OG BG2 and then run BG1 through that engine. With the BG1 and BG2 discs I am able to recreate the experience I remember so fondly. Currently there is no convenient way to do this in 2024 through Steam. I can only play the EEs there, but those games have an entirely different art direction and substantives changes were made to the storyline that go well beyond QoL in my view.
They're just not the games from 1998-2000 that I fell in love with. These used to be available, but later got pulled in their vanilla state to be replaced by the Enhanced things. It's debatable for me whether playing BG1 using the BG2 engine would even qualify as a classic experience of the original game, but it was pretty cool, cause at least that was a completely free effort by the modding community. When we made the BG1 NPC project and the peeps who did Sword Coast Stratagems and such, nobody was out there trying to milk a cash cow on it, you know what I mean. The Weidu mods were just not the same thing as the reduxed enhancements which ultimately copied and replaced them and charged another dime for that. Just kinda annoys me that the whole thing went so far beyond restoration or re-mastery into a full on reboot. Some people would probably want to check those Vanilla games out now, because of BG3 and all, more from a sense of historical curiosity, but the OG game is sorta lost to the mists of time now. That leaves me feeling a bit bitter. In an ideal universe peeps would have both, and then we could look back on them and learn what was, cause it's like a time capsule and a moment in time. It's enjoyable to return to the familiar that way.
I just think for BG3 they might keep that in mind, as a thing that can happen. Frankly I wish Larian had acquired the rights to the previous titles when they got the License for the sequel, cause I feel like their art direction would have been much stronger for a remaster focused on restoration, but that ship sailed long ago I suppose.
Last edited by Black_Elk; 20/02/24 05:19 AM.
