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

Probably not the best idea to necro a thread that has been dead and buried more than a year and a half - I just wanted to say that if there are any old D&D games I'd like to see remakes of in a modern engine, it is SSI's old "Gold Box" AD&D games. Pool of Radiance, Azure Bonds, Champions of Krynn and more. They were all great adventures and were perhaps the most faithful CRPG adaptations of a tabletop system that I have seen to this day.

If you dug into the code of Pool of Radiance and messed with your savegames, you realised they had actually put more of the system in there than you'd ever experience as a player. If you unlocked the level cap characters scaled as they should, if you edited their stats to above natural caps the characters would gain the proper bonuses from the AD&D PHB. And the adventure itself is one of the greatest fantasy adventures I ever played, on computer or tabletop alike. It was simply brilliant. Sokol Keep, Valhingen Graveyard, the Slums... iconic location names that give me nostalgia overload just typing them.

Obviously, the Gold Box games are over 35 years old (and D&D itself has gone through six updates since then) so even if you can get them running, these games won't be very enjoyable to someone used to computer games as they look today. Faithful remakes in a modern engine would bring these adventures to a wider audience who would otherwise never even hear about them. Which is sad, because they were great.

For reference - Pool of Radiance was released 1988, I first played it on my C64 and bought it again after I got an Amiga 500. Dangit, those were the days!

As for Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 they are perfectly playable as they are, a remake would of course be nice but given the very real risk that the developer would screw things up my feeling is that mayhaps they should just be left alone.

Lastly, a funny footnote - in Pool of Radiance, if one of your characters died and you couldn't afford to have him resurrected at a temple, you could remove him from the party and create a new lvl 1 character. When you removed the dead character the game said "<character name> is dumped in a ditch". I spat my coke over the keyboard when I read that the first time...