One of the best announcements so far this year was that we are getting the current Beamdog library of Enhanced Edition CRPGs on console (PS4, XB1, Switch). I was a bit skeptical, the Baldur's Gate PS1 port back in the day was what I figured would be my entry into the series but it never, officially, released. Could this release really bring the games over and have them play well all these years later? You have to figure there are significant limitations on what can be done with old games so it seemed a tall order.
Well, Beamdog put in the work because what they showed at PAX East this year was a very pleasant surprise. I got to talk to the CEO of the studio, Trent Oster, and other employees manning the booth which surfaced some cool information but first let's talk about how the games plays.
While Baldur's Gate was the only title on the show floor all the Infinity Engine titles in the collection, aside from UI design and maybe a handful of one-off situations, should play the same so you can extrapolate from there. I'm just not sure how Neverwinter Nights fits into the equation with it being on different tech. Anyways, here's the controller mapping for the PAX demo…
So the biggest thing out of the gate is the ability to directly control your party with the analogue stick during exploration. Apparently the team at Beamdog had to go and squash a huge amount of pathfinding issues in the game to get this working (formations are still in the game and work with this as well) and I'm grateful for it and the ability to highlight all interactable items on-screen. I had assumed with the age of the games that something like this was not going to happen but they pulled it off. It is a bit funny to see your party, trying to keep formation, dance around you as you twirl the analogue stick.
If you prefer though you can go back to a cursor based setup. This is how combat is still controlled but with the AI options on everyone stomped the spiders in the demo so fast it was hard to get a feel for it. If you wanted to put the games on a lower difficulty and let the AI handle a good chunk of combat so you can just focus on the story that's a valid option.
The majority of the menus have been converted to radial menus so, as seen above, for things like setting command groups it's all driven by the analogue stick position rather than an on-screen cursor.
The game UI itself has been tweaked from the PC/Mobile release to streamline things such as the color indicator for party members on the field will change to reflect damage (green, yellow, red) but everything is there. Apologies for the blurry pics but you should be able to get the idea.
You can adjust the zoom level with the d-pad and expand the text box as well if you want a longer history of events. You can get the camera in real close if you want to see everything break up visually, but the game looks sharp from a solid distance. I asked if Beamdog had looked into the new AI scaling options but apparently it was too late in the process in addition to concerns about throwing much bigger images at this older tech, that it would balloon the file size and the alternative of doing that scaling in real time would impact performance. If I remember correctly they are using HQx for scaling but I may have misheard there; it wasn't running with an integer scale so there was something smoothing things together.
Now for some bulleted info from the developers.
Well, Beamdog put in the work because what they showed at PAX East this year was a very pleasant surprise. I got to talk to the CEO of the studio, Trent Oster, and other employees manning the booth which surfaced some cool information but first let's talk about how the games plays.
While Baldur's Gate was the only title on the show floor all the Infinity Engine titles in the collection, aside from UI design and maybe a handful of one-off situations, should play the same so you can extrapolate from there. I'm just not sure how Neverwinter Nights fits into the equation with it being on different tech. Anyways, here's the controller mapping for the PAX demo…
So the biggest thing out of the gate is the ability to directly control your party with the analogue stick during exploration. Apparently the team at Beamdog had to go and squash a huge amount of pathfinding issues in the game to get this working (formations are still in the game and work with this as well) and I'm grateful for it and the ability to highlight all interactable items on-screen. I had assumed with the age of the games that something like this was not going to happen but they pulled it off. It is a bit funny to see your party, trying to keep formation, dance around you as you twirl the analogue stick.
If you prefer though you can go back to a cursor based setup. This is how combat is still controlled but with the AI options on everyone stomped the spiders in the demo so fast it was hard to get a feel for it. If you wanted to put the games on a lower difficulty and let the AI handle a good chunk of combat so you can just focus on the story that's a valid option.
The majority of the menus have been converted to radial menus so, as seen above, for things like setting command groups it's all driven by the analogue stick position rather than an on-screen cursor.
The game UI itself has been tweaked from the PC/Mobile release to streamline things such as the color indicator for party members on the field will change to reflect damage (green, yellow, red) but everything is there. Apologies for the blurry pics but you should be able to get the idea.
You can adjust the zoom level with the d-pad and expand the text box as well if you want a longer history of events. You can get the camera in real close if you want to see everything break up visually, but the game looks sharp from a solid distance. I asked if Beamdog had looked into the new AI scaling options but apparently it was too late in the process in addition to concerns about throwing much bigger images at this older tech, that it would balloon the file size and the alternative of doing that scaling in real time would impact performance. If I remember correctly they are using HQx for scaling but I may have misheard there; it wasn't running with an integer scale so there was something smoothing things together.
Now for some bulleted info from the developers.
- CEO of the studio was against the idea at first but the team convinced him to let them try it.
- The games have been torn apart and put back together again to get all these control options added. It's been a large undertaking for the studio.
- Implementing a browser for player-made modules in Neverwinter Nights (PC) is not off the table for the console version. Even being able to define rendering options (new renderer is coming for the PC version) on a per console basis is a *potential* option. So something where a fan campaign can define higher quality shadows on PS4 but not Switch to save performance.
- How the physical release will work (how many SKUs, what games, etc) is still an ongoing discussion with Skybound.
- The plan is for all the games to be done before the end of the year and to all release at the same time.
- No online co-op at launch but could come later.
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