It’s a bit of a lose/lose proposition, isn’t it? They can redesign the UI and have their playerbase mod in a much better version that improves on it in every way, or they can do nothing and the modding community will take matters into their own hands anyway. They’ve made the sensible business decision.
I’m waiting for a DA:O-like UI conversion and will buy the EE should such a mod ever be released.
Hmm, I bought the PC version today and I’m having some issues. Frequent slowdowns and stuttering music. Anyone else encountering this?
Everything i’ve heard points to this being a (professionally assembled) mod pack for bg1.
Expecting vast changes to the game or UI is just not going to happen. If people had thought them worthwhile, they would have made them at the height of its popularity.
I’m not sure it is worth me spending $20 for an assembled bg1 with tutu (or whatever mod that lets you play bg1 in bg2’s engine). I still have my discs. The question is if I could find these mods hosted somewhere after the government shut down all of those file hosting sites. I’d basically be spending $20 for a (seemingly) small amount of new content.
Not to mention i don’t believe this pack includes the large fan made expansion (i think it was called dark side of the sword coast or something like that) which was pretty decent.
But don’t let me drive you away from buying it. BG1 is the prequel to the best rpg ever made and even if BG1 is not as good as BG2, if you’re an rpg fan and can deal with the old graphics, it will be one of the best games you’ve ever played.
So is the Mac version out? Their site says November.
Most of the major mods and any new mods will probably end up in this version. The devs have been working with those guys for the last few months making sure they have all the necessary hooks in there and removing hardcoded limitations to make future modding better.
It’s an arduous task to be sure, but Oster and his team have help. Dedicated players and fans of Baldur’s Gate have already contributed to Overhaul’s progress by pointing out previously-discovered bugs, and more recently, contributing translations during the localization process. “Every guy who’s who in the Baldur’s Gate community, who’s ever made a mod or who’s ever made a name for himself, he’s on our beta team, and he’s working with us right now to make this awesome,” Tofer said.
Oster was quick to agree. “It’s like a giant reunion on our forums, it’s just like everybody who’s anybody is in there,” he said. The team sees the fanbase not just as emotional support, but technical as well. “We’re treating these guys essentially as members of the dev team… the goal going long-term is we stay engaged with these people. When they find problems or they find ideas on how to make the game even better, we continue to work with these guys. These guys know Baldur’s Gate better than anybody on the planet. I think even the original dev team don’t know Baldur’s Gate as thoroughly as some of these guys.”
They say themseleves it’s not playable on an iPhone (UI is too small and will need to be redone). My interest is to play it on a tablet, where it should play fine. But we’ll see what reviews say.
Wendelius
Has this unlocked for anyone? I pre-loaded yesterday but it won’t give me an option to start the game.
Has it…!? People have been playing it all day yesterday, you might want to find out what is going on, it launched almost 24 hours ago.
I looked for the game this morning on Ipad, wasn’t there. Can anyone confirm it’s released on Ipad? Did I miss an announcement of another delay?
They have no control over when Apple or Android releases it, and there was some sort of last bug to fix, so they are saying next week. Does no one else read this thread before posting?! Everything I know about this game is from reading this last page!
Oops, hopefully just me ignoring posts on this page. I skimmed!
They will eventually end up on this version. Since it incorporates TOBEX which is what does most of the work to bring it forward. That is to say, a mod, did most of the work of BG:EE. None of the content mods currently work on it, SCS has set an ETA of a month and others have said “eventually”.
The only good mod that currently works on BG:EE is BG2 Tweaks which makes the game playable with inventory stacking and such.
The reason why the Apple and Android versions are having to wait is because Beamdog actually had to do some work on those versions and couldn’t pillage it from mods. When it comes to their work it’s slow and buggy.
They have 100% control over when any Android app is released. There is no approval process on Google Play.
Yeah, Android version is what they call a “trailing version” - they always planned to release it a bit later after the PC and iPad ones. I think last time I heard it they mentioned December for it but we know how they are with their deadlines. :)
See’s Strider’s post below yours, I actually should have put more time into my reply. My bad.
This raised an interesting question for me. Obviously playing on an iPhone screen would be tough without some kind of zoom, so I wouldn’t even consider that, but I am looking forward to playing on my iPad.
The iPad’s resolution is far, far, faaaaar in excess of whatever the hell I was staring at for 100 hours back in 1998, but how does it compare in size? I would almost certainly have been using a CRT back in '98, so a 4:3 ratio monitor of some kind, but how big was it? What the hell was I (a middle-class enthusiast) using back then?
I want to say it was probably a 17". In the early-to-mid 2000s I know I had a 19" Trinatron that I stubbornly held onto when all my weak-minded peers were moving to 15" LCDs (The fools! Did they not notice the ghosting? The lower refresh-rates? Homeworld 2 would play horribly on one of those!), but I don’t think I could have afforded such a monster back in the late 90s, what with the cost of baby formula.
Whichever it was, I don’t think that a 9.7" iPad screen a few inches from my face will be that different (field-of-view-wise) from the relatively small monitor sitting a couple feet away on my desk in 1998.
I played it on a 14" CRT Packard Bell.
That’s still quite a bit larger than a 10.whatever" tablet, though… The tablet is definately NOT how I would want to play, I’d go laptop over tablet if I had that option and I wanted portability, but if a laptop isn’t an option, and you have a tablet, I can see wanting to give it a shot, and maybe it works just fine, so it’s hard to say.
It’s too bad buying one version doesn’t give you access to it on other platforms, or at least a discount of some sort.
I believe they’ve implemented zooming on all versions to accomodate the higher resolution screens.
And that zoom makes everything blurry as fuck.
Got mine to work finally. I guess I had to click on the preload finished bar or something so it could actually download the last bit. Fired it up… on first impression it seems like a decent job. Not sure how it would compare to BG1 running in the BG2 engine with mods, but it seems solid. Curious where this goes from here (BG2? IWD? Planescape Torment?)