I can’t remember the two people, but the conversation went something like this, paraphrased:
Person A: “Noooo! BG1 multiplayer rocked! I had lots of fun with that and I’m really gonna miss it.”
Person B, who is nobody official: “Don’t worry, they’ll add it in one of the first three expansions.”
To the best of my knowledge and experience, hypothetically, if you asked the devs about a multiplayer expansion, first they’d say “What, multiplayer? The engine practically eliminates it as a possibility!” Then they’d say “What expansion?”
I’ll be really annoyed if someone misremembers/misquotes ME on this, though, because the devs probably haven’t formally answered such a question. Must be something about the game not being out yet…
The engine practically eliminates it as a possibility
The engine is a revamped version of the Arcanum engine, which had multiplayer. So I’m quite sure it wouldn’t be impossible, but yeah I wouldn’t expect them to implement multiplayer code in an expansion.
According to Tim Cain he would have liked multiplayer but they couldn’t do it because the game had a very tight schedule and so “maybe in a sequel”.
It really looks, and feels, nothing like Arcanum. The KOTOR engine is far more like NWN, by comparison, even though the BioWare guys will vigorously assert the differences. TOEE feels far more like an Infinity Engine game than it feels like Arcanum.
Ah I think this games gonna rock. Lets hope its a franchise game. Based on the video I saw, I would say that Troika just did Baldurs Gate 3 with a sorta NWN interface (dial thingy)!
Ah, ok then. The last interview I read (about a week ago) just said “We used a revamped Arcanum engine for this game. We rewrote the tiled backgrounds to use pre-rendered scenes, and we replaced the sprite system with 3D characters but we left other game elements, like the dialog or quest system, unchanged.” - sounded like the engine changes were mostly just graphical (and I guess changing ruleset would also involve engine changes), I’ve not been paying much attention to all the other interviews though.
Well, my only real concern is still the fact that it is based on one of the most nauseatingly long dungeon crawls in my PnP RPG memory. I think as I get older I’m starting to tire of monster hacking and dungeon crawls (I lost interest in IWD2 in record time and I used to be big RPG fanboy) :(
I’m sure Troika will provide some interesting quests and dialogue though.
The game has a plethora of side quests and adventures that aren’t all part of one long dungeon crawl. I’m playing a gold right now and I must say…best giant frogs EVAR! I hate killing the frogs, they’re so cute.
Seriously, the game plays nothing like Arcanum. First, the combat is pretty much die hard hardcore D&D 3.0/3.5 rules, pure turn based with no real time options to mess things up, and very intuitive, at least to me. The radial menus work well because, well, it’s purely turn based, and again they are pretty damn logically laid out.
It’s very good looking too, though I would wish for a zoom in function–I can hardly tell what my characters look like even at 1024. The manual is very good too (judging from the .pdf version I have).
