Highlighting items in the environment required different tactics than with a mouse, so new AI routines were written to highlight the most relevant items within an invisible cone projected by the lead party character.Īll the fine-tuning paid off: the Nintendo Switch version of Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition Pack is garnering high praise for its control scheme. Other changes included the new ability to tag specific groups of players, which Rideout compared to how real-time strategy games like Starcraft manage units. Party management is handled with the other trigger button." "We changed a lot of our side bars and changed our panel of menus on the left side of the screen, replacing them with a radial menu you open with one of the trigger buttons. Rather than nested items and mechanics optimized for a mouse, the Nintendo Switch version had to work with analog sticks. Baldur's Gate had very product-of-its-time menus," Beamdog Project Director Luke Rideout told Newsweek. "Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn" on Nintendo Switch Skybound Interactive / Beamdog
This is a departure from the more god's-eye tactical controls of the PC original or modern touch screen versions. For consoles, players control their character more directly, with NPCs following behind. Generally, the team was mindful not to smooth too many bumps, since, as Tofer said, "a lot of the fun about Baldur's Gate was exploiting these loopholes." Other corrections players are unlikely to miss, like a math error that calculated round orders wrong, shortening player attacks once every handful of rounds.īeyond raw mechanics, some of the biggest challenges have come from translating Baldur's Gate from mouse and keyboard to touch screens and consoles. "People were like, 'Oh, now I've got to actually go through the game.'" "That made a lot of people angry," Tofer said. In one instance, the Enhanced Edition eliminated a bug that let players glitch, or cheese, through a section of the game. We really wanted to tap into the memories and feelings, but not necessarily what those raw moments looked like."ĭeciding which elements of a '90s PC RPG are impediments to be improved upon or an essential part of the original play experience made for a few peculiar decisions. So it's like, 'Don't mess with my emotions,' right? It's really tricky. Their memories intermix with that period in their lives," Tofer said. " Baldur's Gate hit everybody at this particular time, and it really hit deep with people. Adapting Baldur's Gate to modern platforms requires tough judgments about how much to streamline mechanics without losing the subjective sensations that made Baldur's Gate such an enduring classic. Minsc in the "Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition." BioWare / Beamdogīeamdog's deep ties to Baldur's Gate have made Tofer and co-founder Trent Oster, another Baldur's Gate veteran and BioWare's co-founder, the right people to guide the RPG from the dial-up era to modern consoles, touch screens and mobile devices. But his most endearing feature is his animal companion and adviser, Boo, a miniature giant space hamster (it's a real thing, from the space-based D&D campaign setting, Spelljammer). This is especially true for Minsc, a tough-looking ranger with purple face tattoos and a heroic, if unstable, personality. It was time for a return to high school, with their original campaign characters becoming unforgettable NPCs in Baldur's Gate. "James was like, 'You know what, I've got this campaign we've been running for so long, and all these characters are super fleshed out," Tofer said. That's precisely how Tofer's character from Ohlen's campaign, Minsc, became an RPG legend. A happy accident of their starter status was that TSR - Dungeons & Dragons' original publisher - didn't give the Baldur's Gate team permission to use any of the iconic heroes in the D&D canon. That '90s dream eventually became RPG giant BioWare, with Ohlen leading on writing and design for 1998's Baldur's Gate. We were making our little games, playing D&D, just living the '90s dream, you know?" We had this campaign going for a few years through high school and a couple of years through college.
I joined a little bit later and rolled up Minsc, and James DMed us hardcore. There was a whole group of us in high school playing D&D.
"I hooked up with James Ohlen, the writer and designer of Baldur's Gate. "That goes way back," Tofer told Newsweek. The original "Player's Handbook" for 1989's "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition." TSR Games / Wizards of the Coast