Saturday, March 31, 2012

Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

I never got a chance to post about the upcoming Baldur's Gate games that were announced a few weeks ago.  
From what I gather, Overhaul Games is going to be doing a complete re-release of the old games for the PC, Mac, and iPad.  I'm somewhat excited about this.  I certainly loved the original BG games, and the idea of working across the sword coast landscape again--or battling Irenicus--is enough to light a spark inside me.

I still have my old CD's of both games, and haven't even considered trying to run them for a long time.  I'm embarrassed to say that I never quite finished BG1 (was very close, and somehow just got frustrated...wasn't much of a tactician at that point and got creamed by a fairly simple encounter), so it could be fun to try it again.  BG2 I did finish and love from start to finish, though I quickly (instantly?) got frustrated with the expansion for BG2.  It would be fun to give them another go.

On the other hand, these games represent tremendous time investments.  Will they hold up?  I'm hopeful that they'd re-do the art to run at better than 800x600, but I'm not sure if that's really in the cards for this release.  Furthermore, how will the game mechanics hold up?  I'm not very excited about going back to the days of THAC0, timed effects on spells, random-roll characters, etc.  I have a hard enough time finishing a module like Aielund II or Prophet, and have yet to even try Storm of Zentir.  There's a lot of gaming on my plate.  Do I really want to invest 100+ hours into a game I already played?

I'll keep thinking about it and following the news about this game as it develops.  It probably won't be very expensive(??), so I might try it just to play around candlekeep and meet Imoen again for the first time.