Tuesday, February 28, 2012

[OMG] Is the Baldur's Gate series getting an HD reboot?



Strange rumblings out of the PCRPG realms today...


Kotaku reported that after 11 years of inactivity, the official Baldur's Gate series site has creaked and moaned back to life. It now sports a cryptic message:
"The Lord of Murder shall perish, but in his doom he shall spawn a score of mortal progeny, chaos will be sown by their passage.
So sayeth the wise Alaundo" 
Trent Oster, former BioWare developer and founder of Beamdog has accepted responsibility for this shameless fanboy-pandering. The line is an obvious reference to the BGII expansion pack, "Throne of Bhaal." What's even more curious is the hidden message inside the source code of the BG site. 

Hit the jump to read what it says and engage the Speculatron-9000.


Above you can see the battle dialog-esque line, "Shadowy Figure- Raise Dead : Infinity Engine" - implying that someone's bringing back the RPG engine responsible for an "age of role-playing excellence" as OMNIpixel once put it.

The BG series, Icewind Dale I & II and Planescape: Torment, all released from 1998 to 2002, were all crafted in the Infinity Engine for Dungeons & Dragons rulesets 2.0 through 3.0.

The hidden comment lines continue:

"And then... it returned. Better than it was before."

The scuttlebutt on Reddit is we'll soon see an HD re-release of BG1 & 2, since the series' arrival on Steam is relatively old news and Oster confirmed through a tweet that his team isn't involved with the Steam port.

But then there's this:


This leads Kotaku to propose an iOS port of the Baldur's Gate series. Most likely, we're dealing with an HD remake for the iPad.

Holy. Crap. 

It does make the most sense. iOS retreads/remakes are all the rage nowadays, touch screen control for party members would be a dream (if Beamdog doesn't royally screw it up) and it would explain why Oster's hinting about the iMac.

Great, now I'm going to be going around all day quoting Minsc...





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