What new features do you hope to see in BGEE?

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So now that it's been announced, and based on what we know so far (see news section), what are you most hoping to see in the Enhanced Edition games??

 

I’m pretty happy with a lot of what has already been confirmed, such as additional voice acting, additional game content, and that we are going to see an overall improvement and modernization of the game engine.

In terms of what I’m really hoping will be included:
1. Improved pathfinding (this has always been so painful in the Infinity Engine)
2. A bunch of new companions to join you in the game, in addition to the existing, and among these some that better represent classes that have previously been missing as options (e.g. sorcerer, monk, wildmage).
3. More interactions, romances and a lot more voiced conversations (not just some, but a good amount more).
4. Some high quality, exciting new quests and new game areas to visit.
5. Implementing a bunch of the stuff from the original game that had to be cut before the original release.
6. New loot, and particularly more of the unrepresented weapons to make them more viable.
7. Some nice graphical overhauls to character models.
8. DRASTICALLY Improved helmet models!!!
9. Improved visuals on weapons, particularly magical or flaming weapons.
10. Characters that stow their weapons when not in combat, like in Dragon Age (why are you still carrying your halberd +3 in the inn? Doesn’t that make the guests uneasy?
11. Some nice graphical updates to spell effects
12. Some significant improvements to combat animations.
13. Improvements to the ambient sounds to make them more current and immersive.
14. All the cool stuff that I’m not sophisticated enough to even think about – but I know that the developers are – that can improve the experience of the game.

That’s a few things off the top of my head. I’m sure I’ll think of more!

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Oh, I see, so more romantic interactions (i.e. sex scenes). Now I see where your head is at!

 

1. Somehow making the game more accessible to beginners while staying true to the spirit. I'm willing to compromise here. Today's gamers are expecting way more hand-holding and a lot less "dying in one hit inexplicably and having to reload". I want this game to be a success with today's generation and it'll have to put on a fresh coat a paint for that. I'm mainly thinking about the way:
- characters can die permanently very easily
- even if they don't die permanently, it's extremely painful/expensive to resurrect them
- if you hit anyone neutral in a city/inn/etc., the whole place turns hostile irreversibly, breaking every quest forever. If you retaliate your reputation drops quickly to the point where you get slaughtered by guards everywhere.

2. Some level of re-balancing low-level mages. Having one spell per day is not fun. Especially when that spell does 1-6 damage, which can be 1. "Weee I did my point of damage of the day, now to pick my nose until night time" - definitely feels underpowered.

3. ...more rebalancing. Some of the BG2 classes were not designed to be used in BG1 and it shows (Berserker, Totemic Druid, etc). They should be usable but not have unfair advantages.

4. More evil things to do and get rewarded for. Baldur's Gate heavily favors Paladins and do-gooders in general - while I can see the realism in that, it definitely makes for a dull evil playthrough.

5. An overhaul of the reputation system. If I slay someone in a dark alley alone with no witnesses, I should not lose reputation. I should not lose more reputation for killing guards than innocents. Not every shopkeeper should care about my reputation - some might even appreciate my low reputation - again, going with the "more evil things to do".

 

Is there any fear among the BG faithful that the new material isn't going to measure up? I mean that specifically in the context of fidelity as opposed to quality; a lot of times purists are offended by anything that isn't canon, so to speak ... which can potentially be anything new.

e.g., beloved favorite character x for the last 14 years now goes on a quest in BGEE to do something he or she never would have done in regular BG. Would you ragequit?

 

@Dr_Asik - I'm guessing most of the changes you suggest to make early levels easier for newbies would not fly, since that would take the game further away from the DnD rules. Perhaps setting the game to ship with a lower difficulty setting, or creating a forced decision on where to set it when the game is installed, which explanations of the challenges associated, would help to prepare players better. The ones who really want an easy game, will hopefully be smart enough to pick the easy setting.

Some balancing of kits is probably in order, as is expanded options for evil players. And I certainly like where you're going with the reputation changes.

Another improvement that I forgot to mention is more flexible weapon changes... even just stealing what was done for Icewind Dale 2 would be awesome. I have always hated how if I want to switch for a dual wield set up to a bow, I have unequip my offhand weapon by opening my inventory, then equip the bow. And then to go back to my dual wield set up I'd have to reverse those steps. The IWD2 set up or some other less cumbersome set up would be amazingly appreciated!

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Not from me, and probably not from most if I guess correctly. Most of the BG faithful have been using loads of mods, and aren't opposed to changes, especially when they improve many of the cumbersome aspects of the original game.

Also, in terms of new material (quests, new locations, even new mechanics, etc) I'm feeling very good about the fact that these changes will be made by many of the folks who created the original game to begin with. They understand exactly what this game is, and I believe, they will have the discretion to make changes that are appropriate to the spirit of the game. That is, unless the upper brass takes an overly controlling role. But somehow, since this isn't going to be a new game, I'm guessing that the developers will have a large degree of freedom to polish and expand the game.

Honestly, this is one of the most favorable scenarios I really could have imagined.

 

Alot more interaction with party members. Prefferably voiced.

 

NWN1 and 2 stick pretty close to D&D rules yet they handle death in a much more gamer-friendly way. Making everyone irreversibly hostile in an entire area when you attack an innocent isn't specified by D&D anywhere. And things that were added in BG2 like resting until healed and max HP on level up can be enabled by default - the "hardcore" crowd can disable them if they so please.

So, I think there are ways around these issues that other games have figured out, without clashing too much with D&D rules.

 

The NWN games are an excellent point. I had forgotten how trivial they had made death in that series. Only a TPK resulted in the need to reload... otherwise dead characters were fine again after a short nap.

This was a feature that I personally hated... but as long as I have a way to turn it off in my game, should something similar ever make its way into BGEE, I wouldn't have too big of an issue with it. I would DEPLORE playing with such a feature in these games though after so many years with death actually meaning something.

If they do choose to dumb some things down, I really hope that they keep it to a bare, bare minimum. I don't want to see my beloved IE "raped" just to bring in more players... that's sort of the whole point, to be successful while preserving the integrity of the original game. My guess is Trent Oster and team aren't overly interested in dumbing things down in BGEE. I think they are mostly interested in making the game more presentable, stable, and fresh for a 2012 release. They will start alienating long time fans very quickly if they start dumbing things down a lot. It's a slippery slope.

Oh, yet another thing I'd like to see if some more flexible multiclassing options. To hell with the 2ED rules on this one. They are overly, and pointlessly restrictive in this area.

 

It might be a good idea for them to at least include the option for noob mode.

But then again, how many people will buy this that are not long time fans of the series?

What I want to know is whether they will include fixes from either Baldurdash or the Fixpack. Especially Fixpack has a reputation for including fixes that... take some liberties with developers intent. But I suppose since they are the developers, they know what the intent is!

I would like to see higher quality character models and maybe more variation in character models.

That being said, I probably wont buy BGEE because I've always preferred BG2 to a large degree.

 

I understand that changing rules is a very touchy issue. I feel that there are some improvements that can be made as long as they're obvious improvements. Faster walking speed in BG2 was, as far as I'm aware, universally seen as an improvement. That's the sort of thing I'd like to see.

And death, to me, seems quite clearly broken in BG1. It's something that happens frequently, from the very start of the game, yet your best recourse is usually to reload. Any rule that causes frequent reloading is immediately suspect to me; reloading isn't a gameplay feature, it's not enjoyable, it means an arbitrary amount of progress lost, it breaks the flow, it breaks immersion. Never mind the chore of having to save all the time, and how that breaks immersion even more.

And yet that's the ONLY thing you can do most of the time in BG1, because you have no means of resurrecting your characters. When you can easily spare 1500 gold, then you have the very fun mean of picking up all the equipment, visiting a temple, and re-equiping your character, (and re-memorizing his spells and re-resting) but that doesn't come until much later, and it's so painful that I still, always, reload instead of doing that. Seriously when was the last time you visited a temple to resurrect a character? In my last 2 or 3 playthroughs I didn't use that once.

And in BG2 you'd think the situation is slightly better because at least you have to option to make your priests memorize resurrection spells, and assuming they don't die, they can resurrect others; but it's actually worse because death breaks romances, silently. Of course that bug could be fixed, but until then death in BG2 more often than not = reload even though resurrection spells are available.

There are different possibilities for BGEE:
- Implement death à la NWN - makes a lot more sense to me from a gameplay perspective, but maybe it's too drastic of a change, I'm not sure
- Keep permanent death in, but make save-and-reload much more seamless: the game should save continuously and allow me to go back in time at will. As is, I find myself hitting the quicksave WAY too often: before resting, after resting, every time I take a step in a dungeon, every container I try to open before detecting traps, every time I speak to an NPC, etc. When I think "I need to save", I'm thinking about a meta-gaming element - it breaks immersion. Find a way - through better UI, automatic saves - that I never need to think about saving and reloading again. I'm not sure that's even feasible, but perhaps.
- Give the player much more accessible means of resurrecting their characters: cheap scrolls of resurrection, resurrecting priests everywhere, I don't know. That might actually break the game more than anything else.
- ????

The most coherent and feasible solution seems NWN-style death. If you're going to give the player easy means of resurrecting their characters, then it merely becomes an annoyance to actually use the scrolls or whatever the means consists of: you might as well "resurrect" the characters automatically. As for a "better save and reload mechanic", the best I've seen is auto-save every x minutes; I don't see how it could be much better than that. The games that deal best with death are those who managed to do away with reloading completely: Planescape Torment (you're just teleport back to the mortuary), Diablo 2 (there's no "save", just "save and exit"), NWN1/2 as discussed.

I really wouldn't see that as "dumbing down". There's nothing "smart" about save and reload: it's not a gameplay feature at all! If anything, forcing the player to save and reload is the dumbest solution to a design problem.

 

1. More banters between party members
2. A return of previous voice actors - plus a few more for good measure.
3. Character customisation of appearance (alterable paperdoll/avatar)
4. Personally I'd like a keep of the portraits, though I feel this is less likely to be honest, especially if the note above occurs
5. Higher detail in areas.
6. The Tab key to highlight containers
7. Better pathfinding, of course
8. A more stable continuation to BG2 (I know, this was a bit of a bugbear putting this here as Khalid and Dynaheir dying is such a big part of BG2 - but also a bit twitchy if you already killed Minsc in Nashkel for example. Dialogue options explaining their presence or small alterations if you never travelled with them or encountered them in dialogues. This will also probably include a necessary bridge between the two games where either NPCs travel with you from Baldurs' Gate and are also captured or leave your presence.)
9. More open modding capabilities
10. Possibly a toolset
11. Beregost to no longer have ALL the womenfolk come out after dark as er... ladies of the night.
12. Bigger Baldurs' Gate city itself.
13. Updated journal, obviously. Possibly with the ability to export your journal to a text file.
14. More cleric options for deities... In fact maybe have something like NWN where you enter your deity even if you're not a cleric.
15. A detailed and non-compulsory tutorial, possibly set up as some of your lessons as a student at Candlekeep. This may mean altering Candlekeep to start with to add more personas and little quests to afford travelling kit - I'm also tempted to add a timer in Candlekeep where if you take longer than 2 days Gorion forces you to come with him whether you're ready or not, this is an emergancy situation after all!
16. Subraces with limited palettes for colour like IWD2

 

Most have been mentioned. I'm particularly fond of 8people's numbers 2, 14, 3, 7, and 1 (in that order)

With 14, the clerical stuff, I would also hope that interactions are more "fine-tuned" to your deity as well. They tried it in IWD2, but not enough.

 

For me: More Kits,
Subraces,
Better AI for Mages and Clerics,
and Improved party scripts.

 

More interaction with the NPC cast like BG2.

But I do not want them to cater to newer gamers. BG is at heart a D&D game. D&D is at heart a PnP rule system. It is why I bought it when it was first released. If your NPC dies, I like the fact that it costs a TON of GPs to resurrect them. It makes you really appreciate the NPCs and take more care. For me, BG is not a hack n slash, it's the same as a PnP gaming night with friends. Or as close to it as you are going to get on a PC. That is what I look for in an RPG. And it's why I didn't care for NWN games as much as the BG series games.

 

@Dr_Asik

In my opinion your missing option is the "old school" option of "don't die so much!"

I can put your post into context somewhat as I know you like to play on insane difficulty. Why would someone who hates to save, save, save, save, reload play on insane difficulty? It's called insane for a reason. So in your case, maybe lowering the difficulty a notch is a good way to prevent many of those deaths/reloads that you don't care for. Pumping up the difficulty really high and then removing the consequences of doing so seems a little pointless to me. To each their own, of course.

Something that is important to a lot of die hard BG fans is the idea of a no reload game, and the NWN approach to death/resurrection really invalidates this playstyle for the most part... as there's no need to reload anyway.

The game is actually a lot more intense when the death of a character may mean losing that character forever. This causes you to weigh every battle, every decision a lot more carefully and actually CREATES immersion in a major, major way. Death isn't merely an annoyance... it's quite probably... the end, just as it is in reality. Avoid it at all costs!

Once you become reasonably comfortable with the interface (which isn't going to take most gamers long at all these days) there is really no reason that reloading should be needed very often at all IF you're playing at a reasonable difficulty setting.

 

I'm not talking about myself. I'm a veteran of the game, I know what areas I can do at my level, I know what can kill me and what can't. Besides I don't use insane difficulty outside of my LP. The only reason I use it in my LP is so that I do die a few times and it doesn't feel like a complete cakewalk throughout. It's for my viewers enjoyment not mine. Besides when I started I didn't know about SCS, I'd probably use that now instead of insane difficulty.

I think like me, most people who visit these forums are veterans of the game, and for them if it wasn't for permanent death there wouldn't be much challenge. If we want more challenge there are better ways to achieve that (as SCS shows), but mostly we have to realize we're not that many people and if BG1EE wants to succeed it'll have to appeal to a larger audience, and one accustomed to today's RPGs.

The option should definitely be there to have vanilla-style death, but what I'm arguing is that it shouldn't be the default.

Have you played Dark Souls? You die ALL the time, and dying means game over... yet, you never have to save and you almost never have to reload. The game does that for you - it's constantly saving. It's basically what my suggestion #2 consisted in: keep permanent death in, but get rid of save and reload through better design.

Save and reload isn't "old school", it's bad design. There are plenty of old-school games that deal with death more smartly than with save and reload - heck even Super Mario World 3 has a better system.

Consider that while it does create tension as you say, it also means that as soon as a character die, you stop trying and immediately reload. In NWN2 you'd continue fighting to the last, and that can also be really cool. I've sometimes won battles with 1 character left with a few hp: that's what I call close! In BG, the system is so unforgiving that either I massively outsmart/outpower my opponents so I don't lose any party member, or I reload. It makes for way more one-sided battles.

With NWN-style death you can have a harder game that's still fun to play - that's a win-win.

Oh, I couldn't disagree more. Unless you know where you're going and exactly how strong different monsters are, you're going to get slain big time. It's an open world with no level scaling. In the area you start in, you can meet dire wolves, which kill any party member quickly and reliably. And black bears. And even wolves for that matter, especially if you made the unfortunate decision of starting out as a mage or rogue (or druid, or even warrior without good dex or splint mail). If you wander into High Hedge (which is the closest area), everything there will kill you very quickly. You cannot deal with skeletons, spiders, gnolls, at that level. Even if you follow the vaguely designated path to Friendly Arm Inn it's incredibly easy to have, say, Xzar killed - he has 4hp! Anything can do 4 damage in one hit. So you reload. After 20 reloads your average gamer is going to shelf the game and post a bad review on Metacritic.

And one you start exploring the world, unless you follow a guide, the only way you can learn not to wander in certain caves/areas is trial and error - save and reload. Farmland area - basilisks. Lighthouse - sirines, flesh golems, ogre mage. Beregost Temple - there are 2 vampiric wolves there. Mutamin's Garden - you get slain. As veterans we know all that and we take a safe path through the game according to our level, but someone discovering the game for himself does not know. He gets routinely punished with "you just lost an arbitrary amount of progress, now you can choose to continue from the last time you thought about saving your game". That's just bad.

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When I play PnP, the DM generally ensures death is a highly unlikely occurence - because it sucks big time to lose your character. In BG, there's no friendly DM and there are wolves in the area you start in. There are friggin dread wolves in the next area, and that's assuming you're on the right path, because you could just as well wander off in some other direction and get pathetically slain elsewhere. If you remove the friendly DM who explains the game and caters the encounters to your level, you have to compensate somehow. And if trial-and-error is the only way you let the gamer figure out what he can and can't do, then you must not punish him too hard for his errors.

 

Well, you did give a lot of examples of how this bothers you personally in your game, so at least to some extent you were talking about yourself, and that's what I was reacting to. My bigger point is that lower difficulty levels can help you, me, anyone and everyone to reduce the chance of death/need to reload.

I'm not saying that there aren't better ways to handle death in the game, or games in general. I really am not a fan on NWN/Dragon Age style death personally. I think it's highly unlikely that we'll see any drastic differences to how BGEE game handles automatic saving and the like, and I rather hope we won't see a NWN2 style death scenario (personal preference), but if we do, as I said previously, as long as I can turn it off it's not that big of a deal to me.

I never said save and reload was the old school approach. I said don't die so much! It's a challenge to see players improve their playing skills in the game, rather than to take away the challenge as is so common these days. The "old school" approach challenges the player to rise up to the level of the game rather than forcing the maker of the game dumb things down to appease the player. If you don't die, you don't need to save and reload, and therefore (not dying) is an old school way to minimize the issue.

Wait a second, I think you glossed over the fact that the tension I was discussing was that which is created in a no reload game. So no, you most certainly do not reload as soon as a character dies in a no reload game. You fight it out until the end, and unless you have the means to resurrect the fallen comrade, that team member is laid to rest. Context is everything, and you took me completely out of context right there.

I will give you that there are many exceptions to this idea, and particularly the first couple of levels can be a real challenge. Arguably though, those first few levels is where the character is still getting the hang of things, so by the time they've leveled up and gotten the hang of things, things generally get a lot easier. Again, there are certain battles and situations that will certainly throw any new player for a loop. Your point is taken here.

 

Max hp on level-up.

 

Bear in mind that existing fans apparently crashed the BGEE website server, twice. Somehow I don't think they'll be short on buyers. I kind of suspect that sales will be perfectly acceptable, based on what their aspirations seem to be, if the target audience of return players responds appropriately.

Considerations of a BG3 notwithstanding, BGEE seems to be primarily an appeal to old fans. The fact that it's (remarkably) still 2nd Edition and that not all that much is really changing seems to support that notion. Also many of the other factors mentioned - not console, not 3D, etc.

Agreed. I think an assumption that all or most players reload upon death is fundamentally flawed. There are a lot of RP purists out there to whom death - and every other twist and turn - means just that.