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Kirk
Sep 22, 2003
here are some steam codes for a game that might interest you

P64EF-DYBCJ-20AK4

X76M3-HVRDF-6LVX0

2QK3K-67LIL-RCNQB

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Kirk
Sep 22, 2003
have some keys

CC9MY-73CK6-VJKZA
35JNV-3E4ML-H2F93
BBC9L-0ZK24-5FDAH
YFJ8K-2F0AR-0D368
T7RIE-F9568-2LK9Y

sorry if you hate the game

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

Milky Moor posted:

I think TOB was very rushed, yeah. From what I remember, they had plans for ToB as BG3 but it got turned into a BG2 expansion for whatever reason.

It was actually the other way around - by the time they were finishing up bg2.5 they realized they should have pushed harder for a full sequel.

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003
I hope everyone is having a good time. We have a bugfix patch coming soon. Sorry if we broke your game.

I wish we weren't getting review spiked but oh well life sucks and is infinitely terrible~

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

cheesetriangles posted:

Are the bad reviews just Grrr social justice?

There are a fair number of bugs we are fixing and multiplayer is slightly broken. So far only two publications have reviewed the game but they are giving it scores in the 8s.

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

gschmidl posted:

Gonna say I'm enjoying both the 2.0 patch and what little I've played of Dragonspear immensely so far. Don't let the idiot brigade get you down.

It's hard when they tank your review scores :(

Oh well. We will do better next time.

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

Vikar Jerome posted:

New UI mod for SoD. No one's ported this loving thing over to bg2 yet but i hope they do before i finish SoD because my BG blood is pumping and i'm going straight into that.

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/50357/mod-sod-widescreen-gui-tweaks




the spell menus are a bit poo poo though, too much wasted space for my liking.

The default UI will be continually upgraded. - I'm not happy with the spell screens and I'd like to get them fixed up ASAP. Things are a little rough around the edges right now because we had to rebuild the entire BG UI in the new system but it should make future improvements 10x easier. But the mods already coming out of the bg forums are insane, as seen above. I'm really happy that worked out.

Kirk fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Apr 6, 2016

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

Luisfe posted:

Are there any plans to add the new David Warner and Jim Cummings voice packs to BG2?
Because it would be oh so good to have those voicepacks for the eventual BG2 run after I am done with BG1+expansions. Again.

Yes they are either already there or will be in the next patch.

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

deadking posted:

I really hope the "improvements" involve an expansion of the character's presence and backstory if only because it puts pressure on the facetious "I'm not upset because there's a transgender character, only that she's poorly written!" line of reactionary complaint.

:madmax:

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003
steam keys:

XKJNB-BB5NA-7C5JC
CMF47-XM3NR-DXNBX
TQKT3-FAETF-XT4LG
DJD65-G72K8-BAHRA
WKG5E-3E5MI-5Q8MQ
3DKQR-5WAZC-AYVED

sorry if you hate it????

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003
Project P was the working name on Steam, we changed it a few hours ago so it will show up differently in the near future

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003
The ui is probably the biggest deal, we had to rebuild it from scratch in 3d to match the style of the original. And we also replaced the awful popup menu from the game world as per Chris' request.

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003
Also, sorry that we suck and haven't been patching things very quickly. But now that PSTEE is done we're gonna do another round of patches for all the games in the near future, look for an open beta on our forums.

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

Rookersh posted:

All of this looks incredible. I'm so stoked.

Only three more games left to EE!

I'm really looking forward to enhancing Konung

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

Vikar Jerome posted:

whats alter senses on the menu? i can't remember that from the original and they say there's no new added content. select life and resume life are pretty obvious.

Settings

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003
The code divergence in IWD2 is probably less than it was for PST based on what we've looked at, but IWD2 was also the least popular of the IE games so there will eventually be a judgement call.

Personally I'd like to do IWD2EE even if it was just to round out the set.

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

rope kid posted:

In many cases the 3E changes made the 2DAs and some functions cleaner than they were in other IE games.

Wanna come work on it?

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

Dragonrah posted:

Did Beamdog give up on bringing Siege of Dragonspear to iOS? That's what I was waiting on.

That's up next

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

Convex posted:

PST: EE is out now.

Also the other IE games are 32 bit apps on iOS and will subsequently stop working when iOS 11 releases in September. Hopefully they will be updated before then :tinfoil:

workin' on it now

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003
also have some more steam keys because pstee is real good

88VR6-4WLXX-ZPF5H
4V2J3-G6MLC-TTA2L
E4K7Y-VZJT6-WR3DC
EAK39-JV6GC-BL39V
MHAQE-2QI8W-L50ID

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

Dillbag posted:

Hey Kirk, FYI the Mac .pkg installer does some weird poo poo on El Capitan 11.6. Near the end of the package installation it opens a Finder window with no dialog or obvious reason why. It's actually asking you for the installation directory, which you have to navigate to manually and click "Choose" to finish the installation. If you cancel out of it, the installer reports an error.

Weird, i'll pass it along to QA. Thanks.

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

Mordaedil posted:

I don't think we're getting NWN2 EE simply because Trent Oster was not on the team for that game.

i had heard rumors that Obsidian wanted to do it themselves a few years back but given the... challenges around the IP and the rights situation back in the nwn2 days I wouldn't be surprised if they lost interest and moved on.

JustJeff88 posted:

This is... ambitious? I'm having a hard time imagining how this would work with no mouse and keyboard.

I no longer work there but the PS:T port to Switch was looking quite good when I last saw it. Pillars provides a pretty solid example for how to do these games on console.

The team joked about sneaking the PSX version into the console ports somehow but that was obviously never going to fly.

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

GorfZaplen posted:

Man, Siege of Dragonspear has some really dumb annoying poo poo and really cool poo poo in equal measure.

agreed, and i will take the blame for the annoying poo poo

Empty Sandwich posted:

I'm playing it for the first time, and holy poo poo is it on rails

also agreed

Siege had a very colorful history and the budget, scope, etc. kept changing wildly throughout the life of the project. Originally it was going to be much simpler. The concept was just "Hey lets make a lil $4.99 dlc adventure between bg1 and 2 - one good megadungeon, some surface adventuring, and we're out :3". We were going to stick within the city of Baldur's Gate, make the whole thing accessible and non-linear, but set after the end of BGEE. As I recall it was more of a murder mystery kind of thing where the city gets locked down with fighting in the streets and eventually the finger gets pointed at the bhaalspawn which drives them out onto the road. That finger pointing aspect evolved into the Skie dagger plotline that was going to have its own resolution in an expansion for BG2EE that never came to fruition.

But then A Directive Came Down that it had to somehow involve Dragonspear Castle. The story evolved to be about the portal in the basement, and then a "siege element" requirement came in shortly after the Dragonspear Castle request and that kind of set our direction.

From there we designed something similar to Dragon Age Origins in terms of narrative structure. You'd tool around the countryside outside of Dragonspear Castle in a non-linear fashion getting allies or enemies in your plan to lay siege to the castle, and then there'd be a big fight at the end. We were swinging for the fences in terms of who you could recruit and where you'd get to go. Warlock's Crypt (Including a much better cameo for Larloch than he got in Neera's quest in bg2ee), way more stuff in the Troll Hills, maybe check out the misty forest, etc. One particularly cool adventure I remember was making a deal with Larloch to get a contingent of undead on your side, which would then cause all sorts of problems throughout the coalition and drive some folks into Caelar's waiting arms. The options for evil players were more extensive.

Sadly that all got cut to the absolute bone. It was stripped down to the barest possible linear implementation of something along those lines. Then, as the project progressed, expectations around what it was going to be kept morphing and changing. Over and over. Suddenly it was far too thin, we had to fatten it out with more road trip activities because the changes preventing it from being less linear once you arrive at Dragonspear were already in place. Now it's much meatier, but it's on rails. The project suffered for these constant scale changes and if we had the exact same staff, time, and budget but stuck with the original plan it would have been an even better adventure. But hindsight is obviously 20/20, and the requirement and scope changes didn't happen in a vacuum.

The Caelar/Crusade stuff came together pretty quickly for the antagonist (admittedly it's slightly disappointing that the ultimate conflict lies with belhifet, who appears purely because we thought it would be fun fan service to link IWD and BG together and also bring back motherfucking m-m-m-major winchester aka David Ogden Stiers, RIP. I think she's cool and I'm sad we didn't get to do the bg2ee expansion. I like aasimars. I just think they're neat.

Kirk fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Dec 4, 2020

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

Arbite posted:

Thank you for sharing that. At what point did David Warner get added to the plans?

Probably about a third in, after the main plot Siege plot had already been established - if his presence in the game feels a bit tacked on that would be why.

The connection between the plots of the two games was feeling a bit weak and we knew there was some ground to cover with Irenicus before BG2 begins. After some discussions with a casting agent it became apparent that Warner was available and willing to come back to the role so it seemed like a great fit to bring him directly into the story. I think the interplay between Irenicus and the Umbral Accord came out kind of neat, although a little underdeveloped. The Umbral Accord as a concept would probably come back in the BG2EE xpac that never came to be.

Kirk fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Dec 4, 2020

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003

The Doormat posted:

Whatever happened with that expansion? I hear about it here and there, but only that it never panned out and that it was likely to bring the SoD npcs over the BG2.

Siege didn't do the numbers to justify more (highly expensive) IE content development time.

The plan was pretty loose still when we decided not to do it, but the gist was that yeah we'd tie off the dangling story bits we introduced in Siege (especially w/r/t Skie). Corwin would have gotten a much better follow up. We had found a list in the old Bioware archive dump we acquired that outlined places and events that players had been asking to see or experience and we were thinking about what to include. Some of them we actually implemented in BG1EE/BG2EE - Lunia, for example. Taking part in large army battles was also on that list and that made it into Siege.

For this we probably also would have done something with those hooded nerds sitting around the table at the end of SoA. They ended up getting retconned into the characters you fight in ToB but the video that shows them was ambiguous enough that we could have fit a little adventure between the end of SoA and the beginning of ToB.

My personal mission was to take Irenicus' dungeon and do a "time-has-passed-and-also-it-was-heavily-looted" version, essentially a new dungeon but in a familiar locale. I also really wanted to do a honey-i-shrunk-the-kids adventure where the party is tiny and battles insects, mice, etc.

There were more expansions planned, one was written by David Baker and it involved the Twin Towers of the Eternal Eclipse. Another one was in development by a third party studio and involved Calimshan in some capacity. Both were unrelated to the mainline BG plot. I don't know what happened to those as I left the company a long time ago.

Kirk fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Dec 14, 2020

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003
Also i tried to boot up a secret project to build a dungeon randomizer so you could play the game like a rogulike but was shouted down and beaten with staves :q:

Kirk
Sep 22, 2003
The workflow and toolchain were really poor and the money it would cost to invest in a better, more efficient workflow and toolchain would have been better spent building something in Unity/UE.

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Kirk
Sep 22, 2003
As well, everything in IE was built initially in 3D and then converted to 2D. So in the end you're doing extra steps for a lower level quality.

Funny story about that - the 3D models for humanoids are insane if you ever look at them from the ground. Women have Z-cup breasts in order to make them visibly busty when they're only 32px tall on screen.

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