Baldur's Gate was a breakout hit in the late '90s. It was one of the most immersive PC role-playing games of its time, with an engrossing story and thousands of lines of dialogue. It also put BioWare -- a studio founded by two medical doctors and powered by more than a 30 untested devs -- on the map.
Fourteen years later, before the franchise popped up on services like Steam or Good Old Games, playing the title on a modern PC was nearly impossible -- or at least required a lot of work.
For Trent Oster and Cameron Tofer, bringing Baldur's Gate back from the dead would be a huge surprise for die-hard fans, and also a way to launch their own PC game distribution service, Beam Dog. The ex-BioWare developers were the perfect ones to do it, too; both had been with the company more than 25 years combined.
But restoring the game went from a walk in the park to a two-and-a-half-year journey, as the pair endeavored against the original license holders and the game's own ancient framework. Since then, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition has been released on the PC, Mac and iPad, with an Android tablet version in the works.
Two-and-a-Half Years in the Making
"There were 30 programmers that worked on Baldur's Gate, and each had their own different ideas of what was working. Looking back at it, I'm amazed at what BioWare achieved at the time, but any time you look at the code, you recoil at horror at what they've done. They solved some crazy hard problems at the time, but it's so complex that it's taken us months to figure out how things work."
Tofer says he was working on a particularly difficult section of the game, so annoyed that he eventually cried out, "Who wrote this?!"
"It turns out it was my code from 15 years ago. I was only 19 at the time."
Another technical roadblock the team had to overcome was reducing the size of the game. Baldur's Gate was coming in at about 3.2 gigs. Apple has a 2 gig maximum for apps.
More Than a New Coat of Paint
There's more than bringing a game back to life than just stabilizing it for the correct platform. You also need to push the boundaries of what you're offering and make the experience as good as possible on modern technology. Oster and Tofer worked to create a game that worked well on tablets by adding zoom functionality and a smart clicking system that could infer what action you probably wanted to complete next.
"I think the iPad really shows off what a great game Baldur's Gate is and how it maps over the product to a new platform," Oster says. "I actually think Baldur's Gate was made for tablets. It just happened to be 12 years early. It's just such a nice way to play the game."
To make other improvements, the team has reached out to their community. Oster says the game's very dedicated fans have even cleaned up the grammar in a script that has "1.1 million words or so of dialogue." The community is also comparing all the gameplay rules with the now ancient texts of the Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition rule set. For comparison, D&D 4th Edition has been out since the mid-2000s.
"The people on our forums are so in tune with it because they spent so much time playing the game," Tofer says. "When you are playing a game as detailed as Baldur's Gate, you really appreciate the detail in there when you get into it."
How did Baldur's Gate win such a devoted fanbase? Oster attributes it to the game's depth and replayability. Every scenario you encounter might play out differently depending on the order of your character's actions, and what dice rolls the game makes internally. It's also not a game to step lightly into. Baldur's Gate is based on a complicated rule set and has a learning curve.
"We made a pretty hard choice that we weren't going to fundamentally change the game to make it more accessible," Oster says. "You have this tenant in modern video games as a whole where they're just dumbing them down and making them easier. But you have the emergence of new games, like Super Meat Boy, where it's like this is nasty, spiky hard and it's going to make you feel horrible until you beat it, then you feel great. Baldur's Gate brings that nasty, spiky feeling back into games."
"There's a difference between challenging and frustrating. We're doing everything we can to make the game less of a chore, but we're not going to dumb it down," Tofer says, adding that they've even added a harder difficulty.
Tofer and Oster are still at work refining Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition and releasing an Android tablet version. When that happens, they envision cross-platform play sessions with multiple people in one room.
"I'd love to see players enjoying this like a D&D session, all sitting on the couch together," Oster says. "We'd like to eventually even release new content that they can experience together."
That, along with the possibility of a Baldur's Gate II remake, means they'll be busy for some time to come.
"We knew it wasn't going to be a traditional release, just zip it and ship it. We wanted to keep working on it and improving it," Oster says. "We're trying to be curators of the Baldur's Gate franchise."
Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition is out now for PC, Mac and for iPad. It can be downloaded online or from iTunes. The Mac/PC version is $19.99; the iPad version is $9.99.