After waiting forever for an obviously flooded baldursgate.com website to finally reveal its secrets, the big surprise is that Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition and Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced Edition is currently in the works for unnamed platforms. Sorry, no real new addition to the franchise today, folks.
"Since its initial release in 1998, Baldur’s Gate has entertained millions of fans around the globe, and has received countless awards," teases the announcement. "This classic saga of mystery, intrigue, and adventure has set the standard for Dungeons & Dragons computer roleplaying games ever since."
According to Atari's brief announcement, Overhaul Games, a subsidiary of Beamdog, has assembled a team of artists, programmers and designers to enhance the two classic PC-based RPGs. Even more, the team includes original Baldur's Gate developers which should give fans a nice, warm fuzzy feeling all over.
Atari also reveals that the two Enhanced Editions will feature "a re-forged version of the Infinity Engine with a variety of modern improvements." Outside that little bit of information, Atari did not provide specific details as to how these games will be changed although Beamdog's Trent Oster shed further light on what's to come.
"We knew #baldursgate was going to be popular, but we never thought it would trigger a DDOS shut down," he jokes on Twitter, referring to the server meltdown when the site's countdown timer hit zero. "Apparently our server thinks we're getting DDOS'ed. Silly rabbit #baldursgate is just loved by a lot of people. The servers aren't screaming. They are shooting flames!"
He goes on to reveal that Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition is going to have new content generated by some of the original team members. It will also include the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion. "We're very interested in supporting the modding community and hopefully kicking off even more mods," he adds. "We're going to stay with the Baldur's Gate model of only voicing some of the content. We feel it allows for more in-depth writing."
As for when the games will arrive, he says that the team is planning a summer 2012 release for Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition. Other than that, details will be slim until next week's info rollout. His latest tweet reports that the team is using the latest code from Baldur's Gate 2 Throne of Bhall as their base, so everything in Baldur's Gate 2 and Throne of Bhall will be there plus what the team will add.
"We're going to fix the broken bits," he adds.
