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PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

Baldur's Gate Mod Lets You Play Original On Sequel 29

Posted by simoniker from the fun-for-all-the-rpg-family dept.
Anthony Boyd writes "The Baldur's Gate series has seen a lot of official expansions and unofficial mods. The latest one is fairly impressive: in about 750k, the BG1tutu team has delivered a file that completely moves your Baldur's Gate 1 games over to the Baldur's Gate 2 engine. According to the readme, it means you can play BG1 with screen sizes of 1024x768 or larger, you get more auto-pause options, and all spells and creatures have been converted to the updated BG2 rules. Best mod ever!"
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Baldur's Gate Mod Lets You Play Original On Sequel More

Baldur's Gate Mod Lets You Play Original On Sequel

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  • Excellent (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Artemis ( 14122 )

    This is great, the 800x600 resolution restriction of the original Baldur's Gate and Tales of the Sword Coast is part of what can make is seem so much older than Baldur's Gate 2. The additional auto-pause options are also welcome, no more pounding on the space bar! Glad to see "new classics" like Baldur's Gate are still being supposed through 3rd-party mod's like this one.

    • Ooh, could this mean Planetscape Torment can be ported as well? That is without a doubt the greatest game rpg ever made. (well I like it)

      The low resolution however does hurt somewhat. A sweet bump up to 1024x768 could warrant a third replay.

      • deinately... I would love to play PS:T again in high res

      • Hear, hear. PS:T rulez.

        PS:T would, I fear, be significantly more complex. Particularly, I'm thinking of interface issues, such as the use of pie menus, and rules issues, such as the different spells available, or the NO's class switching and particular stat system.

        Hmm... I've already done three plays of PS:T. Maybe it's time for a fourth...

      • Re:Excellent (Score:3, Interesting)

        by scrytch ( 9198 )
        > Ooh, could this mean Planetscape Torment can be ported as well?

        Nope. Spells, weapons, screens, all are very different, not to mention the fact that your character could multiclass as many times as he wanted (I just stuck with a mage through, that's the most fun). Spell levels and effects in torment are different -- the full-screen effects of cloudkill were a blast, and each level 9 spell has its own cutscene.

        There's also a project underway to port the BG series to the Icewind Dale II engine for eve

  • Personally (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Prien715 ( 251944 ) <agnosticpope@@@gmail...com> on Sunday September 28, 2003 @12:19AM (#7075583) Journal
    I'd like someone to port it to the NWN engine. It'd involve lots more work, but you'd benefit from 3D gfx and 3rd Ed rules. I'd really like to see what the new engine can do other than make some hacknslash that was the NWN single player campaign.
    • Yes, I would think that creating 3d-maps and models of everything in BG1/2 again and rewriting the entire plot and scrips would be a bit more work.

  • So Far So Good... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kulic ( 122255 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @04:35AM (#7076258) Homepage
    Just downloaded this and been trying it out for a while. My impressions so far:

    The installer is nice and clean, the readme covers everything and there were no problems. Character creation is ala BG2 - this is both good and bad. Kits are available, but be careful with weapon proficiencies - no stores have been changed (e.g. no katanas or other BG2 weapons). Rules for proficiencies are broken - a fighter can put all of their points into one weapon (wasn't a problem in BG2 due to the starting at level 7 or above). Mages should grab Find Familiar in their spells as the extra HP is nice, and you can't buy it.

    In game, the graphics look sweet at a higher res. Spell effects, armor, avatars etc all use BG2 models. Use of the BG2 engine fixes any DirectX problems (playing BG1 under DX9 was prone to crashing - it was written for DX6). The 1.5x walk speed is in. So is the enemy ability to follow you between areas - old tactics don't always work anymore :/ I am unsure about in game movies - I was able to skip the Friendly Arm Inn movie, but not the Beregost one, weird. Having NPCs with kits is cool (provided you choose what you want upon installation).

    After a few hours of playing, I have come to the conclusion that this is a good thing for BG1. It breathes some life back into an RPG classic. If you enjoyed playing BG1, enjoy it again.
  • This would be especially great on a Mac since the original BG1 is an OS 9 only application and a very buggy port, whereas BG2 was somewhat less crash-prone. I wonder if I were to install the files, copy them all over to my PC, convert them and then copy them all back if they would work... worth looking into at some point I suppose.

    Either that, or perhaps the source code could be ported over. It is suppsedly availiable, although the link seems to throw a 404. It does seem to be written in a langauge called
    • I've heard from numerous sources that BG2 crashes more on OS X than it does on OS 9. It's also supposedly slower on OS X.
      • From my (somewhat limited) personal experiences, BG1 has a tendency to crash every hour or so in Classic, whereas BG2 doesn't quite seem to have the same time limit. The annoying thing about BG1 crashing is that then you have to completely reload Classic from scratch, which takes a minute. With BG2, at least you don't have to load Classic. ;)

        At any rate, the net effect has been that I haven't played any of the BG games very far through, just because of the general bugginess of the ports. :/
    • Either that, or perhaps the source code could be ported over. It is suppsedly availiable, although the link seems to throw a 404.

      A mistake on my part. I forgot to upload the v3 source. It should be up now.

  • Spellcasters might live through it now.... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @09:34AM (#7076854) Homepage

    Here is a summary of what I've experienced after about 10 hours of gameplay (using beta 3). First, it's far more crash-prone. In the non-modded BG1, I could play for about 8 hours straight before it started to slow or get crash-prone. In BG1tutu, it crashed about 6 times in 5 hours. That's not so bad, as I make saved-games about every 5 minutes (the Q key works for quick saves). But it is buggy. Also, some areas spawn a whole lot MORE monsters than before, and my characters ended up fleeing to the Friendly Arm after getting mobbed. Also, the quest log is mostly toast. You'll get notes in the journal, but nothing is showing up under the completed quests area or pending quests area. So I'm having a tough time keeping track of what to do. But I'll print out a quest list from a Web site and it'll be fine. Finally, some characters have weapons that don't match their proficiencies. For example, Minsc is specialized in two-handed swords, AND wielding two weapons at once. Huh? He has 4 arms? But no biggie, the game works fine.

    The good stuff is that it really works to play at 1024x768 (and even bigger). My fights have been a whole lot more strategic because of this, already. The "kits" for NPCs are useful. I really like some of the changes I've seen to a few of the characters. Khalid is now a better NPC to have. Garrick is still lame -- I should have selected a kit for him (I left him un-kitted). Another nice thing that doesn't have to do with BG1tutu (much) is that I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the low-level character stuggles. I've visited temples a lot for resurrections, scrimped for enough cash just to get a potion, and really thought hard about what 2 wimpy spells would possibly keep my character alive longer. Although, here's a cool trick: since you can hit "tab" to highlight items in BG1tutu, it's easy to find the ring of wizardry near the Friendly Arm. And since you can play a sorcerer now, try it with the ring. You get 6 spells on level 1. Nice. You might actually survive.

  • The post mentions Baldurs Gate seeing lots of "unofficial mods".

    I'm interested in other mods for Baldurs or the other Infinity Engine RPGs. Can anyone point out a site with more info on these? I checked planetbaldursgate.com and a couple other sites but found no info on any other Mods.
    Would really like to find out more.

    • Re:Baldurs Mods (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anthony Boyd ( 242971 ) on Sunday September 28, 2003 @06:21PM (#7080329) Homepage
      I'm interested in other mods for Baldurs or the other Infinity Engine RPGs. Can anyone point out a site with more info on these?

      You mean you haven't been using them? Oh man, I envy you. It would be great to play through all the mods for the "first time" again. There are banter packs that add NPC dialogues, flirt packs that give some NPCs much more romantic text to say to your character, bug patches, completely new NPCs that can join your group (such as Solaufein and Kelsey), and more. Go here now. [teambg.net]

      Be careful. Some mods, like Dark Side of the Sword Coast, are buggy. It's best to find a mod that looks interesting, and then go to groups.google.com and type it in to see people's comments about it. If it sounds stable, try it.

  • Would be a version of this for Planescape:Torment. A set of portals, some for BGII, some for BG, some for IWD, some for IWDII. It is Sigil, after all.

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