Baldur's Gate Mod Lets You Play Original On Sequel 29
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!"
Excellent (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Excellent (Score:3, Interesting)
The low resolution however does hurt somewhat. A sweet bump up to 1024x768 could warrant a third replay.
Re:Excellent (Score:1)
Re:Excellent (Score:1)
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)
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
Re:Good idea (Score:2)
It'd have been nice to send them a message of warning instead of posting the link to phpMyAdmin on Slashdot, BTW. Hope they didn't save anything more vital than screenshot information on that database...
Re:Good idea (Score:1)
I was a little hasty setting up the website and didn't even think to check the root to see if it displayed directories or not.
Either way, it was completely sloppy on my part. There was some amusing messages in the databases though.
Personally (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Personally (Score:3, Funny)
So Far So Good... (Score:5, Informative)
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
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.
I wonder if this would work on a Mac... (Score:2)
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
Re:I wonder if this would work on a Mac... (Score:1)
Re:I wonder if this would work on a Mac... (Score:2)
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.
Re:I wonder if this would work on a Mac... (Score:1)
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)
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.
Baldurs Mods (Score:2)
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)
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.
What would've been cooler in my opinion, (Score:2)