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 70 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
Oster and Tofer set out to get the license to Baldur's Gate and convince Atari that a 12-year-old game was worth republishing.
"We had to convince these guys this property was actually worthwhile, as opposed to just letting it sit and languish. At that time the game wasn't even available for sale on GoG or any other portal," Oster says. "But eventually, everyone was very excited about the potential of Baldur's Gate on a tablet."
Oster admitted that he thought the hard part was over after the pair had acquired the code, and that the work to update the game would be manageable.
"Hey, let's ninja in, make some changes, and ninja out, hit compile, and see how it goes," he explains of their original gameplan.
They quickly learned Baldur's Gate's age was quite a factor, as was the hardware it was designed for.
"The code was 15 years old and written by a team that was new to programming at the time. Back then we'd just gotten copies of Windows 95. Some people were still on NT. There hadn't been 3D cards at the time," Oster explains. For gamers old enough to remember, DirectX — Microsoft's APIs that allowed developers to create multimedia and 3D software — had just been released for video game developers when Baldur's Gate was in the works.
"We had to go in and find everything that was Windows 95 specific and didn't work well anymore and pretty much eliminate it," Oster says. "That took about six to eight months."
A lot of the game's "million or so" lines of code were built around doing things that hardware does automatically now. A lot of what held them up were pieces of code that handle how software with a single-core processor handles data. Oster says there would often be a lag as one process "waited" for another to finish, even though it didn't have to with our modern chips.
Of course, BioWare's lack of experience was something that surprised them as they dug through the code. Oster says it was amazing what problems they solved back then.
"There were 70 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 minimum 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."
"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."
"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.
Images courtesy of Overhaul Games.
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