Our US chums speak to BioWare’s Cameron Tofer about the origins and legacy of Baldur’s Gate…
The reveal of Baldurs Gate III inspired a couple of popular reactions.
To others, it forced them to ask aloud with some trepidation What isBaldurs Gate?
It was just a lot of pure passion and soda pop and just shag carpets and basements.
It was just a passion that just went straight from around the table into making a game.
Can we use this and that?…Wed been working on them for years.
Trying to translate those possibilities to a digital experience created quite a few hurdles.
And then after that, it was just kind of, how do we map these different things?…
Because you cant do a direct translation, exactly, and Im not sure if youd want to.
At the time this choice was pretty revolutionary.
Though your character survives the attack, youre left with nowhere to turn and no place to call home.
Id argue thatBaldurs Gateis best known for its narrative design.
For me, that moment came shortly after we teased the site BaldursGate.com.
Baldurs Gatewas a fantastic game for its time, but it was limited by the hardware of the day.
We had to rewrite something like 300,000 lines of code to get it running on modern systems.
Cameron Tofer says the team walked away from that game having learned some important lessons.
What did we learn?
People want more of kind of the same.
Its hard to describe.
Its like I want more and I want different.
I think thats been the struggle for quite a while.
I think thats whats going to change.
Its been a massive struggle for, I dont know, the last 10 years.
Like not just voicing all the texts but localizing all the texts into different languages.
Its a crazy, huge burden.
Its a constant kind of back and forth between freedom of choice and a curated experience.
So I think both are great.
But honestly I feel the industry is hard-pressed to go that way.
Its actually turning the opposite.
Its actually more profitable to have the games go away and then make new ones, to be honest.
Its like planned obsolescence, if you will, and just games as a service and whatnot.
Its tough because it really makes economic sense to preserve everything.
So its gonna be a real challenge I think.
And its actually only accelerating.
