Gather Your Party

A timer’s been ticking down this week over at the official Baldur’s Gate website -and it’s finally run out, revealing a slew of new information about the upcoming Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition.

The new announcements include:

• The unveiling of The Black Pits – a new, six-hour long standalone adventure set in the Underdark
• Three new party members, the Calisite Monk Rasaad yn Bashir, the half-elf Wild Mage Neera and the half-orc Blackguard Dorn Il-Khan. Each come with their own story quests that add several hours of gameplay, taking your party into several newly-added areas.
• A new class kit, the Blackguard, a dark paladin.
• An enhanced interface that features all the improvements of Baldur’s Gate II’s engine, as well as support for high resolution and widescreen displays. All races and class kits from BGII will be available in BGEE.
• Improved source code that fixes over 400 issues from the original game.
• Old cinematics redone as hand painted animatics (think Witcher 2).
• Improved multiplayer with support for matchmaking.

To be honest I haven’t been this excited for a game all year. These enhancements sound well worth the purchase. Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition is set to come out this Summer, so expect it sometime soon. In the mean time, I think it’s about time for another playthrough of the original…

UPDATE: A few more bits of info have been coming out of Trent Oster’s twitter feed:

• All new adventures and party members come packaged with the PC/Mac versions of the game. It will be $20.
• The iPad version comes with Black Pits and Rasaad, while Dorn and Neera will be in-app purchases. The game itself will be cheaper but with DLC will cost the same $20.
• The game will launch exclusively for Beamdog’s service. You won’t have to run any sort of official client to play the game.
• Negotiations for a boxed release are currently stalled.
• Cross-platform multiplayer is confirmed. Cross-platform saves are part of the long term plan.
• Android support confirmed, and mention of the Tegra 3 chip has been made. Ouya port in the works?
• Ideally existing mods for Baldur’s Gate will be compatible with Enhanced Edition. Developers are working directly with the mod makers in some cases to make this happen.