Baldur's Gate 2: EE for iPad aiming for 2013, iPhone version possible
The Red Bull blog put together an interview with BioWare co-founder and Beamdog exec Trent Oster, the man behind the upcoming revamp of Baldur's Gate for the iPad, and there are a few salient pieces of news there in the chat. The first is that while the Baldur's Gate remake is coming later on this month, Oster's team is also looking to redo Baldur's Gate 2 in the same way, and that version might be out as soon as next year.
The original PC version of Baldur's Gate, released in 1998, was almost universally praised and helped to revitalize the RPG market; it was also the first RPG based on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition ruleset. (Windows gamers can get Baldur's Gate plus eight other AD&D-centric RPGs from GOG.com; if you've tried any of these titles running virtualized in Parallels or VMware Fusion, let us know.) Both the original title and Baldur's Gate 2 draw from AD&D's Forgotten Realms campaign setting.
"We are committed to doing Baldur's Gate 2: Enhanced Edition," says Oster. Though he also says that he and the rest of his group could use a break, so it is currently targeted "before the end of summer" in 2013, so you'll have lots of time to play the first game until then.
Additionally, Oster says that the team behind the game does have it running on the iPhone, though some more work would be needed to tweak the interface for Apple's smaller screen. So we may eventually see BioWare's legendary Forgotten Realms RPG on all of Apple's iOS platforms. After that, Oster even suggests he might go ahead and lead the way on into Baldur's Gate 3.
But all of that is just speculation at this point: We'll first have to see how the revamped Baldur's Gate does on Apple's platform. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that with the $9.99 price tag and the decidedly retro feel of the game, this one could have a hard time finding an audience outside of the old-school PC RPG fans. But we'll see -- if this revamp of Baldur's Gate takes off, it sounds like the sky's the limit for Trent Oster and Beamdog with this franchise.
