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'Baldur's Gate III' is real and it'll be on Google Stadia
Amid its wave of announcements for Stadia, Google confirmed several new games will be available on the platform. Darksiders Genesis emerged a few hours before Stadia Connect got underway, and there are some other notable upcoming titles too: Baldur's Gate III and Gylt.
A bunch of BioWare classics are coming to console this year
Game developers and publishers Skybound Games and Beamdog announced today that they will be working together to bring a collection of classic PC roleplaying games to consoles. The companies will be breathing new life into a number of titles set in the Dungeons and Dragons universe.
'Baldur's Gate' designer James Ohlen leaves BioWare after 22 years
James Ohlen might not be a household name, but if you love video games, you might have played some of the titles he helped create. He became a full-time designer to work on the original Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II back in the '90s, and he has since worked as lead designer and creative director for various projects, including Star Wars: The Old Republic and Knights of the Old Republic. Now, the industry veteran has announced that he's leaving BioWare after 22 years of working for the company. In fact, he's taking a break from video games altogether to embark on "something smaller and more personal" -- a publishing company focused on creating Dungeons & Dragons adventures, in particular.
BioWare writer David Gaider to helm 'Baldur's Gate' series
When longtime BioWare writer David Gaider announced his departure from the studio, many wondered where he would end up next. The answer shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. He's joining Beamdog, a game developer and distributor best known for the "enhanced" remakes of Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II. That's notable because Gaider started his career at BioWare working on Baldur's Gate II, before moving on to larger writing roles with Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and, most famously, the ongoing Dragon Age franchise.
Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition returns to the App Store
Gaming classic Baldur's Gate has returned to the App Store after being pulled due to a legal dispute a few months ago. Last December, gaming company Beamdog brought the '90s classic to the iPad, but just six months later, it was forced remove the game by publisher Atari on vague "contractual matter" grounds. But an email yesterday from Beamdog CEO Trent Oster posted on Reddit announced a resolution to those contractual issues: Dear Friends of Baldur's Gate, We're back! Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition is available for sale once again. All outstanding issues with our publishing partner have been resolved. We'll announce the details of an upcoming major Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition patch and the Android tablet version in the near future. We'll also have some exciting news regarding Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition soon after. We want to thank our fans for the outpouring of support we received during this difficult time. Legal issues are never fun. We're glad we can once again focus on what matters - makin' videogames! Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition costs US$9.99 on the App Store. [via JoyStiq]
Baldur's Gate pulled from the App Store
Dungeons and Dragons fans may be dismayed to hear that Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition was removed from the App Store yesterday. Peter Cohen of iMore reported that Overhaul Games pulled Baldur's Gate due to some contractual issues that need to be resolved. If you previously purchased the game, you can still download and play it though. An available patch to Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition cannot be released to users until the resolution of the legal issues. Trent Oster, President of Beamdog and Overhaul Games posted an apology to users and assures us that once the situation is remedied, the game will be reposted.
Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition now out on OS X
In case you missed the announcement last week, the Enhanced Edition of the classic RPG Baldur's Gate (that previously came to the iPad) is now available on Mac OS X. You can pick it up directly from Beamdog's website for US$19.99 right now, and we're told it's incoming to the Mac App Store very soon (probably as soon as Apple approves it). This version of Bioware's classic title includes a new adventure to play, three new characters to play with and a number of other technical enhancements, including new character paintings, and support for high-resolution displays. In other words, if you're a Baldur's Gate fan and have been thinking about playing through the title again, this is the way to go for sure. On the iPad, I had a few reservations about this one, mostly that the control scheme tended to lean a little too far to the old-school for it to really work well. But of course on the Mac, that's not an issue, as this game was originally made for a mouse and keyboard. The graphics, though updated, won't stand a chance against modern RPGs like Skyrim and The Witcher, but the story is such a classic one, and Baldur's Gate pioneered Bioware's storytelling and gameplay techniques later seen in games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Baldur's Gate is a valuable piece of RPG history, and it's great to have this excellent edition of it available now on the Mac.
Baldur's Gate Enhanced for iPad is now available
After months of waiting, (we first heard about this one back in March), the Enhanced Edition of Bioware's classic D&D RPG Baldur's Gate has arrived on the iPad. This is the full version of the old party-based game, with more than 80 hours of story-driven gameplay to go through, tons of characters and settings, plus some new characters and content. The entire PC game has been adapted for the touchscreen, and while the graphics are still very old school (2D! Isometric!), the game's just how you'll remember it. I think Baldur's Gate is a great game, but there are definitely better-looking titles on the App Store these days, and more user-friendly RPGs. That said, however, this is a classic, and if you've never played through it, now's your chance. The game is available for US$9.99 in iTunes.
A trio of trailers: Vectrex Regeneration, Baldur's Gate Enhanced and Poker Knight
Well, it happened -- Thanksgiving was last week, Cyber Monday is today and from here on out, we are neck deep in the holiday season. This time of year is particularly busy on the App Store, as various game developers try to get their best products out during the holiday rush, taking advantage of all of those game-hungry users with brand new iDevices. To that end, we've got not one, not two, but three great trailers for upcoming iOS games that we've been waiting for, all ready for you to watch below. Vectrex Regeneration is first -- this is not just a game, but a complete emulator for the old Vectrex video game console. The app includes more than a few old titles (available for in-app purchase, with likely a few freebies to get you interested), and will be out on the App Store later this week. Next up is a new trailer for that Enhanced Edition of Baldur's Gate that we've been expecting on iOS for a while now. As you can see in the video below, this game will be a very faithful (perhaps too faithful?) recreation of the old Baldur's Gate title, except of course that it'll be running on your iPad instead of a computer. Old-school fans will probably love this one, but we'll have to wait and see if it can grab a new audience later on this month. And finally, I haven't heard of Poker Knight until now, but it's piqued my interest big time with the trailer below. The idea looks like a poker game mixed with some fantasy RPG elements, and there's nothing I like better than a genre-crossing puzzle/RPG concoction like that. Poker Knight is due out some time this month as well, so we'll look for it soon. All three of these look great, and they're just a small sampling of what we're in for from the App Store this coming holiday season.
Baldur's Gate coming to iPad
An enhanced edition of Baldur's Gate was announced this month by developers Overhaul Games (which includes a few devs from Bioware that worked on the title originally), and now there's even better news: That enhanced version is also making its way to the iPad. The game will be out on Apple's tablet at the same time as the PC release, and it will include all of the updates and new content as the other platform. Additionally, there will be iPad-specific controls, such as pinching to zoom in and out and dragging to choose units to control. While they're not done yet, Overhaul says there will be more touch-friendly menus and buttons in the interface as well. Which is just awesome, if you ask me or any other old-school gamer with fond memories of the Baldur's Gate series. We'll obviously keep both eyes out for this one. The game is due out sometime later on this summer.
The year role-playing games broke
This is a weekly column focusing on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. The most important year in western role-playing history was also its worst. The late 1980s and early 1990s were an obvious Golden Age, as RPGs were the drivers of innovations in graphics, interface, complexity, and narrative in Wizardry, Ultima, and the Gold Box series. That came to a screeching halt in 1995, when the once wildly popular genre suddenly became devoid of games.The genre was rebuilt after 1995, but it looked very different. The companies and franchises which had dominated withered away, replaced by the ones we know now: Fallout, BioWare, and Blizzard. All these started shortly after 1995, and the only residual series from before, The Elder Scrolls, squeaks in with its first installment in 1994. So what changed, and why did it change?The chief contributing factor was the rise of the compact disc for storage. Games comprised of a dozen ungainly 1.5 megabyte floppies were growing more and more common, so the CD, with 500 megabytes, was a godsend (or so it seemed). All the other technological advances: better sound and music, voice-over, 3-D polygonal graphics, full-motion video, etc, could be used with CDs. This made games bigger -- but it also made budgets bigger, teams bigger, and development times much longer. Role-playing games and their developers struggled to adapt.
