Icewind Dale: EE - Interview @ RPGamer

RPGamer had the chance to interview Trent Oster of Overhaul Games about Icewind Dale: EE, and his future plans of what  the studio will work on next.

JS: I know there were some issues with lost source code and graphical assets for the Baldur's Gate games, was this the case as well for Icewind Dale?

TO: Once again, we started with only some code and assets. At this point we are starting to get used to it. As we moved into development, we managed to uncover some additional assets, but we still spent a great deal of time reconstructing, or simply recreating content. For the Heart of Winter expansion, we had no code for the new engine features, so we relied heavily on a few team members, with a lot of effort from Laszlo Toth (known as Avenger_teambg on the community), to help us reverse engineer the new features. With the user interface it was a complete re-paint. We were able to bring in a talented friend in the person of Lee Nielsen who re-built every single pixel in the Icewind Dale UI, and it looks great.

JS: Is the development cycle on Icewind Dale: EE going to be significantly shorter than the Baldur's Gate: EEs?

TO: We've been working on Icewind Dale for quite a while now. We kept it under wraps with the goal of announcing only a month or so before we were ready to ship. While we don't have a final ship date yet, as we want to ensure the quality before we release the game, we are in the late stages of testing with a current burn-down indicating a ship date later this month or early October.

JS: Do you plan to follow this up with Icewind Dale II: EE?

TO: If Icewind Dale is a brother or sister to the Baldur's Gate games in terms of code and gameplay differences, Icewind Dale II and Planescape: Torment are more like third cousins. You can see the lineage, but the changes are deep. At this point we haven't gone spelunking too deep into those changes, but we are aware of many differences which will drive up the effort to do our thing on those projects. We hope to do more spleunking once we finish up with the 1.3 Updates for Baldur's Gate: EE and Baldur's Gate II: EE and ship Icewind Dale: EE.

JS: We have discussed the potential of Baldur's Gate III in past interviews. Is it something that is still potentially on the table or being considered?

TO: We are still interested in Baldur's Gate III. As to what a Baldur's Gate III would be, wow, that is a terrifying premise. I think every Baldur's Gate fan has a different image in their head as to what it would be, and making all of those fans happy would be a monumental challenge. For now, we haven't started any work on a Baldur's Gate III, but we do discuss the concept on a pretty regular basis.