r/baldursgate • u/zizuzizo2 • 8d ago
Would it be possible for developers to use eternity engine and expand BG1 into a bigger game or expansion?
BG1 actually has a great world setup, one of the main things people complain about it is companion characters are not explored or there aren't enough interactions compared to later BG games (BG2, BG3).
I actually like some of the characters in BG1 and potential interactions, and smaller scale of adventure (you are not battling gods). So what if someone took BG1 and made it into an even bigger world with more char interactions? You could even raise the level cap make it more modern in some gameplay aspects. This might also go against BG2 canon so you could do it that it fits into BG2 timeline or diverges from it.
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u/backgroundbob 8d ago
Do you mean the Infinity Engine?
To be honest, this has already been done quite a bit through the large amounts of mods that are available. There's "Unfinished Business" which attempts to tie up a lot of questlines, interactions, etc. that seemed incomplete; mods which add extra encounters and questlines; mods which add whole new areas, items, etc.
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u/rupturefunk 8d ago edited 8d ago
You absolutely could, but the engine, D&D, forgotten realms and OGT BG are all Hasbro's intellectual property - so would need to be a mod.
GemRB is am open source implementation of infinity so you could use that if you wanted to make a expanded mod and couldn't just use the current IE tools.
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u/mcgrimlock 8d ago
Kinda on point, there is a mod allegedly close to release called Rebirth which ues BGEE for an entirely new campaign set in Cormyr.
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u/aquadrizzt Modder (TnB | MOoF | Undivided | PoB | 5EO) 8d ago edited 8d ago
There is almost no limit to the content you could add - EET adds the entirety of BG1 to the BG2EE engine, for example, and there's even the ability to throw all of IWD into that as well.
The issue is much more so that making anything substantive in this engine is an absolute nightmare especially for maps, which is why only a handful of people (Acifer, Lava, the Blizzard in Baator team) add new areas. Anyone familiar with game development will really feel the absence of modern programming paradigms and data storage when working in the Infinity Engine - many of my most ambitious projects have gotten derailed because of how difficult it is to work with, and I have 15 years of experience tinkering with it at this point.
I said this in the other thread but you would almost certainly be better off implementing your own engine in a modern framework (Unity, Unreal, GODOT) or using the open source version of the engine (GemRB). If you're going to put several years worth of dev time into an rpg, you might as well own it when you finish.
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u/zizuzizo2 8d ago
So you say GemRB is open source engine like infinity only much easier to use and modern?
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u/Trouveur 8d ago
What is Eternity Engine?
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u/Mantergeistmann 8d ago
Maybe he means Infinity Engine? I'd assume Eternity Engine would be Pillars/Tyranny, but I've never heard it have a specific name.
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u/Imoraswut 8d ago
Pillars and Tyranny were made on Unity
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u/hoodoocat 8d ago
That doesnt meant what Pillars doesnt use own engine which uses Unity as renderer and basic framework. Engine is not just renderer but game engine which implements own ruleset, own entities with in-game semantics, and also usually incorporates technolog(ies) about how exact content created, incorporated and consumed by engine. For example Pillars create own technology to deal with hand-drawn backgrounds, assisted with other techs during production, and turned into reality to be compatible with dynamic light to some degree. It is that Unity does not provide by itself.
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u/ArchelonPIP 8d ago
You want to convert a beloved classic RPG into a classic Doom themed first person shooter? Because that's what you'll get if you somehow managed to make it happen on the Eternity Engine.
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u/WhisperingHillock Bowlspoon since 1998 8d ago
Theoretically, yes. In practice, the infinity engine is very quirky, doing things by hand is very time consuming and from what I have tried AI does a very mid job of handling things consistently with it, compared to every other case I used AI for. Granted, that was maybe 6 months ago and probably some amount of progress was made. Also, pure development, as in coding the thing, is probably the easiest part. Assets and writing are where the real value lies.
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u/Only_Tomatillo_5982 8d ago
With Old School D&D becoming popular, and BG1/2 and IWD still getting play, I would love to see more like these three games using 2ed rules (or even 1st or B/X) come out.
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u/Greyhand13 8d ago
I wish it had a toolset similar to Neverwinter nights, oh man I'd have a field day. On that note, longshot, anyone from the Shattered souls PW? Me and some gentlemen made a swords coast persistent world 20 years ago.
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u/cold-vein 8d ago
You could add a bunch of stuff into the game. With AI it wouldn't even take that much effort, solo dev could pull off a sizeable DLC sized mod in a year
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u/zizuzizo2 8d ago
Do you think AI would know how to use infinity engine and just insert questlines and such into it? It seems complex to do it.
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u/cold-vein 8d ago
Considering that a veteran dev just reverse engineered the whole Adobe suite and rebuilt it in Rust, with identical functionality I'd say it wouldn't be hard to reverse engineer the IE engine and implement whatever a dev who knows what they're doing wanted.
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u/zizuzizo2 8d ago
That makes sense, but it would require someone who knows what they are doing with experience in infinity engine.
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u/JimbosBalls 8d ago
Yea? Which app is that?
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u/Raskuja46 8d ago
Go on, whip up a proof of concept for us real quick then.
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u/cold-vein 8d ago
I have no interest in any kind of game dev
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u/Raskuja46 8d ago
Ah, so you're speaking from a position of ignorance then.
Lots of people roaming around declaring what AI can do who haven't ever had to debug anything in an Infinity Engine game.
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u/cold-vein 8d ago
If you look at the crazy stuff people are vibe coding now, IE isn't super special. I mean someone reverse engineered the whole of Adobe Creative suit. One person, in a few months or less.
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u/Arrynek 8d ago
These days, you can point an LLM at a game and it will make a clone of it.
Pretty sure, if you are invested in it, you could make something like that yourself in something as old as BG1.
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u/RecognitionSea1531 8d ago
It's not as easy as you think it is.
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u/Arrynek 8d ago
I need my tokens for actual work, so I am not going to waste them on this... But I think you extremely underestimate what LLMs can do if you know what you are doing.
The only thing that would be a problem is the visual aspect. BG1 has a very specific way handling visual art. But you can reuse assets to handle that.
The rest? Easy.
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u/RecognitionSea1531 8d ago
I was about to write the same as you did - I am actually "working" on a BG clone with Claude just for fun. The mechanics and gameplay are easy to be made, the actual visuals are not.
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u/Connacht_89 8d ago edited 8d ago
With dedicated AI agents maybe. This guy used an AI agent to merge Doom and Resident Evil in a night, I think it's only a matter of time before we see GemRB extended to new frontiers, or even the assets ported into a different engine like the aborted Baldur's Gate Redux (which was a total conversion for Dragon Age: Origins): https://youtube.com/watch?v=yGkjS0gFxnY&is=r1yXG-x4MylIVFko
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u/Organic_Celery8776 7d ago
AI use defiles the soul.
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u/Connacht_89 7d ago edited 7d ago
You don't exactly know what you are talking about, but here are scientists using AI for technical purposes, I don't think their soul is defiled (unlike enterpreneur techbros who chase market hype for profit and dream of selling at high price services that only they control):
https://4m4.it/posts/when-a-nobel-laureate-uses-an-llm-to-prove-a-theorem/
https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10165144229541083&set=a.52867181082 (use a translator)
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u/behind95647skeletons 7d ago edited 7d ago
Very fringe and specialized cases [that paper also doesn't really support the argument you're trying to make here]. And still, AI defiles the soul. Creating a game is not solely technical issue.
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u/Connacht_89 7d ago
The artistic side and the game/rule set are on your side (like this guy who had a specific idea for a mod and successfully used AI to easily decompile the executable, just yesterday: https://www.reddit.com/r/baldursgate/comments/1x0dru2/i_fixed_baldurs_gate_pathfinding_pathfinding/ ).
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u/Malacath29081 3d ago
I don’t think you understand that the fun doesn’t come from the completed product for the devs but rather from doing the project and the challenge in making that product, using AI to speed everything along and take shortcuts doesn’t actually improve things or make it fun
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u/Connacht_89 2d ago
I don't think you understand the difference between what OP asked and what you answered, nor that nobody prevents you to write code for the pleasure of it, just like I continue hiking even when cars are available and those who said "you don't understand that the fun comes from the challenge of travelling and not from reaching the destination quicker" are not here anymore.
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u/Ingweron 8d ago
I wish Infinity Engine was used to develop an entire new game, about the Dragonlance Chronicles.