“For us, enhancing Baldur’s Gate meant trying to recreate the game everyone remembers — not necessarily the game as it was,” Tofer explains of the remastering process. “Baldur’s Gate was a fantastic game for its time, but it was limited by the hardware of the day. We had to rewrite something like 300,000 lines of code to get it running on modern systems. We modernized the user interface, removed all the loading screens, and polished out tens of thousands of bugs, though not all of them — over the years some glitches become canon, so we decided to leave in a few of the fan favorites.”

While most of Beamdog’s projects have been enhanced editions of classic games, Beamdog did release a new Baldur’s Gate expansion in 2016 called Siege of the Dragonspear. While the reception to the game was largely positive, there were some mixed reactions toward some of the choices the studio made. Cameron Tofer says the team walked away from that game having learned some important lessons.

“What did we learn? Expectations. People want more of kind of the same. It’s hard to describe. It’s like I want more and I want different. Yeah. So it’s just like, don’t give me the same stuff, don’t give me different stuff…The familiarity is so important. You play Baldur’s Gate, you loved it, and then you think about coming back, it’s like what was there?”

As Tofer notes, though, the long-lasting appeal of the Baldur’s Gate franchise and the excitement surrounding Baldur’s Gate III is at least partially tied into the series’ legacy for compelling narratives and player agency. So far as that goes, Tofer recognizes the struggles of creating a modern take on Baldur’s Gate‘s greatest ideas in an age where most dialogue is expected to be voice acted and not just written.

“I think that’s been the struggle for quite a while. I think that’s what’s going to change. It’s been a massive struggle for, I don’t know, the last 10 years. Like not just voicing all the texts but localizing all the texts into different languages. It’s a crazy, huge burden. But I think in the future there’s going to be some sort of breakthrough that’s just gonna make that incredibly easy.”