Nothing about mmorpgs, I just wanted to dream about something that I know will never happen. You’ll have to let me wish impossible things.

Put together a small/medium sized team, but with all the key roles covered (artists, programmers, writers, designers etc..), take the 2D Infinity Engine and give it another round of polish, make sure it is up to date and compatible with the latest hardware, add support for a couple of new features and nifty effects, then take the whole pack (the original Baldur’s Gate + expansion and BG2 + expansion) and work to streamline and unify it into a single, seamless game, add to the mix David Gaider’s Ascension (here), Tactics Mod and Baldurdash fixes (odd coincidence: Kevin Dorner seems still alive and updated his site just yesterday after a LONG time with the release of the “unofficial” Oblivion patch), add an handful of new monsters, revise and enhance all AI scripts, polish the whole content throughout the two games and expansions, making sure the flow is good, add some new rooms and locations here and there, some new dialogues, fun bits, some spice, a few new items, and a brand new charismatic NPC with related side-stories and content, to fit with the whole storyline, from BG1 to the very end.

Then let this team work full time on this project for about a year, a year and half and then repackage the whole thing as a remastered edition to be sold for $30-$40.

I wonder if it would be possible even if they wanted to, since the rights of those games may be spread between Interplay, Bioware, Black Isle, Atari and WoTC. I guess it isn’t so simple as I imagine.

And yeah, I know that various mod teams have already tried to hack something like this together in a playable state, but it just cannot be compared with something done by a professional team working full time on it.

The point here is that I bet it would be a HUGE commercial success with a very good cost/profit ratio. It could be a very interesting experiment and I truly believe that it would outplay most of recently released games.

Note: While digging the recent developments of the mod community I found out that there has been a significant progress. It looks like what I pictured is now possible and is supposed to work well enough. Project’s name is Baldur’s Gate Trilogy or BGT in short (forum here). Since BGT is now WeiDU-based I guess it can be easily integrated with Ascension. There’s also another named BP+BGT which not only unifies the two BG and expansions, but also incorporates all the major community mods that were completed along these years. The installation process is looking crazier that the “Falcon 4 dance” and I suppose you cannot expect the same quality of Bioware in the art assets and content, but it’s still quite amazing what these communities have accomplished.

Again, game companies should take notes.