Beamdog Impressions and Interview – PAX East 2019

While at PAX East this year I got the chance to play a quick demo of Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition on Switch to see how it controls. I then got a chance to sit down for a quick talk with Beamdog’s CEO, Trent Oster about the past and future of the company. You can find the interview below.

Interview with Trent Oster:

The demo let me control an over-powered party of characters in a few different areas of the game to get a feel for how it, and the other Infinity Engine titles, will control on console. Outside of combat, players can move their party with the control stick, while objects and characters the player can interact with will be highlighted as they pass them. Characters can be controlled individually by cycling through them with two shoulder buttons, and selecting all again is done simply by pressing both shoulder buttons. Once combat commences, the game will pause, and the player can give individual characters orders, or the whole party orders before unpausing. Actions can be selected from the bottom action bar with a quick button press and then using the d-pad to select weapons, spells, scrolls, etc. If players wish for a more traditional experience, a simple press will switch to the control stick being used just to move a mouse cursor, and everything else will control as close to the PC original as possible. The controls took a little bit to get used to, but on the whole it was a smooth experience.