PAX West Panel and August 31 Livestream Recap

Trent, Alyssa, John and Sarah were joined by Holly Conrad and Jared Knabenbauer for our PAX West panel!

During a special announcement panel at PAX West on September, 1 Beamdog CEO Trent Oster, Art Director Alyssa Duguay, Community Manager Sarah Dawson and Wizards of the Coast, Senior Producer, Digital Licensing John Feil talked about the history of Beamdog and Neverwinter Nights, and showed footage of NWN:EE on mobile. Special guests Holly Conrad and Jared Knabenbauer announced the Dice, Camera, Action! Portrait & Voice pack DLC for the Beamdog Enhanced Edition Family of games.

A day earlier, Beamdog Producer Luke Rideout and QA lead on Infinity Engine games Kristin Warren shared the latest gaming updates and plans for the Enhanced Editions.

Missed the streams? Check out the Twitch video from our Panel (starts at 03:03:10)! Watch the August 31 Livestream here (sorry about the sound quality, we’ll make sure to fix audio-related issues this week)! Below is a quick summary of the highlights:

• The Dice, Camera, Action! voice and portrait pack DLC is coming to the Beamdog Enhanced Edition Family of games later this year! Waffle Crew cast members Holly Conrad, Jared Knabenbauer, Anna Prosser Robinson, and Nathan Sharp are recording player character voice-over for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition and Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. Portraits and voices of Strix, Diath Woodrow, Paultin Seppa, Evelyn Marthain, and a special portrait for DM Chris Perkins will be available as DLC on Steam, Beamdog, GOG, Google Play, and App Store.

• If you’re local to Edmonton, we’ll see you at Edmonton Expo (September, 21 - 23)!
• We’re hiring! If you’re a programmer, technical artist, web developer, or human resources generalist - apply!
• We’ve seen requests to update Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition to the 2.5.17 build (to make the version in line with other games), and are working on it.
• The 2.5 builds for Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur’s Gate II: Enhanced Edition, and Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition for the Mac App Store are with QA.
• A colossal amount of work has been put into the 2.5 patches, but we’re interested in making continued improvements for our Infinity Engine games. If you run into bugs, please use the public bug tracker - we have people checking them on a daily basis.

• We’re sorting out last steps on Rich Presence support for the Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition GOG build. It’ll let players click and join friends, render your friends list in the in-game view, and get information about what server they’re playing on. We also need to make a change to our builds to deploy multi-language on GOG, since they support custom per-language installers.
• We’re working on a variety of visual improvements for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. We’re cautious about how we’ll be implementing new models into the game, considering old machines and mobile devices.
• During our PAX West panel we showed footage of Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition on Android (it’s still Work in Progress). A lot of work is being put into UI and supporting different aspect ratios.

• We’re actively looking into improving the maximum number of bones per skinmesh. Some progress has been made, but we don’t have any specific ETA for this feature.
• If you’re interested in seeing scripting functions that add DoMeleeAttack / DoRangedAttack functions, share your suggestions about how you want them implemented on our forums.
• We’ll be bringing people from the community to talk to during our livestreams. Stay tuned!

Excited for what’s next? Have questions about the Dice, Camera, Action! voice and portrait pack DLC and NWN:EE on mobile? Come and join the next livestream this Friday!