BioWare Four Million Member Content

[GameBanshee News]

Embedded within BioWare's four million member press release is a link to five new features, including a 10-year retrospective article on Baldur's Gate, details for a new "Minion" contest, an "Aribeth's Farewell" Neverwinter Nights wallpaper, and more. Here's what Steve Gilmour, principal lead animator on Baldur's Gate, had to say about the game ten years later:

"Ten years ago there was a small group of young, inexperienced game developers trying to build what was then an extremely ambitious PC RPG, into a market that said the PC RPG market was dead. We were too dumb to know better.

3D animation was very new in Canada, so when you had problems, there was no one to ask. We just looked at each other and cried. Characters were 57 pixels high, animations were tiny, really no more than a few key poses. The most daunting thing was taking all the 3D animations and rendering them off in 8 directions. Oh yes, the characters were sprites. That means each cycle was rendered as a sequential strip of frames onto a contact sheet, in all 8 directions. Then we had go into these massive contact sheets and pick each correct action, for each direction, and give it a very specific name. Human error was bountiful, and I aged horribly. The cinematics were so very crude, but I remember being proud of the volume of work we covered. My favorite is of a body floating in water after the mines flood. It just made me happy that we could even come close to simulating water. Small things make you happy in this business.

I have played through every iteration of the BG series at least 3 times. To this day, despite the visual aging of the work, it still has a sort of magic for me, and it reminds me that a group of people, set on extremely lofty goals, can accomplish amazing things."