Interface
Although the interface of Baldur's Gate was very elegant, improvements are being made. First of all, it is now possible to hide the left, right and bottom panels of the interface, in any combination (see the screenshots section). This allows you to play with no visible interface to increase immersion in the game. While in full-screen mode, pressing the spacebar to pause will bring up the interface in its previous state. The new interface will be done in brownstone to compliment the Italian Renaissance look of Amn. The interface is not yet complete so the screenshots only provide a glimpse of what it will look like. A "Rest" button will be present on the main screen, instead of only on subscreens, and the "Guard" button has been moved. Pressing TAB while over a character will provide their current/max hit points while monsters will only show a qualitative description of how they are feeling such as "Heavily Wounded" or "Near Death". When paused, the TAB key brings up the current/max hit points for all characters on the screen. They plan to allow you to skip cutscenes using the ESC key. Almost all of the GUI buttons will be customizable.
The map screen will be similar to that of Baldur's Gate with a world map and area maps. The map will have some important areas maps and it will now be possible to annotate the area maps yourself. You click on a location, a dialogue box appears, and you can type whatever message you like. There is then a "flag" that marks that location on the map. You can either use the TAB key over the flag to retrieve your message, or double click the flag to open the dialogue box again. All the maps encompassing the city of Athkatla will be uncovered at the start of the game, unlike doing the city in Baldur's Gate. The world map features a blue and green watercolor instead of a parchment, however visited areas still appear on the map like in BG. The journal will also receive a major overhaul and is currently divided in the following sections: active quests, completed quests, critical path notes, and player annotations. Notes are ordered hierarchically under each quest.
Character creation and customization will remain essentially as in Baldur's Gate. More scripts, portraits and sounds will be provided to give more options for how you want your character to look and act. They plan to have twenty new portraits and all of those from BG1. Additional sounds are being added to each sound set to gain a response to an additional environment or to give more variety for a specific prompt, such as clicking on a character now has six instead of three responses. There's three battle cries, a 'critical hit' phrase, a 'my inventory is full' phrase and numerous others. There will be a greater selection of colours to use on your character's outfit. You will now be able to write a biography for your character instead of the default one, especially useful in multiplayer games. [Note, for the current screenshots, they are using a party from BG1, hence the familiar names and faces]
Inventory management will be improved and they may also change how ammunition, such as arrows, are stacked, although no changes for darts are expected. They are experimenting with ways of possibly replacing the unpausing that occurs when entering the inventory screen in the single-player game (which is meant to penalize people for changing armor). Gem bags and scroll cases have been added to improve inventory management. The scroll case will hold all letters, while the gem bag can hold small items under a certain weight like gems and rings. You will be able to take items in and out of these containers, except plot-specific items. All the paperdolls on the inventory screen have been redone and there are separate ones for gnomes and half-orcs now. Female gnomes, halflings and dwarves also have their own avatars and macquettes.
The inventory in stores will change slowly over time, getting better as you gain levels. Stores will not have many magic items in stock. Stores will continue to remain open twenty-four a day for gameplay reasons, although some NPCs (like Alora in BG), will only be found at certain times of the day.
Respawning has been modified to increase the variety of monsters that can be faced as well as its mechanics so that they can fine tune it more to a given situation. There are different sorts of spawn points which are now controlled by better scripting.
The quick spell interface has been modified so that spells do not disappear once cast; their counter is changed to 0.
A quick load key has been added. The quick slots at the bottom of the screen are now assigned to the function keys to speed up their use.
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