Development
The game was first announced by Titus Software in early November, 2000 following the cancellation of the Sega Dreamcast port of the original Baldur's Gate. The game was featured at the Electronic Entertainment Expo where it gained critical acclaim and was was released in December, 2001.
While the GBA version used its own graphics engine, the console versions used a graphically superior one; the Dark Alliance Engine, which was built specifically for the game, and would go to become the foundation for other games on the PS2, such as Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel and The Bard's Tale. Graphically, the Dark Alliance engine is a drastic improvement over the Baldur's Gate series that debuted on the PC in 1998, which utilized the Infinity Engine. Earlier versions were only able to render 2D sprite characters and static environments. The Dark Alliance engine, on the other hand, made use of Sony's PS2 platform, allowing for such improvements as dynamic lighting, real-time shadowing and 3D models of characters and environments. The graphics, in particular, were considered a highlight of the game by many critics.
Read more about this topic: Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Dissonance between family and school, therefore, is not only inevitable in a changing society; it also helps to make children more malleable and responsive to a changing world. By the same token, one could say that absolute homogeneity between family and school would reflect a static, authoritarian society and discourage creative, adaptive development in children.”
—Sara Lawrence Lightfoot (20th century)
“The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)