Last August, I wrote about a Baldur’s Gate 3 modder who had recreated Candlekeep, the library-fortress which serves as the starting point of the original Baldur’s Gate. Well, modder 786r786 is back with a full team and they’re remaking the entirety of Baldur’s Gate 1 as a custom BG3 campaign.

Dubbing themselves Deathbringer’s Reign, with 786r786 serving as project lead, the team have rebranded the Candlekeep recreation as the first demo for their Baldur’s Gate remake. They’re now working towards following it up with a second demo that’ll include locations like High Hedge, Beregost, the Friendly Arm Inn, and Shipwreck’s Coast. You’ll be able to run across the companions found in the classic versions of those areas, including Jaheira, Imoen, and Garrick.

786r786 tells me that the Baldur’s Gate community’s interest in their work has “just snowballed” since they released their Candlekeep recreation, which started out as “simple test” of what could be done with the unlocked version of Baldur’s Gate 3’s official modding tools. “I received a lot of requests from fans of the original games to turn it into a full campaign, along with offers from some incredibly talented modders who volunteered to help,” they continued. “Making an isolated custom campaign is actually a bit easier than making an extension to the base game; you don’t have to account for the incredibly vast amount of scenarios present in vanilla BG3, and you have full control over the player’s environment.”

The team aim to include everything from Baldur’s Gate’s Enhanced Edition in their remake. The sole exception is the Siege of Dragonspear expansion, which might arrive as a post-release update. The original game’s map will be split up into at least eight “different major zones”, with a chance of running into a random encounter when you hop over the borders between them. There’s also the metropolis-sized elephant in the room.

“Without a doubt, the most significant challenge will be translating the city of Baldur’s Gate itself into a fully 3D environment,” 786r786 tells me. “The sheer scale is daunting; the original game has over 100 interiors within the city, whereas BG3 features about 40 buildings in the Lower City. We have to figure out how to capture that content density while adjusting the layout to suit BG3’s modern gameplay and presentation.

“To solve this, we already plan to split the city into three different levels. This makes the workload much more manageable and ensures the final product won’t tank performance, since only one section will be loaded at a time. It also helps that Larian already created the majority of the art assets we need for the Lower City, and since it’s the final area of the game, we will be able to tackle it with all the experience we’ve gained developing the rest of the campaign.”

Naturally, that vast expanse’ll need to be filled with people to chat to. The modders plan to include the majority of the original game’s dialogue lines, but note that these might be “heavily tweaked or altered for better cinematic flow”. New additions are also planned to bring the remake closer to matching BG3’s array of chat options, such as lines specific to certain races and classes, as well as the ability to chat to the dead and animals. 786r786 says the team plan on eventually having every line be fully voice acted, but notes they will have to overcome a key hurdle when it comes to implementing their new lines.

“During BG3’s development, Larian used a proprietary program called FaceFX to automatically generate lip-syncing animations from audio files,” the modder explained. “Because that license is extremely expensive, we don’t have access to it, so we are currently exploring a few complex alternatives.

“The first option is manually reusing and mixing lip-syncing animations from the base game to try and match a character’s mouth to the new dialogue, but doing that for thousands of lines would be incredibly tedious and would have mixed results. The second is using a Blender effect component, but the resulting animation files are up to 75,000 times larger than FaceFX files, which would massively bloat the mod’s file size over thousands of different voicelines. Finally, there is a community-driven effort to build a Python script that translates audio phonemes into a FaceFX-style output. It is showing very promising progress, but it isn’t quite ready for a live project yet.”

While headaches like that’ll need to be solved, 786r786 tells me they can’t wait to get their teeth into recreating uber-tough dungeon Durlag’s Tower. “Not just because of the unique set pieces, creative traps, and sprawling level design, but because of the potential to expand upon the combat encounters,” they say. “We can take full advantage of Baldur’s Gate 3’s mechanics, such as enemies throwing objects, destroying the environment, and creating surfaces, to make those encounters feel entirely new and challenging.”

As of right now, the Deathbringer’s Reign team are looking for more volunteers as they work on their second demo. Anyone with experience using Baldur’s Gate 3’s unlocked toolkit is invited to head over to the group’s Discord server and apply to contribute, with level and combat designers, writers, concept artists, modelers, animators, and Osiris scripters all specifically sought after.