The internet was aflutter last week when a countdown timer appeared on the Baldursgate.com website. The timer expired early yesterday, and revealed that the first two Baldur’s Gate games would be getting HD remakes by a developer called Beamdog, which consists of many of the original staff that worked on the original games at BioWare.

Perhaps the best news for any fan of the series, is that Beamdog are using the remakes to test the waters for a long-awaited third game in the series. According to the report on Tom’s Hardware, the company will focus on getting the HD remakes of the first two games out before starting on a third game, and they may follow in the footsteps of Tim Schafer by using Kickstarter to fund the third game.

There was a Baldur’s Gate III in development in the early 2000s (there’s even a Wikipedia article about it), however it was cancelled and the game engine technology was moved to “Van Buren”, the original Fallout 3 project, which was also cancelled. It’s not known if this new game will pick up the story threads from the cancelled game or will go in an entirely new direction.