Black Isle Studios Board Update

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Yet another update from the Black Isle Studios message boards. Dave Gaider has LOTS to say, so check this one out carefully.

Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal

David Gaider, Senior Designer:

Helms for thieves and mages: All of the Ioun stones from BG2 as well as the new ones are opened to all classes, now. Plus there are a couple of other items of headgear for thieves that I can think of off the top of my head (no pun intended)...all of these protect against critical hits as per a normal helm and some of them have AC bonuses as part of their effect.

Pointy hats: Elminster is the only mage who is allowed to have a pointy hat in the BG series. He has a copyright, I understand (or does he have Gandalf's copyright? I can never remember.)

+6 Spear: The spear in question is an assembled artifact and it is, indeed, +6. Enchantments only go up to 5, however...and, no, nothing in the game would require a 6 enchantment level (that would be silly).

Imoen having Bhaal abilities: Interesting you should say that. The Bhaal essence seems to affect many Bhaalspawn in different ways...now that it's starting to emerge in Imoen, I wonder how it would affect her?

More portraits: That'd be nice, if the art department has the time. We shall see.

Making the final battle harder with the expansion installed: Not a bad idea. The end battle for BG was altered with TotSC, after all. But ToB is such a huge project...bigger in and of itself than many normal games...that I think the focus is on new content.

Having an “uber-end-boss” with very a large amount of hit points and low immunities: Same reasoning as above. Immunities exist in D, but there are upper limits to HP even for godly beings. And besides...immunities and resistances, especially those that can be countered, call on using different tactics for different enemies. That's part of the point, especially at this power level. Having enemies that are purely to be whacked-upon and that have no particular resistances or anything is much easier when the player is lower level and doing much less damage.

Well, the 'end boss' or whatever is bound to be tough...you can be assured of that.

Giving dragons more hit points: We try to stick to the D schematic as closely as we can. Making a dragon, or anyone, have a gazillion HP (as you put it) isn't really the point. Sarevok in Hell had something like 500 HP...fortunately there was a reason behind that, as you 'created' him there, but it's still incredibly unrealistic and didn't really make him last all that much longer besides.

For dragons, we don't intend on giving them more HP...we intend on making them smarter so they react better and use their abilities/magic better.

As far as more dragon scale armor, it's a possibility.

For our part, we're developing some better AI for our enemies (including dragons)...and now that we're aware of some of these questionable tactics, we can anticipate them.

Mage types becoming a Lich: An interesting side quest possibly, involving an NPC or something, as the process of becoming a lich has story potential...but not something I'd implement for your main character. It would become unplayable at that point.

Naming familiars having them progress: I think this is a good idea. Thing is, familiars weren't anticipated for with the original engine...and they were much much harder to implement than anyone had thought. Gosh, there was a point where familiars almost got cut out simply because there were so many problems with them.

And familiars do advance in ToB...all familiars will be stronger, now, and most will have better or new abilities. It might have been cool to build this kind of advancement into the familiars right from the start...but then again it IS only a level 1 spell and familiars are not supposed to be uber powerful in any respect. But yeah...if there had been a way to name them at the very least, that would have been cool.

Jaheira romance bug: The 'dialog loop bug' in Jaheira's romance will be fixed in the patch. I'm pretty sure that you can get a patch that works for it right now at the Baldurdash site.

As for the romances continuing, there is a point in each romance where the romance becomes 'committed' and the global involved is set to 2. This occurs about halfway to three-quarters of the way through each romance.

For Jaheira, this actually doesn't happen until near the end. So for her romance, we just set a requirement that the romance be about half-way done...we set it a couple of dialogues before the 'loop bug' so those people who encounter that can still have the romance continue in ToB as if they had finished it in BG2.

For everyone besides Jaheira, the romance global has to have reached 2.

Enhancing the original strongholds: None of the BG2 strongholds are going to be touched in the expansion...very little from BG2, itself, is going to be changed excepting only various bugs and some new programming. Aside from that, while I know everyone would love to have ultra-complex strongholds, the main holdback is that all this complicated and lengthy stuff that goes into one class's stronghold is seen by only 1/8th of the players. That's a LOT of content that 7/8ths of the player base will never see (unless they replay, which is not everyone), so the more complex you make it, the shorter the individual game is going to have to be. BG2 was a monster, length-wise, overall.

James Ohlen, the head of our design department, had some good thoughts which summed up how we would do strongholds now if we had the chance again (hindsight is 20/20, after all)...I'm not sure where his articles are located now that GA-RPG is shut down, but they sum up what just about everyone in the design department feels. In short, having less strongholds overall (like, say, three main ones...a keep for fighter-types, a tower for magic-users and an inn/tavern for just about everyone) would have allowed us to put more detail into their plots...and it would likely have been a good idea, overall, to tie in the strongholds with the overall game plotline and make in a more accessible 'hub'.

But, again, that's all hindsight at this point. As the strongholds were implemented in BG2 they were designed solely to be a few extra class-specific quests for each class and to get the character feel a bit more involved with the game world. They were far, far more difficult to set up than most players would suspect at first glance...and, sure, players are bound to have all these great ideas about how something should have been done (more closely according to their own tastes, generally), but it's not quite as easy as that. The strongholds did what they were intended to do, but I agree with what you say that some varied quests and more detail would have been preferable in the long run. That just wasn't possible with 8 separate quests...and, regardless, you'd still find people complaining that the quest wasn't suitable for their own particular vision of their character class. That's the way she goes.

In the limited space that we have in the expansion, though, absolutely everything has to be visible and accessible to all players. (Fortunately romances are mostly dialogue).

As for the items you created, they do seem cool for the most part. We have all the items we need, currently, including quite a few that came from fans' suggestions way back on the Interplay boards when we asked for them. But thanks for the suggestions, truly!

Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter

Steve Bokkes, Designer:

ETA for the free expansion pack: Our original target date was set for early to mid May. However, we've recently added a couple more huge levels, so I'd imagine that date will be pushed back a bit. I'll post more info when we have an official release date. As for the title, I'm currently working on that. I've narrowed the list down to about two dozen potentials. Hopefully, we'll make our final choice by next week. More details to follow.