Black Isle Studios Board Update

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Here are some recent comments from the Black Isle Studios message boards.

Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal

Feargus Urquhart, Director – Black Isle Studios:

On Choosing a name: There was a lot of debate about what to call BG2. In the end Ray and I thought that having it be the second of a series, especially since the overall story does continue, was better for selling product. Which is a good thing, because it lets us continue making games. We also felt that it wouldn't really bother the fans too much.

But, there was plenty of conversations that started off "Calling it number 2 is dumb, because Baldur's Gate isn't even in it. Curse of the Azure Bonds wasn't called Pool of Radiance II" followed by "Yeah, but Ultima 4 wasn't called Learn to be the Avatar". The conversations pretty much degenerated farther from there.

On the developer-publisher relationship: Actually the line between developer and publisher can sometimes be a little blurry. As an example, on the Baldur's Gate series with Bioware, Bioware developed all of the content for the game - programming, art, design. However, Black Isle QA'd (Bioware had some of their own QA staff for BG2), managed the Audio, Music, and Voice Recording, and worked with them on early design of the projects.

It all really depends on the relationship between the developer and the publisher, and what publisher it is. Since Interplay has a large internal staff of developers with Black Isle, Digital Mayhem, and Shiny - we tend to help out more on projects. I would never say that we are the developers of products like Baldur's Gate or Neverwinter, but sometimes we do things for the developer that can be considered development related.

I'm sure the next question would be - so is Black Isle actually a developer? And yep, we are also a developer. Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Torment, and Icewind Dale were internally developed by Black Isle. We created all of the art, design, programming (outside of using the Bioware Infinity Engine), and managed audio and QA.

On new technology and Black Isle’s games: Our big goal has always been to continue making games that our fans enjoy. The one thing we do need to do as time goes on though, is to update the engines and bring in the technology that makes sense. With TORN we actually went out and licensed an engine, so that we would not have to develop everything from scratch the first time we made a 3D game. A lot of the reason to do this was that we know that content (design, art, etc..) is what drives Black Isle games, not technology. So, if we license the technology, we can then focus a much larger percentage of our time on the content.

However, having said that, it is important for us to stay within a year or so of the hottest technology, so that our games don't seem dated. A more extreme example of this is that it is very hard for me to go back and play the original Wasteland eventhough I loved it when I was playing it 12 or 13 years ago. Like I said, that is an extreme example, but it shows in some ways why we have to move away from older engines and graphic styles that we have stayed with for a number of years. If we don't evolve from time to time then we're going to get ourselves in trouble.

Dave Gaider, Senior Designer:

On bugs and support: Yeah, but it'd be nice if we could have devoted more time as a developer to fixing the bugs. We found about 10,000 or so, but there's still going to be all the niggly little details.

Nice to have fans like you who do this work, though. While I expect that the upcoming patch with ToB will be pretty comprehensive, even that I imagine will still be missing some things. Don't know what that says about our industry and I'm not about to touch on the subject, myself...but I can understand how players would expect that out of us (and hence Del's grade).

Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter

Steve Bokkes, Designer:

Bag of holding: I'll see what I can do about getting the Bag of Holding into the Dungeon Pack.

Ambient sounds in Burial Island: Believe it or not, we trimmed down the ambient sounds for the Burial Isle significantly. Each ambient had its radius reduced multiple times over the course of the area's development, and nearly half of them were eliminated all together. In the end, the Burial Isle ended up having less ambient sounds than most of the other 6X6 (large) maps. Go figure.

J. E. Sawyer, Designer:

War Chant of Sith: I asked at least a dozen testers in QA, as well as several other designers, what they thought about the War Chant of Sith. They said that it was powerful, but not overly powerful. 2 HP/round = 20 HP/minute. For a fighter with 80 HP to heal, that's four minutes of solid singing. The testers said that they often still used their clerical healing spells just because the War Chant of Sith required a significant amount of time to get the tanks back up to full HP. War Chant of Sith vs. Heal... well, there really is no comparison there. One is useful for regenerating HP for the whole party, and the other is useful for instantly raising a character to 1-4 HP below max. When testing begins on the downloadable expansion, I'll try to observe how much they use it, rather than trying to draw opinions out of them.

Shield of Lathander was reduced to a two-round duration for the patch. Perhaps it and Greater Shield will undergo further revisions during the downloadable expansion's testing cycle.

Axes: If there is any weapon in IWD that gets an undue amount of attention, it must be axes. Having the axe proficiency allows you to use:

* Battle Axes
* 2-H Axes
* Throwing Axes

That allows for a lot of versatility. There are also a lot of axes in the game: The Celebrant's Blade, the Axe of Caged Souls, the Throwing Axe +2, Lonesome Road, Faith Killer, Young Rage.

Contact Other Plane: You can use Contact Other Plane to answer questions in every chapter of the original IWD and the expansion, including the Prologue. The same goes for the ranger's tracking ability.

Old areas modified in HoW: Many (75-80%) of the areas in the original IWD were edited in the following ways:

* Random treasure tables were modified.
* The number of creatures scale to the level of difficulty. When the difficulty is set to Easiest, you don't have to fight as many monsters. When the difficulty is set to Hard to Insane, the number of monsters increases dramatically.
* "Boss battles" often have additional support. For instance, Presio has an apprentice and a warrior bodyguard on Hard difficulty. Maiden Ilmadia has two drow priest-mages with her in Lower Dorn's Deep. Malavon has... you get the idea.