Black Isle Studios Board Update

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Here's a truckload of comments from the BIS message boards. Happy reading!

Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal

Dave Gaider, Senior Designer:

Updated Dragon AI: The thing about the dragon AI is that it's meant to close up some of the cheese-kills that people were using to fight him...and also make him a bit smarter.

You mention the dragon ignoring your fighters and trying to take care of the mage first. I'd say that's smart on the dragon's part. If he puts up a Protection vs. Magical Weapons that's all he can do is hope that will ward off the fighters...the real threat comes from the mage, after all, and the dragon would hope that the wing buffet will blow away any short-term melee problems.

And he ONLY gives the mage priority until he's dropped down below half his hit points...then he goes 'uh-oh' and tries to do something about the melee combatants.

If you got 4 tanks, though, chances are that you're dealing damage so fast that he doesn't have time to switch tactics. That's not bad AI...that's just uber-powerful melee ability. Even if the dragon tried to focus on your melee fighters, chances are he wouldn't be able to do it fast enough. And then people would be complaining because he's leaving the mage alone, and that would be dumb of him.

Besides...we realize that there are people of vastly different skills playing the game. There are always going to be people who come to the boards and go on and on about how easy ((some fights are)). Perhaps true, perhaps not. Regardless, there are ten times as many posts (look around) for people who are finding these fights a challenge. A battle should be winnable fairly easily if you put a little thought into tactics...that's on purpose. You're supposed to feel good about kicking some butt. We're not trying to make fights impossible except by only the most skilled players, after all. (yes yes yes...Chain Contingency...3 Abi Dalzim's...YAWN...BOR-ING).

Dragon names: Kevin comes up with those damn unpronounceable names and I hound him for it constantly. It's like the hint-book guy said: "Apparently, nothing says fantasy like the random insertion of an apostrophe into someone's name."

Pfooey.

Demogorgon: Demogorgon too easy?
Well, none of the fights were supposed to be so difficult you couldn't get by them. And with a lot of fighters, Demogorgon can be whittled down fairly quickly, it's true.

Tell ya what, though. We actually toned down the Demogorgon script prior to release. I think his old 'Summon the Infernal Horde' spell is still in there...I'd be happy to re-tweak the DG's script and send a copy to Kevin Dorner for all you freaks out there who like to thump your chest.

Yeah...what we found, for the most part, is that there was a certain level after which DG became quite easy. Before that, he was very very difficult for all but the most skilled of players (who could probably take him in SoA).

I don't mean to knock anyone. If you got him, great...he's supposed to be defeatable. There are lots of people out there who are having problems, though (just look at the posts). And he WAS tougher with the old script...we just toned it down because lots of people will think that killing DG is a must and would have gotten frustrated that way. I would rather make a fight too easy than too hard.

But if someone wants me to put together the old script, it's not that hard. And he IS defeatable, there, too...it's just...ummm...much tougher. As I recall, he casts an instant time stop...the majority of which is used to cast a spell called 'Summon the Infernal Host' which is 1 merilith, 2 cornugons, 1 balor and 1 high-level mage cambion. He also repeatedly summons cornugons afterwards and his first spell is a nasty Storm of Vengeance.

Heh. But anyways...

In retrospect, it seems the best way to make a creature tough to fight was to give them room to maneuver. Look at Draconis...he isn't meant to be all THAT tough, but because he's scripted to move around and make use of his space, he can be a big challenge to the unitiated. Abazigal is MUCH tougher, stat-wise, but he has almost no room to move. Makes a big difference.

Quasits: Invisibility at will is supposed to be a terrible thing. But unless you're desperate for the 1,500 XP or so for each of the quasits, there's no reason to kill them all.

But if you must, area-effect spells work wonders. No fire, though, as they're immune...but magic damage (like Death Fog, Abi Dalzim's, etc) works nicely, as they have only a 10% MR or something low like that.

Viconia, and epilogues: If Sarevok can find a poison that you can't cure normally, I'm sure Lolth can. I mean, hey, she's only an intermediate goddes, I know...

And why wasn't Khalid resurrected in a similar manner? I thought Jaheira explained this way back in the beginning of BG2. Viconia couldn't be resurrected because that's the way Lolth arranged it, probably.

There certainly wasn't room in the epilogues for us to go into great amounts of detail. And keep in mind that this is only what was publicly known. Maybe the PC did go to fight Lolth to reclaim Viconia from her. I could see it. Use your imagination a bit.

Well, whatever. If you want to quibble, that's up to you. Point is, the majority of the epilogues are simply what was publicly known about these great heroes.

This is our view of what happened to our characters. If you want to decide that something different actually happened, that Viconia wasn't actually poisoned or didn't actually die, then that's up to you. We certainly didn't have the space to write a novel about each character, after all.

I don't see what's so close-minded about it. We wrote the epilogues because people on the board demanded it.

True...maybe Viconia being poisoned is a bit hard to justify with relation to a fantasy world where death has little meaning when you can simply Raise Dead at the snap of a finger. I'm not going to argue that.

But the epilogues are about story, period...what happens to the characters way down the line. Or what appears to happen to them, anyway. You can scrutinize to your heart's content...all I'm saying is that the stories don't necessarily have to be true for what happened in your world. 'Canon' doesn't apply here, after all. The BG games aren't 'canon', if you want to be technical about it...and if you mean canon in terms of the BG universe, what could be canon when every person's game is completely different? In my experience, most people take what parts they like into their own games and leave the rest. You don't think Edwin's ending is justice? Hey, that Edwina thing was just a rumor...most likely he's a lich somewhere, and there you go.

If it bothers you somehow, though, that what was written at the end of the game wasn't what you liked...well, that's too bad. We can't please everyone, obviously.

Half-Orcs: The avatars are 3D sprites already, as far as I know. We've known about the weapon-hand switching for a long time, and while it's irritating (to us, at least), the amount of work it would take to fix isn't worth it (and by amount of time, I mean also the amount of time our relatively few animators would need to be drawn off of other projects to do this).

The half-orc looks like a human for the same reason he did all through BG2. Making avatars for the party characters is the most time-consuming process, even compared to making monsters. To save us a lot of time, gnomes get the dwarf avatar and half-orcs get the human one. It'd be nice (really nice) to get the extra animation time...but that's not the sort of thing we put into a patch. Patches are reserved for stuff that is broken, generally, and I doubt we'd draw the animators from other projects at this point to work on the avatars. Sorry to disappoint.

Ashamed? Pfft. I don't know about you people, sometimes.

Yes, it would have been nice if we had the time and the animators, but the alternative would have been to leave the half-orc out altogether. Making an avatar takes a lot more time than making a maquette (the inventory paper doll).

Avatars: Hmph. You should have seen it before the designers began squawking in indignation. The female elven mage, especially, originally looked like she was wearing a bikini with tassels.

Just like here, everyone at Bio had wildly different opinions about what looked good regarding the maquettes. The artists did the best they could...and for the most part did a good job, I think.

As for the monk avatar that someone mentioned...in order to implement the monk, we HAD to do an avatar. The fighter avatar wouldn't have done because the avatar needed hand-to-hand fighting animation. And that one was a bit easier, I understand, simply because the class can only be human and they have relatively few weapon & armor animations.

I really wanted a gnome avatar, myself, simply because that's one of the base AD&D races (half-orc being an extra). That would have meant sacrificing elsewhere, though, and we'd already cut out so much at that point. At least we got the paper doll, though.

The creature avatars aren't anywhere near as complex as the party character avatars. Many of them support only one weapon that, even if it's taken off the creature file, the animation still has it present. Some support maybe two weapons (1 ranged and 1 melee). None of them would have armor variations.

They were done like this on purpose. Far, far less time to create...and there's really no need for the variants like there are on the party character avatars. And even were we to try using the creature as a base and build onto it, it would still take as much time as starting over.

This is the reason we couldn't use the old Sarevok animation for him in ToB.

Valygar's Romance: There are certain sections in the game which were written before any of the romance dialogues in ToB themselves were added...the meeting with the Gorion wraith and the ending being two of them. Romance dialogue was written for both (although I think the dialogue in Valygar's own banter file has since been erased).

We really wanted to put it in, but a) we ran out of time and b) in the end, it just seemed like adding another romance into ToB would be too rushed, since we couldn't go back and add it into SoA.

I was pretty disappointed, personally, that it couldn't be done in the end...but that's what needed to be done. I'd like to write a Valygar romance someday, I think, given the tools and the opportunity.

Minsc dialogue: My favorite Minsc line in the game actually got cut...even though it was recorded and everything. It's absolutely hilarious. How did it go?

"Minsc and Boo shall stop your eeeevil from spreading like jelly across the cracker of the world!"

LOL! I love that line.

Cespenar: The actor that did his voice was Neil Grahn, he is a very cool guy. It was a lot of fun recording Cespenar because Neil comes from a stand-up background and his ad-libs were quite hilarious.

ToB Novel: Drew Karpyshyn, my fellow writer on Throne of Bhaal, got to pen the novel. I've read it...it's good stuff. Drew was a bit restricted because he had to continue the story and characters from the previous two novels, but he did a good job. For those people who have played the game, it's interesting too because it goes into some depth about what was going on behind the scenes a lot.

Mark Darrah, Lead Programmer:

Greater Restoration Spell: Greater Restoration was improved in TOB to effect the entire party. I'm not sure if this spell shipped. But even if it didn't it is posible that the temple version did.

Stalker Backstab Bug: This is the same as the assassin bug.
The actual problem was in BG2 but is only now being revealed. This will be addressed in the patch. Creating a new Stalker will not have this issue.

Kevin Martens, Lead Designer:

Demogorgon: I am the one who made the decision to not put treasure on him. There are three reasons why:

1) You need the best stuff to kill him. For most players (hardcore power gamers are an exception) he'll have to be killed very close to the end of the game. Most people just plain will not be powerful enough to kill him earlier.

2) I couldn't put any of the weapons or class specific items on him. If I put part of a sword on him, the person with that proficiency who is not a powergamer will probably need the most powerful version of their sword to kill him. Not too fair to that person to have half of their sword on the demon. Same goes for classes and their class specific items. Weapons and class specific items account for most of the best stuff. Putting something low level on Demogorgon wouldn't be appropriate. The other good equipment was already split up amongst other plots/devices (Machine of Lum, Deck of Many Things etc.)

3) Demogorgon gives you a massive amount of XP. That is a very very good reward. Between killing demogorgon, walking upstairs to finish the plot, you get more XP than any other place in the game."

As I said, people who know the system can probably beat anything. Some of the QA guys here, with cleverness, can beat Demogorgon with one character. However, that certainly doesn't represent the entire population. Even at the highest level with teh best stuff, some people will have trouble beating him. Even some experienced people may not find a way to maximize their assests and kill him easily.

While we're talking about easy, the Add-In is a major new part of SOA. Lots of SOA players who buy BGII now or start playing it now will play it with TOB installed. Experienced players who know the system will probably be able to beat him with SOA weapons and XP as well. We can only try to make the fight appeal to everyone.

Yes, we probably could have put one of the sill items on him but I really liked how the Bronze Pantalettes turned out in their current plot.

Don't forget, the XP is massive there and a find reward for all of your hard work.

Valygar Romance: When we were tossing the idea around for adding a romance in, we made sure that the Valygar option was ready to be inserted if we could do it. If you poke around in SOA, as well, you'll find refrences to Valygar's Suna Seni romance as well. A second male romantic lead was probably going to Valygar, with Haer'Dalis as a close second.

High level abilities: Multi or dual characters get their first at the equivalent amount of XP as a single class person. Everybody get's their first high level ability at approx 3 million xp, give or take a few thousand.

Wizard Slayers: At high levels, the MR% goes up for Wizard slayers and they end up with about 80% MR.

Also, with TOB installed, they can use healing potions.