Black Isle Studios Board Update

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(Originally posted by Darien)

Here's an update from the Black Isle Studios message boards.

Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal

David Gaider, Senior Designer:

Scarlet Ninja-To: I don't make the items, myself, so I'm not really sure. I would hazard a guess that the designer who made this was intentionally making a unique item for monks...some quality of the item means that it can only be used by the monk class, period.

But beyond that, there's no real reason why the ninja-to can't be changed. Go hard.

Upgradeable items: I think there were seven items total in BG2 that were either upgradeable or buildable from separate parts. (Thinking...thinking...seven? Maybe a couple more or less, it's been awhile...)

In the expansion, we add on an additional 37, a few of which are also upgrades to items from BG2 itself.

Swashbucklers attacks: Hm? How would they be 'supposed to'? The kit went through several mutations until we got to the current one. I don't think we ever planned for the Swashbuckler to have the same # of attacks as fighters.

At one point, we were trying to get the Swashbuckler have the same ThAC0 as a fighter, but we didn't like the implementation and James wanted something different. But that's just one of numerous changes.

So there's nothing to fix. So, no, the Swashbuckler hasn't been altered.

Sorcerer spell memorization: I think there's a spell or two added at 8th level (I may be wrong, but I believe at least one of the Bigby spells is 8th level), but nothing below that.

And, no, sorcerers don't get to re-pick all of their spells...not for the sake of one or two 8th level spells. Chances are you'll get access to that within a few level-ups, regardless."

Sorcerer spell progression: At level 20, they can cast 6 of each spell level right up to level 9...that doesn't advance. They do, however, continue to receive additional spell selections after level 20.

Item descriptions in ToB: The descriptions for many of the new items are, as a rule, much shorter. Someone mentioned earlier the cost associated with translation, and that's very true.

Keep in mind that an expansion pack is much cheaper than a normal game, and when you're looking at translating said game into numerous languages the costs can really run up. We were presented with a realistic and still very generous word-count limit for ToB...and as a design decision we decided to use the vast majority of that count for story and dialogue. There really is more story here than I think you would find in an ordinary expansion pack, and that was really important to us. The trade-off with the item descriptions may lessen something that was an occasionally amusing detail of the game, but the basics are still there and I don't think the game suffers overall...personally, I think people get more out of the dialogue and such, but I guess opinions vary.

Sarevok's Sword: Q: If we give the Sword of Chaos back to Sarevok,will it regain it's former abilities?

Whether it does or does not will make sense once you play the game. Honestly, I can't say more than that, sorry.

Wizard Eye tactic: Incidentally, this particular tactic won't work anymore. The Wizard Eye goes POP! and disappears if it's so much as looked at violently. Otherwise it wanders about invisible.

Characters played: Well, let's see...In BG, I played through as a human ranger named Rylock.

In BG2, I had to play through a few times. The funniest game and the most complete was my first time I got to go through the whole game and play seriously. That was as Samuel Thunderburp, my male halfling thief (who did very well as a thief, thank you).

After that I went through twice more, once with a female human paladin named Tess and my 'testing' character which was an evil male half-elf bard named Tamlan.

Romances: It's kind of hard that, while developing a game that we put our heart and soul into, we also have to give a nod to the harsh realities of business at the same time...but that's the way life is. The entire making of the game was filled with compromises and necessary cuts...not to knock BG2, though, I still think it turned out better than any of us expected...but one of the hardest was cutting out the extra romance.

We thought we had time to make five romance tracks, and since we knew there were way more guys who were going to play the game, we gave the 'extra' to them. 3 male-oriented, 2 female-oriented stories.

Time, however, ran out. The actual building of the scripts was waaay more complicated than we had anticipated (particularly the Jaheira romance), especially for something we considered (at the time) to be a relatively minor albeit fun part of the game. The amount of QA time we needed to devote to de-bugging alone was pretty big. If we were going to write romances now for a BG2-size game, it'd be a different story...we've done it once, now, and we know how it goes.

But it was a hard choice (among a lot of other hard choices) that had to be made. The male-oriented romances had been written first and it was the second female-oriented romance that ended up needing to be chopped (originally slated for Haer'Dalis).

I agree it was too bad...I think everyone at Bioware does. Putting in more romances would have made the game better, sure...so would have making them longer or having more interaction overall. But that's all we had time to do.

I do think, though, that the reaction we got to the romances was a bit unexpected. And the veritable scolding we've gotten from our female gamers has certainly taught us a lesson. In the future, I can assure you we will approach this kind of thing with a much different mind-set.

And I think, too, that it will take such well-expressed and thoughtful commentary from people like yourself to change not only the ideas that we developers have, but probably the view that the industry has on its growing female gaming population overall.

P.S.: As an aside, have you ever visited womengamers.com? It's a great site where people who share your viewpoint have gathered. I like it and I think it's a good sign of things to come. There may be others like it, I suppose, but it's the only one I know of.

Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter

Kevin Osburn, Line Producer:

Improvements to OpenGL in TotL: We have made some minor tweaks to the OpenGL performance. We are waiting for some feedback from QA, and we will also run it through compatibility to see if we made any improvements. I will give you guys an update as soon as I get one.