Icewind Dale 2 Forum Update

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(Originally posted by Z-Layrex)

Darren Monahan, Producer

Infravision: Actually we don't have infravision in IWD2.

It's simulated Darkvision. Not the best, but it brightens up characters in dark areas for the races that get it.

Tex Yang, Quality Assurance

Dialogue skills: Dialogue skills (bluff, diplomacy and intimidate) are not activated by the play. They will automatically make the appropriate dialogue choices pop up if the player has a high enough skill.

Chad Nicholas, Scriptor

Charm spell effects: There are basically 3 different AI scripts that get applied to a creature when you cast a charm-type spell on them. I don't have the script source handy so I might miss a few details but here's the breakdown:

Charm effect: Creature will only attack enemy creatures that attack it. If the creature knows any healing spells, they will heal the nearest ally.

Dire Charm effect: Creature will attack the nearest enemy in melee combat. If the creature has Rage, they will Rage (and use the Improved Rage if high enough level).

Mental Domination effect: Creature can be controlled by the player. If you leave the creature alone, it will try to buff/heal the nearest ally. It will use offensive spells at your enemies. When attacking, it will use a ranged weapon if it has it, but switch to melee when it closes in on an enemy.

Expansion pack plans: Anyway, there is no expansion pack. One isn't being worked on. One isn't even being planned. No one is even thinking about a story for an expansion pack. No one is even thinking about an expansion pack. Period. The only time someone from BIS thinks about an expansion pack is when someone asks about it; but only enough thought is put into it to come up with, "No."

ECL: ECL is a double-edged sword. It does help to balance a race against other races, but it means that as the game goes on and the non-ECL races have hit level 2 or 3, your deep gnome or drow might still be level 1, with a level 1 character's hit points. With only 4 - 12 HP (plus CON bonus), your PC could die to one hit from an opponent. One-hit-death = non-fun.

So, all races start the game with enough XP so that after they earn 1000xp, they'll be level 2. This gives the ECL races enough HP to survive a hit without dying. After that, they will start to level more slowly than the other races.

J.E Sawyer, Lead Designer

Expansion pack plans: We are not working on an expansion in any way, shape, or form. There are no plans for an expansion, no hopes for an expansion, and certainly no resources for an expansion.

IWD with 3E being too difficult: I think the 3E rules have gone a long way to producing a consistent level of difficulty for a variety of players -- that level of difficulty seems to be consistently "pretty hard". IWD and HoW were either ridiculously easy or incredibly hard depending on how much you knew/abused the rules. At low levels in 3E, there's only so much min-maxing you can do.

You may wish to set down the difficulty slider in certain areas if it seems too overwhelming. Also, having two drow in your party certainly can make the early areas kind of hard. The early areas aren't too magic-heavy, so the drow MR isn't so useful. However, there are certainly a lot of arrows and axes being thrown around, and drow with less hit points are potentially vulnerable.

Danien Chee, Programmer

Weapon combos: The weapon combos are a significant change from the old IE code, what with the changes from single wield to dual wield, 2E to 3E usability rules, etc. It took several weeks on and off to make the combos work properly. It was a case of fixing one bug and generating ten more. The QA guys know what I'm talking about here. Coupled with the new fast switching combo in the main game interface, this section of code was highly fragile. In hindsight, I probably should have rewritten that entire module but that would have taken even longer.

Another point was the potential for confusion on the player's part. Say you have one shield in combo sets 1 and 2. You go to a shop and sell the shield in combo set 1. Upon leaving the shop, you realize that you've just lost your shield in combo set 2 as well. While I understand that some people might not feel this way, I do think that others might. Perhaps I was wrong in the ratio of people who might feel the former rather than the latter.

Yet another potential point of confusion would have been in the mechanics of how to put an item in more than one combo set. I think NWN handled this rather well.

Essentially, it boiled down to what we could do in the little time we had.