Behind the scenes of Icewind Dale
The story of Icewind Dale begins in 1998, two years before it appeared on the shelves of your valiant local games shop. Released to critical acclaim and massive sales figures, Baldur’s Gate turned the RPG genre on its head, its five discs encompassing an expansive and involving story, spattered with swords and sorcery action and an advanced engine called Infinity running the show beneath its vibrant world. The success of Baldur’s Gate meant a sequel was inevitable, yet with a workable and adaptable engine in place, it was clear further games in the Forgotten Realms could prove popular.
However, first came Planescape Torment. A superb mix of macabre RPG, the Infinity engine and a heavily-altered version of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons second edition ruleset, the game was a hit with critics, but not so with gamers. Lead designer on Planescape was Chris Avellone. “Planescape at that point had largely broken me and my health,” he grimaces. “Although it didn’t help, I was working on Fallout 2 at the same time.”
Fortunately, Interplay’s vice president, Trish Wright, instructed Avellone to take it easy and stop working so late. “I was grateful that she was compassionate enough to swing by,” notes Avellone. Soon he would be lending his talents to miscellaneous areas within Icewind Dale, a project that would prove to be a relatively calmer experience for the young designer.
The nature of Icewind Dale’s development meant that, for once, the technical side remained an easier ride for those involved, as opposed to design. Working at parent company Interplay was coder David Ray.
“I’d been in the VR Sports department, working on Interplay Baseball 2000 when I was moved over to Black Isle and Fallout 3,” he remembers. When the sequel in the post-apocalyptic franchise was ultimately cancelled, Ray remained at Black Isle and was put to work on Icewind Dale instead. “I was a huge R.A. Salvatore fan and had read the Icewind Trilogy back in the early nineties,” he continues. “I’d also been GMing a D&D campaign set in the Forgotten Realms for several years, so the idea of being involved in making the digital version made me kind of giddy.”
Several ideas had been brainstormed prior to Black Isle settling on the backdrop of the realm’s harshest region.
“I’d worked on a number of projects at Interplay in a limited capacity,” says Avellone, “and a variety of cancelled and shelved Forgotten Realms titles – of which there were many and in some of the weirdest parts of the Realms too.” Another designer on Icewind was Stephen Bokkes and he recalls how the initial concept came about.
“At the time, Black Isle Studios was close to wrapping up Planescape: Torment. Our next project was Fallout 3, but it was decided that we had the budget and resources for an interim project of smaller scope and scale that would allow us to transition team members between projects more effectively.” Given the long-standing relationship with Wizards Of The Coast, it made sense to utilise another of its properties. “A number of us were avid D&D fans, so another Forgotten Realms campaign seemed like perfect sense,” continues Bokkes. “After a few days, sleepless nights and preliminary concept work, the Dragon Spear project was born.”
The original title for the project was Dragonspear Castle, its name derived from an obscure location within the Forgotten Realms. “We were told to expect a small team and a short development cycle of less than twelve months,” Bokkes explains, “and as such, the initial game concept was pretty much a straightforward dungeon crawler, heavy on combat encounters and light on story and dialogue.” Yet while this concept changed little during development, many of its team felt the scope of the game was too narrow and the setting too little known.
Bokkes continues, “After a bit of hair-pulling, arguing and convincing – [in other words,] collaboration – between us, the management and Wizards Of The Coast, we agreed to revisit the concept. I came up with a list of settings and locations that I considered more interesting and worthy of an adventure of the Forgotten Realms. The Moonshae Isles and Icewind Dale were the team’s top two choices on the list, and being an unapologetic fanboy of Salvatore’s novels, I rejoiced when we ultimately went with Icewind Dale.”
For those not familiar with the Forgotten Realms, Icewind Dale takes place in Faerun, a continent to the north of a world called Abeir-Toril, or Toril. Known also as the Barbaric North or the Savage Frontier, Icewind Dale contains numerous large caverns of former dwarfish strongholds and ruins of long-dead cultures, separated from the rest of Faerun by a wall of jagged peaks known as the Spine of the World.
Peppered by a steady stream of brave souls looking to explore, or simply those wishing to escape the rigid laws and taxes of the temperate southern lands, it is a place where nature rules, in the form of huge mountains and elongated lengths of alpine forests. Yet settlements exist despite the desolateness; linking the towns of Easthaven and Kuldahar is Kuldahar Pass, the main route throughout the north, and Icewind Dale’s tale takes place here, and on the plains of the Dale itself.
Groupshot: Stephen Bokkes, Josh Sawyer, Scott Warner, Chris Avellone, John Deiley, Reg Arnedo
Centuries ago, barbarian tribes such as the Uthgardt and Reghedmen lived on Icewind’s expanses and forged a difficult yet independent existence. When an archmage known as Arakon arrived, complete with a mercenary army and intent on conquering the northern wastes, a fierce battle ensued that initially favoured the wizard’s forces.
However, the tide turned decisively when the barbarian tribes, united by a shaman known as Jerrod, drove back the mercenaries, forcing Arakon into one last desperate act.
As the barbarian army surrounded the archmage, he summoned all of his power and tore open the planar boundaries, opening up a portal to the lower planes. Materialising from this conduit came forth a horde of hideous demons, intent on slaying any creature they set their devilish eyes upon. Struck by a vision from his God, Tempus, Jerrod forced his way through the demons and into the portal itself – his blood combining with its energy to fuse the gateway shut. However, as the introduction to Icewind Dale portentously states, this is not the end of the story, but merely the beginning.
To this backdrop enters a party of warriors, created completely by the player. Each character can be designed from race to colour, class, alignment and skills. “The idea of building every single party member was new,” remembers Avellone, “and while it bogged down the opening of the game, it was still fun to build everyone from scratch. I enjoyed it, anyway!”
The initial storyline was put together by Bokkes and Josh Sawyer, who also generated the game’s preproduction design documentation. As production began in earnest, Bokkes focused primarily on the design of the major quest hubs (Easthaven and Kuldahar) and the level design for several encounter areas. Despite using an existing engine, Icewind Dale’s purpose restricted what could be achieved in terms of design.
Avellone recalls that, “Much of the game was not motivated by what was essential, but more by what we could do with the time (not much of it) and resources (much less than Baldur’s Gate in terms of personnel and budget) and yet still feel compelling. Icewind Dale was designed to get product out fast and keep Interplay afloat during difficult times.”
David Ray was the lead programmer and responsible for the adaptations to the infinity engine. “We were using what we called Baldur’s Gate 1.5,” he reveals. “It was the latest engine and had many of Baldur’s Gate II’s features, but not all of them. A lot of our engineering time was spent working out the kinks in the new features and massaging them to work without complications. One of the notable things we did was in the rendering engine. They had implemented OpenGL to support faster rendering when you had a 3D card, but we wanted to support some of the new features without requiring a 3D graphics card.”
3D cards were fast becoming commonplace but were still expensive. Icewind Dale’s separate software renderer ensured everybody could experience the game’s new magical spell effects.
Other additions and amendments were plentiful, if minor. As Ray explains, “We created a few new animation sequences that weren’t in Baldur’s Gate and many of the spells required updated code paths, but it was mostly the same engine, we just added a few whistles and bells.” By creating the type of game that the Infinity engine was essentially designed for and coupled with Black Isle’s experience on Planescape: Torment the project moved forwards smoothly from this point of view, save the odd ambitious design element that the system could not handle.
“I’m a huge dragon nerd,” smiles Ray, “and there was a lot of talk about putting this huge dragon in the game. But I was the one that killed the idea because I felt like we couldn’t do it justice with the technical limitations and time constraints. I was a little sad about it, but I still feel it was the right decision to make at the time.” A collection of screen-enveloping dragons would eventually appear in both Baldur’s Gate II and Icewind Dale II.
Design proved even more troublesome, with enthusiastic ideas often drowned out by the restrictions of the Infinity engine.
“Most of the issues were over time,” says Avellone, “and we had arguments about aspects of the style guide. Even though it was a dungeon crawler, I didn’t have much tolerance for goofiness in the game, which chafed a bit, especially if it got in the way of an otherwise well-scripted dramatic moment. We kind of gave up on this stance as it vanished during the chaos of Icewind Dale II, where it did get kind of goofy.”
Another aspect Avellone regrets is that a time-saving tokenised system was only employed later on. “It meant the game could read the spell and item data files associated with the spell [or] item and automatically assign the designer-set properties such as duration, damage and class usage,” he explains. “It would then import it into the outward-facing text descriptions. [This] made it so much easier, eliminating the need to enter and finalise data by hand and helping reduce bugs.”
Avellone also contributed a number of elements to several major characters, he helped compose the narrative style guide, tweaked dialogue and proofed script implementation and checklists.
“I had about a 30-row long checklist table for every dialogue in the game to run through for fixes,” he recalls, “and although that may sound boring, I love that stuff when I’m not writing – or not in the mood to write [anyway]. I also wrote the manual, which everyone should do for a game at least once because doing that during the last months of a game is a hellish obstacle course of tracking spell and item information to make sure everything is correct. And a lot of systems can change and be rebalanced during that timeframe.”
Upon release, Icewind Dale was not without its critics. Many decried its simplicity after the plot-heavy and character-focused Baldur’s Gate, others highlighted some of the technical deficiencies of the infinity engine, such as its sometimes dubious pathfinding, that had irritatingly re-appeared from its forebear.
The development team, perhaps sensing that Icewind Dale lacked depth, made the game extremely tough, another fact that was noted at the time. There’s no doubt that charging full-on into many of the tricky battles would soon see several darkened portraits. Sneaking a thief forward and drawing out enemies one by one was a tactic many players picked up on, but this was not one anticipated by the development team.
“I personally liked emergent behaviour in games,” declares David Ray, “and I can appreciate it when players can do things that the developers didn’t think of. I don’t recall if any of us thought of that specifically, but I’m kind of glad it worked.”
Avellone notes of this method, “It may not be realistic, but [such] challenges that force you to re-examine ’charge!‘ strategies really make a designer’s day. One of the most fun aspects of the Icewind Dale series was layering new ways of undermining these challenges.
For example, once it became clear that a number of testers and players were using animal and elemental summon mobs to be their front line tanks, it wasn’t hard adjusting the key spellcasters and enemy mages so they would dispel first and ask questions later.”
Despite the criticisms, Icewind Dale scored well and proved there was a market hungry for its wide breadth of free-roaming adventuring. The game even survived a similar release date to another highly-anticipated RPG in Diablo II, with some remarking that maybe this assisted sales in a perverse way, with many gamers eagerly picking up both titles.
“Diablo II was gonna slaughter us in the action RPG arena,” says Avellone, “and it was almost something you expected, not dreaded.” Nevertheless, the game sold credibly, assisted by the public’s familiarity with its gameplay style and engine. In all, there is little that those involved would change about Icewind Dale itself.
“It was what it was,” says Avellone, “and for that, it was pretty well sized and scoped, except for the system changes. I probably would have left some of those alone in hindsight, so the programmers weren’t on the verge of divorce from the long hours.”
David Ray cites the user interface as something that could have been modernised. “Updating the UI was something we had wanted to do while we were working on it,” he recalls, “but we did a cost/benefit on it and decided it was something we couldn’t fit into the schedule.” For the development team, Icewind Dale represents a variable point in their careers. Avellone laments the role the game played as a bridge to other projects, when perhaps making a start on further Baldur’s Gate games, or even Fallout: Van Buren may have seen those franchises flourish at Interplay.
“We had tons of fun with it, but honestly it wasn’t a ground-breaking game – just fun. But lest I sound like Debbie Downer, fun’s the thing and not every game has to set out to change the world. Players enjoyed it, we had fun making it and that’s what counts,” Avellone remembers fondly.
For programmer David Ray, having been cornered into developing sports games, working on Icewind Dale was a breath of (icy) fresh air and sparked a career of development on similar titles, including the phenomenally successful World Of Warcraft.
Interplay followed Icewind Dale with the expansion Heart Of Winter which was, incredibly, even tougher than the original game, if a little on the brief side. After another (free) expansion entitled Trials Of The Luremaster, a proper sequel was released in 2002. Essentially more of the same, it sold steadily, but not enough to save Black Isle Studios, before publisher Interplay itself became quite the story over the remainder of the decade. But that, brave adventurer, is a tale for another time.
by MCA
