Writer Amber Scott and creative director Trent Oster on a tiny expansion that became a huge video game. With chickens!
"I think that’s just a
Baldur’s Gatething,” says Beamdog president and creative director Trent Oster. “It can never be small. It always has to get bigger and bigger.” He’s talking about
Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, which started life in 2011, in Trent’s words, as a little piece of DLC that would cost around $2. With a storyline that fits between the new enhanced editions of
Baldur’s Gate and
Baldur’s Gate II, it was supposed to ship as a bridge to those two titles before the second one was released.
“It grew in scope and we realized we were tight on time and needed to put more effort into
Baldur’s Gate II ahead of its launch, so Dragonspear went on the backburner. When we came back and re-examined it had become a fifteen-hour expansion. At that stage it was still going to be DLC, although for a little more money,” Oster says.
“This was around fall 2014,” says writer Amber Scott as she picks up the story. “At that point it was just too crowded. We’d designed so much great stuff that when we started doing the test playthroughs you’d walk five feet and a quest would trigger, then in another five feet more NPCs would run up to you to offer other quests. So rather than cut content, we added extra areas so we could spread it out a bit and make it more fun and relaxing to play.”
Working alongside
Cowboys & Aliens comic-book scribe Andrew Foley, Scott pitched additional dungeons and other areas to lead designer Phil Daigle, to house the glut of monsters and side quests. Other Beamdog staff also suggested more wilderness areas for open-world exploration, to expand the map even further. As the $2 piece of DLC continued to grow, the art team working on it reached around 35 people. Oster says
Siege of Dragonspear now offers around twenty-five to thirty hours of gameplay. “That’s if you play the critical path and don’t do much besides, so it’s fitting for the legacy of
Baldur’s Gate,” he adds proudly.
All of which begs the question, did anything get left out? “There were a few quests we did have to cut, as they didn’t work as well as we thought in the new expanded format,” Scott, a former
Dragon magazine writer, says. “We also underwent some story revisions that made a couple of quests outdated, so we put them to one side and maybe we’ll reuse those in a different game or add them in a later patch.”
HERO’S WELCOME
At the end of the first game in the series, assuming you clicked that mouse frantically enough or swiped with precision across that tablet screen, you’re the hero of Baldur’s Gate. When
Siege of Dragonspear begins, there’s a crusade forming in the north of Faerûn, as soldiers rally to a figure known as the Shining Lady. This charismatic woman is Caelar Argent and she’s making the grand dukes of Baldur’s Gate very nervous, as stories of atrocities spread across the region and refugees flood in.
Argent’s story leads players, inevitably, to Dragonspear Castle, which is at the centre of her plans. Aside from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons module
Hordes of Dragonspear, and the recent D&D Next playtest
Ghosts of Dragonspear Castle, it’s not a setting that has featured much in Forgotten Realms adventures. Scott says the Beamdog team mostly worked off the AD&D module when it came to detailing what was in the castle and its surrounding area. Beamdog also took into account a list of fan-requested features that original
Baldur’s Gate developer BioWare had collected.
“Way back in the day BioWare asked the fans, ‘What would you love to see?’ Some of those features inspired the
Throne of Bhaal expansion and others were used to inspire
Siege of Dragonspear. One of those was the idea of having a massive battle or a war where you’re able to influence the direction of a giant melee and that was something we wanted to do in
Dragonspear,” says Scott. “It’s called
Siege of Dragonspear, so I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to imply there’s going to be a large force of enemies at a castle. During the combat sequence you actually get to be on a battlefield and try to make use of the allies you have. You don’t get to control other characters but you and your party participate in giant battles.”
Player choice and the decisions you’ve made in the game also influence that conflict. If you find a group of bad guys, do you decide to let them go, knowing they may show up as your enemies later on? Is it worth being a good person and letting those bad people live if there’s a chance they’ll come back and haunt you?
NEW BEGINNINGS
Players need a copy of
Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition to play the
Siege of Dragonspear expansion, so the suggestion is that they import their existing hero from that game into the new adventure. Yet it is possible to begin the journey to Dragonspear Castle with a brand new party.
“We did keep in mind as we designed
Siege of Dragonspear that people might be coming into this without any sort of history of playing
Baldur’s Gate or any understanding of the feel of the Forgotten Realms. So there are places where you can ask your companions to fill you in on how you met them, and some of the NPCs at the beginning of the game can give you a little rundown of what’s been happening. And, of course, there’s your journal, which reveals a little bit about your history,” Scott explains.
“However, it may not be as emotionally impactful if you don’t know the story from the original game.
Baldur’s Gate is the story of one person, and that person is the hero of Baldur’s Gate. This adventure builds on top of that and if you’ve played through the first game you may notice more nuances and get more emotional engagement out of some of the content.”
Scott says she’s played through
Baldur’s Gatearound 100 times since joining Beamdog in 2014 and is looking forward to playing through the whole ‘trilogy’ back to back when
Siege of Dragonspear is released. Especially as the user interface has been given a spring clean. That includes health bars over the heads of the party’s sprites to make it easier to see who has been damaged, as well as Scott’s favorite new element in the inventory screen: “When you select a new item, the portraits of the people in your party will change color if they can use that item and if it’s an improvement over what they’re currently using. So if I pick up a magic sword and Minsc’s portrait turns yellow, I know that’s a better sword for him. That makes it much easier to make decisions about your game, instead of giving the weapon to every single person in your party and then thinking, ‘Can mages use maces?’”
Those new UI elements will also be rolled out to
Baldur’s Gate 1 and
2 using patch updates. So players starting at the beginning and playing all the way through to the end of
Baldur’s Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal will have the same interface and all the same difficulty and color options.
Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear releases in early 2016 for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, iOS and Android.
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Check out the
next page for some Baldur's Gate fiction by Andrew Foley.