Baldur’s Gate 2: What Went Wrong?

Baldur’s Gate II, one of the most polished games to come out, ever, is not one that many have criticized in detail. However, in GA-RPG’s new weekly column, Biofiles, James Ohlen, the director of BioWare’s writing and design department and the lead designer of their new Star Wars RPG (not to be confused with Verant/Sony’s MMORPG Star Wars Galaxies), writes this week about the changes that could have been made to the game most media decided was the best RPG of 2000, Baldur’s Gate II. He mentions different ways their implementaion of multiplayer could have been better, such as this one:

Unimportance of secondary characters

In the Baldur’s Gate series, whenever the main character dies, the game ends. One of the most annoying occurrences in a multi-player game was when the party was doing well in a battle, the main character died, and the game ended. Our main reasoning for doing this was that the story revolved around the primary character (the child of Bhaal). So many NPCs talked directly to the child of Bhaal that the story could not progress if the child of Bhaal was dead. There are two solutions to this that I can think of. One, the Icewind Dale approach, would be to write a story that revolves around the PARTY, not a single character. Another solution would be to write and script all of the characters in the game to continue the story, despite the main character being dead. Raising the dead would also have to be much easier than it was in the original Baldur’s Gate.

For the whole of it and for all future weekly articles, head to GA-RPG’s Biofiles page.