Icewind Dale/Icewind Dale II Interview

Icewind Dale was released on June 29th, 2000 (the same day as Diablo II), making it nearly seven years old at the time of this writing. Black Isle Studios followed it up with the Heart of Winter expansion pack on February 19th, 2001, the Trials of the Luremaster add-on on July 5th, 2001, and a full sequel on September 4th, 2002.  To pay tribute to yet another amazing Infinity Engine series, we fired over a set of questions to three of the key Icewind Dale developers – Josh Sawyer (designer on Icewind Dale and Heart of Winter, lead designer on Icewind Dale II), Chris Parker (producer on Icewind Dale, designer on Icewind Dale II), and Scott Everts (technical designer on Icewind Dale, Heart of Winter, and Icewind Dale II). Up first is Josh Sawyer:

GB: Tell us a bit about yourself and your role during the development of Icewind Dale, Heart of Winter, and Icewind Dale II.

Josh: I started as a website designer at Interplay, when Icewind Dale was still Chris Parker’s (Dungeon Crawler) project. After it became Icewind Dale, I started doing web design for it and prodding Feargus to let me do junior design work. I eventually transitioned over to a full-time junior design position on the original game. I was a designer on Heart of Winter and Trials of the Luremaster and the lead designer on Icewind Dale 2.

GB: What was it like to be a part of the development team for each of these projects? Any fond memories you can share with us?

Josh: Icewind Dale was fantastic for me because I had somehow stumbled into my dream job.  I didn’t know anything about CRPG development, but I knew more about AD&D and the Forgotten Realms than anyone outside of TSR/WotC should.  We didn’t have any leads on the original title, so we sort of just… did things… with Chris Parker telling us when we were being dumb.

Scott Warner (the designer of Upper Dorn’s Deep) and I will always remember Greedy Ghost, which is referenced to this day.  Someone (who shall remain nameless) asked why the dwarf priest ghost in Upper Dorn’s didn’t charge the party for healing services.  Scott and I explained that it was a ghost and ghosts don’t have any need for money.  That Someone then replied, (Maybe he’s a greedy ghost.)

After Icewind Dale shipped, Feargus forwarded us an e-mail from Brian Fargo in which he said that he really enjoyed Icewind Dale and it was the first game in years that he had finished.  I knew Icewind Dale was a flawed game, but I grew up on Bard’s Tale, so that meant a lot to me.

I was also pretty happy when we finally got most of the major 3E stuff into Icewind Dale 2.  Danien Chee, Bernie Weir, Rich (Malavon) Finegan, and Darren Monahan really gutted a lot of the Infinity Engine’s game logic to make 3E work in it, and I think our implementation of the rule set was fantastic.

GB: Which CRPGs would you say inspired you and/or provided the most influence during the development of Icewind Dale and its sequel?

Josh: Personally, I was inspired by many of the old party-based dungeon crawlers like Bard’s Tale, Pool of Radiance, Wizardry, and Phantasie.  It’s a pretty basic concept: just a party of tough dudes vs. hordes of varied enemies in neat environments.  We always tried to have good stories at the core of the gameplay, but ultimately the PCs (and companions, through omission) were less of a story focus than they were in the Baldur’s Gate games.

GB: How familiar were you with the Icewind Dale region of the Forgotten Realms before working on the series? Did you end up having to do a lot of research for either game?

Josh: I was very familiar with the setting, having read all of Bob Salvatore’s Icewind Dale and Dark Elf books.  I also played a lot of AD&D in college just prior to coming to Interplay, so I was able to dive right in.

Josh: The Icewind Dale games were very linear, so we wanted something to help with re-play value, especially since people could make a wide array of parties.  The original Icewind Dale game had a really wide spectrum of random loot.  There were many unique items (usually weapons or suits or armor) that were stuck in a randomized list with three or four other unique items.

We ran into a lot of balancing problems and we also had to deal with the fact that many parties simply couldn’t be equipped well with certain random drops.  By Icewind Dale 2, we generally used random loot tables for less powerful items.  We put the more powerful unique items in stores or as static drops in chests/on bosses.

GB: Why did you choose to develop the series in the northermost arctic reaches of the Sword Coast? Were any other regions in the Forgotten Realms considered before development began?

Josh: Bob Salvatore’s Icewind Dale books made Icewind Dale extremely popular and the region was a great contrast to the southern Sword Coast.  Very early on (before I came onto the project), Matt Norton had suggested having Larloch (of Warlock’s Crypt and Minor Drain fame) as the big bad guy.  I thought the idea of running around the Warlock’s Crypt area of the Sword Coast (near Lathtarl’s Lantern and other crummy dumps where my college 2nd Ed. group played) would have been neat, but setting it in Icewind Dale made a lot more sense.

GB: The campaign in Heart of Winter was criticized for being too short, which led to the release of a downloadable add-on called Trials of the Luremaster. Did you originally intend to include this content with HoW or was it developed specifically in response to such criticism? Was it difficult to convince Interplay that a free add-on was necessary?

Josh: The content was specifically developed as a response to criticisms about HoW’s length.  When HoW was under development, we had few art resources available to us; most of Black Isle’s artists were working on Torn at the time.  We knew that the expansion was going to be short, but to be honest, a lot of us believed the game was going to retail for $20.  Instead it retailed for $30, which made its short length even more irritating to players.  Most of Trials’ content was developed by Steve Bokkes.  I think it turned out better than the retail expansion and helped make HoW a good product, finally.

I’m not sure Feargus had a difficult time convincing IPLY execs that it had to be done; he protected us behind the Black Shield.

GB: Why did you choose to put most of your development efforts into an Icewind Dale sequel rather than finishing Fallout 3/Van Buren or The Black Hound/Jefferson?

Josh: Both of those titles were using technology that was under development.  Interplay wanted Icewind Dale 2 in four months.  Finishing The Black Hound would have been impossible in that time frame.  Creating an Icewind Dale sequel in that time frame was also impossible, but it was less impossible.

GB: How much work was it for you personally to help in the implementation of the 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules into BioWare’s Infinity Engine for Icewind Dale II? Do you think the conversion was necessary and worth the time?

Josh: I was not a programmer on any of the titles, but I was the designer who worked almost exclusively with the game play programmers on rule implementation.  I fought for 3E conversion from the beginning of the project all the way through to the end because I believed it was one of the few things that could make people look at another Infinity Engine game.

Rich Finegan and I focused very heavily on converting all of the stat bonuses over to use proper 3E bonus types and stacking rules.  This included modifying all of the spells and items to follow that convention as well, which was an enormous amount of work for us and for technical designer Jason Suinn.

Darren, Danien, and Bernie worked on a bunch of skills and feats, the latter of which basically cannibalized the proficiency data with a bunch of custom code for individual feats.  I still take a great deal of pride in the fact that Danien and I figured out how to make true 3E multiclassing work in the Infinity Engine.  I think it added a tremendous amount of flexibility to the game.

Josh: Among IPLY execs, there may have been.  But the cancellation of Torn and the development cycle of Icewind Dale 2 really burned the division.  While there may have been some BIS guys who would have been happy to make Infinity Engine games forever, I sure didn’t know any.  Instead of developing new properties and new technology, we were stuck re-hashing old stuff on super-short schedules.  You can still make fun games that way, but it isn’t really what people dream of doing when they get into games.

That said, I always wanted to see an Icewind Dale game where the player made a party of monsters goblins, kobolds, hobgoblins, bugbears, and ogres who banded together to oppose the Uthgardt or the Ten Towns.  I think I was alone in that dream, though!

GB: Was there any content you would have liked to see implemented into Icewind Dale, Heart of Winter, or Icewind Dale II that didn’t make it into the game?

Josh: Three months of polish.  But seriously, more generous schedules on all of those titles would have been nice.  We wound up with a good amount of development time on Icewind Dale 2, but its initial schedule was so short that we were forced to make hacky, bad engineering decisions.

GB: Are you pleased with how well the Icewind Dale games have sold and been received over the years? Are there any specific factors that you think helped or hindered their sales?

Josh: I think they did as well as could be expected.  The (positioning) of the game helped us and hindered us.  Some people loved the idea of a party-based linear dungeon crawler.  But I do think that more people enjoyed the companion interaction and open exploration of the BG games.  This probably explains why the BG series outsold the IWD series by a large margin.  We also were always following the BG games or coming in after Neverwinter Nights, so we always looked like late-comers to the party.

GB: How has game development changed between your time at Black Isle Studios and Obsidian Entertainment? Do you think a party-based isometric RPG similar to the Icewind Dale games would still be a viable pursuit in today’s market?

Josh: In today’s market, not really.  Hardcore gamers make up an increasingly small percentage of the overall gamer community.  Though a lot of people dismiss the Icewind Dale series as brainless, it still uses a pretty complex rule system and requires the player to manage up to six characters with huge inventories and a lot of abilities.  Now, if the game had the budget of an Icewind Dale game, maybe it would be viable to a hardcore market, but game budgets are now very large and publishers generally are not interested in hardcore PC RPGs.

GB: Hypothetically speaking, if you were given the chance to work on another Icewind Dale title, where would you personally like to take the franchise?

Josh: I would open the game setting up more for exploration.  Dungeon-delving is at the core of Icewind Dale, but it would be nice to have freedom to explore the world in the way you want.  I think it would also be cool to allow the player to define characteristics of their party and party members that could be leveraged in conversation.  Something to make their characters feel more present in the story, instead of having a single speaker and a bunch of tag-alongs who blast everything.  I would also give the game more of a multi-player focus and use data tracking on the characters to foster a competitive aspect to the games.

Thanks Josh!