New BALDUR'S GATE game to be made

In unexpected news, Beamdog have announced they are making a new Baldur's Gate game using the Infinity Engine, the old 2D engine used to create the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series, along with the classic Planescape: Torment.

The new game is an 'interquel', set between the two Baldur's Gate titles, presumably in the few months that elapsed after the end of the first game and before our heroes are captured in the wilderness and taken to Amn to begin the events of the second.

This is a curious decision, likely driven by budgetary and licensing constraints. Beamdog are working with Atari (the D&D licence holders) and Wizards of the Coast (the current owners of the D&D brand itself) and apparently getting them to all work together has been a nightmare so far. Given they are working together on the re-releases of the Infinity Engine games, it may make sense to try to squeeze a new game out whilst there is a window of opportunity to do so and while the isometric RPG market is seeing a resurgence in popularity due to the high sales of Divinity: Original Sin and Wasteland 2, not to mention the upcoming Pillars of Eternity. On the other hand, using the Infinity Engine in all is creaking glory is probably not the best idea, there is no real narrative gap between the first two games that needs to be filled and apart from its head, Trent Oster, Beamdog has very few personnel working for it who also worked on the original games. Certainly most of the major writers and creative forces are now with other companies, or still at BioWare.

Beamdog plan to release the new game later in 2015, so it'll be interesting to see what direction it takes. Meanwhile, Obsidian, who do have many of the writers and creative forces behind the Infinity Engine games working for them, are due to ship Pillars of Eternity, a modern 'spiritual successor' to the Baldur's Gate series, in the next few months.

Icewind Dale II

A band of adventurers are among the mercenaries called in to help defend the remote settlements of Icewind Dale after they come under attack by an army of monstrous creatures. Investigating the causes of the raids, the team embark on a lengthy trek into the hostile Spine of the World mountains.

Icewind Dale II was released in 2002 and was the fifth and last game to use the Infinity Engine. Originally used for Baldur's Gate in 1998, the Infinity Engine had powered a whole series of classic roleplaying games and was arguably the last great 2D engine before most games switched to 3D technology. At the time of its release, Icewind Dale II was heavily criticised for using old tech, made even more apparent by it coming out just a month or so after BioWare's Neverwinter Nights, with it's all-singing, all-dancing 3D engine.

Played without regard for such concerns, Icewind Dale II emerges as an enjoyable, solid roleplaying game much in the vein of its predecessor. The Icewind Dale games are very much the 'brainless action movie' branch of the Infinity Engine tree, where combat is emphasised over roleplaying. There isn't anything too wrong with that, especially since Icewind Dale II also puts more emphasis into puzzle-solving, quest-resolving and occasional bursts of proper roleplaying. You still spend 80%+ of the game hacking enemies apart, but there's a little bit more story and character to proceedings this time around.

As with the previous game, you create a party of six adventurers from scratch. Balancing melee combat characters with ranged ones with magic users (and a rogue to help open all of those locked chests of loot) is key to completing the game effectively. Unlike the other Infinity Engine games, Icewind Dale II uses the Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition rules which gives your characters much greater choices of weapons (no more arbitrary restrictions by class), classes (no more arbitrary restrictions by race) and skills and feats, which improve your combat abilities.

You start the game in the town of Targos which is under goblin attack. After dispatching the attackers you find yourself running around town getting to know people and finding out more about what's going on. This being a game by Black Isle (which splintered apart shortly after this game's release, the remnants reforming as Obsidian and Troika), with such CRPG luminaries as Josh Sawyer and Chris Avellone working on it, the game features some amusing meta-commentary about the genre. One soldier recounts how he started his adventuring life by killing rats for ages because it was 'character-building', whilst running around town doing trivial odd-jobs for pitiful amounts of money. This was funny at the time, but is slightly tragic in 2014 given how many modern RPGs still insist on using the same structure.

The game is linear, with your team moving from objective to objective without as much ability to go off and do some exploring by yourself (although there a few optional side-quests). This makes sense in the context of the game - you are a mercenary party on a military commission to halt an invading army - and also given the time restrictions the game was made under, but it does feel a little constraining at times. The game is also pretty relentless and, in the midgame especially, becomes something of a grind. The environments are beautiful, ranging from palaces made of ice to spectacular underground caverns and windswept mountain passes filled with snow. However, too often there is little to do in these environments rather than bludgeon lots of things to death and search for loot. There are a few moments of satisfying roleplaying - doing a side-mission near the end of the game makes the final battle considerably easier, whilst you can completely skip a lengthy and lethal battle in a mind-flayer fortress by convincing their relentlessly logical leader that it's just safer to let you pass - but the focus is very much on fighting.

Fortunately the fighting is pretty good. As usual you can pause the game to issue orders and battles soon become a frenzied rush of arrows, swords swinging and spells flying past. As the game progresses enemies become more likely to use magic, so it becomes necessary for your party to use magic to buff your characters or summon small armies of monsters to act as cannon fodder. Unlike, say, the Dragon Age games, which have a seriously tiny spell selection (presumably for simplicity's sake), Icewind Dale II offers a large range of spells, weapons and combat options which can tend towards over-complexity, but also give the player a satisfying choice of tactics to pursue. Many seemingly-impossible battles can be won by simply changing tactics or even just the positioning of your characters: bottlenecking large enemy forces in narrow passages is a simple but often decisive tactic.

So the combat is good, the choices for character development are better than any previous Infinity Engine games and the story is moodily and effectively told through animated storybook cut-scenes. For its time, the 2D graphics are impressive (if inevitably a little pixellated on modern machines) and the music is splendid, though there isn't a whole lot of it. The game is pretty long (clocking in at well over 20 hours) so you get a lot of content for your money. The game gets grindy and repetitive at times, but it's worth persevering for the satisfyingly epic conclusion.

Icewind Dale II (****) is a worthy follow-up to Icewind Dale and a decent conclusion to the Infinity Engine era of roleplaying games. You can get the game now from GoG, where it has been optimised to run well on modern machines, or you can also get it as part of a triple-pack with the original Icewind Dale and its expansions (UK, USA).

Chris Avellone details ideas for a TORMENT successor

In December 1999, Black Isle released what continues to be widely regarded as the greatest CRPG of all time: Planescape: Torment. It was only a modest hit, especially compared to its fellow games using the Infinity Engine (the Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series), but a critical success, appearing on numerous 'best games evaaah' lists up to this very day.

Your party at this point in the game consists of an animated suit of armour, a floating skull, a man permanently on fire and a steampunk robot. Plus yourself, an immortal, intelligent zombie (sort of).

The chances of a sequel ever appearing are pretty much zero, since Wizards of the Coast shut down the Planescape D&D setting shortly after the game was released and have subsequently heavily retconned elements of the setting in the 3rd and 4th editions of the game. In addition, with the D&D rights lying with Wizards and the Torment rights lying with Interplay, navigating the legal minefield to be able to make the game in the first place would likely be time-consuming and complex.

For this reason, Torment's lead writer, Chris Avellone, has been musing on the idea of doing a 'spiritual successor' to the game, but not an actual sequel, for a while. He's told Kotaku about some of the ideas he and his company, Obsidian (the successor to Black Isle), have been kicking around. This includes maintaining a non-traditional fantasy setting (no elves, dwarves etc), having a small, focused cast of supporting characters and bringing back an overhead, isometric viewpoint.

Avellone, whose other credits include Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Alpha Protocol, is currently working on Wasteland 2.

Icewind Dale

A band of adventurers arrive at Easthaven, a town in the Icewind Dale region of Faerun, far to the north of most civilised lands on the far side of the Spine of the World. The town's mayor asks the adventurers to travel to Kuldahar, a village of druids in the foothills of the mountains, where they have reported strange goings-on. The adventurers agree, but are cut off in the foothills by an avalanche. Proceeding to Kuldahar on foot through an area inhabited by hostile creatures, the adventurers learn of a threat to all of Faerun that is developing in the mountains and the caverns under them, and they must defeat this threat before it's too late.


Originally released in 2000, Icewind Dale was the third of the Dungeons and Dragons games using the Infinity Engine, developed by BioWare and Black Isle (now Obsidian). These three games were effectively an attempt to corner three distinct types of fantasy: Planescape: Torment was the 'arty', literary and philosophical game, essentially a video game equivalent to Gene Wolfe, whilst Baldur's Gate was the more traditional large-scale, long, broad-based and well-characterised epic, following in the trail of Tolkien. Icewind Dale, on the other hand, was the much more combat-oriented, sword and sorcery adventure, much more of a romp than the other two. This led it to getting somewhat mixed reviews at the time, though viewed in isolation from its forebears, its positive aspects become much more apparent.

Starting off, Icewind Dale has you creating all six characters in the party, giving them names and deciding on their races and character classes. This is unlike Baldur's Gate, where you only created the leading character and then picked from a range of pre-existing companions, and also unlike Planescape: Torment, where you had a pre-generated character (though you could change his stats). This is the biggest change from the other games, since your party is totally user-generated there is little to none of the party interplay seen elsewhere. There is no possibility of romances or rivalries erupting between party-members, which removes some of the flavour and unpredictability of the earlier games, but also makes Icewind Dale a lot more old-school and traditional, which is not entirely a bad thing.

Once you've created your party, it's RPG business as usual. You can explore the opening town, solve a few puzzles (usually through item quests or combat, though you can resolve a few quests through dialogue alone) and so on before you're given the main quest. You have to fight your way through the mountains to Kuldahar (a town built in and around a colossal tree), which becomes your base of operations as you range out on various missions for the denizens of the town. These involve a lot of dungeon explorations and assaults on temples and castles held by various enemies, so a combat-focused party is a must, though the prevalence of traps and sorcerous opponents means you want to bring a thief and at least a couple of magic-users along as well.

The game is well-written, but compared to the other Infinity Engine games straightforward (indeed, somewhat refreshingly so at times). There's a few nice twists but generally what you see is what you get, and what you get is a metric ton of combat. You fight dozens of different types of enemies, from orcs to powerful enemy wizards, and amass vast quantities of loot. You also level up at a rate of knots compared to other D&D-based games. Generally speaking, if more than ten minutes go by without a ferocious combat sequence, something's gone wrong somewhere.

Luckily, Icewind Dale uses a later iteration of the Infinity Engine, with stronger graphics (including the heaven-sent ability to change the graphics resolution to something bearable on a modern PC), a friendlier interface and more options for character classes and combat (not to mention being able to carry lots more loot). In fact, if you ignore the simple fact that the game is 2D and sprite-based (there are 3D options for spell effects, but these tend to be hit and miss with modern graphics cards), it's aged very well indeed. The hand-painted environments are gorgeous, the sound and music is of a very high quality and the combat is fast and furious (though, as usual, you can hit space to pause the game at any time to issue fresh orders). The pace is only let down by the traditional D&D problem of having to rest every couple of fights to replenish spells, or having to quick-travel back to Kuldahar to unload the frankly ludicrous amounts of loot you amass on your quests at regular intervals. The game also ties in nicely (and unexpectedly) with the Icewind Dale trilogy of novels by R.A. Salvatore, despite taking place almost a century earlier (and fifteen years before Drizzt Do'Urden arrives in the area). This tie-in is very logical and satisfying, compared to the more obvious (and cheesy) cameos in the Baldur's Gate series.

The minuses are, for the most part, the obvious side-effects of the positives. Almost every situation in the game is solved by you hacking your way through it (though there are a few more original and interesting puzzles along the way), and overall the game lacks subtlety. The writing and moody black-and-white cut scenes are great, but given you spend a lot of time in combat-focused dungeons, some time can go by between plot-related events happening, which occasionally threatens to reduce the game to a hard grind. And, as great as the graphics are, the harsh snow backdrops and the very large creatures show up some issues with the engine, leading to some pixellation. The combat focus of the game also means it's pretty unforgiving and total party kills are not uncommon. As with all Infinity Engine games, but moreso here, you need to have a finger hovering over the quicksave button at almost all times and remember to save between combats, before resting, after resting, before tackling a complex trap (especially the ones which can backfire and blow up your entire party if you fail a roll) and at least every five minutes regardless of anything else.

That said, the game's not quite a brainless hack 'em up. The story, which it kicks in every now and then, is intriguing and the writing, when it does appear, is generally pretty good (as you'd expect from some of the same team behind Planescape: Torment). These elements give the game a bit more depth than its reputation suggests. In fact, if the game does suffer in departments, it's usually through comparisons to its contemporaries. Taken on its own merits and in isolation, a rewarding and impressive CRPG emerges.

Icewind Dale (****) is a fun, furious and enjoyable roleplaying game which has aged excellently, and is let down only in comparison to more story and roleplaying-focused RPGs. For those looking into a great dungeon-exploring or more action-based RPG, Icewind Dale more than satisfies.

Due to the game's age, there are a variety of ways of getting it. The Good Old Games edition may be preferable since it has been optimised to run on Windows 7 and Vista with no problems, and also includes the free expansion Trials of the Luremaster (which needs to be downloaded separately for the other editions). You can also get it as part of a triple-pack with the paid-for expansion, Heart of Winter, and Icewind Dale II (UK, USA) or as a boxed copy with just the expansion (UK, USA).