Obsidian angling for Icewind Dale 3

My next screed - which I was planning to post in the coming days - was to be titled "Why we need Dungeons & Dragons." It's been percolating in my head ever since I read Tiberius' post on the prospects of a Baldur's Gate 3. I was going to go over the various reasons why there's no substitute for the D&D ruleset and settings, and lament the fact that Hasbro and Atari are locked in court battle over the rights. I just wanted to finish a couple of posts on Dragon Age 2 (the topic du jour) before getting to work on it.

Then I saw this:

Obsidian is also pushing on updating a former Black Isle property: Icewind Dale 3. "I was talking to Atari last week," [Feargus Urquhart] confides, "and said why don't we do this?" The old series, he says, didn't end because of low sales. "They stopped being made because of licensing issues, and Interplay going out of business, and BioWare moving on to console, and a whole lot of things. So a part of it is, why not go make Icewind Dale 3? You can't spend $20 million on it, but why not go make it?"

I actually don't know how newsworthy this is. My impression is that developers and publishers throw around a lot of ideas, the vast majority of which never result in a game being made. Given that, I'm not sure what to make of the fact that Mr. Urquhart chose to disclose this. Good sign? Bad sign? You decide.

One thing's for sure: If Icewind Dale 3 is going to be made, Obsidian is the obvious choice to do it. They have the old-school RPG cred and a history with this franchise in particular. It's interesting that the last time they ventured into the Forgotten Realms was for the Storm of Zehir expansion, in which they brought Icewind Dale-style party creation to Neverwinter Nights 2. Hmm...

Icewind Dale is no Baldur's Gate, but it's still fun to speculate on what a sequel would look like. To me, the essential elements are:

• Set in the Icewind Dale region (duh)
• Full party creation
• Hack-and-slash style, with tactical combat
• More dungeon crawl than sandbox

The most interesting question about an Icewind Dale sequel is, what engine do you use? To me, Icewind Dale is the game that's hardest to decouple from the Infinity Engine due to its emphasis on combat. Players don't revere it for its characters (Baldur's Gate) or writing (Planescape: Torment). To the extent they revere it at all, it's for the way it puts the D&D combat mechanics and character advancement system through their paces. It would take a special game engine to recapture that feel.

Anyway, if you're interested, there's a lot more discussion about this over at RPGWatch, which is where I picked up this "news" item.

Things I learned from the Dragon Age 2 demo

So, as you've probably heard, the Dragon Age 2 demo is out. If for some reason you haven't played it yet, you can find it on Bioware's Dragon Age 2 site. But wait! Don't forget to come back here and read this post while you're waiting for the 1.9 GB download to complete.

Judging a game based on its demo can be tricky, especially when many of the features that will be in the final product have been disabled. But of course that's not going to stop anyone, including me. However, for this post I'm going to try to avoid sweeping statements and stick with things that are safe to say about Dragon Age 2 based on the demo.

So here it is, the Internet-style top 5 list of things I learned from the Dragon Age 2 demo.

Dragon Age 2: Who's in charge here?

Dragon Age 2 has gone gold, the demo is out, and Bioware-fashioned hype has descended on the RPG-o-sphere like darkspawn on an unfortified village. In an attempt to inflame the passions of forum-dwellers on Valentine's Day, Bioware confirmed the love interests in Dragon Age 2 and - if that weren't enough - posted short stories demonstrating the badassery of the characters. That kicked off a 169-page (and counting) thread mostly revolving around the sexual orientation of the love interests, including some speculation that all of them are bisexual.

Totally unfounded, surely. Only an Internet forum could air such a wild notion. But wait...

And please don’t close off all those options to players of the wrong gender. Great as it is, Mass Effect is not such a literary masterwork that it would completely ruin a delicately crafted character to check the bisexual flag. And we know that’s all it takes, because modders have already done it.

That's from a recent PC gamer article 15 things we want to see in Mass Effect 3. For comedic value, I'll point out that the quote is an addendum to item number 5: "More convincing romances." Because presumably it's "convincing" when all the love interests aren't picky about the gender of their partners.

Personally, I would prefer zero bisexual love interests. It's not that I think it's such a rare phenomenon. Rather, it's the meta. It's the knowledge that the sole reason bisexual characters are being included is so that they can do double duty as love interests. That sort of thing bothers me, though I admit my perspective probably isn't representative of players at large. If it does turn out that all love interests in Dragon Age 2 are bi, I will probably skip romances entirely. Yep, I'll take my ardor and go home.

But I (like just about everyone else) have said enough about romances lately, and the larger issue here isn't about love interests per se. To illustrate, I'll throw in another thread from the Bioware forums, in which some players lobby for being able to select the talents and skills of their companions - even those that were logically "earned" before the character joined the party. After all (the argument goes), why should I be forced to turn away an otherwise desirable character just because his or her stats don't fit my party's needs?

In both cases, what players are really asking for is more power to shape the game world to their liking. In the case of bisexual love interests, players don't really want characters who go both ways, but rather characters who go their way. In the other example, they want control over a more humdrum aspect of the characters - their statistical makeup.

Dialogue Trees: The art of deception

A common complaint about dialogue trees is that the player's choices don't matter. No matter what option you pick, you wind up in the same place. The choice of words is just a nod to geeky roleplayers who imagine their characters outside the confines of the game - or worse, a deception meant to fool players into thinking there's more to the game than there really is.

To which I reply: Yeah, so what?

Sure, there's an illusion here - just like there's an illusion in movies, plays, and TV. However, it's an illusion created with the assent of the audience. Does it bother anyone that Two and a Half Men is filmed on a set with flimsy portable walls? Of course not. We want to be deceived. The only time the phoniness of a show bothers us is when it's too obvious, interfering with our ability to believe in what we're seeing.

The same is true of all aspects of game design. In the Neverwinter Nights 2 toolset, there are flat buildings and tree models that look just like stage props. They're for placing at the edge of an area to create the illusion of a bigger world. Similarly, if you pop open an area from Dragon Age, you'll probably find things like towers floating in the air far from the playable area - meant not to be visited, but to fill out the skyline.

But this is the last post in my series on dialogue trees, so I'm going to focus on how you create the illusion that the player's dialogue choices really matter. Of course, sometimes those options do matter. Sometimes they determine a course of action, such as whether to attack an NPC, or open a store, or do any number of other things. However, by necessity most options are Roleplaying Responses that don't have a direct impact on the game. Its those options - the stage props of RPG conversations - that I'm going to focus on.

Rotted Report 06: Grrrrrr!

If you think the title of this post is a flavor quote from Ogress, the PC's Mabari companion in The Rotted Rose, you're wrong. It's a quote from me, expressing my feelings about how modding went last week.