Icewind Dale/Icewind Dale II Interview
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GB: Was there ever any plans to develop an expansion pack for Icewind Dale II or even an Icewind Dale III before things took a turn for the worse at Interplay? 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!
