Home Page / pc / I / Icewind Dale / Review Listing / Review

Bioware’s Infinity Engine, developed for the poorly timed, often praised title Baldur’s Gate, was created with modularity in mind. Within the confines of the engine, many directions could be taken to create AD&D-based RPGs. While Baldur’s Gate tried to be both plot and combat intensive, not really satisfying either crowd, the two subsequent Infinity Engine games have been concentrating on one or the other. Black Isle Studios’ excellent Planescape: Torment showed off the storytelling capabilities of the engine in a plot-intensive RPG. When they set out to make Icewind Dale, however, they made it clear that they were creating a combat-oriented game, more like a traditional dungeon crawl than an epic story. Thankfully, unlike its predecessors, Icewind Dale is on a manageable two CDs, and ships in an actual jewel case instead of disc-destroying cardboard sleeves. Upgrades and improvements have been made all around to the engine for this game. The result is an addictive title that, while unfortunately illustrating some flaws in the engine, is still for the most part enjoyable.

Rollin’, Rollin’, Rollin’

You can create all the standard AD&D 2nd Edition character classes, and are given the standard six races (human, elf, half-elf, halfling, dwarf, gnome) to further customize your character. You can also choose from any of the nine alignments, so feel free to create an evil party. The choice of race and alignment is more than just cosmetic and an ability score modification at character generation. Items can and will be found in the game that are only usable by certain races or alignments. My good-aligned party would often end up selling powerful magical equipment back to the shops because it was only usable by evil characters. You will find it difficult if not impossible to create a maxed out character, so just go with the important statistics. Strength is important for everyone in this game (dungeon loot is heavy!) You can then select an appearance and a voice for each of your six characters. Once you’ve created a party, it’s on to the game.

Exploring the Dale

The game starts out similar to Baldur’s Gate. Your party is dropped in a basic town, and you are given the option to explore and solve sidequests or go straight to the goal. This pattern repeats itself for the rest of the game, though as IWD is a combat-oriented game the sidequests are not required except for the chapter end quests. The story itself provides many small touches for readers of the novels, but they are not at all required reading for enjoying IWD’s plot.

The bulk of the game is the combat. Your party of six fights progressively more difficult battles on the way to unraveling an ancient conflict and, of course, saving the world. You’ll find yourself using abilities and spells that you might not consider in other D&D-based games, as they can give you that extra edge that turns defeat into victory. A favorite tactic of mine was to have some small Monster Summoning I creatures out front holding back the enemy charge long enough for my wizard to get off a fireball. You can’t use the same tactics everywhere, however. One dungeon features hordes of small invisible creatures that appear all around you, forcing you to change your tactics fairly quickly. Another was loaded with archer types, which can get around the “weenie wall” quite easily. Blindly charging through areas doesn’t work, either, as you can quickly find your party overwhelmed by enemy forces. Rogue stealth abilities are quite handy in scouting ahead and planning your movements so as to draw as few opponents at once as possible. Each different character class does play an individual role in battle. You can’t just send your entire party charging the enemy every battle (unless, of course, you’re 6 fighters) and expect to survive very long. This variety helps keep life in the game.

The sidequests are a nice touch that add more depth to the story, though the amount of backtracking required can get tedious at times. One quest in particular comes to mind, where you retrieve an item from deep in a dungeon, then have to backtrack all the way out of that dungeon and all the way up the previous dungeon to return it. This is made worse by the pathfinding.

The Infinity Engine has always had problems with pathfinding. Baldur’s Gate got around it to a degree by not having many areas that would confuse the pathfinding code. Planescape allowed you to change maps without having your entire party at the exit. Icewind Dale, unfortunately, has the map transition limitations of BG coupled with some questionable map design.

Not that the maps are poorly designed from an aesthetic standpoint. Dorn’s Deep feels like an underground cavern, and the town of Kuldahar’s design makes a lot of sense given the storyline. Without spoiling too much, the town is built around a giant tree that is essential to the survival of the townsfolk, so the town itself is built into the nooks between the tree’s roots. Most areas are unique and pleasurable to look at. It’s the design of the maps coupled with the pathfinding code that’s a problem. As an example, let’s take the Vale of Shadows, an early map in the game. When carrying loot out of the nearby dungeon back to Kuldahar to sell, you’ll find yourself crossing this map several times. However, you cannot simply click your party and tell them to move to the dungeon entrance. There’s always one or two party members who think they’ve found a shortcut and end up wandering down the many smaller and wrong paths in the Vale, thus holding up the rest of your party. And pity them if they run into a wandering shadow. This pattern is unfortunately repeated in many of the maps – while they’re pretty cool to look at and provide for some great combat tactics, the pathfinding code just doesn’t like them.

The player AI also detracts from enjoyment of the game. The AI scripts provided with the game, to be brief, suck. A ranger, told to engage from afar with missile weapons, will when he runs out of missiles equip his axe and charge into the fray, generally directly into your just-launched fireball. Non-scripted AI fares not much better. A mage, told to cast a fireball at a certain point, will not launch from his current position but will move into unexplored territory – maybe trying to get a better shot, I don’t know, but usually waking up several monsters who are not keen on the mage ever getting a spell off. Enemy AI is frighteningly better than player character AI. Phase spiders know JUST where to teleport to. Big stupid ettins who decide they want to kill your fleeing mage will chase him, ignoring the attacks of the rest of your party. And enemy spellcasters have no strange wandering tendencies when they drop a cloudkill in the middle of your party. The worst part of the party AI is your characters’ inexplicable tendency to stop attacking until you move them and reissue attack commands, and even attacking each other! This isn’t like a paladin beating on a chaotic evil priest, either, a fully good-aligned party can start beating each other down for no reason, without the help of any enemy confusion spell. Now yes, you could keep pausing and reissuing orders every time someone starts to go awry, but the idea behind having AI scripts is that you can automate some things. Repeatedly telling your party members to stop attacking each other and attack the giant skeleton can get tedious quickly.

All this might cause you to get frustrated with the game. This is abated somewhat by the calming influence of the background music. As with most games in recent memory, IWD has extremely well-done music, which sets the mood for each area perfectly. Sound effects are amusing, with some choice character sounds (there’s a smartass male voice, perfect for a bard) and full speech with fine voice acting on important plot NPCs. EAX on the background sounds provides a nice immersive feel. The game is fully playable with the sound off, but much more enjoyable with it on.

There’s easily dozens of hours of gameplay in IWD. While it is admittedly shorter than Planescape or Baldur’s Gate storywise, the combat serves to lengthen the experience. Some areas are a bit on the long side if you choose to fully explore them, but this is not necessary for enjoyment of the game. You can even choose to play through the game with friends on a LAN or over TCP/IP, which helps alleviate some of the frustration of the AI problems.

If you weren’t a fan of combat in Baldur’s Gate, I’d avoid IWD. If you can look past the annoying quirks of the engine, and are a fan of dungeon crawls, I’d certainly pick it up. The sad part is that this game was completely overshadowed by Diablo II, as it was mysteriously released on the same day. This was extremely poor marketing on Interplay’s part. Don’t pass this one over just because you’re distracted by the big ugly demon on the other box!