When we talked to Beamdog’s Trent Oster about Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, we were prepossessed with the future of D&D RPGs – but he was just as concerned about mistakes made in the past with one of the best RPGs on PC.
“We rushed Baldur’s Gate II out. It’s that simple. We rushed it and we screwed things up,” he told us. “1.3 fixes a ton of things. That thing is massive. The number of fixes in there is just insane.”
The free update incorporates around 500 bug fixes, as well as text translations for German and Spanish, options to change font size, and improvements to some incredibly obtuse millenium-era pathfinding.
Most pertinent, however, is the addition of stabilisers to the game’s co-op mode – which allows you to play through the whole 200 hour shebang with a friend or five. It’s here that Baldur’s Gate II is feeling the benefit of Beamdog’s work on Icewind Dale.
“We went through and we basically sat and we debugged it and we debugged it,” said Oster of Icewind Dale multiplayer. “We cooked hours upon hours upon hours of people testing it and testing and testing and trying to trap every scenario where that game went sideways on us.”
During ID:EE’s development, Beamdog had devs playing six-player co-op games until they were as fatigued as their party members and had to go to bed.
“So stability is way out. Baldur’s Gate 1.3 multiplayer stability is awesome, Icewind Dale same thing. We fixed it, we finally nailed all the little problems,” said Oster.
“After that we’re already talking about the 1.4 feature set. What are we gonna add, how are we gonna clean things up, what are we gonna change, how can we makes things better? There’s a ton of work still to be done in the Baldur’s Gate universe here.”
Have any of you lot revisited the rough-and-tumble city of Athkatla in recent months?