Icewind Dale

Black Isle takes the helm for another adventure in the Infinity Engine, made famous by Baldur's Gate and its sequel.  But does Icewind Dale's greater focus on combat ultimately help or hinder its playability?

Black Isle (later rebranded "Obsidian" after Interplay's financial troubles) is a name synonymous with many beloved RPG franchises, having worked on games like Fallout 2, Fallout: New Vegas, Planescape Torment and a few others like Alpha Protocol and Dungeon Siege III.  They also contributed to the Baldur's Gate franchise, and would later take their own crack at the Infinity Engine without Bioware's support in Icewind Dale.

Like virtually every prior video game both licensed and inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, Icewind Dale largely exhumes the device of a tabletop role-playing game as a storytelling vehicle and instead focuses almost exclusively on combat.  This is even more apparent in this game's case, however, as encounters in the game are frequent and massive in scale compared to Baldur's Gate - one can easily walk into any room in a dungeon and face a small army of roughly twenty monsters bearing down on them all at once.  Similarly, virtually every spell in the game is geared toward combat, removing many of the utility spells from Baldur's Gate in favor of adding more elements, enchantments and healing spells to give the player more tools for the battles they will face.

All of that said, Icewind Dale is at least one of the better-polished games in this format.  Combat, while frequently challenging, feels far less "cheap" than Baldur's Gate, with considerably fewer instances of spells that debilitate one's party and scarcely any foes that feel overly "broken" and all but require the player to use underhanded tactics (and savescum) in order to succeed.  This is aided in part by having numerous new equipment choices that allow the player to resist many status effects that neither Baldur's Gate ever allowed them to, but also by having a more linear progression to the game that ensures they won't stumble into, say, a Beholder lair before it's something they can reasonably handle.

The more linear format, as well as a lighter focus on story, comes into play in other tangible ways as well.  Most notably, since the story is no longer focused on a single character but now on the party as a whole, there are no longer immediate game overs when the lead character dies.  Loot is no longer fixed as it was in Baldur's Gate, but now somewhat randomized - most encounters have at least one item drop that is picked randomly from a list each time one begins a new game, which helps prevent "powergaming" with one's party to a degree.

Icewind Dale also takes many efforts to better balance the class and alignment choices afforded to the player, unlike its predecessor.  Bards, for example, now have many exclusive abilities that can buff the party in battle, help them resist (or cancel) negative status effects, as well as unique pieces of weaponry and armor.  Druids, Paladins and Rangers, as well as Multi and Dual classes, are considerably more viable choices as the low level cap of Baldur's Gate 1 is no longer in effect.  Furthermore, many good pieces of equipment are restricted to particular alignments, encouraging the player to mix them up among their characters - a stark contrast to the Baldur's Gate games, where characters of alternate alignments would violently conflict with one another.  This unfortunately means that alignment has little impact in terms of storyline or player choice, but does allow the player to take advantage of spells and abilities they might not otherwise see in a pure "good" or "evil" character playthrough.

Efforts are made to give higher-level parties something to do as well.  There is an expansion that adds in a fairly large optional quest to undertake, recommended for parties at level 9 or higher, as well as an extra quest included in the final patch called "Trials of the Luremaster" recommended for even higher level parties.  One can also begin a second playthrough by enabling the "Heart of Fury" difficulty setting, which gives all enemies the player encounters a large boost to their HP (multiplying their default total by 3, then adding another 80 on top of that to be exact), but to compensate for this, they give out far higher experience totals as well.

High-level play is not without drawbacks of its own, though  Those who have played Throne of Bhaal can attest that it was a fairly long slog, with the player having little in the way of challenge to face aside from some foes that required cheesy tactics to defeat, not aided by the comically overpowered high-level abilities they were granted (such as turning every attack they fired into a critical hit, or summoning exceptionally powerful monsters like Planetars to aid them).  Icewind Dale does not have any such abilities and is thankfully much more of a well-planned experience; however, Baldur's Gate's hard experience cap of 8,000,000 is handled in an equally inelegant way here - by giving every class a hard level limit of 30.  This applies to each class for a Dual/Multiclass character, which means that single-class characters ultimately fall by the wayside in a high-level game in favor of Fighter/Mages or Fighter/Thief/Mages or Fighter/Cleric/Mages - effectively the opposite of Baldur's Gate 2's high-level power dynamic.

At the end of the day, Icewind Dale aims for a combat-driven Infinity Engine experience and ultimately realizes it quite well.  Those looking for a deep storytelling experience probably won't find much to enjoy here, but fans of large-scale tactical combat with a D&D bent and a heavy emphasis on dice rolls (and more than a little savescumming/rolling back to earlier saves) should have quite a lot of fun with Icewind Dale.

Developer: Black Isle Studios, Overhaul Games
Publisher: Interplay
Platform: PC, iOS, OSX, Android, Linux
Released: 2000, 2014
Recommended version: The 2014 "Enhanced Edition" updates the game into the Baldur's Gate 2 EE engine, allowing for a much greater number of class choices, reduced spell durations on many effects (most prominently Charm and Sleep) and a much less clumsy interface.  Higher resolutions are also supported, updating the title to modern standards, and party AI is much improved over the original releases, with many new options for adaptive AI that make party management significantly less cumbersome.  Add an extra half-star for that version.

Fallout 2

Fallout 2 is the followup to the highly acclaimed 1997 PC classic, addressing some of the first game's shortcomings and bringing a massive amount of new content to the table.  But does Fallout 2 prove to be just as much of a successful role-playing experience, or is this the archetypal sequel that tries to do too much too quickly?

Released one year to the day after the first Fallout game, Fallout 2 was an archetypal sequel in many respects.  Still set on the west coast of a post-apocalyptic United States, it retained many of the familiar elements of its predecessor - mutated animals, random encounters, and numerous landmarks of the setting, as well as the same engine.  However, there was significantly more to see this time - the number of visitable locations on the map had nearly tripled compared to the original game's, and the amount of NPCs, quests and character dialog in the game had expanded nearly tenfold.  Indeed, almost every location the player can visit, rather than having one overarching quest and a handful of smaller ones, now has at least a half-dozen quests to complete, and not all are as easily broken into "good or evil" choices as in the first game.  One prime example of this is New Reno, where the player can ally with any of the four major crime families in the city (or none at all).  Others are more morally ambigious, such as helping Vault City force out the ghouls running a damaged and dangerous power plant in nearby Gecko, or repairing the plant and letting them maintain their independence.

Some other common complaints from the first game were addressed as well.  Recruitable NPCs now had customizable AI, with the player able to specify conditions for when to heal themselves and what types of weapons and tactics to use in a fight.  They could even now be equipped with different types of weapons and armor (up to and including power armor), making them viable even into the late stages of the game.  Weapon types are now more balanced, with Big Guns now being a viable (though still costly) choice and even Small Guns now having viable options in the later stages of the game.  Advanced in CGI also ensured that the few animated cutscenes in the game were now of much higher quality, with much less "plasticy" characters and environments and much smoother animation.  Some skills were given more of a practical use, as well - the formerly pointless Outdoorsman skill now aids with avoiding random encounters (allowing the player to skip them if they make a successful roll) and helps with finding rare Special Encounters that grant rare and powerful items.  Another example is the Skilled trait, rather than a fairly pointless (and minimal) boost to all skills, it now grants five extra skill points per level, and the longer wait between Perks is significantly less devastating for reasons detailed below.

Fallout 2 has more of a clearly defined progression to its story, with the player all but forced to go from one story-relevant area to the next in a linear fashion, lest they try to stray from it and encounter enemies much higher than their current level (and usually die).  Indeed, incremental equipment upgrades from town to town are all but necessary to survive the trip to the next for much of the first half of the game, and even then, an unlucky random encounter can put a character with a pistol in a matchup with enemies touting automatic shotguns, resulting in a game over.  As in the first game, frequent quicksaves and reloads are an integral part of the experience.

Despite this focus on balance in the early stages, the game puts much thought into higher-level play as well.  No longer is there a hard level cap at 24; instead, the player can theoretically gain as many levels as they want (up to the game's hardcoded time limit, at least) and the skill system has been tweaked to match.  The maximum for all skills is 300% now (up from 200), and at certain milestones, the cost increases - raising one point beyond 100% now costs two skill points, beyond 130% costs three, 150% costs four and so forth.  Powerful perks like Better Criticals, Slayer and Sniper now have substantially higher requirements as well.  Players can still become massively powerful, but these changes ensure that this remains an option best kept for the end of the game, and does not allow them to quickly max out their weapon skills and breeze through encounters as in the original Fallout.

One change to the game that remains universally controversial, however, is its overall mood.  While the original Fallout had an overall dark tone with a few tongue-in-cheek elements reminiscent of a comic book plot, Fallout 2 very much plays up the humor aspect of the franchise.  Frequent pop culture references creep into the dialog and the game as a whole, running the gamut from video game references to movie lines to parodies of celebrities like Mike Tyson, Bruce Lee and Tom Cruise.  Not to say that the game has no real atmosphere or interesting themes - it definitely does in its stronger moments - but elements like these mostly serve to make Fallout 2 a much sillier experience than the original game, particularly when it starts to break the fourth wall (such as providing the player with a magic 8-ball that provides in-game clues, or the game over screen mocking the player for not saving frequently enough).  It's an enormously fun game to experience and explore, but there are frequent instances where one gets the impression that Black Isle wasn't taking the experience all that seriously.

In the end, Fallout 2 is a standard but largely successful sequel, taking what made the original game great - its open-ended storytelling and dense design - and providing a lot more of it.  Some may find the humor and frequent pop culture references distracting, but for those who can roll with the punches, deal with some occasionally frustrating challenge, and laugh at the game in spite of itself, Fallout 2 is a lengthy and highly replayable quest that will keep you engrossed for many, many playthroughs.

Developer: Black Isle
Publisher: Interplay Entertainment
Platform: PC
Released:  1998
Recommended version: N/A