Icewind Dale

Game Facts

Icewind Dale, released in 2000, was I believe the third of Bioware’s Infinity Engine D&D rules role playing games (RPGs). The titular setting is in the Forgotten Realms, a frozen wasteland far north of Baldur’s Gate and the other cities of the Sword Coast, and the story is like an echo in history of the Drizzt Do’Urden novels of the same name by RA Salvatore.

The Infinity Engine series of games, starting with Baldur’s Gate, present a 2D isometric view of a party of up to six PCs controlled by the same player, or shared out in multiplayer mode. The PCs wander across beautifully painted landscapes and underground dungeons. Combat is in real time, but can be paused at will or automatically for a more tactical approach and there is emphasis on non-combat activities through dialogue interaction with NPCs. The games are all based upon the 2^nd Edition D&D rules, apart from the final one, Icewind Dale 2, which uses 3^rd Edition rules.

Opinion

It was inevitable that I would choose to review or, perhaps more accurately, share reminiscences on at least one of Bioware’s Infinity Engine games and I chose Icewind Dale as it was the first I played.

At the risk of being boring and even more nerdy than strictly necessary, I first want to set a background to such games, as it illustrates how revolutionary this series was at the time. My previous experience with RPGs were the Eye of the Beholder series, which presented a first person view (slightly strangely of multiple PCs in a chosen formation) and block movement, by which I mean the player moves one 10-ft square at a time, and can rotate in 90 degree jumps, not really much more advanced than a very old game I played for the Dragon 32 called Ring of Darkness, though there was more detailed rendering and the monsters growing in strange jumps as they bore down on you along square corridors had simple animations. There was virtually no NPC interaction.

After that for me came what I call the Ravenloft games, first released in 1994 These were in the same 1^st person visual format, but movement was smooth and continuous, like in Doom or Ultima Underworld. There was more of a story and more NPC interaction with merchants, etc. There were two sequels to Ravenloft; one, called Stone Prophet, was set in an Egypt-like Ravenloft world, and the other was Menzoberranzan, which coincidently also ties in with the legendary Drizzt.

On first playing an Infinity Engine game (for most, the original Baldur’s Gate), the leap in sophistication from the Eye of the Beholder series would have been huge. The isometric view of several PCs in a party much more closely simulated the table-top miniatures D&D experience, and the pauseable real-time was ideal for the PC – all the number crunching was done for you, but you still had the tactical options of table-top. The degree of conversational interaction with NPCs was hugely expanded, and as close as one can achieve to having a real dungeon master as has ever been achieved before or since. So it was possible for the first time to role-play rather than merely to roll-play. There was much more of a recreation of all the things that a table-top player could choose to do – properly targeted spell-casting, thieving abilities, merchant interactions, etc. There were side-quests and side-plots, so that gameplay involved completing mini-goals in a flexible manner rather than simply grinding up levels by fighting hordes of enemies. Finally, all bar the first PC in some games would be fleshed out NPC characters whom you would come across and invite into your party, rather than just constitute a set of pre-rolled stats. This allowed for more role-playing and for quests based upon who was in your own party of adventurers.

I found the leap from the Ravenloft games slightly less dramatic. The latter games were somewhat underrated and possibly did not have a huge impact among many players who were not mainly seeking the PC for a D&D experience. For me, it was more of a different experience than a greater experience, one that was a much better simulation of table-top gaming but which lacked the immediacy of 1^st person perspective, the latter of which would eventually be exemplified by non-D&D RPGs like Skyrim.

Moving to Icewind Dale in particular, this was an Infinity Engine game that lacked NPCs that would join your party. Instead, in true D&D style, you would generate a whole party at the start. (You could choose to risk having fewer in your party so that each one would gain experience more quickly.) In non-D&D style (if you actually had any friends who would play tabletop D&D with you), you would control all these PCs simultaneously, but the beauty of the computer is that so much of the chore of combat is done automatically, and so instead of being overwhelming, it simply opens up perhaps even more tactical options than if you were having to communicate with players round a table. There is also the option to divide out the PCs among other human players who are on a LAN with you.

Not knowing anything about the all of the quest and role-playing possibilities of Baldur’s Gate at that time, I didn’t know what I was missing and loved the ability to fine-tune creating a 1^st level party exactly as I wished, especially with the fantastic Jeremy Soule music playing in the background all the while. In fact, when I then played Baldur’s Gate 2, I thought, “Who are these idiots imprisoned in some big ugly bloke’s dungeon with me? I would never choose that combination of classes, or permit a fighter with less than 18 91 strength.” And so I did a pseudo-multiplayer option to generate all my own PCs, thereby missing out on most of the party NPC interactions for the rest of the game!

Perhaps as a result of the lack of detailed party NPCs, Icewind Dale is considered the most hack-and-slash, and dare I say least sophisticated, of the Infinity Engine games. But perhaps for the same reason (ie being a rather unsophisticated person) and because it was my first game, I enjoyed it more than the Baldur’s Gate series.

At the time I played it, I felt the only drawback was the same as for that of all computer games at the time and since. In the expectation to deliver the full D&D experience, levelling up would be far more rapid than playing tabletop D&D so that one adventure would transform the player from a neophyte to a virtual demi-god. The first few levels would fly by especially quickly, almost as if to get them out of the way so that the player would have more combat options. When it’s finished, that’s your lot until the commercial release of the next adventure. And when the follow-up did come in the form of Heart of Winter, that resulted in even more extreme levelling up, sometimes throwing millions of experience points out for completing rather trivial quests, just to get the PCs to the level where they could win the end fight.

On reflection, the plot of Icewind Dale was rather linear, and more effort might have been made to make it possible to visit the various exploration/ combat areas in parallel rather than sequentially, or to have more reason to travel back and forth to explore/ loot them piecemeal instead of just back and forth to the “merchant base” at Kuldahar. As a result, the quality of the experience trailed off for me slightly after the first chapter.

But that is just a minor gripe compared to the experience of following the twists and turns of the story through beautifully rendered areas of frozen wilderness, ice caves and dark dungeons to the accompaniment of the best music soundtrack in any game (with the possible exception of Skyrim). There is a lot of work to get through fighting a wide variety of different enemies, and the final combat with the twist at the end is appropriately satisfying.

Stand-out moments for me were:

• The introductory cut scene and setting up the party generally were of a production quality far higher than any D&D game that had gone before and really set the tone for the adventure.
• Leaving the inn and entering the snow-draped village of Easthaven for the first time to the swelling strains of the Easthaven theme. For those steeped in Forgotten Realms lore and RA Salvatore’s novels, areas such as Icewind Dale and the Sword Coast are nearly as familiar and evoke as many memories as the geography of one’s local town! Sad but true.
• Struggling through the wilderness on the way to Kuldahar, desperate for shelter and recuperation from the harsh winds of Icewind Dale and the Spine of the World, and then finding a snowy ruined tower. Do you enter the tower and fight the ogre resting inside, or travel on hoping not to suffer too much gradual attrition from the goblins lurking everywhere? Such are the stark choices in Icewind Dale, where battles are fought not for riches but simply for a bit of shelter and the right to survive. And then to hear the peaceful melody of the Kuldahar theme as you at last reach this mountainside oasis of calm, warmth and safety.

What Next?

There were two sequels to Icewind Dale, the last of which had 3^rd edition rules but which clashed with the release of Neverwinter Nights (NWN) and was not commercially very successful. NWN completely changed the ball-game. Although there was a limitation in terms of the lack of multi-PC control, and the environments were not as varied and as artistically rendered, these environments could be recreated relatively easily in a toolset that allowed the community to produce an endless wealth of gaming modules. The official campaigns and many community modules had the same mad levelling-up charge so alien to table top D&D (but which most have now got used to or even demand), but one did not have to wait several months and buy a new game to repeat this experience – free gaming at any character level and in adventures of any scope was just a quick download away!

In a way, the most apposite final curtain for the Icewind Dale series was for it to become the subject itself for a community Neverwinter Nights 2 (NWN2) recreation. With this contribution by Slowdive Fan and others you can faithfully replay the original Icewind Dale in a NWN2 game engine that can do it justice and using 3.5 Edition rules!

Aside from NWN and the Baldur’s Gate series, for the most accurate recreation of the 3.5 Edition rules in the isometric format, there is Temple of Elemental Evil (2003), a heavily tactical combat-orientated game. Recently, an update of Baldur’s Gate and its first expansion has been released (2012) – the same game with higher screen resolution, bug fixes and some add-ons and which is playable on tablet format rather than just on PC.

And then, in many ways the opposite of Icewind Dale, there stands alone and apart… Planescape: Torment. This is an Infinity Engine game that flaunts such mundane concerns as combat and a sensible user interface in favour of a huge interactive world and a truly epic story. But since I am playing it right now and for the first time, I shall give it a separate review later!

Summing Up

Icewind Dale is arguably the king of “proper” D&D rules hack-and-slash fests, in one of the most evocative fantasy settings presented beautifully both visually and musically.

The Court’s Verdict: 9/10