10 Years of Baldur's Gate

RPGVault is running an article commemorating the 10th anniversary of acclaimed RPG Baldur's Gate. They sat down with members of the Dragon Age: Origins team, some of whom worked on Baldur's Gate, to talk about their experiences with the game and what made it so popular. "The other thing I was responsible for was balance testing. It was a constant fight between me and the Interplay testers; they were always trying to make it easier, and I was always pushing back to make it harder. At one point, I got so frustrated with the final battle with Sarevok that I created a 7th level Minsc, gave him some weapons and armor, and then began to spawn in Sarevok's — mowing through them like a hot knife through butter. After I'd killed six or seven of them, I spawned in a final one and took a screenshot, with the fresh one standing among all his slaughtered predecessors. I edited it and put a bubble above Minsc's head that read 'Sigh... another one of those pesky Sarevoks' and then e-mailed it out to the company. Growing up playing D&D with James Ohlen (the Lead Designer on BG, and now on our new MMO), I knew that would piss him off to no end, and suffice to say he was much tougher when I tried to fight him the next day."

Comments

An interesting coincidence

[Dutch Gun]

I just happened to have picked up Bauldur's Gate I && II recently from Amazon for some entertainment on my laptop. It's a reasonably powerful machine, but it's starting to show its age a bit as a gaming machine. So, having never played these games despite being a huge RPG fan, I picked them both up on the cheap.

Obviously, the game shows its age in some ways, but its still fantastic fun, and sometimes deeper than more modern games (requiring explicit 3D visualization of everything in the world sometimes has its disadvantages). I'm just starting out, and I'm already having a blast. I can't wait until I get a bit deeper into the story and see what unfolds. The only hangup for me was I had gotten used to the more streamlined D&D v3 rules (never played with 3.5 or 4, at least yet), so dropping back to v2 was sort of strange.

The stories about "100 hour work week" caught my eye as well. I was working in the game industry since about that time (coming up on 11 years for me), and attitudes by management certainly were a lot different then. Many companies just figured, "that's the way it is" in the industry while routinely exploiting the hell out of their workers. Most developers were young, having fun on the job and willing to work stupidly long hours, especially as one could be fairly easily replaced. Still, make no mistake, 100 hour workweeks are nothing to be proud of by either side. One side is exploiting, and the other is enabling that exploitation.

I've been through crunches - and not even as bad as others have experienced. There's nothing good that comes out of it except a burning desire to get far away from the company that just finished putting you it (at least for me). Eventually, one comes to the realization that crunches are simply the result of bad scheduling, unrealistic expectations, continually shifting targets, or a combination of this and other issues. In other words, it means your project is a mess. I've seen multiple instances of a team that, quite literally, completely disintegrated at the end of a death march. Is a single project worth destroying a development team?

Fortunately, attitudes are slowly changing in the industry for the better. Many of those who stuck through it have grown up, married, and have kids. We no longer will put up with demands to sacrifice our lives, and fortunately, occasionally have enough experience and clout to push thing in a saner direction. Some developers put through the wringer years ago are now in leadership positions, and vehemently fight against this sort of nonsense (this describes my current bosses, I'm happy to say). Keeping developers happy, not too surprisingly, is a good recipe for long-term success.

Re:An interesting coincidence

[Zarhan]

If you just picked it up, I suggest you get EasyTutu, which allows you to play BG1 with BG2's much improved engine. Including higher resolution and all the other improvements.

Re:An interesting coincidence

[Dutch Gun]

I totally appreciate your point of view... but I can hear management right now..

"That's fine, we still have India"

70% of Toca 3's cars were outsourced to India....

The [sad] truth is, no matter how unwilling you are to do something, there will always be someone grateful for it, even if they are getting paid 3x+ less than you.

I feared this day coming, and the truth is under current laws etc, anything that can be outsourced WILL be outsourced, and what are but a few ones and zeros? :-/

Our company outsources some of our artwork to Asia, but it's somewhat limited in scope. Most of the outsourced tasks are isolated in nature and have very clear "blueprints", so to speak (i.e. we need another several variants on this theme of outfit, etc). One could compare it to the difference between key animators and betweeners in traditional cell animation work, I suppose.

Knowledgeable management understands that outsourcing only works well in particular cases. You mentioned car models were outsourced. This is actually a pretty good example of something that probably does happen to work well for outsourcing. A car, especially a licensed car, is a well-defined and isolated game asset. Assuming there's a standardized starting rig and shaders (which I'd guess the local artists created), it wouldn't be too hard for external houses to crank through them. I've worked on a baseball game before, and the stadium modeling was outsourced.

None of our programming and none of our "key" art assets are outsourced, because:
1) In some cases (particularly regarding engineering) it would require handing over too much information to someone we really don't know or trust (we've had damaging PR-related leaks from external partners before).
2) They would not be able to coordinate with other team members in any way that approached what a local developer could do, especially if they're nowhere near the same timezone. Our working space is optimized for easy communication with each other.
3) They simply don't have the industry experience that our team has (many have five to fifteen years), and wouldn't be able to deliver the same quality and creativity.

In our particular situation, both inter and intra-team communication is extremely important. Game development is a highly fluid process, and it's important to be able to change directions quickly when new ideas are thought of, or when an old idea are discovered to be unfun or just unworkable. Management-think like what you described is the same sort of short-sighted thinking that directly led to the demise of many development houses. The same mentality that was used to work people until they became physically ill (yes, I know of this happening) could also be used to keep wages suppressed. We already receive lower-than-industry-average wages due to the nature of the work we do - not complaining, I knew this going in. The threat used to be with replacement by fresh college grads or whiz-kids off the streets. Now it's by outsourcing. It sounds good on paper, but it just doesn't end up working like that.

I've been hearing this for a decade now, and the threat of cheaper labor has always been there. If your company plans to outsource everything to India or China, you might as well find a new job anyhow. Management who doesn't understand the value of what an experienced developer can do is pretty much guaranteed to run the company in the ground eventually. I mentioned earlier the industry is improving / growing up. Part of this natural evolution is, to put it bluntly, the culling of companies that simply won't ever be successful due various reasons, including short-sighted management.

Re:Minsc says....

[Ravn_Silvalar]

Go for the eyes Boo, GO FOR THE EYES!! RrraaaAAGHGHH!!!

BG is still very much active

[Nick Ives]

Check out the mod section on Pocketplane.net, there's all sorts of mods. Probably the most popular thing to do is to bring BG1 into the BG2 engine along with the classic BG1 mods like DSotSC, this allows you to play the whole saga+mods as one giant game. I'd reckon about a 400+hr experience!

I did that about last year, (un)fortunately I managed to screw it up somehow by installing a few other smaller mods as well. I got about 50hrs in and when I attempted the side quest mod in question it caused a crash. My previous good save was more than 10hrs old so I lost interest, thereby saving all my weekends for what would most likely have been all the past year and probably a year ahead too!

Epic Adventures

[ShakaUVM]

I loved the Baldur's Gate series, and while I rate them among my favorite games of all times (and just bought them again in the D&D collector's edition) they lived in a weird place, where I both wished they were longer and shorter games.

At a certain point, I enjoyed just wandering to some random place in the world, and having some sort of encounter there. HOLY CRAP, there's a red dragon! And then figuring out how to beat it. But some sequences, especially and unfortunately in the main quests, could really drag. In BG II, once you travel to this island, you're basically on a railroad for the next 20 hours of your life. You end up traveling through three full acts of the game until you're allowed to re-emerge on the world map, travelling through a mage's tower (where you lose one of your party members permanently... which bugs the hell out of me when games do that), then underdark adventurers, then a full city of a drow that you have to navigate through before finally being able to emerge, blinking, on the surface, where there's still a few more adventures on rails before you're allowed to travel back home with the 3000 pounds of loot you've been accumulating the whole time.

Best bug in BG II - an unsigned short underflow on magic item charges when fighting those monsters which eat magic. A sword with 32k charges of haste? Yes please. Especially since the price of an item is proportional to how many charges are left in it. =)

I kind of wish that they'd have gone the extra mile and done a BG III instead of devolving into the pit of crap that is Neverwinter Nights and related games and expansions.

Re:Epic Adventures

[hibiki_r]

I hated NWN out of the box. The campaign was a turd sandwich, boring as they get. The party size limitation made the game into a mess too: You cannot really have a full party, so no adventures that are challenging and interesting for all classes could be set up in the first place. D&D was designed with groups of 4,5 characters in mind: How can you play with just 2?

The [arty interactions were also severely limited. Half of the fun in BG was to hear your party bickering. NWN got rid of that too.

I'd not say it was the worst RPG ever, but it was definitely a step down, and only gets closer to BGII in quality after downloading the very best user generated content.

Hamster Fun!

[vjmurphy]

"Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the eyes!"

A worrying sign

[Lida Tang]

Some of the info given about BG are really interesting. This caught my eye

Some parts of BG seem simple now, and many perceived character relationships were outright imaginary. The players imposed their own perceptions on those tiny sprites and unrecorded text.

This engaging the player's imagination is a very powerful tool since it allows each person's experience to be personal. Here is how they describe Dragon Age

With full quality voice and cinematic visuals, the characters provide a huge array of responses in no uncertain terms.

I fear the uncanny valley also apply to exposition. The more you anticipate how the relationships between the characters could go, the more artificial it could seem to the players, because it will only reflect what the designers think could happen.