Published by Interplay
Reviewed by JayTee on 8/8/00

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First Impressions

After being extremely disappointed with Diablo II (which broke another mouse), I was actually pining away for a good old RPG that required more than strong index finger muscles. I pre-ordered Icewind Dale, and thankfully, it arrived a few weeks after the release of Diablo II. After realizing that I did not have enough HD space left (thanks to my ubiquitous CounterStrike 6 and having just installed Deus Ex, which by the way, is quite cool), I decided to trash DII to make room. It was a good day.

Background

Taking their cue from the outstanding success of Baldur's Gate (plus add-on Tales of the Sword Coast) and Planescape: Torment), Black Isle Studios is back with yet another fantasy RPG, which may have been literally torn from the pages of R A Salvatore's Icewind Dale series, based on TSR's Forgotten Realms game world. This should prove most attractive to traditional pen-and-paper based RPGers, and they have cause to celebrate: Icewind Dale, despite its technological shortcomings, IS excellent in one valuable aspect: its game design.

Icewind Dale, a region located in the Spine of the World, is home to the nomadic Barbarian tribes. Set in the Northernmost part of Faerun, the Dale is a cold and harsh tundra with a small number of villages scattered here and there, which are referred to as the 'Ten-Towns'.

Flipping through the pages of an ancient book, an unseen narrator tells the tale of a Barbarian-Mercenary war that took place in the Dale long ago. It was a war waged by a power-mad evil archmage and his band of mercenaries, who aimed to enslave the Barbarians. Because they wrongly underestimating the Barbarians, the mercenaries were being steadily extinguished. Seeing that defeat was imminent, the archmage, in an act of selfish desperation, opened a portal to the lower plains that let in the horrors of the underworld. However, the demons and monsters attacked all that were living, barbarians and mercenaries alike, and in the end, the opposing forces had to join ranks to defeat the hellspawn that kept pouring out of the portal.

Shaman Jarod, leader of the tribe of Barbarians, who worshipped the deity Tempus, could see that they were losing hopelessly. Then, in a sighting that was interpreted as an omen, the Shaman jumped into the portal and sealed it with his own blood.

Fast forward a few years, your band and you arrive at a town called Easthaven. You learn of disturbing and unexplainable events happening in the Dale and are given the task to investigate and ferret out the great evil behind them. Whether for profit or the good of all the Dale, this serves to be your primary objective throughout the game.

Character Generation

Highly similar to Baldur's Gate's character creation system, Icewind Dale allows you to create up to six characters of your own, utilising AD&D Second Edition standards. While you can start with less than six characters, I would advise you to have a full party comprised of very different and far-ranging characters to make your gameplay more enjoyable and less aggravating (the game IS difficult to play).

Character generation can be a tiresome process to some (especially Diablo II aficionados) as it requires you to "roll" several times to distribute points properly to achieve an optimum starter character. If you do not distribute your points wisely, you may discover grievous shortcomings later on in a poorly created character that would be better off dead as there is no option to rectify later on. I had to recreate characters over and over (taking spaces of my deceased characters) because combat is intensive in Icewind Dale, and every little point counts. What I would recommend at this point is to choose diverse characters so that you might enjoy all items in the game. I also discovered that a mage, thief and cleric are a must (so don't just make warriors). You won't last long without these, as some monsters such as cold wights and mummies will not respond to basic hacking and slashing.

In character generation, I quite enjoyed choosing portraits for my characters, and those provided in the CD are very well done. I also wrote bios for my first three characters (because they survived through the whole game). I learned that you can even create your own portraits or download those others have created (links below).

One thing I noticed in the character generation process was that while I could create bad-ass characters, because of the way the game itself is designed (good NPCs all round), I could not progress as easily with them as I could with my "good" characters. The reason being that most quests are given by good-hearted NPCs, and you will find NPCs not being very friendly or cooperative if you are an evil character. Still, one or two guys with attitude may not be too bad in a party six. As mentioned, I would recommend making your group as diverse as possible, so that you may experience a richer first game (oh, you will replay Icewind Dale more than once).

Interface

Excellent! Let's start with the interface, which again is pretty the same as Baldur's Gate, but believe me; it is much better here in Icewind Dale. While I enjoyed Baldur's Gate game interface the first time I played it, I remember only too well the problems associated with it. For example, the pause feature was a little irritating, because the game would resume if you switched to your spells or inventory screen. Thankfully, they fixed this in Icewind Dale, where the action remains paused and is only resumed at the player's command. This may be viewed as a small adjustment, but it helps a lot.

Another small yet superb modification to the interface is that you can now see your characters' green circles move in your map screen. There is a lot of traveling to be done in Icewind Dale (a complaint about this below) so this helps tremendously (to mentally urge them to walk faster, if not anything else, as there's no 'Run' command in the game).

Because Icewind Dale is built on the Infinity engine, path finding remains an unsolved issue. And since the maps in the game are smaller and have more tightly woven passages, characters get stuck or lost quite often, requiring much micro-management in this area.

Gameplay

Very good. Combat in Icewind Dale is well-paced and persists throughout the game, where groups of monsters, ranging from wights to goblins to giants to salamanders, lie in wait of ambush around every corner. Exploration and combat is forward-progressing; once an area is cleared, it remains cleared, but there are some areas that continue to spawn monsters randomly (but not many). You may rest in most maps when not in combat, but the spawning of monsters while you rest depends on your roll of the dice (I always save before resting so that I can reload if salamanders attack my badly-wounded party in mid-slumber).

What is impressive about combat in Icewind Dale is the monster AI. By targeting the weakest of your characters and your range-attackers first, combat is much more challenging and interesting. When you win, the feeling is definitely more gratifying. Granted you can pause mid-combat to drink potions (having depleted those in your belt) and reissue instructions, it is still a daunting task to kill three or four magic-casting mummies scattered across a room.

There is one bittersweet feature in Icewind Dale with which I am still not able to come to terms. While there are tons of cool items in the game that your party will pick up, the space in your inventory and the burden limits of your characters require frequent trips to towns or shops, and there aren't many (Kuldahar mainly). Also, the items for sale in the shops are mostly crap, so as you progress, you will realise that trading isn't as lucrative as looting. I ended up not going back to town at all except for quest updates.

Another deterrent to taking trips back to town is the engine's poor path finding, which leads to frustrating micro-navigation of characters through one map after another just to go back to Kuldahar. There are no waypoints or town portal spells as in Diablo II, so it gets quite aggravating rather quickly. There are NPCs that will offer to teleport you now and then (after you finish certain quests), but you'll discover that getting back to these NPCs is another tiresome task, so much so that you'll rather stay your course of getting to the bottom of things even if it means dropping some superb items.

This may be disappointing to hardcore RPG fans, but Icewind Dale is linear, and the designers meant it to be this way. Answering this question on the game's official site, the guys at BIS said, "Our game is very linear. The game was intentionally designed to be linear from the start. We feel that this makes multiplayer gaming more straightforward. This doesn't mean that the game is the same each time you play it, though. Dialogue options and NPC reactions can change according to the speaker's race, alignment, class, gender, or ability scores. You can also play through the game multiple times and find many new and unique magic items."

As you can see, linear doesn't necessarily mean "no good." Depending on your characters' personalities and how they interact with the NPCs, you will come to three different endings.

As for how high a level you can achieve with your characters, my highest was 14 for my thief and mage characters, but since you're sharing XPs between six characters, the process can seem a very long one. Not ungratifyingly so, however, as the higher you go, especially for mages and clerics, the more exciting the gameplay is. As any RPG veteran can tell you, the importance of character development is crucial to the experience of a truly enjoyable game. This aspect of Icewind Dale is commendable, as you are not given too many experience points too quickly between one level and the next just so that you can kill bigger and harder monsters. The progression is smooth, and so is the delivery of better items to reward your mounting efforts.

Graphics and Audio

So-so. Icewind Dale uses a modified version of the 2D bitmap system used with the Infinity Engine (as seen in Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment). The hand-painted environments are beautifully rendered but are nonetheless static and do not allow for much interactivity. Kudos must be given to the artists at Black Isle Studios, though, because they gave monsters such as giants and etins a sense of scale - they were humongous.

There is also one serious problem with a 2D system, and that is visibility of items. For example, as part of the Astrodome quest, I had to find the last mechanical part, which I feared was dropped by a monster that I may have forgotten to loot (with so much in your inventory, you will forego some looting). Given that the environment was quite dark, I had to slowly comb through all the levels (and believe me, remembering one's way in the Severed Hand was difficult enough, but now I had to find a teeny bit of machinery on the floor!) and needless to say, it took me some hours before I could proceed.

The voice acting for NPCs is decent, whereas sound bites for your own characters may be improved upon - the choices available certainly did not fit the personalities I wanted for my characters.

Stability

Okay. Before the 1.06 patch was available, there were bugs that affected the game critically. I remember writing an e-mail to the support people about a level where I was supposed to kill this snake-woman called Yxonomei, and after escaping for a quick rest to recharge my characters, I returned to find that she had disappeared. A reply from the support guys told me that she could be found at the top left corner of the map in a room. This bug is fixed by installing the patch.

The game did crash twice on me, but that may be due to a variety of problems. Heck, my machine is not problem-free, so I will give Icewind Dale the benefit of the doubt.

Conclusion

By all standards, and compared to Baldur's Gate, this is one of the best RPGs I have played this entire year. I cannot say that this verdict will remain true throughout 2000, because it will have Neverwinter Nights, Pool of Radiance and Shadows of Amn to compete with, all of which will be coming out soon.

If you have to choose between Diablo II and Icewind Dale,however, I would recommend the latter with all my heart. At least you get to kill some drow in this one.

Women in Icewind Dale

There are just as many female characters as there are male in Icewind Dale, ranging from gnomes to elven to humans. If the beautifully painted portraits are anything to go by, I'd say that Black Isle Studios recognise that women are into RPGs as much as their male counterparts.

References

For regular updates, downloads of more art, plus the latest patch:
www.interplay.com/icewind/index.html
For a very useful walkthrough (which is in the form of a FAQ), try: www.gameadvice.com/cgibin/faq.cgi?game=i/IcewindDale-DSimpson.txt
For strategies, this is your site (membership needed):
http://guides.ign.com/
For hints, cheats and even an editor:
www.tgeweb.com/ironworks/icewind/cheats.shtml