Icewind Dale: EE - News Roudnup

I  managed to find a new interview today on PCGamesN for Icewind Dale: EE.

Beamdog have unearthed and restored five quests, which constitute four or five hours worth of material cut from the original game. With access to Black Isle’s design docs, they were able to determine which ideas were cut due to time constraints, and which Avellone and friends would probably prefer left buried.

“It’s like going in and finding Tolkien’s notes and trying to write the next book,” said Oster. “It’s really intimidating to start, but you’ve got most of his thoughts for the first third and you’ve just got to finish it up. At the end of it you get something you’re pretty proud of.”

There’s a sense that Beamdog are continuing a tradition that modders have engaged in for a decade - digging through the files of western RPGs and dredging up quests lost in hurried development cycles. 

“Often it’s the same story,” agreed Oster. “You’ve got a lot of good plot ideas, you implement all of them, and late in the game you’re like, ‘We’ve only got time to fix 80% of the bugs. So 20%, we’ve just got to cut those off and bury them somewhere’. And that’s what you do.”

I also found two new reviews that were released today.

Invision Community - 4/5

I was into AD&D in the early 80’s. Later, when the original game came out, I loved it for it’s great graphics and deep story line which reminded me of the games I’d played with friends. This version is a great throwback to the first one; although the ‘enhancements’ don’t make the game boldly different for me, it’s still excellent role-playing!

GameBanshee - No Score

If you haven't played Icewind Dale yet, then you should definitely give the Enhanced Edition a try.  The Infinity Engine games make up one of the cornerstones of CRPG history, and they're all worth playing.  But if you already own Icewind Dale, then the answer is a little more difficult because most of the enhancements are available for free from mods.  As I was playing the EE, I was sort of wondering why anybody with bother with it when they could just play a modded version of the original game, but then just like with my recent review for Xenonauts, I went back and tried playing the original game again, and I figured out the answer: the interface.