Icewind Dale 2's Superiority to Icewind Dale 1

Well, I've had the new color and placement theme for this blog up for 10 days now, and no complaints so far, so I'm gonna assume that it's good to stay.



I know it was a big hit with PC RPG gamers back in the day...but in all honesty, I didn’t really think much of Icewind Dale 1. In fact...well...I think it was actually kind of a bad RPG. Not very bad, but a little bad.

ID1 has a cookie-cutter western fantasy plot, the villains are undeveloped and uninteresting, and since the entire main cast are silent protagonists with no distinguishing traits whatever, there is seriously just nothing whatsoever in the game to catch and hold your interest besides exceptionally generic tabletop-to-video-game RPG gameplay, some kind of nice backgrounds, and a couple of nice background tunes.

If I had to take a guess as to how this came to pass, it’d be that the game’s developers were trying to bring the Dungeons and Dragons experience from your basement or the back room of the local comics shop as faithfully as possible. And in a sense, they succeeded.* With ID1, you’ve got the basics of a long-term campaign plot in a classic Dungeons and Dragons land, starring an adventuring group who kinda just rolled into town out of nowhere. They're a group of characters whose every trait is determined by the player at the character’s creation, and who are given no personality whatsoever by the game itself so as to have no impediment to the player’s ability to imagine the characters however the player wishes. That’s a pretty basic start to a D + D campaign, right there.

The problem is that there are certain elements of a tabletop game that you can’t imitate in a game like Icewind Dale 1--those featuring human interaction. The reason that a basic and unimaginative plot maintains one’s interest over a lengthy set of D + D sessions, the reason that empty characters who have no personality thrust upon them by the story’s narrative don’t get boring, is that D + D has human interaction helping it along. It’s the social aspect that gives the game most of the fun, ultimately. The way you and your friends work together to solve the conflicts thrown at you by the Dungeon Master makes those conflicts more interesting, the way that every step of your journey is narrated by your DM and your group forces you to employ your imagination to see it all (and it’s hard to be bored by one’s own imagination; your mind instinctively tries to interest itself, provided it’s given some leeway to do so), the way your characters are given personal shape both by their players and by their companions’ players’ actions...it all adds up to a good time, if you’ve got fun, imaginative people to play with.

But you see, that’s it right there--empty characters and basic plots work for a tabletop game because the social and imagination factors enhance them, fill them in (in fact, it wouldn’t work with more concrete plots and characters), but when you take those same factors and transfer them into a video game RPG, a more or less solo activity where the world and story are concretely displayed and told, and imagination’s ability to make positive adjustments is very limited, all you have is a bland game with empty characters. To make a Dungeons and Dragons video game right, one must go further, take steps in the storytelling process that wouldn’t normally be necessary. That’s why RPGs like Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are good--they take the normal D + D foundations, and build off of them with well-defined (and well-written) support characters, and a more detailed plot. Icewind Dale 1 does not.

Now, Icewind Dale 2 is interesting, because even though ID1 was, so far as I’m aware, a commercial success and lauded by many players, ID2’s writers seem to have gone out of their way to try to improve several of the shortcomings of the first game.

For starters, there’s the plot. Now, I wouldn’t call Icewind Dale 2’s plot amazing or anything, but there’s definitely a stronger effort to have the plot maintain its hold over all the game’s events than there was in ID1. The events the lead into one another seem more clearly defined, and the reasons and goals of each step of the campaign feel more present--there’s considerably fewer times in ID2 where it feels like you’re kind of just vaguely wandering around, hoping to stumble over the next part of the story by accident. The plot is also better in general--it has better twists, exploration, and narration, and there’s some human depth to it this time around, aspects of it that warrant appreciation and even consideration. At its heart is the question of the treatment of half breeds in the Dungeons and Dragons setting, and even if it doesn’t exactly explore that question in depth, it at least gives us a glimpse at this deeper cause. And in doing so, we get a game that more solidly ties itself to the D + D lore and culture than ID1 did. ID1 basically was just its own bare-bones story taking place in a Dungeons and Dragons setting; ID2 takes the interesting issue of prejudice against half breeds, which is, from what little I’ve seen of the Dungeons and Dragons lore, an intrinsic element of the D + D universe. ID2 even references one of the most major overlying plot points of the setting through this theme, the Blood War. So ID2 not only has a better, fuller plot, but it endeavors to tie that plot more significantly to the series in which it takes place, and doing so makes this game all the better, makes it seem a relevant, important piece of the overall D + D picture.

The cast of ID2 is also much improved. Granted, the major flaw of the first Icewind Dale cast has not been improved upon--we’re still being saddled with not 1, but a full party of 6 voiceless, personality-less characters. Sigh. As I said earlier, I understand the reasoning behind it, but I still think that reasoning just makes for a less interesting game. Even your standard Silent Protagonist in a JRPG gives more color to his game than all 6 of these “characters” do.

Still, the rest of the casting in ID2 is very much better than its predecessor. The game’s plot-important NPCs have more personality, and actually seem to have some decent relevance to the game’s events. This time around, the narrator seems like someone actually telling a story, not just blandly reporting facts as seemed the case with ID1’s narrator, and she and her uncle are fun and engaging characters in their own right. And best of all, Icewind Dale 2 actually has a couple of decent villains. While I think that Isair and Madae had much more potential as villains than the game tried to realize, they nonetheless have some depth and background to them, with understandable motivations and emotions, and goals whose motives were good. In fact, if their actions had only been a bit less extreme, I’d actually say their villainy was justified. As with any good villain, having Isair and Madae as the game’s antagonists elevates ID2’s quality as an RPG quite a bit.

In the end, Icewind Dale 2 still isn’t much more than just an okay RPG. Its plot is fine, but not amazing, its cast is decent where it can be, but severely lacking in its most important aspects (the actual party members), and the theme of half-breed prejudice is interesting and worth exploration, but isn’t actually delved into all that much after all is said and done. Still, ID2’s a huge leap forward from the bland time-waster that was Icewind Dale 1, even though ID1’s sales meant that it really didn’t have to be, and I credit it for that.










* I only ever played a couple of sessions of Dungeons and Dragons in my youth, so I do have to admit that my familiarity with and perceptions of its universe and the general playing of the game are not too experienced. So just bear that in mind if I go in the wrong direction here.

Icewind Dale 1's Add-Ons

Well, y’know, I enjoyed the Baldur’s Gate series fairly well, so I figured I’d check out some of the other Dungeons and Dragons games made in the same vein, starting with Icewind Dale 1. And lo and behold, what do I find, but another game that had add-ons. Well, it may be over a decade late, and nowadays any reliable retailer you can purchase ID1 from is going to sell the add-ons bundled with it...but like I said in my Baldur’s Gate series add-on rant, some day (soon, for that matter) EVERY add-on rant I do will be out of date as every game is eventually automatically packaged with all its DLCs and expansions, so why not just do a rant rating the expansion and DLC of Icewind Dale 1 anyways?



Heart of Winter: With a story that’s just a tiny bit interesting, a villain with a smidgen of character depth, and a plot whose events actually have some halfway decent narrative structure, the Heart of Winter expansion is leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of Icewind Dale 1. The fact that it contains a guest incarnation of the character Ravel Puzzlewell, of the infinitely excellent Planescape: Torment, is a nice bonus. In fact, even though the Seer of this expansion is at best a weak imitation of the amazing PT character, she’s easily the best part of Icewind Dale 1 in its entirety. Still, even if Heart of Winter is superior to ID1’s main game, I’m not sure I would have advocated paying for this expansion, because it’s still a bit lackluster in its story, and its cast, with the Seer’s exception, is not particularly interesting. Nonetheless, Heart of Winter was at least a step in the right direction from the main story of Icewind Dale 1, so it earns some appreciation from me, I suppose.


Trials of the Luremaster: Released after the Heart of Winter expansion, Trials of the Luremaster was a free additional DLC to go with Heart of Winter that added a challenging extra dungeon to the game. As the story goes, according to Wikipedia, there was some criticism by audiences that the Heart of Winter expansion wasn’t big enough, so Black Isle Studios whipped up this lengthy super-dungeon to compensate.

By itself, I can’t say I really think much of Trials of the Luremaster. All it is, honestly, is a new dungeon with some (admittedly excellent) stuff to loot, a lot of tough battles, a few puzzles, and a very weak story. The premise is that the adventuring party is tricked into being taken to a dangerous, cursed castle, and they have to match wits and swords against the ghost bard that runs the place to put him to rest and escape. The story behind the castle, which is mostly revealed through reading some of the literary items you can find within it, is okay, I suppose, but it’s kind of generic, really, and not very interesting. I’ve seen this kind of DLC before a couple times now (Dragon Age 1’s Warden’s Keep, and Baldur’s Gate 1’s Durlag’s Tower, for examples), and honestly, this is the weakest iteration of the Cursed Historical DLC Castle/Tower/Fortress idea that I’ve seen. DA1 did it well enough with the Warden history tied to the place and thematic use of blood that relates to the rest of the game, and I actually thought that BG1’s Durlag’s Tower had an almost riveting way of telling its tale. Highest praise I could give to Trials of the Luremaster is that it’s dead-middle okay.

However, I still judge this DLC positively, because, well, they made it free of charge, so it’s not like it cost any extra to experience, and it’s not like it’s bad at all, or anything like that. And I really appreciate the idea of a developer taking the time to make something like this, responding to its customers’ disatisfactions in a positive and proactive manner by giving them what they felt was missing, and doing it all free of charge. And all of it seemingly without complaint, or smug, snide PR statements about the grandness of the favor! Really puts Bioware to shame by comparison, doesn't it? Yeah, I'll give Trials of the Luremaster a thumbs-up.



And that’s it; Heart of Winter and Trials of the Luremaster were the only add-ons made for Icewind Dale 1. How do they measure up? Eh. Could be worse. If we compare to ID1’s peers, they were certainly better than the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion for Baldur’s Gate 1, but at the same time, the Throne of Bhaal expansion for Baldur’s Gate 2, released the same year as Heart of Winter, is a heck of a lot better. Still, it’s not a lot of add-ons I can definitely say are better than the main game. I mean, if you can already put up with the nigh-mindless slog-fest that comprises 90% of Icewind Dale 1, then Heart of Winter and Trials of the Luremaster are worth checking out and will seem really good by comparison. In the end, Icewind Dale 1 gets a pass from me for its add-ons.