Icewind Dale II Designer Diary #4

Dave Maldonado, Black Isle’s designer for the upcoming Icewind Dale II, paid another visit to RPGVault to post the fourth of his Designer Diaries. Here’s a bit of what he had to talk about:

Sure, we have legitimate excuses for some of the additions… the new skills system, for instance, requires that dialogs make skills like Bluff and Intimidate cool and rewarding, meaning we’ve got some dialog tweaking and adding to do. But some of it is just plain aesthetics (e.g. making sure we’ve got consistency across areas and designers) and role-playing-type fun. After all, wouldn’t an evil cleric Player Character want to gloat a bit just before crushing the servant of another (clearly inferior) deity? Yes… yes she would. Now we just need the SFX of a metal-shod boot driving someone’s head into the bloody, steaming snow while laughing disdainfully and we’ll be all set.