Icewind Dale II Designer Diary #9

The ninth installment of RPGVault’s Icewind Dale II Designer Diary has been posted, this time written by Black Isle’s Damien Foletto. In it, he talks about some of the pre-made parties you can choose to get into the action quickly, some of the initial areas you’ll explore, and the stats of some unique armor. Here’s a snippet:

What really grabs me while playing Icewind Dale II is all the options I have to complete quests, especially through dialogue. Many places within the game will give different dialogue options depending on what character I use and their appropriate Diplomacy, Intimidate or Bluff skill. One quest I came across involved several steps for me to assemble a potion. Now, I had a wizard with a high alchemy skill, so I could have had her put the potion together, using notes that I found. However, I decided to use my half-orc barbarian, who had a total Intimidate skill of 17, and have her pressure a nearby alchemist to put it together. My half-orc bullied the little fellow until he finally agreed to do it – which didn’t actually take that much convincing since my half-orc seemed to scare the hell out of him – and I just slaughtered everyone else on the level. It was very rewarding to know that I had more than one option to fulfill a quest, and the different options sometimes yield better results.