A new Icewind Dale 2 Designer Diary has been posted at RPGVault today. Designer Dave Maldonado tells Well, the programmers are implementing the last tasty crumbs of the "shiny new features" code... that is, when they're not fixing all the bugs the cretinous designers are constantly generating with all their nutty requests. Those programmer guys are amazing. I think that one day they'll just snap and revolt... it'll probably be a bit like Animal Farm, including the part where someone gets turned into glue, or dog food, or something.
Said cretinous designers - along with the help of the scripters, of course, who the designers would be quivering jelly-like lumps of uselessness without - are making final passes over their areas, balancing the fights and (ostensibly) fixing bugs. Of course, we all know that all the producers' secret fears are true and that "fixing bugs," for designers (and sometimes scripters - come on, admit it guys), means attempting to secretly cram in new items, combat scripts, dialog options and so on while decrying other designers who are caught doing so. 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. |
Icewind Dale 2 Designer Diary #4 at RPGVault
