''Baldur's Gate II
was developed by BioWare and published by Black Isle Studios, a division of Interplay Entertainment. The game uses the same Infinity Engine as Baldur's Gate'' (1998), but with many improvements. Other games that used this engine were Black Isle Studios'
Planescape: Torment (1999) and
Icewind Dale (2000). BioWare dedicated ''Baldur's Gate II'' to Daniel Walker, who died in 1999 and was the company's second employee. Though a success, both commercially and critically, ''Baldur's Gate
was the first role-playing game designed by BioWare, and they applied what they learned in the process to Baldur's Gate II
. They also felt they did not have enough time to reach their design goals with the first game, due to developing both the content of the game and the Infinity Engine at the same time. In Baldur's Gate II
, it was determined that the designers should be allowed "adequate time" so that the game might "reach its full potential". From the suggestions of fans on message boards and newsgroups, reviews of Baldur's Gate'', and internal suggestions, a list of constructive criticism was compiled; from this list, a slightly shorter one of features to be added to the game was made. Producer Ben Smedstad said that "the engine was up and running since day one, which is a huge morale booster. When a monster is complete, we put it into the 'override' directory and it appears in the game! This is a huge change from working on the original". Pathfinding had been improved in
Tales of the Sword Coast (the ''Baldur's Gate
expansion), and was improved further in Shadows of Amn'' through a feature called "bumping", which allowed a character to move another one out of the way if the path was blocked. Also, to aid pathfinding even more, paths in dungeons were widened, so that characters would get stuck less often. The interface was also refined a bit. To avoid some of the design mistakes made in ''Baldur's Gate'', guidelines were drawn up for each department; the level designers had the longest set of guidelines. These lists continually changed and evolved as the development progressed. The main design guidelines for the entire project were that the players should feel like their actions have an effect on the game world, and good versus evil options should be available depending on which path the player takes. Guidelines for the story were to keep the focus on the player's character, keep the player updated on the activities of the game's villain, add a significant plot twist, and make the ending of the game open enough so that there would be room for more sequels. Environment guidelines were to break the game into chapters, make some locations key to the central plot, keep areas interesting and easy to quickly navigate, and showcase areas before they were available to explore to capture player interest. For the game systems, guidelines focused on character customization and a well-crafted reward system. The writing guidelines were concerned mainly with dialogue: limiting the number of sentences NPCs spoke at a time, keeping the number of player response choices at three as often as possible, avoiding profanity and accents, and having a small set of random dialogue for unimportant NPCs. Many early design decisions did not follow the guidelines, and programming constraints were not always followed by other departments, such as design and art, leading to slowdowns in some parts of the game that were difficult or impossible to fix. The process for creating levels was long and complicated. It began with the creation of a general layout of the area to be built by designers. They would pass this concept map to the artists, who added models to it, beginning with the largest objects and ending with small items such as individual pieces of furniture. After everything was put in place by the art team, designers took over again, inserting graphical enhancements, effects, and
collision detection code. With a functional level, creatures, items, traps, and triggers were added last, then
scripts were written for everything to control behavior. The team found it quite difficult to keep track of changes made to levels, and there were sometimes communication problems between different parts of the team, such as the artists and designers, resulting in inconsistencies between their work. Co-executive producer
Ray Muzyka wrote that "they learned to make sure all elements of the team are talking to each other and working as a group, rather than as a bunch of individuals!" They did feel they had done a good job automating the level creation process, as levels were rapidly designed. Muzyka also said that "a designer might submit a level description and receive it, art complete, a month later ready for scripting, but missing some key features (almost always a door). We would then have to determine whether the omission was important enough to have the art piece redone, or whether we could simply tweak the design of the level to fit the finished art". Marcia Tofer, art director for
Shadows of Amn, worked with a team of 8 to 12 people to create the game's artwork, such as the backgrounds, monsters, etc. Tofer observed that the city of Baldur's Gate had been their first attempt at city building and what they learned there served to make Athkatla "far more diverse and interesting". City renders took from 18 to 24 hours, though they used hardware that was powerful for those days: multiple dual Pentium IIIs at 500 MHz, coupled with 512 MB of memory. In traditional mediums like text or film and television, what is read or seen is effectively controlled by the creators. Games are a visual medium, according to Luke Kristjanson, one of the writers and designers on
Shadows of Amn, but they are unlike the traditional ones of film and television. For ''Baldur's Gate
, the developers knew what would be seen on the critical path, but not when'' players would see it, or whether the right amount of significance would be placed upon it. In
Shadows of Amn, several tools were used to remedy these shortcomings. One of these were in-game cutscenes, which were like small plays, "adding suspense and depth to the world and overall story". Cutscenes had been used in ''Baldur's Gate
, but were employed "more effectively" in Shadows of Amn
. Another technique was to increase, to a greater degree than Baldur's Gate
, the interactivity of the characters that travel with the player. While the characters in Baldur's Gate
possessed "banter", there was a very great increase of this in Shadows of Amn'', but was not merely an increase in the amount of dialogue and text. NPCs interject, reinforcing "the importance of events [and] contributing their own motivations". They recognize critical junctures in the game, since those are of significance to them as well. Kristjanson noted that the character of Imoen was unexpectedly popular with players of the first game, in spite of the fact that she was a late addition during development and was undeveloped as a character. Kristjanson remarked that her lack of interactions with other characters in the first game projected an impression of closeness to the player character, although this was not intended by the developers; this led to her being revealed as the player character's half-sister in its sequel and an integral character to its plot. Producer Ben Smedstad, speaking of "crunch time" during the latter stages of a game's development, noted that it was important to begin it at the right time, not too early, nor too late. By July 2000,
Shadows of Amn had entered its second phase of crunch, where the hours ran from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays to Fridays, and from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturdays. Their first crunch phase had been a normal working week, but hours of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays. "As long as it takes" would be the philosophy of the last phase, encompassing the last week of development. Smedstad said that the second phase, which they were working under in July 2000, is where the stress really begins, and that the third phase is actually not as bad as one might think, because by then people are used to the lengthy hours. During the game's development, a quality assurance department was added to BioWare, and the game's publishers lent their assistance in testing. The game contained about 290 quests, each of which had to be tested in both single- and multi-player modes. When a quest was verified, its cross was removed. English actor
David Warner provided the voice for Jon Irenicus;
PC Gamer observed that "his commanding portrayal of the arrogant elven mage made Irenicus one of the most memorable villains in RPGs, and is one of the key reasons why ''Baldur's Gate 2'' remains such an arresting experience today".
Michael Hoenig, a German composer who played with
Tangerine Dream, composed the game's music. He also composed the music for the first ''Baldur's Gate''. ==Release==