History of creating the game Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of amn

How the game was developed, and how it influenced the further fate of BioWare.

Imagine that you are a game developer (or, if you suddenly are a developer, you may not imagine). So, you are a beginner developer, and your first game is a simulator of the battles of giant furs, although you deserve restrained praise, but in fact it turned out to be nobody needed.

But your second game … She, generally speaking, shouldn’t have appeared. Publishers refused it. And she came out by some miracle, thanks to your personal connections and acquaintances, and the enthusiasm of a friend working in a major publishing house. Nobody expected anything from her. Pays off – and then thank God.

But … she became a hit. Game disks do not have time to bring to stores. Players are speculative, selling exorges the game purchased the day before. From a novice developer, you turned into a locomotive of the gaming industry overnight. Or at least a genre.

You begin to develop a sequel. But now everything has become much more complicated. Now everyone is looking at you at all. Game publications write articles about your game every two days. Players want the game to be like that. Or like that. Better, in general, this is how. And everyone, of course, wants different.

I am not a developer, but it seems to me that in such a situation it is extremely difficult to get together and not to establish. Many good studios did not succeed. But in 2000 it succeeded in the Canadian studio Bioware.

Systematization

In December 1998, InterPlay publishes the game of BIOWARE – Baldur’s Gate. The game unexpectedly for everyone becomes a hit. Since sales were higher than expected by almost 500 percent, BioWare could calmly do what they were going. And they were going to do a sequel.

Formally, work on Baldur’s Gate II began immediately after the release of the first part. But in fact, the second BG began to be created simultaneously with the first. This did not happen because Bioware tried to chase two hares at once. The reason was prosaic: the developers simply did not have enough time to add to the first game all the chips that were planned. In parallel with the development of the first Baldur’s Gate, BioWare, they finished and improved the game engine – Infinity Engine, pulling it under specific tasks that arose in the process of creating the game.

As a result, the design of the first Baldur`s Gate was quite simple. Those ideas that did not fit in the original game were postponed for the second part. Thus, by the end of 1998, Bioware already had a supplemented and improved engine, as well as a number of artistic, design and narrative ideas that required a lot of time.

Fortunately, we use a ready -made engine, and this means that we have a good starting point – the game is already working. So we, as programmers, can spend time optimizing the game and the implementation of ideas.

Bin SMEDSTAD, producer of the game

Of course, it was almost impossible to realize all ideas at once. Therefore, Rey Muzik is one of the founders of the studio, decided to systematize them. In order to do this, he used two sources. The first is the creativity of BioWare and InterPlay employees, and the second is the opinion of fans. The forums already had a huge number of opinions, offers and wishes from players. Moreover, on the official website of InterPlay, a feedback page with players was created. She, of course, quickly filled with hundreds of pages of discussion.

Based on the information received, BioWare compiled a list of priority goals that had to be achieved during the development. The list included 15 points that included purely technical points: for example, support for 3D graphics and resolutions of 800 by 600 and above, and the implementation of some Dungeons & Dragons mechanics. So the game was supposed to add the most popular creatures from DND, including dragons, powerful 9 circles spells, subclasses and the like things.

BioWare believed that the key to the success of the sequel lies in the work on the mistakes of the first part. The most annoying shortcomings of the original BG should have been corrected in the continuation of the game. So the list was obtained by processing the magazine of tasks and maps of the area. The speed of the characters’ movement was increased, the mechanics of searching for the track was improved. This was really a serious problem of the first BG-characters under the control of artificial intelligence loved to rest somewhere at the wall if you tried to force them to go from one end of the location to another. Looking ahead, I note that this specific problem in the end could not be completely eliminated and failed.

As part of the improvement of the role -playing system, two tasks were added to the list. The first of them is work on a system of worldviews, which was supposed to allow both a good and evil character equally comfortably. And the second task was to create a system of novels with satellites. This feature took root so tightly in Bioware Games that was present in most of their games that were released after BG2.

Morrigan, the light of my life, the fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Mor-Ri-Gan: The tip of the tongue makes a path three steps down the palate, so that the third is pushed on the teeth. Mor. Ri. Gan.

Such systematization has significantly simplified the development process. However, Bioware, as Rea Muzik later admitted, made one mistake. They decided not to share game functions in terms of their importance, and the elaboration of each of the fifteen points of the list was equally priority.

Such a miscalculation led to serious problems. Some of the planned chips of the game turned out to be difficult to implement, and were subsequently removed from the final version – for example, it occurred with the Desmachtcha mode, which was supposed to be in the game, which was spent a lot of time and effort, and which did not see the light because Bioware could not cope with the Infinity Engine code.

The network code seems to have been one of the weakest places of the engine. Most of the criticism deserved by the first Baldur’s Gate was associated with the network mode of the game. One of the most disappointing shortcomings of the first BG was a system of dialogs, implemented so that while one of the characters was talking with NPC, for the rest of the players a pause was paused. Dialogs could well last for several minutes, and this pause annoyed.

Therefore, BioWare’s shadows of the amne decided to process the dialogue system in the multi -user mode so that at the time when one of the characters leads dialogue, the rest could freely move and explore the location.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be incredibly difficult to implement. Almost at the very beginning of development from this idea, I had to refuse.

However, at the later stages of creating the BioWare game, focusing on feedback from the players, they realized that this function could not do without this function. Therefore, at the beginning of 2000, a continuous dialogue again began to enter the game.

Despite all the difficulties that arose in the process of developing the game, BioWare realized that the idea with compiling a list of basic functions was worthwhile. Therefore, when creating the next games, the studio has always been a similar list. Only now Bioware ranked game functions in importance, and noted which of them, if necessary, could be cut.

Hydline for design

Despite the fact that the audience accepted the first Baldur`s Gate very warmly, BioWare believed that the design of the game has several significant drawbacks. And, developing a sequel, they wanted to fix these shortcomings. Since different employees had a different opinion, it was decided to make a sort of Haydline – a set of rules and principles with which should have been leaning from time to time during the development. For each department, its own Hidline was compiled. Now many of these points seem obvious to the genre, but twenty years ago, many of them have become a good help for developers and facilitated the process of creating the game.

There were three basic rules above all the guidels:

Firstly, the player should feel that it was his actions that led him to victory. It doesn’t matter about the battle with a strong enemy, about the puzzle or a multi -stage dialogue. The player must feel that he solved the problem, and not a successful throw of the cube.

Secondly, the player must see how his actions change the environment and the game world. Player actions should have consequences.

Thirdly, the game for a good and evil character should be different. Some parts of the narrative should change, depending on the character’s worldview.

In addition to these three cornerstones, on which the second Baldur’s Gate should be erected, the basic principles for the design of the environment, narrative design, gaming mechanics and so on were also formulated. These principles continued to form in the course of development, so they acquired the final appearance only for the final stage of creating the game. BioWare considered these principles not as an immutable law, but as a list of recommendations, so if one of the employees believed that in a particular case, one of the principles should be retreated, he was usually allowed to do this.

In general, looking at the list of these principles, you can notice that they are largely distinguished by Baldur’s Gate 2 from the first part of the game. One of the most striking examples is dialogs.

In the first BG, a non -trial character could suddenly begin to pour out the soul in a long monologue, which was completely displayed on the screen. In the sequel, each node of the monologue was limited by two lines. The character’s replica itself could be quite long, but at one point in time the player saw only two lines of the text, except for rare exceptions.

Answer options for the https://memocasino-online.co.uk/ player’s character should have been placed in one line. And there should not be too many answer options themselves – from two to four. At the same time, the dialogs became more branched than in the first part. This created a feeling of greater “depth” and the elaboration of the dialogue.

Another good example is the game world design. Firstly, the world was divided into chapters, which were supposed to have approximately the same size. Some areas of the gaming world were originally created as “main areas”, a sort of proto-version of the location-hab from modern games. Such a location, for example, Atkatla, became the capital of Amn, the region in which the actions of the sequel took place. The player often returns to the main locations, and therefore they should change with the progress of the plot – new events should take place on them, new quests and characters, and so on appear.

And Bioware decided that a good idea will show the player things that he cannot use now or places that are not yet available, but will become active later, with the course of development of the plot. Almost like in metro -vocabulary.

The portal at the starting location is not available without a special key. Found the key – returned to the portal. And if you play the Baldur’s Gate Trilogy fan assembly, then he will transfer you not another part of the dungeon, but to … Icewind Dale!

But, of course, not everything went smoothly. As I said, the principles of creating the game were formulated gradually, which led to some incidents. So, for example, the second chapter of the game, in addition to the main plot, included a bunch of additional activities, including individual quest chains to receive stringhold, unique to most classes – and this made the second chapter the largest and most bulky chapter in the game. Its complete passage could take up to 60 hours. BioWare could not come up with a way to correct this situation, because they needed to place all the additional quests at the point on which the players, regardless of the class, worldview and the style of the game, would have equal access. So with the “bloated” beginning of the game I had to come to terms with.

Not all sets of principles were dictated by a general vision of the game. Some of them proceeded from technical and software restrictions. The maximum sizes of audio files, the frequency of animation frames, the area of ​​visual effects and so on were clearly regulated. In some cases, these rules were not executed, which led to fps drawing in certain moments of the game. This, in turn, led to endless tremors – optimization problems were solved at the end of the development cycle, and to solve them had to be spent more time than expected.

Despite all the difficulties that struck, for the most part, from the lack of proper experience, as a result, such an approach to creating a game – with systematization and guidelines for each department, turned out to be more productive. BioWare was no longer just a company of lovers of dwarfs who decided to try to digitize the party of their dreams. The approach to development has become more professional. An accurate calculation came to the place of naked enthusiasm.

Marketing, neiming, promotion

Just as Bioware itself changed, the attitude of the publisher has changed to it. After the unexpected success of the first Baldur’s Gate, Canadians turned in the eyes of InterPlay into a promising studio, so the promotion of the sequel was paid much more attention.

One of the first tasks to solve was the Naming of the game. At first, BioWare made a list of names, which, as it seemed to the developers, could be suitable for the game, and then sent this list of InterPlay for joint discussion. At this stage, there were many names: Shadows of Athkatla, Mortal Ties, Call of Dreams, but what, even about what deuce to put in the name, Roman or Arabic, disputes arose. The final name is Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn sent to Wizards of the Coast, owners of D&D license. “Byzardians” liked everything.

The next step in promotion was to be a closed show of the early version of the game. It took place in November 1999 in Seattle, on the territory of the company’s game center. According to Chris Parker’s memoirs, to collect in one place a hundred people from various corners of the United States and Canada at that time was a grandiose task for them. I had to solve problems with hotels, logistics, equipment and other routine things, but in addition to this, it was necessary to show the game itself.

Wotc Game Center: Mecca for Lovers

BioWare had a playable early build, which could be played without problems for about twenty hours. The development of the sequel was faster than the development of the first part of the game-Ben SMEDSTAD said that when they developed Baldur’s Gate, it passed almost a year before they saw something on their monitors, even reminiscent of the game. In the case of Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, Bioware, they immediately dealt with a ready -made engine, so adding, for example, a new monster, it was enough to just place it in the right catalog so that it appeared on the screen.

In addition to the working prototype, promotional materials were needed. A short promoter was mounted to show it at the presentation, and then pour it into the network. And also discs with promotional materials were created, which were awarded to guests at the end of the event.

As far as I was able to reconstruct events, promotional disks were created on the principle of “I blinded it from what was”.

We created a disc with screenshots, concepts, history and other garbage.

Chris Parker, producer of the game

And as promotional material, beer was used with the BG 2 logo 2

Game press with great interest reacted to the announcement of the game. Baldur`s Gate, as a general opinion, became the best RPG 1998, so large editions followed the game. After showing the game, the marketing departments of Bioware and InterPlay were littered with a huge number of interviews, screenshots and other Staffe. Employees willingly responded to the press requests, some gave interviews, articles describing the details of a particular aspect of development were sent to other publications. Bioware also continued to communicate with fans of the first BG on thematic forums and on the feedback page.

Game Pipes

When many people work on one project, it is necessary to create a methodological process. Develop an algorithm of operations that will allow specialists working on various aspects of the game to interact with each other as efficiently as possible. This is commonly called Payplain.

As I said earlier, Bioware has pretty much grew since 1996, when the development of the first Baldur’s Gate began. The process of developing the development of the studio has become more complicated. By 1998, the shares were compiled by the Pipes for different elements of the game. They continued to be guided by Bioware in the process of creating Baldur’s Gate II.

The largest Paydlas was the creation of locations. He included 8 stages:

Only after this, the necessary models were created for the location, as the level placed inside and textured.

Then there was work on the scenery – small elements, like furniture, barrels and so on, and lighting was tuned.

Only after that, characters, monsters, triggers, objects were added to the location – in short, all interactive objects.

Naturally, in fact, everything was not as smooth as on paper. Despite the fact that BioWare tried to accompany all the changes with the text document, it turned out that with this scale of work it is almost impossible to timely enter all the information about the editors in a timely manner. Designers and artists did not always clearly interact with each other, which often led to the absence of some elements on the final version of the location – Mostly doors.

And there was also a misunderstanding with the names and names of its own, which could become a huge problem, given the scale of the game. Subsequently, Bioware will create a separate database, the edits of which will be displayed for all real -time specialists employed over the project, which will greatly simplify the process of developing the following studio games.

Ray Muzika recalled that their Paydaine to create locations had one very significant drawback: the lack of testing at an early stage. Testing Bioware locations began in the later stages of the development cycle when most of the game was created. In such conditions, any changes entailed a shaft of consequences affecting the whole game. When the problem became obvious, Bioware, along with Black Isle, created a special department that tested locations at once at their end, and this was the last, ninth paragraph of Pipesin. And those locations that were created before, caused sleepless nights for testers and programmers.

Creation of a team

If at the dawn of the existence of the BioWare studio, the developers created a game on naked enthusiasm, then with the growth of the staff of the studio, an increase in the scale of tasks, both the technical and creative plan, specialists who perceived the development of Baldur’s Gate 2 not as the matter of their life, but as a work that needs to be done. This sensitive approach, in general, was somewhat adopted by the founders of the studio.

Ray Muzika tried to remind that they create games because they like to make games. A joint rest inside the studio was a joint vacation – once a month the team instead of sitting in the office, went to a barbecue or in a movie.

Or on a gay parade … But this is much later, at the end of the tenths-the Muzik has nothing to do with it

In parallel with the development of the second Baldur’s Gate, Bioware, I was engaged in several more projects: Neverwinter Nights, Knights of the Old Republic, and even the MDK 2 shooter. In the middle of the development, Muzik noted that many employees seem to be somewhat crushed by the work process. He tried to “shut up” the developers, asking some of them if they want to temporarily change the project. Many agreed, and this led to tangible progress. As it turned out, some of the developers feel better when they show creativity, creating an interesting creative idea – but they are damn boring to bring it to the end. Others, on the contrary, were uncomfortable to feel when they needed to come up with something new, but with pleasure they brought to mind the ideas of others. After Bioware secretly divided the developers into “beginners” and “finishing”, and began to give them tasks corresponding to their work style, the crisis of the middle of the project passed. A good example of how this system worked is the experience of David Gaider, who was one of the scriptwriters of the game and the author of the novels with Viconia and Aeri. Before he joined BioWare, he worked as a hotel manager, and in his free time he painted comics and was a master in the desktop D&D, and also spent several LARPs – in our country known as known as polygon (or field) role. For one of these games, Gaider wrote a book of rules, which through one of his friends fell into the hands of James Olen, leading the designer of the first and second Baldur`s Gate. Olen called Gader and offered him a screenwriter’s position in BioWare. However, Gaider refused because working as a hotel manager, he received a significantly large amount. In addition, he was far from the computer games industry.

I knew that my friend was working in the gaming industry, but I didn’t think about it, because I didn’t even know that we had a real game studio in Edmonton. I heard about the first Baldur’s Gate, but did not know that these guys did it.

David Gaider, screenwriter

So Gaider refused to participate in the project. But fate ordered otherwise. A few days later, Gaider unexpectedly found out that the hotel in which he worked was sold, and the new owner is going to dismiss all the staff.

At first, James Olen practically did not provide scriptwriters with freedom of action. Especially when it concerned the main plot: the Olen carefully painted all the key points, actions and consequences, and the scriptwriters remained to fill it all with dialogs. Almost mechanical work. At the same time, the deer often could recall 5-6 options for a long dialogue in a row, simply because he did not like them.

Real tyrant and exploiter

When working out side quests, Oleen’s instructions were more vague, and the scriptwriters were given more freedom. Gaider worked on several additional quests, and over time, Oleen’s instructions for him were reduced to the phrase “Here’s your location, make it interesting”. Moreover, even in the case of writing a dialogue for part of the main quest, Gaider allowed himself to move away from the strict scheme that James Olen gave him.

I knew what he wanted, even when he himself did not know that. He could tell other writers “do it like this” – and they did exactly as he said, but he still did not like it, and he had to redo everything from time to time. He often gave me a task in which he described what he wants. And, working on this task, I thought “I think, in fact, he needs something else,” and did something else.

Few other than Gaider allowed themselves this. Other scriptwriters followed the instructions received from Ole, rewriting the text as many times as required. But Gaider clearly understood Olena better than himself, which James was only happy. It was a teamwork, not blind of the instructions – what Ray Muzik tried to achieve. With all this, the situation inside the studio was enough … informal. Very informal. Ray Muzik and Greg Zeshchuk were bosses for employees, but besides this, “cool guys”. No officialdom – Zeschuk went at work in shorts and slopes. If someone in the office decided that he did not want to sit in clothes, he could just take off his pants and stay in underwear. One of the artists periodically watched porn at the workplace. I just looked, without worrying about this, not caring about what others think.

It was very … I do not want to talk about student dormitories, because I am not sure what they really look like – I never visited the university, but I always imagined a student hostel just like that.

There were conflicts reaching the fight. Especially often they took place between the artistic department and the design department – I already mentioned that these guys had difficulties with mutual understanding, despite all the attempts of Muziki to organize the work of the studio, while retaining the spirit of the team of people who simply love to make games. Departments were too segmented. They followed the guidelines and soldiers – for the most part, they really tried to do their work as best as possible, but for a long time in the studio there was no person who could say: “Stop doing this, take it better for this task”. James Olen had a fairly clear idea of ​​how the game should turn out as a whole, so he had an influence in all Bioware departments. They did not always listen to him, but in many ways Baldur’s Gate 2 turned out to be what it is thanks to the deer. Nevertheless, while Fergus Urkhart has not taken control of the course of development and testing, it was perhaps inside Bioware, too much creativity and too little specifics.

Too big game

Too much creativity is like at all? I have met the opinions many times that before-at the same end of the 90s-the games were made with the soul, and now they are simply aimed at the widest audience and large sales. Product of handicraft, not creativity. What is called the “soul” of the game is a manifestation of the creative beginning of the developers that players see. Isn’t it like that?

Maybe so. However, in the case of BioWare and the “shades of amn” of creativity, there was too much not only comparable to other aspects, but also regardless of something.

It worked something like this: in BioWare there was no Hidlene that prescribed when to stop. When creating the city of the gates of Baldur in the first Baldur`s Gate, the rendering of one scene with a size of 4 by 3 thousand pixels took almost a day – computers simply could not cope with the load. When creating an atkatla in Baldur’s Gate 2, the sizes of scenes became even larger, reaching the size of 5 by 4 thousand pixels. In addition, there are more objects in them, more light sources, most of all in general. I had to create a new rendering system so that the same location could simultaneously process several computers.

But not only the size of the locations became problematic. The developers wanted to embody the maximum number of their ideas in the game. The scriptwriters were given a huge empty location, and they carefully filled it with side activities and optional dialogs. When the designers “cut” some kind of artistic art, the artists also turned to writers-instead of Art, his text description appeared in the game himself.

Some scene does not make sense? Let’s just add there a dialogue that will explain it. Any things that could not be implemented in a different form were carried out using scriptwriters and writers. They almost without stopping added more and more new ones to the game.

When you return from the subway and face the Bodhi face to face … As far as I remember, it was not even a planned meeting. Everything happened on the fly. Like, if Bodhi abducts the hero’s lover? It will be cool! Oh, and will turn her into the vampire! Yes, let’s do so! – So we created ideas. David Gaider, screenwriter

As a result, the amount of text in the game was just huge. The publishing house was worried when about two -thirds of the game were ready. The scriptwriters regretted everything that they considered it possible – of course quite a bit. After some time, James Olen realized what was happening, who began to sound the alarm and convince the scriptwriters that they cannot continue to create new content at such a frantic pace, but on the contrary, it is necessary to cut everything that can be cut out. Having crossed out-well, now everything that was possible in general-the scriptwriters looked at the final result, and many of them have seen a bunch of shit instead. Some stories had to be thrown away at all – in a cut -out form they did not make sense. This was very shaken by the moral spirit of writers. But the worst blow for them was still ahead. When about 80 percent of the game was ready, Fergus Urkhart arrived from Blackisle, worried that most of the quests in the current BG 2 work work crookedly. In addition, no one could tell him how they are going to correct this situation. Having delved into the problem, Urkhart voiced a painful but only correct solution: “Either your quests will work, or they will be cut out of the game”.

Fergus Urkhart – Tyran and Operator Fool Olena. Thanks to him for that!

Everyone, including James Olen, was in despair. People spent the night in the office, trying to put in order all the quests that they created – because they were damn attached to these stories. Several times novels almost flew out of the game – but Gaider and Christianson managed to defend them. This is especially surprising in the case of the Christianson hatch. He wrote an affair with Jaheira – the most difficult and confused of all – which, even in the release version of the game, was the most huge and – as it were softer to say – unstable. Is it a joke, the dialogs with Jaheira had more text than all possible remarks of all possible satellites in the first gates of Baldur. Scriptwriters and writers were in such a deep crisis that they were sure that the game would fail. However, we’ll run a little forward – after the release, reviews on the game, and in particular, on its text component – were positive, and sometimes even enthusiastic. Players and reviewers did not see “holes in the plot” because they did not know that they were there. This was obvious only for people who worked directly on the plot – their opinion turned out to be biased. Only later the writers who worked on Baldur`s Gate realized what trap they fell into. Gaider called this “the problem of prologue” – in those episodes of the game that were ready first of all, the entire team of the project managed to play almost a dozen times. As a result, these episodes of the game began to seem boring to the developers, and they began to wind up additional stories around them. When all this went under the knife, the developers saw only a boring initial story, and even cut. But the player saw this story for the first time. BioWare made conclusions from this mistake. When working on the following games – starting with Knights of the Old Republic – the amount of content for each chapter or location was toughly regulated.

Time for tests

Despite all the abbreviations, the final version of the game was huge. Its full passage took more than two hundred hours.

And all this had to be tested.

As I said, not at the early stage of testing was carried out. There were almost three hundred quests in the game, each of which took from 20 minutes to two hours of real time. All of them had to be tested both in a single -user and multiplayer mode. And taking into account the fact that many of them were nonlinear … In short, BioWare did not quite understand which party to approach this task at all.

Guess who organized this process? Well, yes, as usual Fergus Urkhart. Together with Chris Parker and Douglas, Iani, he created an algorithm, thanks to which BioWare and Blackisle were able to defeat this gigantic lump of bugs, which was a game.

First, a list of all quests in the game was compiled. Then BioWare employees – testers and designers – were divided into couples, each of which was given one of the quests for his thorough and thoroughly verification. After correcting all the errors found, the quest was disrupted from the list and went to check in Blackisle, to the second passage. Inside Blackisle, about thirty people worked on control testing of Baldur`s Gate 2 – not counting those who were sent to help BioWare for the first stage of testing. In parallel with this, mistakes were not related to quests – there were fewer and they, as a rule, were more obvious. And at the same time there was work on the final sound design of the project.

Based on the results of the Bioware and Blackisle testing, it was possible to find and fix about fifteen thousand bugs jointly. Critical errors were eliminated, but Bioware understood that even with the help of Urkhart they were not able to track all possible combinations of quests, dialogs and actions of the player. Therefore, it was decided to shoot the game – after the release, the Canadians continued to monitor the feedback of players in official forums and corrected the bugs that they missed during testing. Perhaps if the “Shadows of Amn” came out now, they would have been released in early access.

Perhaps testing of the game has become the turning point that finally separated the BioWare of the 90s from the Bioware sample of the two thousandths. It became obvious inside the studio that you won’t go far on one enthusiasm and talent – clear regulations, internal hierarchy and other attributes of an “adult” business are needed. In addition, many employees have been exhausted by treasures of the final stage of development – over the past few months, employees worked 70 hours a week.

Of course, thanks to these crazy processing, the game was brought to mind, but many were not ready for such loads. Shortly before the Bioware release, several employees left the studio since the time of creation of Shatereed Steel.

In addition, by mid -2000, InterPlay, the publishers of Canadians, were already in a rather shaky position. Majorian shareholders were unhappy with the state of affairs in the company, so it was obvious to the Canadian leadership that they could not count on such large -scale assistance from the publisher when developing the next games.

Release, reviews and sales

September 21, 2000, the release of the game Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn. The huge work that was done by BioWare and Blackisle was not done in vain. Holding almost a month in the top chart sales, Baldur`s Gate was the most profitable game for InterPlay in the history of the publishing house. Of course, she received a bunch of various awards – the best game of the year, the best role -playing game of the year, one of the best games of all times. Interesting additional quests, the study of heroes and villains, and the general logic of the narrative were especially noted. The second gates of Baldura became the perfect sequel – they were more, better and deeper than the first part.

The game impressed not only journalists, but also ordinary players. Until now, Metacritic shadows of amn occupy the sixth place in the list of the highestly estimated computer games for all the time, having the highest user score from all BioWare games – the closest competitor, Mass Effect 2, is in 9th place.

To evaluate the general sales of Baldur’s Gate 2 taking into account reprints, digital assemblies from the GOG, an extended publication from BEAMDOG and other variations of the game is not possible. According to very approximate data, it was sold at least as well as the first part – with a circulation of more than two million copies. Most likely the real number of people who played the game – even without taking into account the pirates playing fan assemblies – at times more.

This is the story of the creation of Baldur`s Gate 2, as you might guess, is coming to an end. I hope that she turned out to be interesting to you.