[Memnoch]

Today's news...


Throne of Bhaal
Kevin Martens (Lead Designer)
Shapeshifters: Shapeshifters can access the high level ability shapeshifting forms, like all druids.
David Gaider (Senior Designer)
More reversed priest spells: 'Fraid not. If we were going through the whole cleric and mage list and adding in more medium-level spells, then we'd probably do that. As it is, there's a set of high-level spells that's been added to both clerics and mages for the expansion.

Clerics turning demons: No. In D&D, clerics can turn undead due to their Negative Plane nature. Demons are the natural enemies of good clerics, coming from evil planes, but clerics cannot turn them as a part of their class.

Shapeshifters: The Shapeshifter doesn't get new forms, but the Greater Werewolf form has been improved a great deal (so Kevin avows, anyway, I haven't seen it myself) and the Shapeshifter can also assume the form multiple times in a day (allowing shifting back & forth between his spellcasting form and werewolf form during combat).

Romances for females: It's kind of hard that, while developing a game that we put our heart and soul into, we also have to give a nod to the harsh realities of business at the same time...but that's the way life is. The entire making of the game was filled with compromises and necessary cuts...not to knock BG2, though, I still think it turned out better than any of us expected...but one of the hardest was cutting out the extra romance.

We thought we had time to make five romance tracks, and since we knew there were way more guys who were going to play the game, we gave the 'extra' to them. 3 male-oriented, 2 female-oriented stories.

Time, however, ran out. The actual building of the scripts was waaay more complicated than we had anticipated (particularly the Jaheira romance), especially for something we considered (at the time) to be a relatively minor albeit fun part of the game. The amount of QA time we needed to devote to de-bugging alone was pretty big. If we were going to write romances now for a BG2-size game, it'd be a different story...we've done it once, now, and we know how it goes.

But it was a hard choice (among a lot of other hard choices) that had to be made. The male-oriented romances had been written first and it was the second female-oriented romance that ended up needing to be chopped (originally slated for Haer'Dalis).

I agree it was too bad...I think everyone at BioWare does. Putting in more romances would have made the game better, sure...so would have making them longer or having more interaction overall. But that's all we had time to do.

I do think, though, that the reaction we got to the romances was a bit unexpected. And the veritable scolding we've gotten from our female gamers has certainly taught us a lesson. In the future, I can assure you we will approach this kind of thing with a much different mind-set.

And I think, too, that it will take such well-expressed and thoughtful commentary from people like yourself to change not only the ideas that we developers have, but probably the view that the industry has on its growing female gaming population overall.

As an aside, have you ever visited womangamers.com? It's a great site where people who share your viewpoint have gathered. I like it and I think it's a good sign of things to come. There may be others like it, I suppose, but it's the only one I know of.


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