THE MAKING OF Baldur’s GateTM DARK ALLIANCE I & II
IN THE KNOW
» PUBLISHER: INTERPLAY ENTERTAINMENT
» DEVELOPER: SNOWBLIND STUDIOS/BLACK ISLE STUDIOS
» RELEASED: 2001, 2004
» PLATFORM: PLAYSTATION 2, GAMECUBE, XBOX, GAME BOY ADVANCE
» GENRE: ACTION RPG/DUNGEON CRAWLER
ERIC DEMILT
Eric is an industry veteran who cut his teeth working on the ‘Enhanced CD-ROM’ version of SimCity back in 1993. He’s currently a development director (fancy word for producer) at Obsidian Entertainment, working hard to bring The Outer Worlds to Nintendo Switch while also working on the recently announced sequel.
From the first roomful of rats we cleared in Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, we had the implacable feeling that there was something special about this game. We didn’t have the smarts or vocabulary to define this when we first played it 20 years ago – all we knew was that it looked and felt incredible. Going back today, we can finally identify those minutiae that still make Dark Alliance and its sequel such a joy to play today.
It’s in the pots, crates and barrels, which use weighty physics to fall apart when you smash them. It’s in the way that zombie limbs and rat halves lie strewn around a room after a melee – perhaps with half a zombie still mindlessly crawling towards you to nibble at your ankles.
Weapons, armour and potions fly out from falling enemies like fireworks, and gold piles always look just right, which Snowblind Studios’ senior artist Jason Wiggin tells us is because each pile in fact contains the exact amount of coins that go into your character’s pocket. Whenever you cleared a room in Dark Alliance, the resulting mess always felt like an apt pay off for the whirlwind brawls of arrows and clashing steel and magic you’d just survived.
Much of this was thanks to the incredible Snowblind engine – made in-house by the game’s developer Snowblind Studios, which until that point was best known for N64 racing game . To go from there to creating a console spin-off for one of the greatest RPGs of all time could be seen as something of a
