Released fourteen years ago in the shadow of its twin brother, Icewind Dale did not look like much more than a stand-alone expansion pack for BioWare's RPG masterpiece Baldur's Gate. Indeed, the minor differences between the games were, and still are, close to indistinguishable - so why did my trek into the frozen north of Faerun end up being so enjoyable?
Black Isle's Icewind Dale focuses less on creating a large world to explore and filling it with quest-lines, and instead attempts a smaller-in-scale, more combat focused, experience. Initially, this had me quite worried as I much prefer narrative over dice rolls.
Much like Baldur's Gate before it, I was afraid Icewind Dale would be plagued by some rough and sudden spikes in difficulty. Indeed, more often than not, computerized dice rolls can leave me feeling incredibly frustrated.
Dice rolls are very binary in their execution, and do not really come close to the excitement of a real pen-and-paper session. You either succeed, or you don't, and the outcome is always the same; your last save game is readily available for you to try again, should the latter come to pass.
But unlike how “getting the right rolls” can sometimes feel like a necessary evil to get you through less polished parts of a game (unless you exploit your pre-knowledge of upcoming battles and buff up right before they happen...) I was surprised to find I did not feel that way with Icewind Dale.
I actually enjoyed the combat quite a bit because of this. Sure, the game had sudden spikes in difficulty, but I always felt as if I had myself to blame for being careless. Turns out charging head-first into a room full of magic-casting mummies isn't the brightest of ideas.
I never came upon a situation where I, after entering an area, was forced into a huge 10-15 minute long dialogue tree, at the end of which the speaker attacks me and I either lose the main character or the entirety of my party, with no way of defending myself against it apart from re-loading and hoping the Dice-Gods would favor me this time. There were certainly areas which were hard to get through, but I felt they were still asking fair things of me as a player.
Such as how I had to place importance on getting rid of traps and scouting ahead with my thief, move my characters in a smart formation, or pull enemies in smaller groups and make sure I engaged them at bottle necks. This felt more strategic compared to the reload-your-last-save extravaganza of something like Baldur's Gate - which I do admit I probably tried to play more as an action game than it really was meant to.
It also helps, that Icewind Dale is party-focused rather than character focused, which means you can design a well-rounded (or min-maxed, depending on your perspective and preference) party that can function well in many different situations - but more importantly it means they've done away with the if-your-main-character-dies-it's-game-over trope.
This was a huge deal for me, and something I appreciated quite a bit as I feet it gave me more leeway in both the creation of characters and participation in the actual combat itself.
Sadly, creating your own party leads to a complete lack of any interesting “idle chatter” or character development between party members. There are no NPC party members or hirelings this time around, and as such none of their own stories to add to the greater whole – something that was one of my favorite things about Baldur's Gate.
Being combat oriented, it's important to note the AI still seems to fall for the same tricks as before, but have also come up with some neat tricks of their own, such as thieves hiding in shadows attempting to backstab your weaker characters. That really helped give the combat some well needed flavor.
Together with a strong loot system where, while it was often unclear if, for example, a weapon was straight-up "better" than another, many were situational - encouraging me to actually use the extra weapon slots of my characters - and some were even direct counters to certain enemy types.
It feels strange to say that a D&D game (of all things) tickled my loot lust, but this one certainly managed to. Finding an unindentified magical item actually felt exiting, which in turn made the main focus of the game that more enjoyable.
The combat aside, my initial feeling of "this is just an expansion pack" never truly went away. The game feels hindered from becoming its own thing, probably because of the shoes it was trying to fill. It felt as if the game isn't really sure of what to be.
Parts of the story feel shoehorned and out of place. When the game tries to play towards fantasy tropes of a grand “saving the world”-scale and there's not much there to back it up - mechanically or story-wise, the contrast ended up feeling quite odd. Instead of trying to be bigger, I would have loved to see them embrace the smaller nature of the rest of the game.
We do see some fascinating beginnings of game design philosophy here that surely must have eventually influenced Baldur's Gate 2, such as centering all activity to a sort of "hub town" and then letting the player set off into the world for their adventures. The problem here is that the main area just never comes alive, and isn't able to carry the weight of the main quest, which is a shame as you revisit it so often.
They attempt the illusion of a living city by adding small events in the "hub town" but the city still manages to seem rather flat and insignificant - a feeling enhanced by NPCs who continue to speak about events from much earlier as if they only just happened.
As such, I would not jump into this expecting an epic main-quest to rival any of the great RPG classics. Now, every D&D campaign doesn't have to be about saving the world. And if Icewind Dale just took that concept a step further instead of trying to be something it wasn't, I would have been able to shake the feeling of this being a stand-alone expansion pack. Unfortunately that did not end up being the case.
That said, if you've ever felt like jumping back into Baldur's Gate but hesitated because you've already seen so much of that world, already done the quests, know the story beats, or just want something fresh-but-familiar – well, Icewind Dale pretty much has you covered.
But if you don't have any nostalgia for Baldur's Gate at all, it's important to note that much of my own enjoyment of this game comes from having that past experience.
To me, it was as if I had visited the world of Baldur's Gate again, as if I was exploring those last few areas I never saw my first time through.
That's a very powerful feeling and I'm afraid that, if you don't fall into the category of people who loved Baldur's Gate but somehow missed Icewind Dale, this is sadly (but probably) a game you can skip.
