Cross
Arcane
- Joined
- Oct 14, 2017
- Messages
- 3,000
I know you love spreading your Sawyer worship to every topic, but Sawyer wasn't the lead on Icewind Dale and contributed little to its story.This was a piece of trivia that they eagerly shared with me during my job interview back in days of yore. Apparently the advice they got from Black Isle was that Baldur's Gate should be about helping a small village survive a hard winter involving bandits, low-tier monsters, etc. It would be interesting to see such a game someday, but the vibe I got in the interview (and to be honest, it seems semi-plausible) was that the Bioware folks thought that Black Isle was setting them up for failure giving them a humdrum storyline while Black Isle made games about saving the world from super mutants, etc. It's not like Black Isle's subsequent AD&D games followed the prescription they offered Bioware.
The IWDs certainly weren't as ego-pandering as BG, nor was The Black Hound supposed to be. Perhaps that was because of Sawyer's involvement. Avellone loves being over the top.
PoE (and from the looks of it, its sequel as well) is a game where you literally get to meddle in the affairs of gods. It sure as hell doesn't make the argument that Sawyer favors non-epic stories. Meanwhile, Avellone's PS:T is a personal story about a character coming to grips with the fact that they can't change their fate and that trying to cheat the afterlife was a mistake.