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Tags: BioWare; Brian Fargo; Descent to Undermountain; Feargus Urquhart; Greg Zeschuk; Interplay; James Ohlen; Ray Muzyka; The Digital Antiquarian
https://www.filfre.net/2025/03/the-crpg-renaissance-part-4-long-live-dungeons-dragons/
https://www.filfre.net/2025/03/the-crpg-renaissance-part-4-long-live-dungeons-dragons/
They decided to show the Infinity Engine to their friends at Interplay, accompanied by the suggestion that it might be well-suited for powering an Ultima Online competitor. They booked a meeting with one Feargus Urquhart, who had started at Interplay six years earlier as a humble tester and moved up through the ranks with alacrity to become a producer while still in his mid-twenties. Urquhart was skeptical of these massively-multiplayer schemes, which struck him as a bit too far out in front of the state of the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure. When he saw the Infinity Engine, he thought it would make a great fit for a more traditional style of CRPG. Further, he knew well that the Dungeons & Dragons brand was currently selling at a discount. Muzyka and Zeschuk, who were looking for any way at all to get their studio established well enough that they could stop taking weekend shifts at local clinics, were happy to let Urquhart pitch the Infinity Engine to his colleagues in this other context.
Said colleagues were for the most part less enthused than Urquhart was; as we’ve learned all too well by now, the single-player CRPG wasn’t exactly thriving circa 1996. Nor was the Dungeons & Dragons name on a computer game any guarantee of better sales than the norm in these latter days of TSR. Yet Urquhart felt strongly that the brand was less worthless than mismanaged. There had been a lot of Dungeons & Dragons computer games in recent years — way too many of them from any intelligent marketer’s point of view — but they had almost all presumed that what their potential buyers wanted was novelty: novel approaches, novel mechanics, novel settings. As they had pursued those goals, they had drifted further and further from the core appeal of the tabletop game.
Despite TSR’s fire hose of strikingly original, sometimes borderline avant-garde boxed settings, the most popular world by far in which to actually play tabletop Dungeons & Dragons remained the Forgotten Realms, an unchallenging mishmash of classic epic-fantasy tropes. The Forgotten Realms was widely and stridently criticized by the leading edge of the hobby for being fantasy-by-the-numbers, and such criticisms were amply justified in the abstract. But those making them failed to reckon with the reality that, for most of the people who still played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, it wasn’t so much a vehicle for improvisational thespians to explore the farthest realms of the imagination as it was a cozy exercise in dungeon delving and monster bashing among friends; the essence of the game was right there in its name. For better or for worse, most people still preferred good old orcs and kobolds to the mind-bending extra-dimensional inhabitants of a setting like Planescape or the weird Buck Rogers vibe of something like Spelljammer. The Forgotten Realms were gaming comfort food, a heaping dish of tropey, predictable fun. And the people who played there wouldn’t have had it any other way.
And yet fewer and fewer Dungeons & Dragons computer games had been set in the Forgotten Realms since the end of the Gold Box line. (Descent to Undermountain would be set there, but it had too many other problems for that to do it much good.) SSI and their successors had also showed less and less fidelity to the actual rules of Dungeons & Dragons over the years. The name had become nothing more than a brand, to be applied willy-nilly to whatever struck a publisher’s fancy: action games, real-time-strategy games, you name it. In no real sense were you playing TSR’s game of Dungeons & Dragons when you played one of these computer games; their designers had made no attempt to implement the actual rules found in the Player’s Handbook and Dungeons Master’s Guide. It wasn’t clear anymore what the brand was even meant to stand for. It had been diluted to the verge of meaninglessness.
But Feargus Urquhart was convinced that it was not yet beyond salvation. In fact, he believed that the market was ready for a neoclassical Dungeons & Dragons CRPG, if you will: a digital game that earnestly strove to implement the rules and to recreate the experience of playing its tabletop inspiration, in the same way that the Gold Box line had done. Naturally, such a game would need to take place in the tried-and-true Forgotten Realms. This was not the time to try to push gamers out of their comfort zone.
At the same time, though, Urquhart recognized that it wouldn’t do to simply re-implement the Gold Box engine and call it a day. Computer gaming had moved on from the late 1980s; people expected a certain level of audiovisual razzle-dazzle, wanted intuitive and transparent interfaces that didn’t require reading a manual to learn how to use, and generally preferred the fast-paced immediacy of real-time to turn-based models. If it was to avoid seeming like a relic from another age, the new CRPG would have to walk a thin line, remaining conservative in spirit but embracing innovation with gusto in all of its granular approaches. The ultimate goal would not be to recreate the Gold Box experience. It must rather be to recreate the same tabletop Dungeons & Dragons experience that the Gold Box games had pursued, but to embrace all of the affordances of late-1990s computers in order to do it even better — more accurately, more enjoyably, with far less friction. Enter the Infinity Engine.
But Urquhart’s gut feeling was about more than just a cool piece of technology. He had served as the producer on Shattered Steel, in which role he had visited BioWare several times and spent a fair amount of time with the people there. Thus he knew there were people in that Edmonton office who still played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons regularly, who had forged their friendships in the basement of a tabletop-gaming shop. He thought that a traditionalist CRPG like the one he had in mind might be more in their wheelhouse than any giant-robot action game or cutting-edge shared virtual world.
He felt this so strongly that he arranged a meeting with Brian Fargo, the Big Boss himself, whose soft spot for the genre that had put Interplay on the map a decade earlier was well known. When he was shown the Infinity Engine, Fargo’s reaction was everything Urquhart had hoped it would be. What sprang to his mind first was The Faery Tale Adventure, an old Amiga game whose aesthetics he had always admired. “It didn’t look like a bunch of building blocks,” says Fargo today of the engine that Urquhart showed him in 1996. “It looked like somebody had free-hand-drawn every single screen.”
As Urquhart had anticipated would be the case, it wasn’t hard for Fargo to secure a license from the drowning TSR to make yet another computer game with the name of Dungeons & Dragons on it. The bean counters on his staff were not excited at the prospect; they didn’t hesitate to point out that Interplay already had Fallout and Descent to Undermountain in development. Just how many titles did they need in such a moribund genre? They needed at least one more, insisted Fargo.
BioWare’s employees were astonished and overjoyed when they were informed that a chance to work on a Dungeons & Dragons CRPG had fallen into their laps out of the clear blue sky. James Ohlen and his little gang from Grande Prairie could scarcely have imagined a project more congenial to their sensibilities. Ohlen had been running tabletop Dungeons & Dragons campaigns for his friends since he was barely ten years old. Now he was to be given the chance to invent one on the computer, one that could be enjoyed by the whole world. It was as obvious to Urquhart as it was to everyone at BioWare that the title of Lead Designer must be his. He called his initial design document The Iron Throne. When a cascade of toilet jokes rained down on his head in response, Urquhart suggested the more distinctive name of Baldur’s Gate, after the city in the Forgotten Realms where its plot line would come to a climax.
Said colleagues were for the most part less enthused than Urquhart was; as we’ve learned all too well by now, the single-player CRPG wasn’t exactly thriving circa 1996. Nor was the Dungeons & Dragons name on a computer game any guarantee of better sales than the norm in these latter days of TSR. Yet Urquhart felt strongly that the brand was less worthless than mismanaged. There had been a lot of Dungeons & Dragons computer games in recent years — way too many of them from any intelligent marketer’s point of view — but they had almost all presumed that what their potential buyers wanted was novelty: novel approaches, novel mechanics, novel settings. As they had pursued those goals, they had drifted further and further from the core appeal of the tabletop game.
Despite TSR’s fire hose of strikingly original, sometimes borderline avant-garde boxed settings, the most popular world by far in which to actually play tabletop Dungeons & Dragons remained the Forgotten Realms, an unchallenging mishmash of classic epic-fantasy tropes. The Forgotten Realms was widely and stridently criticized by the leading edge of the hobby for being fantasy-by-the-numbers, and such criticisms were amply justified in the abstract. But those making them failed to reckon with the reality that, for most of the people who still played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, it wasn’t so much a vehicle for improvisational thespians to explore the farthest realms of the imagination as it was a cozy exercise in dungeon delving and monster bashing among friends; the essence of the game was right there in its name. For better or for worse, most people still preferred good old orcs and kobolds to the mind-bending extra-dimensional inhabitants of a setting like Planescape or the weird Buck Rogers vibe of something like Spelljammer. The Forgotten Realms were gaming comfort food, a heaping dish of tropey, predictable fun. And the people who played there wouldn’t have had it any other way.
And yet fewer and fewer Dungeons & Dragons computer games had been set in the Forgotten Realms since the end of the Gold Box line. (Descent to Undermountain would be set there, but it had too many other problems for that to do it much good.) SSI and their successors had also showed less and less fidelity to the actual rules of Dungeons & Dragons over the years. The name had become nothing more than a brand, to be applied willy-nilly to whatever struck a publisher’s fancy: action games, real-time-strategy games, you name it. In no real sense were you playing TSR’s game of Dungeons & Dragons when you played one of these computer games; their designers had made no attempt to implement the actual rules found in the Player’s Handbook and Dungeons Master’s Guide. It wasn’t clear anymore what the brand was even meant to stand for. It had been diluted to the verge of meaninglessness.
But Feargus Urquhart was convinced that it was not yet beyond salvation. In fact, he believed that the market was ready for a neoclassical Dungeons & Dragons CRPG, if you will: a digital game that earnestly strove to implement the rules and to recreate the experience of playing its tabletop inspiration, in the same way that the Gold Box line had done. Naturally, such a game would need to take place in the tried-and-true Forgotten Realms. This was not the time to try to push gamers out of their comfort zone.
At the same time, though, Urquhart recognized that it wouldn’t do to simply re-implement the Gold Box engine and call it a day. Computer gaming had moved on from the late 1980s; people expected a certain level of audiovisual razzle-dazzle, wanted intuitive and transparent interfaces that didn’t require reading a manual to learn how to use, and generally preferred the fast-paced immediacy of real-time to turn-based models. If it was to avoid seeming like a relic from another age, the new CRPG would have to walk a thin line, remaining conservative in spirit but embracing innovation with gusto in all of its granular approaches. The ultimate goal would not be to recreate the Gold Box experience. It must rather be to recreate the same tabletop Dungeons & Dragons experience that the Gold Box games had pursued, but to embrace all of the affordances of late-1990s computers in order to do it even better — more accurately, more enjoyably, with far less friction. Enter the Infinity Engine.
But Urquhart’s gut feeling was about more than just a cool piece of technology. He had served as the producer on Shattered Steel, in which role he had visited BioWare several times and spent a fair amount of time with the people there. Thus he knew there were people in that Edmonton office who still played tabletop Dungeons & Dragons regularly, who had forged their friendships in the basement of a tabletop-gaming shop. He thought that a traditionalist CRPG like the one he had in mind might be more in their wheelhouse than any giant-robot action game or cutting-edge shared virtual world.
He felt this so strongly that he arranged a meeting with Brian Fargo, the Big Boss himself, whose soft spot for the genre that had put Interplay on the map a decade earlier was well known. When he was shown the Infinity Engine, Fargo’s reaction was everything Urquhart had hoped it would be. What sprang to his mind first was The Faery Tale Adventure, an old Amiga game whose aesthetics he had always admired. “It didn’t look like a bunch of building blocks,” says Fargo today of the engine that Urquhart showed him in 1996. “It looked like somebody had free-hand-drawn every single screen.”
As Urquhart had anticipated would be the case, it wasn’t hard for Fargo to secure a license from the drowning TSR to make yet another computer game with the name of Dungeons & Dragons on it. The bean counters on his staff were not excited at the prospect; they didn’t hesitate to point out that Interplay already had Fallout and Descent to Undermountain in development. Just how many titles did they need in such a moribund genre? They needed at least one more, insisted Fargo.
BioWare’s employees were astonished and overjoyed when they were informed that a chance to work on a Dungeons & Dragons CRPG had fallen into their laps out of the clear blue sky. James Ohlen and his little gang from Grande Prairie could scarcely have imagined a project more congenial to their sensibilities. Ohlen had been running tabletop Dungeons & Dragons campaigns for his friends since he was barely ten years old. Now he was to be given the chance to invent one on the computer, one that could be enjoyed by the whole world. It was as obvious to Urquhart as it was to everyone at BioWare that the title of Lead Designer must be his. He called his initial design document The Iron Throne. When a cascade of toilet jokes rained down on his head in response, Urquhart suggested the more distinctive name of Baldur’s Gate, after the city in the Forgotten Realms where its plot line would come to a climax.
