BGII Developer Interviews

[WizWom]

http://pc.ign.com/index/features.html?cons...urn_all=is_true

(way down at the bottom of the page...)

 

IGN managed to get a number of interviews with the BGII crew and producers while they were doing the game.

 

It's pretty interesting stuff, from a modder's perspective - it's not as much on the characterization of NPCs, but it's worth a glance.

[Smoketest]

By the way, there are a total of 12 articles, with the first one at the bottom of the page.

 

 

The final article by Ray Musyka about bugs left me with a chuckle...

Our quality standards are very high so we're not going to be content unless we can knock all the bugs right out of the game.

Aye, but as we all know, money talks bigger than love in a commercial game project. This is one reason why I will never take a paid job as a game developer. Some do it for money, but I only do it for fun.

 

The testers at Black Isle/Interplay are also verifying every bug that has been fixed at BioWare (some 3000 bugs are on the verified done list right now).

 

The QA effort on a game the size of Baldur's Gate II is truly impressive - BG2 is one of the largest games that I've personally ever played, so QA'ing it to find every single bug is a lot of work!

The problem with relying on QA to find your bugs is that many bugs are minor enough as to be unnoticed unless played by thousands of players over the course of time. If only Bioware had used editors like NI and DLTCEP to tell them about the hundreds, if not thousands, of minor glitches (and not so minor) they still had to fix, before King $ stepped in and put a halt on the whole thing.

 

Anyway, thanks for the link. I wasn't that active online until awhile after BG2 was released, so I missed most of the chatter beforehand. A lot of it is airy business philosophy, but it's still interesting.

[Gorilym]

Indeed, good link WizWom. The NPC backgrounds were nice, especially the evolution of Xan - from pnp life as githzerai kensai to rather-less-than-hardy elven enchanter on account of NPC balance.