25 years ago today, Baldur's Gate 2 set RPGs on the path to becoming the industry-defining genre they are today: 'We were putting all the fantasies that we had into the game'

Read the full, unabridged, and beautifully laid out version of this behind-the-scenes feature in PC Gamer magazine issue 415, out October 9th!

In 1998, Baldur's Gate redefined what a computer RPG – and videogame interpretation of the D&D ruleset – could be. Just two years later, Baldur's Gate 2 expanded on it so much that development nearly ballooned out of control. This is the story of one of the most influential and ambitious RPGs ever made.

Many of the great RPGs are etched into the popular imagination by their beginnings, those tentative first steps in a new fantasy world that tease the vastness ahead, and the freedom to carve your own path through it.

The first steps into Baldur's Gate 2's world are one of those moments. After a tough opening sequence that sees you escaping captivity from the wizard Irenicus, you emerge into Waukeen's Promenade, the trading hub of Amn's central city of Athkatla. Surrounded by golden minarets, it's a bustling amphitheater of traders and thieves, wealthy and poor – a filthy and vibrant snapshot of urban plenitude.

Within this district alone you'll find a circus leading to a pocket dimension, a shop selling goods from different planes of the Forgotten Realms, and all manner of peddlers and big personalities. Then, once you leave the area you see that it's just one of seven districts in Athkatla, which itself is just one of several regions in the nation of Amn that you get to explore. Even 25 years on, that sense of opportunity is still exhilarating.

The nation of Amn – equal parts Venetian merchant republic and Constantinopley cultural crossroads – was largely uncharted territory in the D&D universe, which is precisely why Bioware picked it for the game's setting, as lead designer Kevin Martens explains. "We deliberately chose a part of Faerûn that was not well explored so that we could do what we wanted," he says. "Forgotten Realms has all sorts of adventure hooks, and we wanted to use those and fill something out without stepping on anyone else's toes."

Setting the game in Amn gave Bioware something of a blank slate within a D&D context, opening up a Pandora's Box of creative freedom that proved almost impossible to keep under control.

Opening the floodgates

Following the success of the original Baldur's Gate in 1998, Bioware was immediately set to work on Baldur's Gate 2, and there were several factors that meant development got off to a blisteringly fast start. Firstly, Bioware had already built the Infinity Engine, which meant a lot of technical legwork was out of the way and that the team could really focus on the fun stuff of actually designing the game.

Producer Ray Muzyka outlined an ambitious feature list for the sequel that included character relationships on par with Final Fantasy and the inclusion of all the famous D&D monsters. This outline reflected the maximalist approach in the making of Baldur's Gate 2. "We were putting all the fantasies that we had into the game," says Mertens. "What were our favourite parts of all of our childhood campaigns? What were our favourite parts of every fantasy book we'd read, of Temple of Elemental Evil. We were just stuffing it all in."

Baldur's Gate 2 quickly started taking the shape of a toybox of D&D adventuring – a D&D Greatest Hits collection bundled into a plot that followed on directly from the original game. Yes, your goal was to retrieve your half-sister Imoen and your soul from the dastardly Irenicus, but along the way you could take on vampiric clans in hieroglyph-adorned tombs, get embroiled in a conflict between two mafia-like ruling families in the City of Trademeet (which is being held to ransom by a faction of genies), or become a feudal overlord in your country estate.

The density of the world was matched by the writing. The number of recruitable companions decreased for Baldur's Gate 2 (from 25 to 17), but now each one had fleshed out motives and histories, as well as unique relationships with the player and each other. Lukas Kristjanson, designer and writer for Baldur's Gate 2, and key writer for Jaheira's quest, tells me that, "Baldur's Gate 2 was something like 1.8 million words. I think Jaheira's word count in BG 2 was more than all 24 companions in BG I combined."

The quest for Jaheira – straight-talking Harper and co-icon of the series alongside perennial hamster pal Minsc – would prove to be a microcosm for Baldur's Gate 2's development – expansive almost to breaking point. She not only had the most dialogue, but also an elaborate personal quest which Kristjanson merged with her romance quest, so that if the player romanced Jaheira, it could affect the outcome of her personal quest.

Quest design was facilitated by new tools that allowed writers to effectively script their own scenes. "We had a visualisation tool called Dotty which would draw the conversation in bubbles," says Kristjanson. "If you got it right, it looked like the Crystalline Entity from Star Trek, just beautiful, but if you're a dumbass like me and plug Jaheira into it, it just breaks the machine."

The tool couldn't wrap its head around the timings from merging Jaheira's companion quest and romance, and there simply was no time to fix everything. "By the end of the project, James [Ohlen] put a sign on his door saying, ‘If it's about Jaheira, don't knock,'" says Kristjanson. "I've been paying the karmic debt for that for decades." This was just one of many cases where powerful tools and efficient pipelines gave designers so much freedom that they'd get too ambitious with the power in their hands.

While romance feels like a near-necessity in modern RPGs, at the time it was a largely alien concept, as designer and writer David Gaider explains. "The whole romance thing was just an experiment, like James had no idea that anybody would even like this," says Gaider. "We were writing these long stories, and they were cool, but romance? It was like, ‘People don't come here to romance, they come here to fight shit and battle dragons!'"

Gaider also insisted to Ohlen that “he was not a romantic guy” and tried to get off the hook from writing companion romances. "Of course James said, ‘No,'" says Gaider, and he was ultimately tasked with writing the romance for Anomen, the entitled, arrogant cleric that everyone loved to hate. Gaider was also lined up to write romances for companions Valygar and Haer'Dalis, but due to the general wariness around how well romances would go down with the audience, as well as the headaches caused by Jaheira's romance, they were eventually dropped.

Narratively, trauma was a driving force for Baldur's Gate 2's wayfaring characters and their arcs – a storytelling device that would go on to be used in RPGs to this day. These weren't just archetypal D&D heroes, but people with serious stuff to work through.

Almost every character is tinged with a humanising pathos—and this was all heavy subject matter for a studio of 20-somethings that Gaider described as a friendly frat house. "I don't know how we were able to be so subtle in our storytelling," says Mertens. "But it's cool that we figured it out."

Merging all of Baldur's Gate 2's disparate snippets and side-quests of storytelling into a cohesive whole was a challenge. When I ask Gaider how this was achieved, he laughs, "I don't know, is it cohesive?"

Dungeon masters

Gaider arrived on Baldur's Gate 2 from the hotel industry, based on his reputation as a master Dungeons & Dragons DM in the local area. Despite not having any videogame experience, his DM background gave him a strong baseline for the cRPG storytelling. "With games, you don't know what the player's thinking, but you can throw hooks of various things that might interest them and guide them down the path you want with little bread crumbs," he says. "And that's exactly what you do as a DM, right? You're trying to imagine how different types of players would approach the same thing."

Around half of Baldur's Gate 2 is contained in chapter two (out of seven), where your solitary main quest goal is raising 20,000 gold to get aid from the Thieves' Guild (or, alternatively, the vampires). While that may feel simplistic by today's standards, it allowed the player to inhabit the world and find their place in it via whatever means they wanted: whether you wanted to head out into the wilderness in search of classic dungeoneering or make a name for yourself in Athkatla's underground fighting circuit, it was up to you.

"As a hook, the 20,000 gold pieces thing was kind of lame, but as a system that supported narrative I think it was really good," says Mertens. "You have absolute freedom but you're still accomplishing the critical path, which is hard to do."

This structure occurred almost by accident, according to David Gaider – a result of the all-in approach to development that resulted in Baldur's Gate 2 being loaded with content in chapter two, before becoming a more linear adventure in subsequent chapters. "It was like a snake swallowing a house," says Gaider. “Chapter two was so monumental, it was all growing exponentially and if we'd continued like that I assume that game would've crashed."

But at the time, the designers didn't have a sense of the game's excessive growth. In fact, they felt the opposite. "I remember conversations about it being too short," Mertens begins. "We were worried there wasn't enough there, which is ironic given the 240-hour play time," says Mertens. "I think if we'd had a tight 200, it'd still have been a pretty good game."

As release loomed, the production needed help, and Black Isle Studios' Feargus Urquhart was drafted in to bring the scope creep under control. "I went to Brian [Fargo, Interplay CEO] about six months before BG 2 was supposed to come out and asked him, 'so how important is it that BG 2 ships for Christmas this year (2000)?” says Urquhart. "He said, 'Well, we might not all have jobs next year if it doesn’t.’ My response was, ‘Ok, well I guess I’m spending a lot of time in Edmonton over the next six months!’”

Urquhart filled the Bioware corridor with whiteboards, with every quest on it having two Xes. "The first was the designer says the quest is done and ready to test, the second was QA says the quest has been tested and has no bugs," says Urquhart. "If QA found a bug, they would put the X back under the designer column."

Inevitably, many Xes remained, which meant that the cutting axe started coming down on quests and romances deemed too buggy or secondary to what was needed to get the game out the door. "There was this spider cult quest, and we got rid of the entire thing," says Gaider. "There was a bit of uproar because everybody loved it so much."

Crunch blighted development in those final weeks – people sleeping in the office, and shambling pyjama-clad around the building to get the game finished. Mertens recalls a rebellion during this time over crunch-time dinner being Domino's Pizza every night; eventually this was eventually swapped out for Thai food, boosting both morale and nutritional intake on the team.

"The crunch at the time was brutal," says Kristjanson. "But it also came with a sense of, 'Well, I own this, so if it's going in it's going in because I'm doing it.' There were less random tasks assigned to whoever was available like you get today."

That sense of ownership was a major motivator to get the game over the finish line, but some of the team began to lose confidence. "Suddenly the game felt like this hacked-up monstrosity that was still full of bugs," says Gaider. "By the time it shipped, I think everybody on the team was like, ‘This is going to be horrible.'"

Levelling up

Baldur's Gate 2 went gold in August 2000, and then all that was left to do was await the verdict from the gaming public, with not only Bioware's but publisher Interplay's future depending on it. When it launched, Baldur's Gate 2 was indeed a buggy behemoth as anticipated. And yet, despite everything, it was also a resounding triumph.

Its myriad technical issues were drowned in a sea of quality writing and unrivalled D&D-flavoured adventuring (setting something of a precedent for future buggy-but-brilliant RPGS like The Elder Scrolls and Baldur's Gate 3). It set videogame RPGs on the path towards intimate, companion-driven storytelling, and established the Bioware formula that would find future success in Mass Effect and Dragon Age.

"To this day, I will ask the gameplay guy, the programmers, the senior guys, ‘What do you want to see in this thing?' and write to that," says Kristjanson. "If I'm just telling someone I'm making something, what ownership can they have of that? Ownership is vital to games having a heart to them."

Baldur's Gate 2's development was like an archipelago where each designer presided over their own set of islands, with ideas and inspiration flowing freely between them. From the Copper Coronet with its seedy underbelly, to the sewers containing cult hideouts, from fetishistically designed Drow cities to the grimy, lively streets of Athkatla, every corner of Baldur's Gate 2 teems with storytelling, told by one talented developer or another determined to leave a bit of themselves in the game.

Yes, it almost split at the seams, but the final product became a perennial codex that RPG developers will always refer back to. Not only that, but 25 years on it remains a timeless game in and of itself; an anthology of D&D stories orbiting around an intimate central plot, all bound together by a visual style that remains so soothing on the eyes even though conventions have long since moved on. Like a masterpiece Romantic painting, its quality shines across the generations.