Icewind Dale: Heart of Winter Preview

When Interplay released Icewind Dale created by the RPG veterans, the Black Isle Studios, it just gave us a short distraction from awaiting Baldur's Gate II from Bioware. Still, Icewind Dale surprised many with its interesting design and different approach to the storyline than the one designers used in Planescape Torment-a and Baldur's Gate. A lot of players seemed to be quite happy because it had much more action. The Icewind Dale project had been developed as an extremely commercial title, mostly meant for people who actually liked playing Diablo and similar action games, which have RPG labels stuck to them for God-knows-what reason. Anyway, Icewind Dale achieved a great success and became well accepted by all types of RPG players.

The expansion pack - Heart of Winter (HoW) is due to appear in about one month. It will feature many more new cold terrains for our heroes to conquer. The audience eagerly awaits HoW primarily because of the technical improvements which should enhance even some of the old locations like Kuldahar, Dorn's Deep, Severed Hand...

The storyline of the original Icewind Dale was pretty simple and linear. Some mysterious evil force had threatened ten Towns on the far north of Faerun, better known as Icewind Dale. The game started in Easthaven, one of the ten towns. Your coterie investigates a series of peculiar events, which lead it through numerous quests in the region known as the Spine of the World. The story proved to be interesting and appealing enough for the designers to continue it with new quests that can be found in HoW. New locations include a small lumber camp called Lonelywood, in the far north of Faerun, a barbarian fortress on Bremen's Run, and an gorgeous little swamp with a graveyard-island in the middle of Maer Dualdon. Altogether, more than 20 hours of new adventures.

The expansion pack will let you continue the adventure in two ways. Everyone who played Icewind Dale know that there was a house in Kuldahar that you could not enter, not even with a ninth level thief. The expansion will let you continue the game through this very house, that is, this is where you find a new NPC that will give you further instructions. The new NPC is a barbarian Shaman Hjollder who will elaborate on his vision of a long-dead barbarian King that resurrected and wants to unite the barbarian tribes and lead them into a bloody war. They would besiege the Ten Towns region, so all you have to do is embark on another rescue mission.

If, on the other hand, you decide to start the expansion missions from the main menu, your party gets imported from the original game and teleported to Lonelywood where you get to speak to the shaman I mentioned earlier. As the story develops, you get to know that the resurrected King is in fact Wylfdene who got possessed by the spirit of Jarrod (yup, that's the bloke who sacrificed himself in the intro).

The HoW should support 800x600 (and unofficially even higher resolutions). It will use the redesigned Boware's Infinity engine, which we had an opportunity to see in Baldur's Gate II, wrapped up in even better artwork from Black Isle's artists. Pre-rendered backgrounds will use 16-bit, 24-bit or 32-bit palette. There will also be support for 3D acceleration, which should make the new flashy spells look much better. Another interesting feature is the possibility to hide all the toolbars and panel (by pressing "H"). The new locations like the Burial Island and some strange dungeons look much darker than most locations in the original game. This will present a nice contrast to the bright areas like the Lonelywood camp and frosty caves...