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Black Isle Studios, as it boasts on its web site, has produced some of the best RPGs of the past several years. Games such as Fallout, Baldur's Gate, and Planescape: Torment have been either commercial or critical successes and have earned Black Isle the reputation of being a premier developer of role-playing games. However, those three RPGs were long labors of love that emphasized a lot of character interaction and dialogue. What they didn't emphasize was quick and dirty hack-and-slash action. Black Isle, in an attempt to quickly turn out a hack-and-slash adventure, decided to take the Baldur's Gate engine and throw out a more Diablo-esque role-playing game that would cram lots of action into a much smaller and faster-paced

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area than in Baldur's Gate. The result is Icewind Dale, which is in the beta stage of development and should ship to store shelves sometime in late spring. It's a game that Chris Parker, producer on Icewind Dale, characterizes as a modern remake of the classic dungeon crawls of the old days.

Icewind Dale as a location in the Forgotten Realms has been largely untouched by Wizards of the Coast. It was made famous in R.A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale trilogy, wherein the famous dark elf ranger, Drizz't Do'urden, made his first appearance. Unfortunately, the Icewind Dale game does not take place at the same time as the novels. In fact, the game is a prequel to the Icewind Dale trilogy, and it takes place almost 60 years before Drizz't and friends adventured through the Dale. However, the location is the same, a windswept, snowy location full of dangerous ice-bound creatures. Some of the monsters

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that plagued Drizz't, such as tundra yeti, will likewise impede the progress of the player characters in Icewind Dale. Thus, apart from Salvatore's novels some ten years ago, Icewind Dale is very much an unexplored area of the Forgotten Realms, and the Black Isle team on the game has had relatively free reign to craft a compelling RPG in those frozen wastes.

Icewind Dale is still two or three months from completion, but the game's features are complete and it's in testing. Join us as we uncover the innovations in the game, as well as the locations, monsters, and other features in this hack-and-slash RPG.

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