Interview: Lead Writer of Baldur's Gate - Lukas Kristjanson

You may have read my Baldur's Gate 1 Review in which I deem Durlag's Tower to be one of the greatest dungeon crawls in cRPG history. Well, to my delight the Lead Writer of Baldur's Gate, Lukas Kristjanson, was recently kind enough to answer my questions on Durlag's Tower, and also offer insights into riddlecraft and the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion, in general.

I asked him: Who conceived the idea of the Tower, Who wrote it (the riddles & rhymes, the allegory on Fear), and Who did the dungeon design?

Wow, a long time since I thought out those days.

It was our first crack at an expansion, and we wanted something that could plug in and be engaged at almost any point. And since it's Dungeons and Dragons, we wanted to try our hand at a traditional crawl. A real adventure just for the sake of it. And like so many other things, we went back to the tabletop source.

I really liked the extended lore of things like the Dragon Mountain module, and we all have nightmares from the Temple of Elemental Evil. So we went for something established in Forgotten Realms, but not so detailed that fans would nitpick what we did as "not accurate". I don't remember who suggested it, but Durlag's Tower is mentioned in Volo's Guide to the Sword Coast by Ed Greenwood. So it was "legendary" but not a focal point, and that gave us room for interpretation. More or less the same tactic we would later employ with KotOR, by setting that game thousands of years before the movies. Still recognizable to fans, but lots of room to do your own thing.

I wrote a lot of the expansion and the tower. And while it's hard to remember specifics, I do recall being a jerk about the riddles. Because some players would reload after a wrong answer, so I built in redundant riddles, and made the game pull them randomly on load. So if you got the wrong answer and reloaded, there was a good chance to got a different riddle. That wasn't a fix, by any means. We always knew that multiple choice was a weak way to present a riddle. We briefly toyed with a text entry system in BG1, but realized that it was out of scope. Not just due to coding for the interface and GUI art, but also maintaining it across the different language translations of the game. But riddles are very AD&D, so we still wanted them. I tried to integrate them as much as possible, and sometimes had fun with them. Like having Minsc jump in to give wrong answers to some quizzing Guardian in BG2.

Personally, riddles were always (and still are) a pain in the butt, because there's a very small window for them to be satisfying. If you don't know it, it's impossible. If you do know it, it's obvious. Riddles that allow the player to consider and solve are rare, and made all the more challenging by multi-language releases. That's why you keep seeing physical puzzles repeat in many games. Those at least can be manipulated and give you time to "get it." Translation isn't a factor, and even if you know how to do it, there's still a process to solving it, instead of just "answer, move on." Like the Towers of Hanoi, or the "Towers of Annoy" as they came to be known.

Honestly I can't remember who all was involved in the dungeon design. All of us, to some extent, and I'd only leave someone out if I started trying to go through them all. You'll have to run through the credits. The Level Art team drove a lot of it, because we wanted the environment to be interesting. Plus their time was at a premium. Text was cheap back then, so it was easier to react to what Art could deliver. And we stretched ourselves pretty thin in places. Not so much in the tower itself, I'm thinking more of that mage-trap island cave that we crammed in. I believe we ended up using the same layout as the Ankheg caves, just mirrored, altered slightly, and recoloured.

That's some stuff off the top of my head.

Lukas Kristjanson.

Thanks for taking the time to respond, Lukas.

Durlag's Tower Walkthrough -- Baldur's Gate 1 Review.