The Playstation 2 was not a platform known for its Western-style RPGs. You had few options if you were the kind of adventurer looking for dwarves and elves and half-elves who traverse deep dungeons by torchlight before emerging with their loot to trade in the city, where you’d be served beer and quests. by a busty barmaid at a fuggy tavern called The Regal Horseshoe, The Prancing Pixie, or The Spread-Eagled Goblin…or something like that.
And while I’ve talked quite recently about a rare find of a Western RPG that came out on PS2, there was also an unexpected RPG heavy hitter that came to Sony’s console moments later. In 2001, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance arrived on PS2, with all the tropes described in that first paragraph: busty barmaid and all.
Dark Alliance went along with the then prevailing stereotype that console gamers had the attention span of Slaughterfish (which is slightly longer than a goldfish, I’m told) and wouldn’t be able to run a complex RPG in the vein of the first two. Baldur’s Gate games. It was a Diablo-style ARPG, with a focus on hacking, slashing, massive loot, and a highly streamlined leveling and progression system.
The thinking was simple, according to Interplay Senior Producer Eric DeMilt. He told me in an interview last year, “My feeling was, ‘Hey, this is our biggest IP and we don’t have a console offering for it. Here’s a team with really great tech that’s really in this space. Why are we talking? not with them about making a PS2 and Xbox version?”
It was actually a pretty awesome game for the time, built by a 13-strong team in just six months on a powerful internal engine made by Snowblind Studios, the Snowblind Engine. It had incredible water distortion, silky-smooth frame rates, and plenty of nice little touches like individually displayed coins dropped by enemies, meaning the amount you picked up on a stack reflected the number you received in your inventory.
Combat also felt great, with satisfying squelchiness as battle axes split rats and goblins in half, fire spells caused enemies to go up in convincing flames, and spell effects sparkled. The shoehorn of a jump button and various platforming elements is, in retrospect, rather odd, showing that the game is a product of a time when such things were considered important boxes to tick in console games. It’s like the business-minded box tickers, thinkin’Console gamers are simple people. They don’t know what an RPG is, but they like platform stuff like Crash Bandicoot or Mario, so let’s have some of that.”
Dark Alliance sold over a million copies on the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube, which was enough to warrant a sequel. In fact, Interplay publishing house ran into serious financial difficulties at that time. The publisher sold Baldur’s Gate developer BioWare and had to cancel new PC entries in the Baldur’s Gate and Fallout series. Console games seemed like a relatively quick and easy way to make money, so Interplay started looking at a Dark Alliance sequel.
The problem is that Dark Alliance developer Snowblind was only contracted for the first Dark Alliance, and after the game’s release, the talented studio was quickly snapped up by Sony Online Entertainment to create Champions of Norrath – an action-RPG spin-off from the popular MMO EverQuest. As a result, Interplay had to use one of its legendary in-house studios, Black Isle Studios, to create Dark Alliance 2.
This created a fascinating split, with two games of a similar style being built simultaneously by two different teams on the same custom-built engine. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 2 and Champions of Norrath came out within a month of each other in early 2004, a fork of the immersive ARPG formula that Dark Alliance started in 2001.
The games could have been a total overhaul of each other, with the same combat system, engine, art style, and even UI fonts. But they had some key differences. Dark Alliance 2 (which I recently reviewed an unexpected PC port) introduced a much more diverse and engaging roster than its predecessor, complete with individual character quests, dialogue, and so on. Being a Black Isle game, it also introduced some nods to its PC lineage, with things like an overworld map you could travel across and some interesting crossovers with Baldur’s Gate lore (although it was a stinky little console game , it was never considered suitable for Forgotten realms canon).
Champions of Norrath, meanwhile, was a beast that was both similar and very different. Instead of giving you preset characters with their own stories, you can create your own from different templates based on Everquest races and classes. So you could be a Dark Elf Shadow Knight, say a Barbarian Fighter, or an Erudite Wizard, choosing their gender, as well as different hairstyles, faces, and tattoos. It was customization at the expense of characterization, and whether it was better or not didn’t matter as much as the fact that it felt that way. parallel to Dark Alliance 2.
In some ways, Snowblind’s greater experience with their proprietary engine was telling in Champions of Norrath (and its 2005 sequel, Champions: Return to Arms). The game brought co-op to four players (and took advantage of the PS2’s burgeoning online play feature), and the EverQuest environments were a bit more flashy. Norrath’s treetop towns, rolling desert dunes, and even tropical climates felt more vibrant and varied than Dark Alliance 2’s more classic fantasy world.
Some of the original Dark Alliance’s voice talent, such as Cam Clarke and Tony Jay, also went to Norrath, although Dark Alliance 2’s voice talent such as Alan Shearman, Alan Oppenheimer (aka He-Man’s Skeletor) was nothing. sniffed at both. Black Isle’s RPG chops were also reflected in Dark Alliance 2’s slightly deeper leveling and skill system.
Whichever of the two games you chose (why not both?), their coexistence was bizarre, like the convergence of two separate timelines – one in which Snowblind kept its engine, the other in which Interplay kept the rights to it. And if you ask Snowblind, then these two games should not have to both existed. When Snowblind learned in 2003 that Interplay would continue to use the Snowblind Engine to make its own games, it launched a legal dispute, claiming that Interplay should have been allowed to use the engine. The dispute ended in 2005 with a sort of pyrrhic victory for Snowblind. Under the terms of the agreement, it was agreed that Interplay could continue to work with already created games in the Snowblind engine, but not use it for future games.
This exacerbated Interplay’s financial problems and meant they had to cancel development of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 3, as well as Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel 2, the sequel to another similar hack-and-slasher set in the Fallout universe. (that, it must be said, was far inferior to Baldur’s Gate of Champions). The shelf life of the Snowblind Engine didn’t last long after 2005 anyway, and the last game made with it was Justice League Heroes, released by Snowblind Studios in 2006.
We don’t know if Interplay really believed it was “co-owned” by the Snowblind Engine, or if in their financial turmoil they were just trying to see how many games they could put out on it before getting caught. Given the recent re-releases of Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance 1 and 2 on modern consoles and PC (for a whopping $40 / £30, no less), it looks like Interplay has gotten quite a bit of mileage out of the Snowblind Engine. You have to wonder if Daybreak Game Company, the current holders of the EverQuest IP, are looking at these games and weighing a similar return for the Champions of Norrath games, allowing today’s gamers to experience this interesting PS2 era RPG rivalry. .
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