Before Baldur's Gate 3, these games made D&D's Forgotten Realms a fixture on PlayStation
Dec. 25, 2023Play Magazine exhumes the best PlayStation games that incorporated one iconic D&D setting over the years
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The Forgotten Realms is not just Dungeons & Dragons' most popular setting, but one that belongs to everybody. One where the story told by your dungeon master across a dining room table is every bit as valid as the one projected onto a cinema screen in Honor Among Thieves. It’s no surprise, then, that it’s proved a perfect playground for video games - a medium where the storytelling is shared between you, the player, and the professional writers who’ve put together your dialogue options. From Baldur’s Gate to Neverwinter, in RPGs and action games, developers have been sending us to the Realms for decades now. And in the absence of a passing bard, we’re your guide to the very best of it.
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This feature originally appeared in Play Magazine. For more great features, interviews, and more delivered to your digital device or doorstep,subscribe to Play Magazine.
Baldur’s Gate defined the shape of the Western RPG as we know it, setting the stage for Dragon Age: Inquisition andThe Witcher 3many years later. In fact, we’re so familiar with its innovations today that it can be difficult to appreciate just how strange and experimentalBioware’s pitch was back in 1998.
The prototype the studio brought to publisher Interplay was an unprecedented fusion of tabletop-style RPG stats and fast-moving isometric combat, the latter inspired by the rise of speedy strategy games like Command & Conquer. Feargus Urquhart – then a producer at Interplay’s Black Isle division, later the head of Obsidian – took a chance. He pushed to grant Bioware the Dungeons & Dragons licence, and it proved an ideal pairing.
Characters flowed straight from the Canadian developer’s tabletop sessions into Baldur’s Gate, providing the story with both its villains and memorable companions, such as the dunderheaded yet endearing barbarian Minsc. Bioware worked wonders with the Forgotten Realms setting, drawing from a series of tie-in novels to spin a dark yarn about mortals vying to take the seat of a dead god. Its depiction of the Sword Coast saw magic and prophecy collide with more grounded geopolitical concerns and iron shortages. At the same time, dire warnings in dialogue mingled with Pythonesque comedic interludes.
Somewhere in that juxtaposition, the Realms began to feel real. Baldur’s Gate was a hit, and its sequel shored up Bioware’s success. That game replaced the Sword Coast’s patchwork open world with a more curated collection of druidic forests, visiting circuses, and dragon dens. Its map was dense with chance meetings, terrifying battles and meaningful choices, and it’s still regarded as a high water mark for the RPG genre.
Bioware drew from a series of tie-in novels to spin a dark yarn about mortals vying to take the seat of a dark god.
In such glowing company, you might expect Black Isle’s spin-off series to lack luster. Icewind Dale was made with Bioware’s engine, but without the developer’s involvement, and took a less ambitious path through the Forgotten Realms, its developers opting for linear dungeon crawling rather than freeform overland adventuring. “Chris Parker laid it out pretty clearly,” Obsidian design director Josh Sawyer recently told the Designer Notes podcast. “We are going to make this in 14 months. We are not going to have companions.'”
Back then, Sawyer was one of a handful of junior designers working on Icewind Dale – without the direction of a lead designer. It sounds like a project primed for disaster, but the narrow focus and deep D&D knowledge of Black Isle’s staff saw it through. These dungeons weren’t simply dank caves, but stuffed with sights pulled from the Realms' bestiaries and lore books.
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One level of Sawyer’s abandoned dwarven fortress, Dorn’s Deep, was home to fire giants, salamanders, and pools of orange lava; another was a villa housing a master thief. A third took the player through a series of botanical domes occupied by a dark elf wizard. Meanwhile, umber hulks from the Underdark ploughed unexpectedly through the walls, like abyssal Kool-Aid Men. If the battles were sometimes too grueling, they were correspondingly rewarding for those who’d mastered the Infinity Engine’s ruleset over multiple games.
The making of Neverwinter Nights actually predates Baldur’s Gate. This was a five-year commitment in an era when games typically came together in less than half that time. Its long gestation can be explained in part by its technical complexity. Not only was this Bioware’s first 3D RPG, it was one that would connect players together for co-op and competitive encounters across the millennium-period internet.
Neverwinter Nights' toolset was taken up by fans, who created MMORPGs, fighting arenas, and sprawling sagas.
It would launch with a fully-featured campaign comparable in scope to Baldur’s Gate that could be played solo or with friends. And every element of that campaign could be pulled apart and used as the building blocks for brand-new adventures, which could in turn be shared as tiny downloads online.
In the end, the Bioware-directed adventure starting in the titular city of Neverwinter didn’t prove the equal of the studio’s previous RPGs. But the toolset was taken up by fans, who created MMORPGs, fighting arenas, and sprawling sagas. Bioware did a marvellous job of spotlighting the best player inventions, even funding further community expansions with the backing of publisher Atari. Some of the finest Western RPGs of all time are still to be found within the walls of Neverwinter Nights.
For several years afterwards, Neverwinter Nights was Bioware’s primary recruitment tool for new developers. And over in Poland,CD Projekt Redmade its first ever game on the foundations of Bioware’s engine; switch to isometric view in The Witcher’s original PC release and you can clearly see the resemblance.
In its Dungeon Master mode, one player could resize dungeons, place chests, designate quest givers, hide secret rooms, and design monster encounters. Then, when adventurers entered their nest, the DM could steer and antagonise them in real time. Sadly, its story campaign failed to live up to the pedigree of Dragon Age: Origins game director Dan Tudge, and the multiplayer mode that once gave Sword Coast Legends its USP has shut down, its servers closed. As it stands, no new developer has stepped up to the daunting task of representing Dungeons & Dragons in its entirety on console. Most adaptations of the tabletop game settle for nailing either the lore or the ruleset, but leave out the shared storytelling that sits at the centre of the tabletop hobby.
There’s an umber hulk in the room that we haven’t been addressing. The vast majority of celebrated D&D games have been developed for PC and only belatedly ported to PlayStation. As such, they bear the hallmarks of their original platform: a slow pace; an isometric perspective; and an awful lot of tiny boxes filled with text and numbers.
While you can have a wonderful time with any of them on a telly screen, it’s not wrong to want an adaptation that plays to the traditional strengths of PlayStation: speed; immediacy; and an undeniable sense of cinema. Game developers have been working towards that end for decades now, with mixed results.
The formula remained untweaked, and when Diablo 3 arrived on consoles a couple of years later, there was no reason to return to any hack ‘n’ slash pretenders.
Demon Stone filled the screen with clanging swords and marauding trolls in heightened siege scenarios.
Demon Stone’s other draw was its development talent, Stormfront Studios having put together a popular Two Towers adaptation in time for the release of Peter Jackson’s movie. While Rannek was no replacement for Aragorn, Demon Stone recreated much of the same drama in the Forgotten Realms setting, filling the screen with clanging swords and marauding trolls in heightened siege scenarios.
This feature originally appeared in Play Magazine. For more great features, interviews, and more,subscribe to Play Magazine.
Jeremy is a freelance editor and writer with a decade’s experience across publications like GamesRadar, Rock Paper Shotgun, PC Gamer and Edge. He specialises in features and interviews, and gets a special kick out of meeting the word count exactly. He missed the golden age of magazines, so is making up for lost time while maintaining a healthy modern guilt over the paper waste. Jeremy was once told off by the director of Dishonored 2 for not having played Dishonored 2, an error he has since corrected.
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