Interview with James Ohlen
Describe your pen and paper AD&D campaign that keeps on getting alluded to on the message boards? Which BioWare employees are in your current campaign and how are they faring?
Actually I haven't run my campaign in many months now, although I plan to restart it once BG2 ships. Almost every NPC and villain in the original Baldur's Gate was named after a character from my Forgotten Realms campaign. However, their personalities often had to be modified so that they could fit within the context of the story. Many of the characters that didn't make it into BG will be making an appearance in Baldur's Gate 2. The Bioware employees who played in my campaign include: Dean Anderson [Senior Artist], Cameron Tofer [MDK2 Lead Programmer], Ben Smedstad [Producer] and Ross Gardner [former Scripter].
For Baldur's Gate, you changed Ben Smedstad's kensai pen and paper character into the enchanter Xan. Has Ben forgiven you yet? The screenshot of Amanujak suggests he hasn't. What type of character do you typically use when testing the game?
He's forgiven me for Xan, but not for Neb (I won't go into that). I use all sorts of different character combinations, but invariably name them Caspiar (an old character of mine).
What still needs to be finished on BG2 before it is solely being playtested? How many people from Interplay are temporarily living in Edmonton to test the game?
Writing and scripting is nearly done, as well as most of the background art. Monster, character and spell animations still need to be finished, as do movies, character portraits and sounds. Right now we are using placeholders for most of these (as you can see from our screenshots). It was pretty funny being attacked by a beholder that looked like an ogre (we've since gotten the beholder animation).
BG suffered from many spelling mistakes, while Torment had virtually none, but more scripting errors. What steps have been taken to improve the accuracy of the text and the more complex scripting instructions?
We had very little editing time for BG1. Basically, we were writing content all the way to the end. With BG2, Dave and Luke have entire months allocated to spelling and grammatical errors and writing tweaks.
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