Dragon's Breath Forge has conducted
an interview with David Gaider of BioWare, discussing Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Neverwinter Nights, and even a little Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Here's a snippet:
Q: I noticed that in BG2 Imoen has a belt that cannot be removed, but is gone when you re-acquire her in the asylum, what was the belt for?
A: Have you read the description? Beyond that, there is a technical reason. Initially, we didn’t have the ability to add states onto creatures directly as we do now. We had to put items on them that conferred those states as equipped abilities. We originally put an invisible item with no icon on Imoen’s creature file that made sure that she couldn’t be killed while she was in the original Irenicus dungeon…if she got to the point where she would have, she had to run off and be present for the cut-scene with Irenicus once you escaped. Very late into production, however, one of the testers noticed that you could still select ‘something’ in her inventory’s belt slot…and that attempting to drag it anywhere would cause the game to crash. We didn’t want to play around too much with that portion of the game, since it was already supposed to be solid…so instead we made the belt real and gave a vague reason as to why Irenicus might have put it on her. Much of what he did was ultimately unexplained, after all.
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