Baldur's Gate Memories, Part Two

RPG Vault continues to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Baldur's Gate by offering a small amount of retrospective commentary from BioWare's James Ohlen.
I had a lot of fun as lead designer on Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II. Those games were a chance for me to bring everything I love about Dungeons & Dragons to a computer game. I remember trying to cram every creature, setting and class that I could think of into the latter in an attempt to outdo the first game. As much fun as those titles were to make, we did go a little crazy, and built a world that really was just a pastiche of everything that had been done in fantasy. The main city in Baldur's Gate II had a beholder cult, a lich, vampire assassins, a crazy illusionist, etc. While we did try hard to bring it all together into a consistent story, in the end, the world still felt a little like a comic book.