The retro RPGs based on the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop game have seen remasters on modern systems over the past few years, but there is one game that can’t be ported, as the source code for Icewind Dale II has vanished. Icewind Dale is a location in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons, which is home to several remote settlements and a lot of hungry monsters.

Icewind Dale was the setting for the first entry in The Legend of Drizzt series of novels, and it would appear in numerous Dungeons & Dragons books and video games over the years, including the upcoming Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance. The first Icewind Dale video game was developed by Black Isle Studios and released for Windows in the year 2000. Icewind Dale let the player create a full party of six adventurers, rather than the one main character that the player used in the Baldur’s Gate games. The Baldur’s Gate series earned acclaim for translating the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rules into a video game, while still managing to tell an excellent story. By comparison, the Icewind Dale games were more about battles and exploration than narrative.

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Icewind Dale received an enhanced edition for PC and consoles in 2019, which added new content, fixed many bugs from the original game, upscaled the visuals, and made it compatible with controllers. The remaster was done by Beamdog Games, who also released enhanced editions of other Dungeons & Dragons video games, like Baldurs Gate, Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, Planescape: Torment, and Neverwinter Nights. The fans noticed that a game was missing from this line-up, as an enhanced edition of Icewind Dale II was never mentioned as being in development.

What Happened To Icewind Dale 2?

Icewind Dale II was released in 2002, and it differed from its predecessor by using the modern (for the time) third edition rules of Dungeons & Dragons. The game was made using the same Infinity Engine that was used by Icewind Dale and the Baldur’s Gate games, so fans were confused as to why it hadn’t received a modern remaster, especially as Baldur’s Gate & Baldur’s Gate II Enhanced Edition had been received so well.

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The answer was revealed in a 2017 interview with Kotaku when Beamdog CEO Trent Oster revealed that the original source code for Icewind Dale II had been lost. Beamdog employees had managed to track down the source code for the old Black Isle Studios games in the Wizards of the Coast archives, but Icewind Dale II‘s original data was nowhere to be found. Oster revealed that it could be possible to try and work with the existing version of the game and heavily modify it from the outside, but the process would be so costly and time-consuming that the people at Beamdog don’t believe that it will be worth it. To date, the source code for Icewind Dale II has yet to be found, assuming that it still exists.

Icewind Dale is making a comeback, as it will be the setting for both Dark Alliance and the upcoming Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign for the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Larian Studios is currently working on Baldur’s Gate III, so there is no reason why players couldn’t see the Icewind Dale series revived in the future. As it stands, they likely won’t see an enhanced edition of Icewind Dale II for modern systems, and fans will have to rely on mods or the original version of the game on GOG if they want to get it running on their PC.

Source: Kotaku

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Scott Baird
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Scott has been writing for Screen Rant since 2016 and regularly contributes to The Gamer. He has previously written articles and video scripts for websites like Cracked, Dorkly, Topless Robot, and TopTenz.
A graduate of Edge Hill University in the UK, Scott started out as a film student before moving into journalism. It turned out that wasting a childhood playing video games, reading comic books, and watching movies could be used for finding employment, regardless of what any career advisor might tell you. Scott specializes in gaming and has loved the medium since the early ‘90s when his first console was a ZX Spectrum that used to take 40 minutes to load a game from a tape cassette player to a black and white TV set. Scott now writes game reviews for Screen Rant and The Gamer, as well as news reports, opinion pieces, and game guides. He can be contacted on LinkedIn.

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