Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Infinity Engine In Memorium!

If the Source engine is an infinitely malleable piece of software, a golden calf constantly being reshaped to meet the needs of its users, then the Infinity Engine is wrought of folded steel: a tool, perfect for its task, but totally intractable in its function. Still, there’s something about the Infinity Engine, its simple elegance and adaptability to various kinds of RPGs, that makes it not only important but beautiful in the context of its time.

There were many top down RPG engines that took advantage of point and click interfaces. Fallout has its home-brew engine, resplendent with bugs and with iffy context sensitive cues that failed to activate as often as not. This wonderful toybox that made one of gaming’s classics possible had many, many problems that the Infinity Engine solved handily, running the gamut from unreliable hirelings who could barely be ordered, let alone controlled, to tricky triggers and a forced turn-based combat system with one of the single worst user interfaces I’ve ever had the displeasure of using.

Arcanum had the same set of problems, paired with scripting issues that dwarf the considerable ones apparent in later Infinity Engine entries, more than enough contextual issues and a completely un-usable real time combat system, which wouldn’t be so bad if Arcanum hadn’t come out so long after Bioware released the Infinity Engine and fixed all those problems Troika’s developers ran into while they were making Fallout. Even Lionheart, a hilariously ahistoric game with a me-too top down isometric perspective, failed to take the lessons of the Infinity Engine to heart, using its own bugged out, poorly interfaced control methods to trailblaze new ground in making games unnecessarily difficult to play.

Compared to these games the Infinity Engine and its various entries had an understand elegance all their own. With a user interface designed to translate the rule set of Dungeons and Dragons, a rule set aped by nearly all of the abovementioned games to one extent or another, it managed to simplify complicated ideas and add wonderfully intuitive context sensitive elements to its operations without making them overly buggy, a challenge that most script heavy games still encounter today.

Streamlined design, unobtrusive and some of the least demanding technical requirements in gaming history all made the Infinity Engine a great tool for delivering content to a wide array of gamers. But what truly made it impressive was the loyalty to its source material and diversity it offered to developers within its context. While the Infinity Engine only represented Dungeons and Dragons rules, it did so with such aplomb that its hard to critique its realization of D&D’s mechanics. While there are more literal translations of the rules of Dungeons and Dragons there’s no game that more effectively captures the spirit of Dungeons and Dragons, its exploration, discovery, progression and combat, than the games of the Infinity Engine.

Take, for instance, Baldur’s Gate, which introduced a generation of gamers to the “vanilla” flavor of D&D, Forgotten Realms. Baldur’s Gate essentially ran a campaign for players, but it never forced players into any situations or artificially gated any gameplay areas off. There were places you could not visit, but the triggers that opened them related not to timelines being met but rather events proceeding as planned. The world was wide open for exploration, and the plot could be advanced completely out of order, various sections of the game bypassed or omitted as the player desired. Baldur’s Gate delivered the campaign hook, gave the players vague directions, and then never asked them to stay on the beaten path. It was essentially an introductory campaign rendered in silicon, a new and terrific accomplishment over the punishing and sometimes slavishly linear and punishingly arranged Gold Box games of old.


And if some of the other Infinity Engine games, the like of Icewind Dale and Baldur’s Gate 2, seem derivative of Baldur’s Gate’s game play formula think of Torment, the game that redefined RPGs for a generation.

With a complicated system of variables running beneath its hood and a world as vibrant and alive as anything I’ve ever played, Torment took the basic framework introduced in Baldur’s Gate and reshaped it into an event more contextually sensitive world. It fixed many of the issues that plagued Baldur’s Gate (randomly generated stats, duping tricks and under or completely undeveloped NPCs) and blew them out of the water. Torment showed just how well the scripting language of the Infinity Engine could work in the hands of masters, just how well a primarily text based engine could work with some minimalist visuals and some truly expert writing behind it.

The Infinity Engine didn’t last long, nor did the era of small, isometric RPGs. Even though these titles still live on vibrantly in gaming memory (so much so that they still occasionally go on sale in storefronts as prominent as Impulse) they were but a flash in the pan. Eventually the Infinity Engine would give way to the Aurora Engine, a three-dimensional shit show of an interface that introduced a brand new set of problems that it would never fix. With the death of the Infinity Engine there was a marked decline in party RPGs, and Dungeons and Dragons licensed RPGs in general. Neverwinter Nights made a good attempt at sustaining the environment, but it simply couldn’t do the job. The Aurora Engine was not the Infinity Engine, and its means of resolving the complicated and sometimes fickle rules of D&D, even if it was more loyal to the official rules of the game, lost something in translation.

But it is with fondness that I recall the Infinity Engine and the golden age of role playing games it provided us with. While it was just a piece of software, infinitely replaceable in the eyes of both its players and its developers, it accomplished something incredible: it made, and indeed sustained, an entire mode of play for half a decade, creating some of the most interesting titles I’ve ever played and bringing me back to them again and again to this very day.