Baldur's Gate Review

 Paying deference to the Grandfather

Chalk that one off of the bucket list whiteboard because I've finally done it. After years of hearing this game revered and praised and sung from the high heavens as the all-mighty godfather genesis of western roleplaying games as we know it, I've finally had the chance to play Baldur's Gate. Or rather, Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition, which is mostly just a remaster with some significant touch-ups under the hood, so for all intents and purposes I have played the original Baldur's Gate to competition. That is total competition, by the way, as in- the main game, Tales from the Sword Coast, the Blackpits and even the homebrew 1.5 DLC which Beamdog cooked up in 2016, Siege of Dragonspear. I'm telling you, I didn't want to miss a single slice of the Baldur's Gate pie just in case there was something there that I ended up really liking. And was there? Well you'll just have to read this review to find out, won't you?

Baldur's Gate is a Classic RPG dating all the way back to 1998, and the series is often cited as one of the best two Bioware series' ever made. (I tend to lean more towards the other candidate: Knights of the Old Republic.) The premise sought to take the 2nd Edition D&D ruleset and transfer it into a game with realtime pauseable combat, the likes of which hadn't really been executed in this way ever before. Even now when you look at these sorts of isometric RPGs, realtime combat is usually reserved for ARPGs, and those games generally won't allow the player to up and pause the minions of hell coming to carve off your face so you can sit around and have a think. This is also an RPG that featured the coveted 6 companions limit which it feels like every team-based role playing game has been judged against ever since. ("What's that? You've got a whole cast of lovingly fleshed out companions in your RPG? Well that's cool and all but how many can I hire at once? Only four? Meh, you should've worked harder")

Coming to this game after all this time is sort of like facing the final boss of my CRPG discovery tour, although that's not to say it'll be done after this. (I'm literally downloading 'Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire' as I write this.) Everytime I'd dive into Dragon Age, or The Elder Scrolls or any of the other number of RPGs that owe their linage back to this game, I'd feel it's presence niggling at the corner of my subconscious, goading me to pay respect to my elders. Well it took some time, but I've fulfilled the prophecy; and in doing so I feel like I've had a decent number of revelations regarding why many of these games play the way they do, what it is that had people so entranced for years after the series went defunct and why some people can't bring themselves to look on Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 as a true sequel. (Although that last point is honestly worthy of a blog on it's own. I won't be touching that.)

The story of these games is what really interested me, for in my younger days I always looked upon Bioware as being master storytellers and thus assumed that a renowned game from their early days would similarly shine with that effortless narrative spark. An older version of myself can look back and see how a lot of those Bioware stories I championed were pretty tropey, but I still attest that they're good for what they are and certainly still have punch for anyone coming to them today. (How else could Mass Effect Legendary Edition sweep up the Internet by storm a few weeks back like it did?) And yet even acknowledging all that, I came away from Baldur's Gate 1 feeling a little disquiet at a narrative which seemed closer to Black Isle Studios Fallout than it did later Bioware. Not to say that it itself was bad, I actually found the story itself to be hugely compelling. Rather the presentation wasn't what I was expecting.

It's a curious approach wherein most of the key narrative points are placed into the world to be discovered by optional observers, not so much told to the player directly so that they are aware of the rising stakes at all time. It's a hands-off and irregular method for telling a story, but one that I honestly respect and feel the effect of when done right. Going to bars and buying some drinks in order to hear the rumors surrounding the diseased iron and then overhearing conversations on the street about the nearby nation of Amn and the possibility of their impending invasion, it all felt a lot more involved and active on my part. The downside of this being the point at which factions and ideas are bought up to which I feel unequipped. I didn't know what the Iron Throne were for half of the game, which is insane given how important they are to the story and their role within it, I just didn't see that first story hook where I was supposed to be introduced to them and thus wandered from quest objective to quest objective a little bit bewildered. I was also unaware as to what The Time of Troubles was, something which I think had an able chance to be naturally explained to the player thanks to the setting of the intro to the game. (A library of scholars? Just have the game start in the middle of a history lesson, that way even players who aren't paying attention will have the information passively relayed to them.)

Once the actual meat of the story gets going and the players are set into their roles, the journey of Baldur's Gate is actually a really wild ride, taking the player all the way up the Sword Coast in a tour that did a fantastic job of just familiarising me with the world before I even touched Baldur's Gate proper. In fact, I was actually a little disappointed when Baldur's Gate showed up, because it just felt like another stereotypical fantasy city, at least in raw appearance. (Although I might be saying that because a lot of fantasy cities from then onwards owed their inspiration to Baldur's Gate) I kept coming back and thinking "This is the famous city they even named the game after? Feels like a little bit of a wasteland". Perhaps I just found a little more charm in the various residents of the Friendly Arm Inn, or the town of Beregost, which I took to affectionately naming 'Inn City', for it being a town with no less than five competing Inns within streets of each other. And hardly a day's walk from Baldur's Gate itself. (How does anyone remain in business?)

I really did fall for the quirkiness of this world and the characters you find here, especially the various companions and their very distinct personalities. D&D character creation always dictates people be created with their 'moral alignment' squarely stated from the getgo. I always felt this was a weakness of character creation, serving as a nudge to less devoted role players in helping them give themselves to the fiction perhaps, but reductive in the overall symphony of character driven storytelling wherein a person can start as one thing and evolve to be something completely different by the end. Seeing how Baldur's Gate uses these very alignments as basis to create a simply humungous cast of detailed characters with predilections and duties leading them to all corners of the moral compass, made me release how powerful a well oiled alignment meter can be. These characters might perhaps be a little bit unrealistically eccentric, but that's what make the bunch just so darn loveable. (I found myself wishing the companion cap was bigger so I could spend quality time with more of them.)

Speaking of Character Creation, Baldur's Gate did a decent of job of streamlining this aspect without leaving players completely confused as to what they were doing. I was a little disappointed by the number of races available, you couldn't even play a full Orc, let alone a Dragonborn or Tiefling. (I just want the chance to play a somewhat interesting race sometime, you know?) My character ended up being a Neutral-Evil Gnome Cleric called Knud, and the tooltips were very handy in explaining how my character should be built in order to properly advantage those choices. With an exception towards telling me that all weapons, even those made for clerics, have a mid-level strength requirement, instead of a Wisdom one. Now you could say that is a mistake caused by my own hubris, not realising that stat improvements are nigh-on impossible in base D&D, but the result was me going around the entire game with no weapon better than a club. (Thank god I picked a support class)

The quirky nature of an avaricious Cleric not brawny enough to pick up a Morningstar fit in great among the cast of character that make up the 25 companions that this game has to offer. Yes, 25! You might think that's a tad too much, and truthfully it sort of is, but that does mean I always felt like whatever challenge I went up against I'd have enough people in my back-up roster to handle things. I can't say I had the pleasure of experiencing all of these companions, or even most of them for that matter (I only played with around 15 of them) but amidst those I did pick there were a good number of memorable and great characters. Such as Minsc, (the Barbarian of questionable sanity with his pet Space Hamster Boo) Dorn (the Half-Orc Blackguard who lives up to the 'evil mercenary' persona and then some with his unfiltered brutality) Neera (the Half-elf Wild mage who can literally turn the tide of your battle eitherway on the whim of a die thanks to her unpredictable magic) and Imoen. (The ever supportive childhood friend who's your rock no matter what bad choices you make.)

The sheer number of companions is perhaps necessary given the way that Death works in Baldur's Gate, which is a mix of my least favourite parts of D&D alongside some of their own twisted choices. First of all, I hate the fact that most forms of death can be reversed with a simple spell in D&D. Okay, it isn't exactly a simple spell, but it isn't a rare or unheard of one, any church cleric can do it. It removes a lot of the sanctity of death and makes one wonder why you don't see regular enemies popping up to get revenge more often. (There's some rules in there about keeping the body intact and the soul untouched, but I still don't love it.) In Baldur's Gate, there is no unconsciousness state, meaning that anytime your HP reaches 0 that person instantly dies. If they die in an unlucky way (i.e. Get immolated) They're dead forever. Although, honestly, it's usually just worth reloading if someone dies anyway because they drop all their gear and that's just a hassle to re-equip again.

I thought that Pillars of Eternity's system was broken for the way it rarely ever contributed to actual dynamic gameplay moments and just meant that you had to hoof it back to an Inn every now and then; but Baldur's Gate gives that a run for it's money. Suddenly, every fight could lead to a reload or heavy backtrack because your mage was standing at the wrong place and got swarmed before getting out of the way. I can't help but feel like there must be a better CRPG system for handling death out there somewhere, between Tyranny's overly lenient 'wounds' mechanic and BG's hardedge 'total death' approach. Surely someone found an accord somewhere!

Now that we're onto gameplay, I must say that I was surprised how similar this game played to the CRPGs of today, proving how timeless this style of game can be. It essentially comes down to throwing your band of adventurers at the band of enemies and waiting for them to bash each other to death, maybe taking a pause to reposition someone every now and then. Of course, as things grow more complicated other factors come into play, and soon you'll be managing spell slots and throwing up buffs before fights. (Although the rest mechanic for recovering spell uses and healing was far too spammable. They try to throw up the odd ambush to put you off but those were just annoying. I usually slept 8 hours after most significant encounters, which isn't very D&D-like at the end of the day.)

One issue I had with Pillars was the way in which magic casters were inundated with far too many spells with effects that I never learned, but in Baldur's Gate this is negated significantly to the point where I knew what pretty much every effect was and could build my clerics and mages to the situation. (Which was important for some of those endgame challenges) I don't know whether this was a simple effect of my growing familiarity with the genre or if Baldur's Gate really did just throw less new cleric spells at me upon level-up, but by the end of game I had a really strong grasp on how everyone played and for boss fights I typically wouldn't let the AI whole-sale manage anyone, it was all stop-n-start strategy for me.

The difficulty curve of the game can be largely attributed to another strange quirk of the D&D ruleset, one which got excessively annoying for the harder encounters in the game. Essentially everything comes down to armour class and the fact that if the behind-the-scenes dice rolls (aided by stats, buffs and the gear you equip) doesn't pass some arbitrary value, your character doesn't hit. It invokes, predictably, Morrowind levels of helplessness where you come across enemies you simply cannot hit no matter how much you swing that darn wooden stick. At these points you're not simply facing off against Goliath vs David odds, but total massacres where no matter how many buffs you throw around your fight is useless, because you haven't got this one specific +3 weapon yet. I prefer simply staring at a too-long healthbar and slowly chipping it away over dealing literally no damage because the giant monster has a THAC0 of -2 or something stupid. For the main game this isn't really a problem however, and I actually found the challenges presented to be very fulfilling to resolve, even if there wasn't a great many of them.

Where things really kicked into gear was with Legends of the Sword Coast, the expansion for the original game which added a few new very fleshed out questlines which were all real playthrough standouts on their own merits. However, they each featured at least one encounter which I feel crossed the boundary of 'tough' and entered into plain 'unfair' territory. The island quest was incredibly fun, but contained one boss fight against monster that can only be hurt with three weapons in the entire game. Two of which can only be found in the room with him. (How often do you loot a room before clearing it out?) Another is a spectacularly long and involved dungeon which easily eclipses anything the main game had to offer as a truly unique epic dungeon trekking adventure. However the end of quest fight, upon returning the dagger, is simply wacky for the amount of rules it introduces and expects you to just know. (Like the fact that every NPC in the room needs to die before the boss lest that creature is reborn through one of them. What the heck?)

My main problem with those difficult fights is that key mechanics aren't explained before you're chucked into them, leaving you helpless. Such is not the case with 2016's DLC, Siege of Dragonspear, which similarly features endgame-level threats but lets you know all the chips before you commit, so that you're not stumbling around for ages and resorting to forums just to figure out how to go about the darn fight. In fact, I really liked what Beamdog did with a lot of Siege of Dragonspear, and now do hope they get the chance to one day make a fully fledged D&D-based CRPG of their own construction because they could likely do something special with it. I'm being serious, I may have grown to like Baldur's Gate, but I actually loved Siege of Dragonspear and felt it actually told it's story better than base BG did. (Even if base BG has a better actual story to tell. If that makes any sense.)

Envisioned as a 1.5 entry, bridging the weeks-long gap between Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Siege of Dragonspear exists to answer the question "What exactly led to the 'dark circumstances' that drove the Bh- I mean Gorion's Ward-" (Keeping spoilers to a minimum here) "-to flee Baldur's Gate?". In this pursuit, Beamdog, who worked on remastering Baldur's Gate 1 for the Enhanced Edition before this, really pushed the Infinity engine to it's limit on impressive set piece scenes and more modern game design philosophies, some of which fit Baldur's Gate and some of which stuck out like a sore thumb to a new player like me. One example of the latter would be the enemy group compositions, which went from the small groups of base Baldur's Gate to instant giant hordes of death, much more indicative of the group compositions you'd see from games like Pillars of Eternity. (I used Fireball a lot more in Siege of Dragonspear)

For the DLC, Beamdog abandoned the free exploration in favour of a more linear progression of events with concentrated content and quality in the handful of locations shown off at one time. This allowed for the narrative to be much tighter, for cool game setpeice moments to drive the world along in a meaningful sweep and for the pace of the narrative to be keenly felt. Especially with how your home camp physically moves each chapter, mimicking the campaign across the land leading towards Dragonspear. I feel like there might have also been more opportunity for action and consequence to be in the story, albeit this was still limited in comparison to modern RPGs through plain merit of the base game engine's age. I think the main reason that I took to this DLC so much, however, comes in the raw setup. Because just like my favourite CRPG, Tyranny, you enter this world as a known quantity and have a place within it, thus giving weight to the character you choose to play in this position. Of course, in Baldur's Gate you're just the Hero of the city, a role given for beating the base game no matter how much of a monstrous heathen you were whilst doing it; rather than the brilliant customisability of Tyranny's protagonist. But anything that gives me even that slightest hint of Tyranny is getting extra points in my book.

Although if I'm being critical, much of the adventure which characterised the actual Siege of Dragonspear is inconsequential in the grand scheme of things, and only really the final chapter does the work of linking Baldur's Gate 1 to 2. However as with any great D&D campaign, there's nothing wrong with going on a complete tangent for some sessions with a cool new villian, Caeler Argent, in order to do something super cool if non-progressive to the main plot, stop a crusade. Perhaps one might look at the meat of Siege of Dragonspear and call it a side quest, but when it's that fun of a sidequest, is there anything really to complain about? Also, I would be remiss for not commenting on how witty and fun all of the writing became for this DLC alone. I mean, it borders on overly sardonic at times, but for the most part it really breathed life into the character of the Ward that wasn't necessarily missing from Baldur's Gate, (I happen to think the original was written rather well actually) but was perhaps a little muted.

I saved The Black Pits for last, despite it being another expansion for Enhanced Edition that released before SoD, because it's entirely unrelated to the main game and in fact demands a new party of characters entirely. It tells the story of a death arena built by another entertaining companion from the main game, Baeloth the Entertainer, and you as a group of adventures that have been kidnapped to 'play' the games here. That being said, there's not a whole lot of story and the expansion pretty much consists of fifteen straight arena fights with a little bit of spending money to work with in the meantime. I found the whole thing to really be an exercise in how to test builds, and it helped me really familiarise myself with those last nagging tactics I needed to become a true asset to the tactical field. The Black Pits are fine, I don't think anyone would be missing anything by ignoring them in favour of the main game parts.

Overall, I seriously did enjoy my playthrough of Baldur's Gate and just know that going forward it's going to form my bare minimum basis of what CRPGs need to achieve to be worthwhile. At it's best times I truly felt like I was in throes of my very own D&D campaign, high on the endless adventure of the open road and at it's worst I was just frustrated by a poorly set-up encounter or badly explained mechanic, never was I bored. The Sword Coast, though basic, appealed to me as a game world in that 'blank canvas for adventure' sort of way, and the actual details of the narrative were genuinely thrilling during some parts of the climax, even if the execution was lacking. I would give base Baldur's Gate a B+ Grade, for a game that shows it's age a little bit but still holds up very well against the contemporaries of it's field. I give The Black Pits a C Grade, for something that didn't need to exist, and is a little buggy for having existed, but for what it is proves inoffensive. Siege of Dragonspear was actually the highlight of my play experience, mounting an excellent adventure with solid new characters and a compelling tie in for Baldur's Gate 2 tucked away at the end. Making it easy to attribute it an A Grade for it's trouble. Overall, then, I'd have to rank Baldur's Gate a mean of a B Grade, with the stipulation that I seriously enjoyed my time and look forward to moving onto the next game. For my 130 or so hours I gained a new appreciation for CRPGS and old school Bioware whilst getting saddled with a burning desire for this campaign I already know doesn't get resolved. (Might as well enjoy the heck out of the journey, then.)