The Baldur's Gate: The Story so far...

 The life and times of a Bhaalspawn

With the Baldur's Gate series now well and truly behind me, I can hold my head up high and say that I've experienced that mythical age of golden Bioware and their platinum Roleplaying games that people drone on about incessantly; like my very own RPG coming of age story. I've yet to start Icewind Dale or Planescape Torment (All in due time) but given the reverence that Baldur's Gate affords at almost any comparison, I think the real historical merit lies there. Therefore, in order to truly unwind myself from the series and prepare to get back into other series which I've kept on hold for far too long, and maybe even the oddly titled 'Baldur's Gate 3' down the line, I thought I might decompress and go over what I thought of the narrative of these games in this here blog. Because although I was a big fan of most of the gameplay elements (THAC0 is stupid and can die in a pit for all I care) the narrative is what makes this series special to so many people, and it's personally the reason why I'm looking at Larian's coming campaign with the eyes of the sceptical. As such, there are going to spoilers for a twenty year old series heading this way, (no BGIII spoilers, I haven't played that yet) so if that matters to you at all than abandon blog here.

So a nice catch-all way to refer to the Baldur's Gate campaigns as one, from 1,2,Throne of Bhaal (and now, made for the enhanced edition versions, 'Siege of Dragonspear') is the title 'The Bhaalspawn Saga', on account of the way all the game's tell the story of you, the Bhaalspawn. One of my pet peeves with the original Baldur's Gate narrative is the way in which its key aspect, the fact that you are a child of the God of Murder Bhaal, is linked to an event called 'The Time of Troubles' which is only ever barely touched upon during the games themselves. Yes, I know its a time where many gods took the form of humans and walked upon the land, but I don't know why that happened, I don't know how long of a time it was, I don't know when the gods decided to sod off back to heaven, I know basically nothing about an event who's breadth is crucial to this entire storyline; something which could have easily been fixed through something basic, like maybe having the story start with you having a lecture on the Time of Troubles before Imoen interrupts class to drag you out early because Gorion needs to see you. Perhaps that might be a little on the nose, but it would present the information to the audience in a natural way and make sure that just a sliver of it is rattling around their skull for when the time comes to call back upon it. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself; Baldur's Gate begins with you, an orphan, being whisked out from the relatively safety of Candlekeep by your adoptive Father in the wake of looming destiny come to kick your arse into gear. Before you can get more than two feet down the road, however, Gorion is killed by a white guy with a black guy's voice and you get pulled into the mystery of discovering who you are and what your role to play in events to come might be. As far as impetus for storylines go this one is pretty textbook and, unfortunately, devoid of the emotion it's supposed to inspire. Gorion is introduced as your adopted father literally the scene before his brutal murder, and at no point is the player given a reason to understand and believe the ways in which he fills that fatherly role, as such the several points throughout the series in which your asked about your feelings towards his murder feel hollow. That being said, this actually works fine to get the player involved in the mystery of why all of this is happening, and that's an important thing even some modern RPGs can fail at sometimes. (>cough< Pillars of Eternity 1 >cough<)

The main meat of Baldur's Gate 1 is journeying across the Sword Coast tracking the activities of a guild known as the Iron Throne, and here blossoms my issues with the BG1 narrative. The Iron Throne are expected to be your main antagonists right off the bat from leaving Candlekeep, despite there being no specific story hook to tie you to them. Sure, if you go the optional route of finding Gorion's friends and following them, then you might be introduced to the Throne naturally, but BG1 like Fallout, treats it's players to a little more freedom than their narrative is built to maintain. Which means you could very easily get a few chapters into your 'investigation' into the Iron Throne without even realising you're investigating them. But that's a small hold-up in the grand scheme of things, because it doesn't take long to figure out they may be the bad guys when the Iron Throne are artificially painting Baldur's Gate's neighbours at Amn as ruffians prepping for war.

Only around about the midpoint of the story does the Saga drop the other shoe, yet strangely through another optional event, as you can actually miss reading the journal which reveals your protagonist is the child of Bhaal, god of murder. (I had to reload because of how badly I missed it.) It it revealed upon a revisit to Candlekeep that not only are you a child, but that Bhaal sired a score of progeny before he got killed off at the tail end of the Time of Troubles, presumably in some scheme to continue his legacy beyond his unavoidable death. One such child just happens to be the murderer of Gorion, one Sarevok Anchev, the guy murdering his way into a leadership position over at the Iron Throne. The finale of Baldur's Gate has the player battling to stop Sarevok as he schemes to brag his way into repute across Baldur's Gate, start a war with Amn, and revel in the discord and loss of life just enough to fuel his ascension to godhood. Something he has absolutely no evidence will work, but at least he's being proactive or something, right?

It's here where I have to congratulate Beamdog, the developers who remastered these games recently, in their efforts at creating a connective chapter between BG 1 and 2. Siege of Dragonspear manages to introduce a brand new storyline and threat that has a slight connection to preestablished Bhaalspawn narrative whilst providing a complete open and shut tale all on it's own. Caelar Argent's crusade at Dragonspear drags you into it under rumours that Caelar is another spawn of Bhaal (which pans out as being untrue) but really hooks to the next BG game by introducing Jon Irenicus early as a mysterious hounding figure that seems overly interested in your bloodline and the potential of you nursing your powers. I really enjoyed the position of worth that Siege of Dragonspear thrust you in as being the far-recognised hero of Baldur's Gate, similar to what Tyranny does with it's protagonist, although I did acknowledge how that in turn makes it arguably the most 'Role Play' limited campaign in the saga. (You are literally unable to kill innocents, much as that sucks to have to say.)

Putting aside the contained narrative of Siege of Dragonspear, decent though it is, I really have to commend Beamdog again for perfectly matching the enigmatic dominance in portraying Jon Irenicus; really stoking the flames for his intrigue-driven pursuit which Bioware laid out in the Shadows of Amn, the first campaign of Baldur's Gate 2. By the time I started BG2, I was already invested in what this guy was about, given the fact that he frames you for a highprofile murder and in doing so has you run out Baldur's Gate. (Handily explaining why you never return there for the rest of the saga) As such, it feels a little less jarring when you start of BG2 having just been kidnapped by Jon and experimented on, as it might do having just gone straight from 1 to 2. (Else I might be wondering why on earth I was sleeping outside in the wilderness to start with.) My only lingering ache was from the fact that Skie's story was never wrapped up, with her being left as your murder victim and never really getting the closure you felt was promised. I wonder if Beamdog meant to expand on this with another BG-based expansion down the line, but I neglect to see where such an expansion might fit into the games. (Unless the gap between Shadows of Amn and Throne of Bhaal is longer than we realise.)

Shadows of Amn is all about mystery, learning who this Jon Irenicus is and why you and Imoen are so important to him. An inquiry that eventually leads you to discover that Imoen, the girl you grew up alongside in Candlekeep, is yet another child of Bhaal, feeding further into the mystery. These first few chapters were handled perfectly to me, with the creepy way in which Jon is trying to clone some woman that he is rumoured to have loved, whilst recovered journal fragments reveal how he now struggles to feel anything for her. If only Bioware had thought of a more interesting conclusion to the whole thing, because the second you learn what Jon was all about in the end he becomes a cartoonishly boring stereotypical evil guy. Oh, he wants to siphon the 'world tree' so that he can 'become a god', that's why he was interested in your Bhaalspawn taint... 'cause you're kinda like a godling... So he wants to... to steal that taint so he can use it to become a god through... >snore<

I don't know. The entire final chapter of Shadows of Amn was just a disappointment to me. From the way that an entire huge Elven city was just sprung on you as being just a few miles from Amn despite no one ever even mentioning it before, to the fact that these Elves and their story is essential to Jon's life, as it's revealed he used to be one of their elves before being cast out. I think my ire stems from the promise in the early chapters that this would be a personal tale, what with his obsession with the Bhaalspawn taint, only for the late game to blossom into a standoff where only plot elements introduced in the final two chapters mean anything at all. I think the plot's set-up was poor, that's about the high and low of it. But it did lay the stage for The Throne of Bhaal nicely, so I can be content in retrospect.

The finale of the Bhaalspawn saga, Throne of Bhaal, starts with chaos gripping the Sword Coast as the various children of Bhaal start tearing up the land and causing destruction just as they had been prophesied to do all this time. Leading this carnage is a cabal of five Bhaalspawn who seem to be actively hunting their siblings and are decently concerned about the rise of you, a Bhaalspawn who's been making quite the name for themselves. This actually makes for a great crescendo for the entire Saga, as the action is taken away from the machinations of the giant principality of Amn or the bustling city of Baldur's Gate and instead reduced to this edge of the world bustling with God-like Bhaalspawn duelling for supremacy. It sets things up so that the events here feel like the most important thing happening in that world right now, which is what you want for a finale. 

It isn't long before you are suddenly introduced to the entirety of your extended Bhaalspawn family, as the town of Saradush has been turned into a makeshift sanctuary for them by the mysteriously magnanimous mage Melissan. Or at least, it was a sanctuary, until the Five started assaulting the town in order to get to their siblings and kill them for their own supremacies sake. The protagonist is then thrown in the middle of this chaos, stuck in this war of Bhaalspawn, as they attempt to break the Five and save themselves from their wrath at the same time. (All the while becoming aware that the time of prophecy is upon them) I loved the paranoia of this part of the story, as everyone important you met could easily be another Bhaalspawn, and therefore could be someone else plotting your destruction. Amusingly, this also meant you had the opportunity to meet all those lesser Bhaalspawn from all over the place who didn't rise to become demi-gods and are just trying to live their cursed lives in relative peace.

Of course, things don't pan out well for the Bhaalspawn, and whilst you're working against the Five, Saradush falls and the passive Spawn are all slaughtered, much to the horror of Melissan. Thus you are sent on a journey to hunt down each member of the Five before they can achieve whatever horrible end it is they're planning and trying to ignore the way they all gloat about how "Oh yeah. It's all coming together" in their dying breathes. (Oh, and Sarevok comes back into the story as a resurrected teammate. So yeah.) I rather enjoyed how distinct the five were from each other and how each one of these boss fights were different enough to make you sweat and change things up from battle to battle. Although I do recognise that this is also the draw of many critics who claim Throne of Bhaal is too Boss fight oriented. (Personally, I love boss fights. So I guess it's a preference thing.)

Once the Five are defeated, it is revealed that you were betrayed and that lovely mage lady who only wanted to help all Bhaalspawn, Melissan, is actually the leader of the Five who intentionally corralled all the other Bhaalspawn to Saradush in order to be slaughtered. (Something which she literally is accused of doing in the first act by the paranoid general of Saradush. Nice foreshadowing, Bioware.) Seems the Five were sacrificing Bhaalspawn essence in order to resurrect your dead Father and bring about his return, as led by Amelyssan, (Melissan's real name) who was once Bhaal's topmost priestess. But I guess working for an evil god breeds treachery (who could of seen that coming?) because Amelyssan has turned her back on old man Bhaal and is instead funnelling all Bhaalspawn essence into herself so that she may become a god. Which sort of means she needs to off you for your essence. (Well nuts.)

What follows was, for me, the hardest battle in the franchise wherein the woman manages to summon six shields on her at once, (Which is literally impossible by DnD rules. Someone tell the DM she's cheating) and throws endless waves of high powered demons on you to screw you up. All this is just the icing of course, because Bioware expects you to kill her four times in a row without resting. (The amount of hair I tore out in that fight isn't even funny.) Once you've done the impossible and killed a fledgling god, it's up to the last surviving Bhaalspawn, you, to finally decide their own fate. (Imoen, if she's still alive at this point, willingly surrenders her Bhaalspawn taint. Something it was never made clear that anyone could do until this express moment.) You can either ascend to the Throne of Bhaal and achieve godhood, maintaining the balance he sought over (and abused) for time immemorial, or surrender your taint to the gods so that they can destroy it. (or hide it. For some reason the ending seems to imply that they do both.) Either way, thus marks the end of the Bhaalspawn saga.

Truly an epic tale and one that absolutely needs no additions to it save from maybe another Beamdog DLC to wrap up the loose narrative thread they themselves sent dangling. (Way to write in your own job security. That's forward thinking!) So one might wonder why on earth Larian is currently making Baldur's Gate III, I don't know but I'm morbidly curious to find out. The team have implied that there's a real good reason they're sitting on until the full release of the game, and whilst I struggle to believe them Larian hasn't actually given me any genuine reasons to be mistrustful and so I ultimately surrender to their better judgement. Whatever the case, the Bhaalspawn saga, as it exists, is all up there and I'd go so far as to call it one of the most decent Bioware RPG narratives the company has told. Larian certainly have their work cut out for them if they want to attempt to even match their predecessors, let alone succeed them, but even if they fall off one can just remember how the originals are always here and just as kick-ass as they were back in release. (Except for the THAC0 system. Screw THAC0) 

Baldur's Gate II: Review

Chaos will be sown in their passage. So sayeth the wise Alaundo

Knud stands on the precipice of eternity, burgeoning with the destiny of forever barely concealed beneath a pudgy Gnomish body, hard-won through countless impossible trials and dire duels. Behind stands a cadre of veterans, friends, each with the power of demi-gods in their own right, without whom Knud might not have made it this far, although he did still have a couple special tricks all-of-his-own up his sleeve. With a breathless chuckle he thinks back, and remembers a time fresh out of Candlekeep where his greatest threat were a pack of wolves hounding at his feet, or a surprise ambush from a murder of Red Wizards. That seems so far away now, like the squabbles of ants beside the behemoths who duel for supremacy now. A grim resolve grips him, he can dawdle no longer. Destiny, and something wholly more terrible, awaits him just beyond the pale and Knud know he will have to call upon the darkest of his arts if he is to have any hope of breaking the bounds of his ken and ascending further than his kind have any right to. Taking one last moment to hold onto the sweet of innocence, he charges forward, ready and doom-bound to rise, thrive, and save-scum his way to his rightful place inside the history books.

That, in a nutshell, was my feeling entering the final moments of the Fourth campaign in the Bhaalspawn sage, Throne of Bhaal; (Knud being my Neutral Evil Cleric, for clarities sake) and I must say, I don't know if another Bioware game, or RPG in general, has ever made me feel quite that way before. And I say with the experience of quite a few under my belt, mind you; from all walks of life. I've played almost every single major Bioware, Bethesda, Square Enix and just about everyone else's fantasy RPG that I can get my hands on. I'm an addict for the genre, greedily scooping them up like a junkie. I live for these experiences. And some of my favourite moments are sitting at the end, reflecting on my journey, and feeling that massive chasm between who I was then and who I am now. (Bonus points if the distinction is apparent on who my character is, beyond their abilities) And Baldur's Gate 2 put those other comparisons to shame, and made me feel a mountain unlike any other before; for that alone I know that Baldur's Gate is going to enter my list of favourite RPGs of all-time. (Where has this series been all my life?)

For all intents and purposes, Baldur's Gate II is a direct continuation of Baldur's Gate in such a way that there's no real significant difference in the way that they play. They're both infinity-style CRPGs and and as such both feature real-time combat with your spellslots that need to be queued up and replenished on 8 hour rests, which does mean that a lot of dungeons play out with the character clearing a difficult encounter and then falling to sleep for 8 hours. It's unnatural perhaps within the fiction of the universe, but Bioware wanted a game as close to DnD rules as possible and so that's how the whole thing works. Combat encounters still feel a little messy and as though some just chuck hordes of enemies at the player without really considering how this will challenge them, and once again I found myself particularly incensed by the system which randomly interrupts rest periods with spawned ambush enemies. It was always just a tedious stopgap between getting my characters back into fighting from and I hated the game always putting me in that position.

And yet Baldur's Gate II does something which I've never seen any other RPG like it do, and that's move the player from a position of being the large fish in a small pond to being the exact same size fish in a bigger pond. What I mean be this, is that Baldur's Gate allows players to import their character at their exact level from the last game to the next one, with the threat level of the game itself continuing on from that point, so that endgame threats from the first game are start-game threats for this one. It's an incredibly clever system which I can only think would have been nigh-on impossible to achieve without the guidance of the DnD system to lean on. By the end of Baldur's Gate the typical player will be around level 8 (or 10-12 with the Siege of Dragonspear), and from there Baldur's Gate II picks up like some sort of huge expansion tacked onto the end of the game, which helps make the entire journey feel like this one huge ultra campaign during which you achieve a whole story from beginning to bitter end.  

As for the first campaign of Baldur's Gate II, Shadows of Amn, I actually found it to be quite an interesting evolution from the way the first game handled itself. For one, the exploration system was changed so that instead of wondering map-to-map, maybe finding something of note inside one of them, you travel specifically to points of interest that are guaranteed to have some sort of quest or purpose for being there. It certainly fits the pace of the story, in that now you're an adventurer who doesn't have time for idle wanderings, but I feel part of the innocence of aimless exploration was lost in the transition. I no longer felt as though I could pander around the countryside without a care in the world finding my inner adventurer. (which I suppose was the point)

The artistry of Baldur's Gate II certainly kicked things up a notch with the move to Amn, with the almost middle-eastern aesthetic paving the way for a visually distinct city that shone leagues more interesting than Baldur's Gate (the city) ever did. I particularly loved the unique shape of Wuakeen's Promenade, and the various Cleric temples, as well as Hexxat's quests to various tombs all over the world that even introduced a little Chinese design influence here and there. Baldur's Gate II does a distinctly superior job of building it's world in terms of lore as well, with the purpose of Amn, the Underdark and various other ports of call being made very abundantly clear to the player so that they can reflect on the significance of the places they're questing through. I just thought it ironic that in a series called 'Baldur's Gate', the city of Baldur's Gate is the least interesting setting.

Narratively I quite enjoyed Shadows of Amn in that it followed a formula which Pillars of Eternity later would, having the player hunting a mysterious figure of interest to them that is powerful through his enigmatic anonymity. Actually, I found Jon Irenicus to be a better executed villain than Thaos, with Jon's presence in the narrative particularly burning a hole of curiosity into everything I did to the point where I desperately wanted to dig out who he was and why I was involved. However, in almost direct contrast to Thaos, once I found all of it out, Jon immediately becomes degrees less interesting as his motivations were pedestrian at best. In fact, all of Baldur's Gate's main antagonists seem to have shades upon the exact same motivation, and that feels like a shame when these stories felt on the cusp of so much more. Be that as it may, I enjoyed the story just fine.

'Throne of Bhaal', the second campaign, kicked things into high gear in a manner I wasn't expecting, dispensing with a lot of mystique of Shadows of Amn and throwing the player into the middle of chaotic struggle for supremacy where demi-god-like enemies are roaming around. Some were disgruntled with Throne of Bhaal and the way it sort of feels like a boss rush, but when you look at the entire series as one unit and Throne of Bhaal as the grand finale, I think it fits perfectly for Throne of Bhaal to throw it's worst at you and often. Many of the fights in Throne of Bhaal require you to totally rethink strategies that have worked just fine up until now, and for the first time in the series I felt the absolute need to perform kiting manoeuvres! (Especially in that Demogorgon duel) High level encounters that force you to expend every ounce of your tricks and tips are the name of the game for this half of BG2, and the consequence for myself at least was that I came away from a lot of these fights feeling that same contended relief as after a Dark Souls duel. Yes, Bioware managed to tap into that primal release of victory and it tickles just as many, and the right, endorphins.

In terms of story Throne of Bhaal is certainly weaker, pretty much putting it's cards on the table right off the bat, but I think that pure presentation makes up for that alone. The breakneck pace of events makes great room for set-piece moments and showdowns that make it feel like the weight of the world is forever resting on your shoulders. Some of these make for great gameplay moments too, like the assault on Sendai which will have fighting a literal army of constantly spawning small enemies just to reach her, or the Abazigal Boss fight, which throws you against a fully-powered Blue Dragon. Any one of these could make for stand-out conclusions to their own campaigns, and the fact that you're doing these one after the other I think accounts for a lot of player's fatigue with this campaign, yet also fuels my excitement for it. Getting creative with the boss fights themselves is just the icing on the cake.

Coming through the Baldur's Gate series I was unsure whether the whole thing would hold up for me, in that I was worried that I may not find these 'classics' to be as great as many others do; but due to unique charm and situations that no other RPG has managed to replicated in the twenty years since, Baldur's Gate easily manages to hold the throne of one of the best RPGs ever made and with the whole series now enhanced you simply owe it yourself to play through it if you've any serious interest in the genre. Does it come with frustrations? Of course. And some of the antiquated systems can ride one's nerves (such as the lack of fast mode or the occasional long monologue before a tough fight that is then unskippable) but the overall experience is totally unforgettable. Baldur's Gate II was really the glue here, taking my decent experience with Baldur's Gate 1 and making it worthwhile with a great followup and a worthy conclusion. I even think BG (as a whole) might enter my top 10 favourite games of all time, I enjoyed myself that much. All that being said, I think it's fair enough to say that when judging this game as an RPG I have to grant BG 2 with an A Grade on it's own, and an A+ Grade with Baldur's Gate 1 attached. Of course, that is providing you understand that this game is tough, to the point where those who aren't willing to learn the systems might struggle and not have as good of a time as they could. But if you give yourself that rope, enjoy being challenged and are open to an epic journey, then look no further than the Baldur's Gate Trilogy. Truly, this series deserves it's place as a standard to which other other RPGs are held and a must play across the Role playing game fandom. (If only the games themselves weren't so darn long.)