Baldur's Gate

"PC Role-Playing At Its Best"

Immerse Yourself in an Adventure of Epic Proportions

Notes and Intro

Although Baldur's Gate is incredibly outdated at the date of which this review was originally written, the game still provides a great number of hours of “true” role-playing game entertainment. Role-playing games come in a variety of different shapes and sizes for your amusement—Baldur's Gate is an RPG that allows a whole lot of freedom without sacrificing any story, plot, or game-play. Baldur's Gate is almost completely non-linear, a quality which allows the player to do almost everything that he or she wants to in the game's world. Although there are specific things that the player must do to complete the game, the player has some sort of choice in almost every other decision that is not directly related to the story. From my experience, playing extremely story-driven RPG's (right before I played Baldur's Gate, I had completed Chrono Trigger) didn't hinder my enjoyment of Baldur's Gate at all. In actuality, the freedom that was allowed in Baldur's Gate was a nice break from the linear style of console, specifically Square-Enix style, RPG's. Overall, Baldur's Gate may initially require a little (or a lot, depending on what kind of gamer that you are) patience to enjoy, but those who are skeptical will most likely have a change of heart the moment they discover the game of Baldur's Gate at its core, because it's really one of those classic games that everyone should try at least once.

The Game

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Baldur's Gate and/or any other infinity-engine games (such as Icewind Dale), learning the basics of the game may take a while to figure out, but eventually you'll discover how the game works. To be honest, Baldur's Gate was the first non-console RPG that I ever played, and I was pretty hesitant and reluctant to touch any game that wasn't really popular or mainstream. Maybe throughout the process of this review, I can convince you otherwise. Learning how to play Baldur's Gate in its entirety took at the most about a day or so, and it involved a lot of thorough reading through the surprisingly informative manual—something that other modern games should learn from. Keep in mind that learning the basics of Baldur's Gate will enable you to handle any games that are similar to Baldur's Gate with relative ease, and trust me, you'll be glad you have that information (especially with Baldur's Gate 2 and Icewind Dale I and II out already; don't forget expansions either). After you get a handle on how the game works, you'll realize that everything, from the item management and equipment to the spell-casting and learning, was really designed for your convenience. You'll really enjoy how everything in the game is designed (from choosing spells to the dialogue system); the system is practically without flaw.

To begin, you create a party of one character, choosing a race, gender, class, and then you customize his or her statistics to your liking. You can also configure your controls before you start playing, but you probably won't want to unless you really think that you know what you're doing. The journey begins once your character is created. You begin in your hometown of Candlekeep, where mysterious assailants try to dispose of you. You handle the goons with relative ease. Confused, you seek counsel from your wise father, and the story unfolds; soon, you are left to fend for yourself in the wild and will find other people on the road that just might join you, while a vast epic tale unfolds as you begin your unknowing journey. Experience from your quest is divided amongst your party members; for example, if you kill something or someone that is worth five thousand experience points, and you have five party members (up to a max of six), then each of you will get a thousand experience points each. Even on the normal default difficulty, experience is veryvaluable. Leveling up takes much longer in Baldur's Gate than in console RPG's such as Final Fantasy, as fighting random enemies doesn't dish out as much experience as you might expect; completing certain quests or killing specific creatures will provide an exponentially greater amount of experience, so doing those “side-quests” is highly recommended and probably necessary to get through the many harder parts of the game.

Indeed, the battle system is complex, but getting the hang of it is half the fun. Trust me. Battles are all done in real-time, meaning that you will get slaughtered by your opponents if you don't utilize the “pause” button. Basically, hitting the pause key will change real-time combat into a freeze mode where you select your actions; when the game is paused, you can tell your characters what to do. The computer is constantly generating commands for your enemies, so they don't need time to select their actions. Only you do. You can still command your characters when the battle is going on in real time, but it would obviously be more difficult to give them commands when they're moving around, attacking, or casting a spell etc. You can program the game to auto-pause at desired points, like when you get attacked, someone dies, or your weapon breaks; or, if you like doing things yourself, like me, you can manually pause at the touch of a button. Now how does the weapon and armor system work? I'll give a brief summary. Equipping weapons and armor is done via the inventory screen, which allows you to drag any of your items into the designated slot; e.g. gloves into the hands slot, shield into the left hand slot etc. Similarly, if your party consists of a mage, your spell-caster must memorize the spell, first by writing the spell into his or her spell-book, and then completes the process by sleeping to memorize it. After that, the spell will be useable. If at this point you still don't know what THAC0 means, you probably need to refer to the humongous instruction booklet/manual—there's an enormous section on how hit modifiers, damage modifiers, damage resistance, magic resistance, etc. all work. It might all look a little intimidating at first, but when you finally understand it, you'll shout out with ecstatic enthusiasm and realize that the system was easy and simple all along. Numbers, combinations, and probability play many factors in this game, but if you're like me and prefer to keep things simple, you'll just recognize that a bigger number generally means better and a smaller number means worse, with some few exceptions. Nevertheless, the battle system was really designed for convenience—you don't really have to think more than you have to—as well as feasibility; probably nothing else could have worked better for the game.

There are no separate battle screens; combat takes place in your traveling environment, and enemies can become hostile at the drop of a hat. Combat is simple; the characters swing their swords, fists, daggers, and shoot their arrows, and throw their darts, and cast their magic missiles at each other, whatever; and at the end of the onslaught, to the victor goes the spoils of the dead enemies' carcasses. Dialogue has a different system; you go into a dialogue window and have a typical conversation with the other person by choosing from the given options; your success in conversations depends on your intelligence; you will have more or less things to say. It will also depend on your charisma, which you can use to manipulate characters (“Your” refers to your party leader; the character that you created doesn't necessarily have to be the leader, as anyone you pick up on your journey can assume that title). Exploring every single one of the individual areas of the game will truly take gigantic quantities of time. Each area alone could take a couple of hours to explore in its entirety, and the quests for each area could take even longer to complete, considering how certain quests are only activated by performing other tasks later in the game. As I mentioned earlier, it's up to the player to decide which quests he or she wants to do and how he or she wishes to complete them. The possibilities are, to be frank, near endless.

Graphics

Graphics, to be completely honest, aren't really that much of a concern in Baldur's Gate, considering that the game engine really isn't heavily reliant upon them. You won't ever get a good look of the characters in the game anyway, besides their portraits, but you'll always notice that the environments are really detailed and expansive. All of the magic spells and the combat scenes are done really nicely with little to no slowdown—and the game can be run on a fairly outdated machine, which makes this a plus for anybody who never upgraded their old hardware. The exceptional lighting in the game makes the environments look just as they should; the caverns look very dark and dismal, the forests are lush, green, and tranquil and with beautiful details, and the cities and towns have that humble, medieval, antique, and rustic charm to them (that's really the best way that I can put it). There are also short Full Motion Videos that occasionally pop up throughout important events in the game, such as chapter start and ends, and they are done beautifully. There really isn't anything super-special and fantastically eye-popping about the graphics, but they work for the game, and that's really all that matters.

Sound & Music

The sound and the music are, in my opinion, the weakest components about the game. The sound effects are fairly decent, but nothing ever really stands out. The music is also decent, but there aren't nearly enough musical tracks to cover all of the areas in the game. It was a hard task though, so I can't blame them. Music, generally speaking, tends to add to the atmosphere of the game. Because of the lack of music, the environments of some areas might not feel as “impressive” and “epic” as they really are. The characters' voices are done nicely, but once again, there isn't enough variety in the sound effects or voice acting to cover a game of this magnitude. Basically all that's wrong here is that there should have been some more emphasis put into the sound & musical aspects and the game could have really been close to perfect. However, the lack of music and sound is no reason not to play this game; whatever is already there isn't that bad—it's just that the game could've been a whole lot better with more. Baldur's Gate really surprised me regardless, as my skepticism before I started the game turned into sheer satisfaction. It exceeded almost all of my expectations.

Conclusion

Patience is the key here. Baldur's Gate is a really good game that has the potential to last for many weeks or even months if you really can get into it. Some people may not be able to dedicate themselves to keep playing because it's such a time-demanding game, and it's really a shame. Baldur's Gate, in my opinion, is a big step up for D&D RPG's, and everyone should try it, no matter what genre of games that they prefer. The game only gets better with the more time that you spend playing it, and I can say that with confidence as I have completed the game twice. Perhaps my only complaint is that the music and sound could have been improved slightly, but those are minor details that don't really affect the game in any significant manner. Baldur's Gate is still an enormously entertaining and remarkable role-playing game. I highly recommend a purchase of this game.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 12/30/03, Updated 05/29/04