I think a lot of people have that game from childhood. The one that we immersed ourselves in without really understanding it, stumbling around in the dark but still so enthralled that we weren’t ready to give up. We threw ourselves at the same things over and over again, weathering down the barrier between us and story, experience, and understanding, until only a sharp bond remained - one strong enough that after all this time, it still cleaves through years and cuts to the marrow of childhood fascination. That game for me is Baldur’s Gate.


Sitting in a sea of game materials - a pc game box designed like an ancient tome, a map of the sword coast, a manual that might as well have been written in a different language - I remember installing the game for the first time, and even that seemed like an epic adventure. It’s silly, but an installation that spanned over five discs and several hours was an event. I could not take my eyes away from the drawings on the screen while I sat and stared at the loading bar slowly journeying its way across the bottom of the screen.

I had always wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons, but there was no one to play with. My step-dad had told me stories of his campaigns, epic and funny stories of exploration and fighting grand battles. I remember one in particular was about a wizard who stopped an entire army in their tracks by stopping a catapult through simply holding up his hand and casting a spell. The boulder smashed against the wall of force that he had conjured, but to the opposing army, it just looked like this wizened old man smashed a boulder with the heel of his hand, so they fled. I wanted so badly to partake in stories like this, and Baldur’s Gate was my first chance.

With this wizard in my mind, I rolled up a Mage without understanding how the stats worked, and ventured forth from Candlekeep only to be killed almost instantly. I honestly can’t remember what I died to anymore, but I know that rather than being upset, I just kept making characters. I didn’t really understand the rules. I read the manual, but couldn’t quite figure out everything it was telling me, so I just put it aside and kept playing.

The Sword Coast had swallowed me up and I could not escape. Around every corner was a new adventure - an artist who just wanted to finish his final masterpiece, a troupe of silly monsters that offered me an autograph, a chance encounter with one of the heroes from a book series I loved, a cranky wizard in his tower, and more. I didn’t even care or know what was going on with the main story. I just kept playing because I wanted to experience more of the world and the characters within.

I had been offered freedom in a video game that I had not known at the time, and I think that freedom and richness still holds up today. It’s why I’ve kept playing these games now for over 25 years. Eventually, I did figure out the mechanics. I did learn the story beats. I did save the Sword Coast. There was no definitive moment, but rather just a gradual deepening of understanding over time, which I think is primarily what makes this series so special to me. My progress mirrored the protagonist. At level 1 leaving Candlekeep, they have no idea of what is going on. They are fragile and disoriented, but piece by piece they begin to understand and grow in strength, and by the end of it (and the saga at large) they are ready to take on any challenge thrown at them.

Baldur’s Gate was truly an amazing adventure for me, and remains that way after all this time. I think this is its biggest strength and triumph as a saga. It manages to weave together small vignettes of stories that are rich and interesting through a large overarching plot, allowing every moment to feel grounded and important while still servicing a grand narrative that leads from childishly fleeing in the night out of terror to challenging nations, powerful sorcerers, terrible dragons, and even gods themselves. Humanity and character expression remain the forefront of the writing in Baldur’s Gate regardless of the stakes, which makes these games timeless, and continues to make me fall in love all over again each time I play. I hear those first words, “Nestled atop the cliffs that rise from the Sword Coast, the citadel of Candlekeep," and I'm 10 years old again, ready to begin my adventure.

Despite my fondness for world-focused crpgs of its lineage and the pleasure I take in kitschy 80s fantasy settings, I had never completed Baldur’s Gate before. I’d given it a few earnest tries, a couple of them hours long, but it wasn’t until now that I was properly tuned to be comfortable with older PC gaming interfaces after a lifetime of console comforts, or probably interested in the slow rhythms of this particular chunk of faerun countryside.

I think a lot of people get to the character creator and see that there’s no active auto-level tool for your party members once you recruit them and get intimidated by poorly explained, unintuitive mechanics and the sheer depth of choice on display across your up to six guys, probably not helped by how actively you’ll be juggling them during combat if you want to keep your mages and ranged people alive especially early on. I know this had happened to me. The fact of the matter, though, is that all of the dice rolling and calculations and rules lawyering being handled behind the scenes by the computer smooths that stuff over considerably, at least on the normal difficulty setting. Perhaps my familiarity with tabletop games and rpgs gives me something of a skewed perspective but I feel like as long as you pick a lane and slap your points into it consistently, it’s hard to go wrong permanently here, and it almost never puts you in situations you can’t back out of to prep or re-prep for.

And the reality is that combat in AD&D at low level, where this game spends most of its time, is a pretty simple affair. There’s an interesting curve to it all here you start out SO unbelievably weak that there is an interesting tactical challenge to just getting through fights with like, Two Healthy Wolves or That Include A Mage At All, because you have SIX HIT POINTS and Imoen has FOUR and you’re both specced to be thief adjacent and this is NOT an ideal setup we gotta get some friends FAST dude. Then towards the endgame they’re confident enough that you know what you’re doing and have a wide enough toolset and the beef on your guys to work through stuff that encounters can be constructed in more interesting ways through combinations of monsters and enemies and mages with varying skills and abilities, and those encounters swing the combat back to really cool shit. The Problem then, is the very long middle stretch of the game, levels like 3 – 6 (in a game where you start at 1 and the cap is either 8 or 9, I ended at 7 and saw conflicting sources) where you are mostly just fighting groups of really boring identical enemies; a room full of kobolds leads to a room with MORE kobolds in it leads to a room with a few kobolds and a mage. Then it’s onto the spider area. Then it’s onto the bandits and hobgoblins area. There’s not much spice to 90% of the game’s encounters, at least on the normal difficulty, especially because you can rest to refill health and magic almost anywhere and at any time, and the only tax on that is random interruption by small groups of enemies before you can try again. There are a small handful of timed quests in the game but outside of those very brief windows there’s no reason to ever be caught with your pants down. The only thing you’re ever sacrificing is time. So after a while I just flipped it to easy difficulty because making these fights go a little fast just seemed more appealing for the level of engagement I was at. Based on my final playtime vs other peoples’ and the shock of my friend when I told them how long it took me to finish, I would estimate this move shaved literally like fifteen hours off the game. And I don’t regret it! I flipped it back every now and again for big fights and felt satisfied. I’m sure there’s more depth to the hardest difficulties but that’s just not who I am.

Busting the game down to Easy doesn’t feel like much of a compromise because as much as the culture around this game and its sequel is based around crunching numbers and debating party composition and class balance and shit like that, I always also got the impression that the real tactics-fiend dungeon crawler’s games were in this one’s sister series Icewind Dale, which as I understand it are way less focused on narrative and way more focused on cutting guys. The interesting thing about Baldur’s Gate, then, is that I wouldn’t say it’s a particularly story heavy experience either? What this feels like is a robust mechanical simulation of what it’s like to play second edition D&D, and it’s hugely successful at that, but while it’s really good at setting the table for adventure and providing little vignettes for your party to wander through, there’s not much substance to these characters themselves, or much depth to the choices you’re allowed to make throughout these scenarios. Which would be completely fine if you transplanted everything in this game onto a table with a real DM who could react more naturalistically to stuff you say and do than the restrictive options you’re given here, and a party of real friends who could fill out these characters with responses to events as they happen, rather than “hey here’s a paragraph of what I’m about when you recruit me and I will never speak again outside of my combat barks.” So despite the wonderfully goofy writing of the rest of the game, the characters at the heart and souls of it – your player character and their companions – feel really hollow compared to everyone they interact with.

Despite my complaints this is both forgivable and completely fine. Forgivable because this is not only Bioware’s first game but rather famously the first game anyone at the company had ever worked on, and with that in mind the scope on display and success of implementation within that scope is outrageously impressive. And it’s fine because the game is so much more about vibing than it is about the actual plot or characters, even if I think the plot itself is rather good, but we’ll get around to that. If 90% of the combat in this game is boring low stakes encounters where you mostly just mob guys until they’re dead as long as they don’t have a caster, then 90% of the Story Content in the game is just walking around the muddy countryside talking to anyone you run into, and sometimes they ask you to do something and sometimes they just have one dialogue box of information or colorful dialogue or sometimes they have nothing really at all. Maybe you find a weird circus to fuck around in full of sinister games. Maybe you’ll get pickpocketed. Maybe you’ll meet somebody famous on the road and give them a hand with a group of bandits. Maybe you’ll lie your way past an assassin sent to kill you. Many, many times, you will swiftly and immediately be hit with a game over death you could not possibly have seen coming and it will be funny every single time. It’s hard to really talk about this meat of the game even though it’s the stuff I look back on the most fondly because it’s all so ephemeral. Brief encounters that come and go with the wind as you trek through relatively anonymous fields and woods and hills. Individually all of this stuff is extremely shallow, but it overwhelms by sheer volume, and it is sublimated into the game’s overall relaxed, rural atmosphere.

This pleasantly languid pace works in favor of the main quest as well, where after some rumblings of great prophecy you’re cast into the world to futz around doing essentially whatever you want at largely your own pace as your party slowly uncovers the world’s most patient and economically specific evil murder god conspiracy. While the ultimate roots of the game do trace back to a shadowy evil cult manipulating city-states behind the scenes to start a bloody war whose corpses will power their arcane ritual and bring glorious hopeful purpose to their child of prophecy, Baldur’s Gate is a game where you go from level 1 to level 8 so that stuff really barely comes up at all in this game and instead, perhaps uniquely among all video games of this ilk, you REALLY get into the nitty gritty of investigating the cult’s front operations. The way they’re taking over all of the mines in the countrysides surrounding the city of Baldur’s Gate, their conspiracy to monopolize and short all of the iron production in the region, how that links to the political machinations of multiple trade organizations and WHY this child of evil prophecy would want to do all this shit when if he was just after power there are other, easier ways to get it. He is already powerful, surely there’s more to it, and there is! But for most of the game this simply doesn’t concern you. What DOES concern you is tracking down guys who are like eight rungs down the ladder from the top, managing hired bandit gangs that harass people and tracking down the dudes who might know the dudes who might know where the guy who operates the mines are. THIS is the good shit.

Which is not to say that the game can’t do full on RPG ass intrigue shit either, even if the scale is smaller than gamers might be accustomed to. It hits pretty hard when, after 75% of the game is over, you actually do have to go to Baldur’s Gate itself for the first time and it’s massive, a city nine screens big when no town has ever been more than one until now, full of multiple skyscraping businesses and mansions, merchants and taverns. It’s overwhelming, a little bit even after you realize there isn’t actually that much to do here outside of the main quest stuff. Unlike the rest of the game, npcs here react to events in the plot too, there are times where the status quo changes radically and people have new things to say. Towards the end of the game, going around town and gathering intel from townspeople is essential to finishing the game and it feels more organic than similar interactions in any game that inherits this one’s will. I don’t think it 100% nails the writing on all of the big stuff but it’s entirely unassailable when it comes to characterizing the world, maybe the best to ever do it.

A big part of what makes the Big Story Beats of the game fall a little flat is your place in it, and the way Bioware is still clearly getting their sea legs on how to handle player choice and consequences here. There are often only options to express that you are a Nice Person or a Mean Person and no matter what you do or say most interactions end in a fight. It’s not universal but it’s a large enough majority to feel disappointing compared to the complexity of interaction in some later infinity engine games, or even some moments in early 3D Bioware games, which the dialogue in this has more in common with.

Big spoiler for the big twist in Baldur’s Gate incoming! Okay here it is: They do try to paper over this inevitable violence with the script in that, as is mentioned in the most comically nonchalant reveal I’ve ever seen in a game, your character is the child of Bhaal, the previous god of murder, who for reasons only known to people who cared about the larger lore of d&d in the 90s, lost to time, is dead and whose essence now seeks to ascend in one of his many many mortal children. So there is some implication by the game that you get into all of these fights because on some level, liquid snake voice you enjoy all the killing. Or if not that explicitly, then at least the killing is an intrinsic part of your being in a way that is abnormal, and the amount of murder you find yourself doing is unusual even by the standards of a D&D adventurer. This COULD suck shit and indeed is a Stock Video Game Twist that will be annoyingly deployed in countless games including Baldur’s Gate’s own loose descendent KOTOR 2.

I’ll say though, that I think it works here, really well even, not just because Baldur’s Gate was deploying this twist, if not on the ground floor then at least on floor two or three, but also because the WAY it’s deployed is gracefully fit into the world the game has constructed. Rather than a crude gotcha on the player, it’s used here to characterize their avatar and introduce the philosophical underpinnings that the EXTREMELY FUNNY FREDERICH NIETZCHE QUOTE THAT OPENS THE GAME EVERY TIME YOU BOOT IT UP suggests is the ultimate theme of the series. Because while you do get the choice to play however you want and the game does seem like it will accommodate your play, I do get the vibe that it’s designed with a Good-Aligned Player Character in mind, and if you do play that way than this twist introduces a really great conundrum. It’s your nature to be a murderer. You have spent your entire free life doing a LOT of murders. How do you turn that into a defiance against the idea that your fate is to be someone overtaken by the essence of cruelty, as the villain of the game (your brother) has? It’s something that only gets to be touched on lightly here because the god stuff all comes in right at the end of this one, which ends super abruptly right afterward, but I really really hope BG2 and Throne of Bhaal follow through on this idea because it has the potential to be a lot more than a justification for shallow writing.

Since I finished the game I’ve gone back and reloaded a few saves and poked around in the expansion area, been extremely unimpressed with Drulag’s Tower (sorry everybody I just don’t care about this combat, even though the xpac stuff is mostly endgame tuned and is comprised of a lot of cool fights; the narrative hooks aren’t there). Even though I felt like I got a complete experience with my original playthrough, I was happy to keep poking around the areas I hadn’t seen, the stuff I hadn’t fully explored. This little game with like 30 map screens is stuffed with so much interesting, innocuous shit that I feel like I could keep going back forever, finding all these weird little encounters and never get bored with them, even as I’m bored with a lot of the individual elements of the work. It’s pretty magical; even though I’m really excited to see how the second game can flesh out the writing and deepen the characters and complicate the quest design, I know from experience with all of the games inspired by this one that there’s nothing else out there that emulates The Vibes on display here. A truly remarkable, singular work .

The new generation will proclaim that this game is dated and boring because it doesn't let you 'Romance' a menagerie of different fetishes, the new generation will proclaim that this game is dated and boring because it's a relic of its time with goofy ass real-time DnD combat, but real money hustlers will recognize that the game is about instilling the value of grinding and rising. Sarevok and your PC are in a race to see who can go harder, move smarter, think wiser, stack more, talk less (or better).

Hard to dislike. It wears its heart on its sleeve, and even if it is a dorky sleeve sewn by a grandmother, can you really hate on that?

(This is a review of the original release with the expansion, not the Enhanced Edition)

It's impressive how dedicated a young and inexperienced Bioware was to faithfully recreating the low level D&D experience. This unfortunately includes all the not-so fun parts of it like random oneshots from low level enemies and mages who can't do shit. Unfortunately for Baldur's Gate it lacks all the cool ancillary elements that help you forget about this like eating pizza while joking around with your pals and a cognizant DM to paper over the rough patches of the game.

If you can get past this early-game roughness though you'll find that slowly but surely the game opens up and starts to become something really interesting. I think it was around the Nashkel Mines that it finally began to win me over. With some levels under our belts battles finally felt a little more like I was winning by strategy rather than luck and exploration became feasible. A whole lot of your time for the first half of the game is going to be spent wandering around random woodlands and chopping through hobgoblins and wolves, praying you don't get ambushed by a clearly unwinnable battle on map transition. Baldur's Gate is roughest when you begin and only grows better the more you play.

By the time you reach the titular city proper you'll finally be in a level range that you'll feel competent just in time for the game to open up and give you the opportunity to take on more or less any sidequests you want. There's a ridiculous amount of optional stuff going on here and I didn't even come close to doing all of it, probably not even half if I had to guess.

The Real Time With Pause combat the game uses has become contentious over the years. For many players the need to frequently interrupt the action by pausing to issue commands sort of defeats the benefits of real time. The only occasions you get to enjoy seeing your characters actually chop through enemies unimpeded is during fights with mindless trash mobs. Outside of that you'll be tapping that space bar every few seconds to issue commands. The hybrid gameplay fails to fully capitalize on the tension and finesse of a full time system or the relaxed planning of a turn based one.

Despite my issues with the system and even with its faults there are genuinely fun and engaging encounters to be found across the game. There were plenty of times I came up against a tough battle that I had to really think, strategize and plan my party around to tackle without any losses. The game is also really good at distributing fun tools like wands, potions and spells that give you creative opportunities for how you want to tackle each encounter. I was always finding cool ways to use these to help in fights that seemed insurmountable otherwise.

Pathfinding in this game is a pain in the ass. When you click on a location your characters will frequently take the most roundabout path possible or start to go in the completely opposite direction cause they bumped into another npc or minor obstacle. It requires you to babysit them a lot and is just annoying. They also have a frustrating tendency to break formation meaning you'll often end up with your squishy mages and thieves standing in the front lines if you aren't constantly engineering for them to sit in the back. It just adds a whole lot of busywork without real value to the simple act of moving around. This is exacerbated by the dungeon designs which use tabletop-style narrow corridors that your party is going to constantly get stuck moving through.

I also found the attempt to simulate rest and travel ambushes to just be annoying. The fatigue mechanic makes it clear that playing without resting wasn't the developer's intent. But getting ambushed early on can be a death sentence, especially if you really needed to recharge your spells, and having it happen in the late game is nothing more than a minor nuisance. It really feels awkwardly implemented and like they just never found a satisfying way to balance the system.

The story in Baldur's Gate does as much as possible to stay out of the player's way for as long as possible. The majority of the game is going to be whatever you make of it, adventuring and doing random odd jobs for NPCs like getting their items back from some monsters who stole it or the like. Companions are likewise very barebones, most consisting of just an introductory recruitment and possibly a single questline. There's only occasional party banter and no one has much of anything to say. There are a ton of different NPCs to recruit though meaning you'll have a lot of freedom in how you want to build out your party.

It's only in the final third of the game or so that the plot that has been slowly building up starts to come together. Ultimately there's not much to be said about it unfortunately save for the fact that the antagonist's methods are surprisingly well thought out and there are some interesting revelations that are built up to well. But really this isn't a game that puts much emphasis on its major plot. Baldur's Gate seems more interested in letting the player make it the kind of story they want to.

Of the expansion content I only engaged seriously with Durlag's Tower and found it to be a really fun experience. It was easily the best dungeon in the entire game and full of interesting encounters, traps, puzzles and some surprisingly effective storytelling, with Durlag's story serving almost as a sort of cautionary tale toward the potential fate of our would-be hero. Absolutely worth playing through.

If you can get past the rough opening and the cumbersome nature of the pathfinding you'll find a game that I think is well worth experiencing and enjoying. At the very least it's worthwhile to get to the city of Baldur's Gate so you can enjoy the full sandbox experience the game has to offer of traveling and adventuring.

Baldur's Gate struggles to get the love of it's later brethren and the CRPGs that surround it, but that's not for lack of quality. Baldur's Gate doesn't have an action packed story or deep C&C or nuanced companions. Instead Baldur's Gate seeks to be an open ended adventure where you are lost in the wilderness and caught in a dangerous conspiracy. It achieves this perfectly by plopping you in the middle of nowhere as a level 1 character and forcing you to claw your way to success bit by bit. Learning the games systems and maps mirrors the journey your character takes as they learn to be an adventurer; and the games story lacks in gravitas but makes up for it with a meditative ambience and a perfect execution of the conspiracy plot.

Love the world, love the quests, story was good enough. The combat is.... contentious. Real time with pause works in a lot of fights around the mid-game where it helps you quickly get through and feels a lot cooler than normal RPG combat. But maaaaaan the late game slows to a crawl and feels cheap because of it, when you have to manage spells and counter a barrage of enemy cc's where positioning matters A LOT, the amount of micro makes it into a turn-based game with the added annoyances of fighting against bad AI pathfinding and hoping you don't accidentally miss an attack in the midst of a flurry. This combat design flaw is made especially apparent by the game's final boss, who attacks so fast I had to cheese it to gain an even tactical footing. If I was to just review the late-game I'd probably give it a 4/10 but the early to mid game is just the spirit of fun in an RPG so I'd still recommend it overall.

Much has been said in recent years about the unwieldy influence of film on video games, critiques ranging from the length of Metal Gear Solid's cutscenes to the appendix gameplay of Naughty Dog's AAA ventures. Much less, if anything, has been said about the continued, in my opinion, smothering imposition of tabletop games on their digital siblings.

Baldur's Gate is a slog of a game. Companions appear and join at a whim in the midst of a perfunctory narrative about a chosen one burdened by a mysterious dark destiny whose surprises will not land in the slightest without preliminary knowledge of Forgotten Realms lore. Story, characters, twists: these are elements that will be improved in the landmark sequel, one that would establish BioWare as the preeminent voice in the Western RPG landscape. But the first Baldur's Gate's shortcomings aren't just absences to be filled in, but rather hollows that in a tabletop setting played by IRL friends with a passion for the setting, would have been more than adequately filled in. From this light, the emptiness of its story and characters are that much more understandable - that much more unforgivable. It is so clearly an inferior work, and almost makes sense the simplifying trajectory BioWare would take from BG2 onwards.
The sequel filled in the characters with pre-written depth and linearized the story, establishing a narrative territory becoming of video games. From here, BioWare and WRPGs at large would more and more molt their tabletop past, reaching its critical and commercial zenith in Mass Effect 2, a game defined almost solely by the charms of its pre-written companions and ease of gameplay. And though the third Mass Effect would murder that future, Baldur's Gate stands at the opposite end, a fossil that deserved the meteor. In the worst way possible, BG1 is an artifact not only of an extinct genre but a dead optimism: it made you believe video games were evolving.

responsible for teaching millions around the world exactly why low level d&d combat is bad, and thus advancing humanity's overall awareness of rpg mechanics tremendously.

in a lot of ways it's really impressive as a translation of a forgotten realms campaign experience into videogame form. in a lot of other ways, it's a forgotten realms campaign and therefore sucks the big ass

fascinating as a document of the origin of trends that would define the next two decades or more of wrpgs. otherwise probably still a fun adventure and a nice big fantasy world to explore on a first playthrough... but i'm so far away from my first playthrough at this point that i can't imagine what it would be like to start this today

admito que minhas intenções ao experimentar “baldur’s gate” (1998) pela primeira vez eram puramente vindas de um interesse histórico: já tinha observado de perto o ancião “wasteland” e queria fazer o mesmo com um dos jogos responsáveis por dar nova vida ao gênero crpg, junto do fallout original. pensei que iria jogar por um tempinho, fazer graça com as regras estúpidas da segunda edição de dungeons and dragons (não vou entrar em detalhes aqui mas vai por mim, são estúpidas) e parar logo em seguida. tenho que dar esse mérito para “baldur’s gate”: ele é engajante. a experiência grudou de uma forma que eu não esperava. os cenários rurais pitorescos são deliciosos de explorar, as quests são interessantes e a atmosfera é muito cativante, por mais que muitas vezes os conteúdos são espalhados de forma dispersa em um mapa. eu nunca tinha jogado um jogo do estúdio bioware, mas “baldur’s gate” me deu um interesse pelo catálogo da empresa.

algo na narrativa que me surpreendeu foi o quanto que esse jogo possui um viés político bem específico para a época. assim como “fallout 2" fez críticas bem apontadas à propaganda anticomunista norte-americana, o conflito principal de “baldur’s gate” apresenta em seu antagonista uma figura militarista tentando ganhar poder através de um plano que usa da xenofobia e pânico moral para forjar uma crise de recursos ao mesmo tempo que tenta ao máximo personificar o mito do “grande homem”, algo que todo direita-facistóide eventualmente tenta executar em sua carreira miserável. estou dizendo que bolsonaro é uma cria de bhaal, o deus do assassinato? sim. (gravação vazada de jair bolsonaro após comicamente perder as eleições de 2022.)

esse elemento da narrativa é algo que se mantém relevante mesmo nas duas décadas que se passaram após o lançamento do jogo original, ao ponto de que se fosse lançado hoje em dia seria recebido com ódio fervoroso pelos mesmos supostos fãs da série que fizeram campanhas de assédio aos desenvolvedores após a expansão “siege of dragonspear” (2016) introduzir uma personagem trans. se você for jogar “baldur’s gate” utilizando a “enhanced edition” (que é a única versão disponível na steam hoje em dia), eu te imploro: baixe o mod com as cutscenes originais. não tô nem aí se você não gosta de fmvs antigas: elas são melhores que as versões novas

falando em dragonspear eu dei uma cinta de trocar o sexo pro khalid e depois dela ter virado uma garota trans ela ficou insanamente mais forte. claramente não foi coincidência é isso que aconteceu comigo

Fallout came out over a year earlier and does almost everything better, the main exception being how companions are handled. While I do find this game's combat more fluid than Fallout's, the encounter design is, more often than not, fucking abominable and ends up making the combat as a whole feel worse as a result. This would be a friendship ruiner if it were an actual D&D campaign, maybe even a cause for justifiable homicide. I'll give it props for its cultural impact and for cementing BioWare's place in video games, but that's about it.

Baldur's Gate is, unfortunately, completely obsolete. For reasons other than sheer nostalgia or curiosity, it simply is no longer worth playing. I don't wish to be too harsh on it, as in its day it was the product of quality and purpose, but something must be said of "standing the test of time." Baldur's Gate is of a time when simply being able to play Dungeons and Dragons by oneself, on one's own schedule, with automated combat rolls and more audio-visual happenings than Orthanc or any of the other primordial D&D computerizations was an earth shifting novelty.

For a citizen from far beyond The Year Two Thousand and especially for one who has been lucky enough to actually play D&D consistently with a group that they like, Baldur's Gate is a complete and total slog. The hack and slash brand of tabletop roleplayer that it was made to service is one that has dwindled to virtually nothing, and wasn't exactly huge to begin with. Even for those who still hunt such solo simulations, there are better solutions than D&D, and there are better editions than AD&D. Most importantly, there are far, far better dungeon masters no matter your preferred system of play.

There are a great many things that a good DM will do to ensure a good experience for their group, and Baldur's Gate will do none of these. Baldur's Gate is perfectly happy to fill a dungeon with spiders that cast Web immediately, every single time they enter combat, and then make you sit there and wait until the full duration of the spell expires, even if all of the spiders have been dead for nearly a full minute. At the tabletop, any competent DM would either do something interesting with trapping the party in webs, or they would skip things ahead... because having everyone sit silently for a full minute in between encounters would be fucking annoying, and no one would like it.

It's not just that Baldur's Gate's DM is a cold robot who cares not for fun, it's that he's a pre-teen giga-nerd circa 1995. He assumes that you'll be utterly starstruck when faced with the canon-renowned Elminster: Greatest Wizard, and he thinks that you'll be on the floor in need of stitches when you first encounter his brilliant Noober. The joke is that Noober is annoying, you see. A noob, if you will. The DM will offer you endless fields of bog standard and disinteresting sidequests because he thinks that you are just as excited about the mere opportunity to play Dungeons and Dragons as he is. In its way, that's adorable. Unfortunately it renders most of the game no more than a time capsule... a window into a time where the fact that a computer could perform Dungeons and Dragons for you at all was thrilling enough. It no longer is.

Even if one conveniently ignores the bountiful pastures of subsequent CRPGs that offer more engaging narrative experiences, it is far, FAR more likely that one can now simply play D&D with actual human people. In your Baldur's Gate party, everyone simultaneously won't shut up and never says anything. In the end, from a modern perspective, Baldur's Gate feels like a bad session with a sophomoric DM and a truly lame batch of players, and that's a real shame, because the story does eventually reveal itself as something with great potential. Maybe the sequel can capitalize on it.

You must gather your party before venturing forth.
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
Shitbag: FOR THE FALLEN!!!!!!

I've tried to analogize the world and encounter design of this game to Ys, in that dungeons feel like brief interruptions to wandering through a flat overworld and bumbling into encounters, or to Kaeru no Tame ni Kane wa Naru, in that the disproportionately high experience yields from certain encounters make levels feel more like a progression item one's seeking out. What I feel it's closest to, though, are the impossibly pure games promised by mobile RPG ads, in which the only stat is character level and the only gameplay's in going after weak enemies to level before taking on stronger ones. This isn't to say it's completely devoid of strategy or decision-making, but that every bit of character progression feels like it expands the range of where one can go and what one can do. It's not a terribly interesting world, and this feeling drops off around the halfway point, when the experience starts to come slower and the plot becomes more focused, but it's a neat structuring device while it lasts.
It's notable for being a D&D CRPG with some commitment to pacing and presentation, but it's incredible how badly it handles certain rudimentary parts of the genre: it's a dungeon crawler in which sending a party down a narrow corridor breaks the pathing. Most of the difficulty evaporates with a party of fighters wielding bows supported by mages doing crowd-control, except for a very sudden spike at the end which kind of begs to be cheesed. I'm not actually certain how I beat Sarevok and I think it might have been via friendly fire from his own party.
Absolutely incredible that the company responsible for this would go on to briefly be the kings of the American otome game. The cast is thoroughly sexless and unpleasant: I could not even bring myself to like the Solanis-coded glass canon fighter.

I got used to the old mechanics and had fun for a bit. There's a charm in the pure DnD style and exploring each square map to see if you find secrets, the magic spells were super cool, I liked the different companions with their moral compases (Although they say the same few lines over and over and you get kind of annoyed by them).

But then the ending was kind of hard and I got bored and I stop playing it, and I tried coming back to it months later but by then I had forgotten how to even play it. And there's some bullshit at one of the final battles, people that insta kill you, and you have to protect some random people or you die automatically, it's way too much.