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.

So this was an interesting game, but there was a lot I didn't care for. I liked that there was actually a tutorial which explained the basics, leaving you to figure out the more complex stuff. I found all the systems within the combat to be a bit stressful, but never too terrible until the fights got hard toward the end. I played on baby mode for most of the game, and even that got too hard, but luckily they put in a story mode where you essentially auto-win every battle. But the combat wasn't what I enjoyed most. The story itself was kinda generic, but I really enjoyed the actual roleplaying aspect of just going on random quests. The characters are mostly all blank slates, so you can kinda just build your own ideas over how things are meshing within the group. Onvce you progressed further into the game, I became less engaged since the fairly dull main plotline began to take primary focus, and also these types of games start losing their appeal once the wonder wears off. Still, it was solid. 3/6

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 .

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

Of all of the video game versions of Dungeons & Dragons I can think of, this is the first one to get it right. It uses the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: 2nd Edition rules in the Forgotten Realms module. This has led to Faerun being my favorite D&D setting. I replay this game pretty often. The Enhanced Edition on Steam is what's mostly available today. I'm not going to call it a better version. It's just a bigger version. To me, it was just the same game with more quests and a couple of extra playable characters, which was great, so definitely the Enhanced Edition is the preferred version for me.

Also...GO FOR THE EYES, BOO!

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.

Yeah so when people say Baldur's Gate is an all-time great RPG that is still a benchmark for writing, atmosphere, memorable characters, and world design, they're actually talking about Baldur's Gate II. This one was a massive leap forward for RPGs, but it's so full of rough edges that the second game and later CRPGs successfully smoothed over that it hardly compares to them. It's also severely padded with repetitive encounters and uninteresting side quests--totally lacking in respect for your time.

What would become a defining element of Bioware's great games to come--the unforgettable companions and the choice-driven conversations the player can have with them--are barely here. Random party banter which lets you flesh out your relationship with them is practically nonexistent (interestingly, except for the new Enhanced Edition characters, which range from bland to neat), which makes the writing feel a bit sparse, especially when so many quests, despite the regular dialogue trees, ultimately devolve into killing a pack of enemies here or a horde of them there. It makes you wonder what your choices really added when it ended up in a similar combat scenario either way--and there are so many similar combat scenarios strewn a bit too liberally throughout the game. This becomes less of an issue in the dense, dialogue-rich city of Baldur's Gate, but it takes so long to get there that the wait doesn't feel justified. Meaningless fights pad too much of the open world and the dungeons, but experience points aren't meted out generously enough to make some of the tough required fights fair or fun if you rush past optional content.

The combat itself isn't a horrible system, but AD&D is simply too much of a slog at low levels--and this entire game is low level AD&D. While the real time with pause fights allow for a blend of strategy (when tougher fights demand planning, timing, and positioning) and speed (when the game throws wads of trash mobs at you to pad a forest or dungeon), it's ultimately one of the weakest parts. Again, it feels better in BG2 (or successors like Pillars of Eternity) simply because you're actually strong enough in that one to have some real power and flexibility, which is where RTWP combat feels the best. It's not horrible here, just a bit of a jumbled mess waiting for refinement. The pathing AI will have you and your companions enthusiastically running to their death, and the encounter design doesn't help to massage out the kinks in the combat. Enemies are frequently loaded with irritating powers like poison and petrification that will inevitably force reloads due to sheer bad luck, even if you bring antidotes or try to weave around them. Even Planescape: Torment, famous for having some of the weakest combat of the Infinity Engine games, was occasionally more fun precisely because it was rarely if ever that hard. Sure, it didn't demand any strategy, but at least you could click on some dudes or run away and it would be over shortly, and what little combat it demanded usually carried narrative weight or at least fit the tumultuous setting. Being tossed into unwinnable fights doesn't demand any strategy because "reload and come back later" or "turn on Story Mode difficulty for this fight" isn't strategy, it's something a Gamefaqs walkthrough tells you to do.

It's not an awful game, and there's a lot to love. It captures the feeling of wandering aimlessly around the Forgotten Realms at low level (complete with encountering Drizzt and Elminster in passing) where everything is dangerous fairly well, but that alone doesn't carry the game, and in fact starts to get tedious and frustrating well before you're done. Everything it does well is done better and sooner in Shadows of Amn. And some will tell you that it's necessary to enjoy its vastly superior cousin, but in my experience, that isn't the case, even if people who stuck with the first seem to have a stronger attachment to the returning characters. I shudder to think how many people in recent years have bought this game, tried it, and put it down when it got too boring, tough, or repetitive, then never tried the second game assuming it was more of the first.

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.

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.