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 .