izigame.me

Baldur’s Gate is one of the best simulations of the AD&D 2e experience. This is both a compliment and an insult. Ultimately, I think this is a good game and worth playing if you can get over a lot of the dated game design. But if you’re a total newcomer to CRPGs, especially those of the late 90s, this game is a trial by fire. I would not recommend this game to anyone who simply wants to play it for the story, because on top of it being just okay, this game’s strength is the way you interact with the world more so than it is the quality of the narrative itself and that means getting deep into the mechanics of the game.
To start positively, Baldur’s Gate is great at presenting the Forgotten Realms D&D setting. If you’re a lore nerd, there is a lot to dive into here. There are countless books explaining the history of the region, its gods, and the politics of the kingdoms hidden all over the place. Bartenders will tell you rumors if you buy drinks from them, and each powerful magical item has a story in its description. There is a decent amount of environmental storytelling in the maps as well, moreso in the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion pack than the base game, which are beautiful and colorful and look like you’re playing in a painting. It’s a unique feel of 2D and 2.5D isometric sprite games like this can provide that you just can’t get from a photorealistic 3D rendering. Unfortunately, the character models on the other hand range from okay to “what the fuck am I looking at?” and the lack of a unique visual profile on most of the humanoid sprites makes it tough to pick out important targets like spellcasters when the combat starts.
The plot of Baldur’s Gate is fine. It’s a pretty bog-standard D&D adventure of discovering an evil bad guy’s plot to take over a kingdom and eventually saving it. There is a bit of interesting in-game politics that sets the backdrop for the campaign and ties into the characters, but it’s not by any means some deep or thoughtful narrative. The real strength of the story comes from how you can interact with it via choices made in dialogue, combat, party composition, etc. Outcomes of major plot points aren’t going to change, but side quests can be much more open ended by simply having the right (or wrong) companion in your party. And the side quests are so numerous and wide in scope that many of them will have direct connections to the main quest, even if they aren’t necessary to progress. Combine that with the sheer amount of companions in this game (29 in total) and the way they interact with each other while in the party, and there is simply no way to see it all in a single playthrough.
The only real issue I have with the narrative, outside of it just stopping instead of having a proper ending, is that its pacing is crippled by the side quests and gameplay in general. There is a calendar in the game keeping track of the time you have spent on your adventure, but it is never important outside of certain companion’s quests. The big bad evil guy will always be about to reach his goal, no matter if it takes you 2 in-game days or 2 in-game months to find him; and you will be spending months preparing for that next step. Following the main quest alone will leave you severely underleveled and you have to grind side quests, which is time consuming both in-game and in person. Healing and recovering spells means resting for at least 8 hours at a time. And if you don’t have many healing potions or spells, that means you could be spending literal in-game weeks trudging through a dungeon. All of this makes it almost impossible to avoid ruining the pacing. Maybe it’s a testament to everything else that I find this is immersion breaking, but it is nonetheless.
The reason you will have to do some grinding is that this game is HARD. Part of this is AD&D 2e’s design, but some of this is on the game too. Characters, especially early on, will have very little HP depending on the class. A martial focused class like a fighter might be able to take a hit or resist being hit in the first place, but god help your mages who can easily be killed by a single arrow until around lvl 5. And since combat plays out in real time, characters can be obliterated in the blink of an eye.
I don’t think it’s a bad thing that combat is this hard, even on easier difficulties. I do have a problem with it playing out in real time though. The pathing AI is atrocious, and the pace at which it plays out is fast. Thankfully you can pause combat and still choose actions and even set up auto-pause triggers for certain events, but it’s not easy to get the hang of nor all that satisfying once mastered. I never felt like any of my successful battles were a result of my immediate tactical decisions like it would in a game like Xcom, mostly because there isn’t much you can do while watching them play out. Most of the strategy has to come from knowing what you’re up against ahead of time and preparing before the actual fight.
AD&D 2e has this, quite frankly, terrible spell slot memorization mechanic in which every spellcaster must choose their spells for each available slot on a short rest. For example: if you have 3 lvl 1 slots and want to cast magic missile 3 times, then you had to have already memorized 3 magic missile spells during your last rest and you won’t be able to cast any other lvl spells that you’d know until you swap slots on the next rest. It forces you to plan ahead for encounters and dungeons, except there is no way of figuring out what to expect on your first playthrough so your best bet is to just Edge of Tomorrow your way through the game. This isn’t the only complaint I have about AD&D 2e either. In this system, the thief class is the only one capable of disarming traps (of which there are a lot in this game that are unavoidable and will only trigger for player controlled characters for some reason), mages can fail to learn spells from scrolls on a dice roll (which easier difficulties at least disables), THAC0 exists, the list of shit goes on. It’s an outdated and unnecessarily complicated system on its own, and translating it into a video game only serves to highlight its issues.
Then there’s the gameplay elements outside of the AD&D system. You know all those cool companions that you can form a party of 6 out of? Well you’re gonna have to remember where you left them because they are going to remain scattered across the world if you talk to them and decide to swap party members. Only a few of the Enhanced Edition characters will hang out at a central location. Companions not in your party are not getting experience points either, so you better be happy with your decision on who’s in the party and pray they survive. You’d think that the game wants you to replace dead characters based on how many there are, but I am not going to spend 30 hours grinding up a replacement when they are 7 levels behind. And I’m certainly not gonna waste my time trying to revive the dead because they don’t come back with their stuff, and I’m not about to spend 40 minutes trekking back and forth to get everything with how annoying this inventory system is; being that individual characters need their inventories managed separately. Some of this is easier to overlook than others, but I have to call it out because it’s clearly a problem that was fixed in future sequels and expansions.
Obviously, I wouldn’t say that all of these problems make the game unplayable; I’m still recommending the game after all. I do think it’s important to mention though because it’ll backhand slap any newcomer across the face and probably deter them from sticking with it. It almost kept me from doing so, until it finally clicked for me in the final chapter of the game. Perhaps on a replay, now that I know what I’m doing and what to expect, I will have a better experience. I just wish that better experience was something I could’ve gotten the first time.