Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

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On the Mass Effect Scale, Baldur's Gate gets willing participation in 5 out of 6 genocides. Thoughts on game sectioned and labelled below. It's Old Caveat: Baldur's Gate is older than me with a release date of 1998 which comes with old gaming systems. It is not a game I would recommend for a quick adventure, it comes with commitment to a game designed to be played on a screen smaller than a phone, with 2nd edition Dnd rules, and a point and click rpg, which all have their caveats. The textures are grainy and warped, but for a game so old they translate wonderfully to modern equipment, and the only real problem is that some models and textures that the designers choose to use are just ugly. 2nd edition DnD is something that most people have never touched, but the basic premises of the system are the same that every single person who has touched a video game should understand. Plenty of Beamdog post and other online forums speak as if 2nd edition DnD takes years of training to understand but a couple of hours looking at the basic rules of the edition are more than enough jump into the game. Having said that, the game is still unforgiving in "incorrect" point allocations and by the end of the game if the player has choosen a bad class, or allocated points in the wrong direction it will be difficult to defeat the final boss. This happened to me in both BG1 and BG2, where at the final boss my player character was completely useless due to me specking fully into summoning... The only way I beat Baldurs Gate 1 is through lucky rolls, and BG2 I only beat because the final bosses character AI broke after i reloaded for the 50th time. So unless you really want to play this game a few times, were a single playthrough can be 20 hours, the game should be played on the normal difficulties, like most other old rpg games. And finally it is a point and click adventure. Like other point and click adventures it is slow and it is sometimes difficult to see. In comparison to my only frame of reference the first Fallout games, Baldur's Gate is much easier to operate and see in. Unlike the fallout series there is highlight interactables button, which makes searching through an area trivial. Exploration: Blew me away in this game. I don't think a single game has ever used a completely blank map like Baldur's Gate 1 to such a good effect as BG1 does. Your party is given a limited field of vision, and to see anything in a loading area the objects in screen have to fall within your party's field of vision to be revealed. Every step you take can lead you into a wyvern or a cliff-face, you can be storming to the top of a hobgoblin camp to rescue the witch that has enchanted the most noble of warriors and his [spoiler]giant space hamster[/spoiler] or going to the back exit of the camp taking the wrong stair case. In a normal game these results might seem like bad design, but because of how well crafted Baldur's Gate is this exploration is fun. If the player tries to interact with people in town (plays the game) and doesn't randomly wander off into the wilderness, the npcs and lore will tell the player what to expect on their explorations. This makes every mission in the wild a treasure hunt, were you are given all the information you need to find the location but along the way you'll bump into fun dialogue, a suprise attack, or a new side-quest the player can follow. Being in the dark sounds inherently unfun, but due to the effort that the Bioware puts in, its actually an incredible mechanic, which I have not seen used to the same effect anywhere else. The one problem with this mechanic is its setting specificity. It really only works in the wilderness environment that Baldurs Gate mostly takes place in. At the end of the game, when you enter Baldur's Gate finally (oddly you don't enter this city again until Baldur's Gate III) the mechanic stops working. I'm not entirely sure why this is the case, but maybe its due to the locations in a city being suprisingly less distinct, where it becomes difficult to distinguish between one elaborately designed house and another, especially when your field of vision won't reveal the entire model. Bioware recognized this problem and in the sequel all cities are fully revealed upon entrance, but even with this caveat this sole mechanic makes me want to play the game a second time. Story: The only problem with the story is that it doesn't achieve the same perfection as the sequel story. Taken by itself it is still very good. However, it is not exactly what a modern player would expect. It is written like a DnD campaign because it was a DnD campaign. Bioware literally just published a DnD campaign that the office played together and rather liked. That's exactly the story the game was goes for though. BG1 is in the end a DnD game, so for the story to be a direct rip from a DnD campaign only makes sense. This results in a story that has an overarching plot that feels like a backwater to whatever the player main quest is right now. Do I really care about the main bad guy while I'm diving into the [spoiler] silver mine's to fight lunatic kobolds[/spoiler]? Not really. But this is the story the game is trying to tell, one were the plot cares more about what the player is doing right now than fighting the villain. Its fun and it works. Combat: Its servicable. You select your characters, queue up attacks, and react to the attacks that the enemy is doing. Most of the attacks that the enemy uses aren't really reactable, like if a Dragon decides to turn you to stone, your not going to be able to tell your character to cast the anti-stone turning spell, however (once you turn on the dialogue box so you know what moves the enemy is casts) after the fight you have two options. Either you reload the game to cast protection spells on your fighters before the battle to prevent the petrifying gaze spell or you have been delivered a quest to learn the spell depetrify to free your companion turned to stone. I for the most part went with option 1, because usually its not turned to stone, but something more like instant death for your whole party. What this results in is the supposed problem of DnD before edition 5 (i think, I'm no expert), doing party wide casting buffs before every single fight. In Baldur's Gate 3 there is something called concentration which limits the amount of buffs that a party can cast on each other. This is not the case in BG or BG2, so instead the player is encouraged to cast all their combat spells before every fight in the game, giving their party like +5 stats to everything and preventing some of the nastier spells. It's pretty boring and I am glad that they removed this in the 5th edition, but the cycle of figuring out what sort of damage an enemy is weak to, what spells they use, and how much damage they do is fun and most fights in the game don't need every spell to be cast. Side Notes: I wrote this review a year or so after I finished this game, but the entire BG series are such good games that they will be enternally locked in my memory, even though the story of this game isn't as stellar as every single Bioware game, its still one of the best games I've ever played.