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Love Letter: Baldur's Gate

Greg Dewar
The Commuter

Monday, February 9, 2009

There you are, on the road from Candlekeep. It’s a barren wilderness. Your foster father is dead. You’re the rape-progeny of the lord of murder. A comely lass saying “Heya!” a lot is running toward you. What do you do?

While it may have not have captured the essence of true tabletop AD&D, it certainly captured the hearts of the 2 million people who bought it, considering it spawned two sequels and two console spinoffs. The lowest grade it ever received was 4/5 stars.

Baldur’s Gate was special. CRPGs were waning; Diablo and Fallout managed to fix that (more games I could write these sweet, sweet love letters to), but Baldur’s Gate did something spectacular: with a small degree of inaccuracy, it completely translated Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition to modern PC gamers.

Baldur’s Gate put you in a gigantic world with 55 beautifully hand-painted, and very large, square maps to explore. The world was essentially your oyster as there were random NPCs and sidequests at every turn. One thing it did that I really appreciate was it put in small things that newer games just don’t have. For instance, one of the first magic vendors you meet allows you to pick-pocket one of the best wands in the game. Looting every container in every house (while requiring a thief) was profitable, if time-consuming. The game went so much more in depth than the usual hack-and-slash or extremely linear games, where a vendor is only a vendor and will never do anything else. In Baldur’s Gate, a vendor could turn on you to try and rob you, or with the right combination of speech options open up a completely new section of inventory.

Essentially every character in the game had items, dialogue, and a story to tell. Sometimes just finding an item that seemed to have no value and bringing it to an NPC would give you a massive reward. I don’t think I could ever express just how perfect NPCs and social interaction were in this game.

On the more mundane side of things, there were a ton of side-quests— almost all of them dependent upon your alignment, your reputation, and the path you chose through conversation options; something every game successive of Baldur’s Gate has tried to emulate.

The main plot was amazing, and while you did eventually have to follow it, you could spend hours upon hours just exploring the world and getting completely lost. Its implementation of the Forgotten Realms campaign setting was crafted with such love and attention to detail that I feel more at home there than in any Dungeon and Dragons tabletop adventure I’ve been through. My first run-through of Baldur’s Gate took over 80 hours to complete, and I didn’t even do everything. They sure don’t make ‘em like that anymore. Final Fantasy: eat your heart out.

You control a party of six adventurers, one you create (unless you made an empty multiplayer game and created them all, but that was lonely) and the rest you recruit. Some will only join if you have another NPC in your party. Others still depend on your alignment and reputation. Some are from quests. Some are pure chance. One even requires you to have a male in your party or it’s no dice. They interact, flirt, and fight with each other, sometimes, even at inopportune times, killing one another while you may be busy shopping for that new sword.

Loot was balanced and no one class or type of weapon or school of magic was overpowered, and while it gets mundane not upgrading at later levels, at the same time that axe you busted your ass earning really sticks with you.

Sound was of the highest quality, with an amazing orchestral soundtrack, ambient sounds for nearly every THING in the game (birds, rockslides, streetwalkers), and exceptional professional voice actors for the NPCs, some of which have gone on to become pretty famous in the Anime world.

Baldur’s Gate just allowed you to be and do whatever you wanted in such a large world you can’t see it all the first time. You have to go back and play as Neutral and Evil alignments. You have to go back and see what happens when you say that other thing to the NPC. Sometimes killing the NPC nets a better reward than they give you for turning in a quest.

Unfortunately, Baldur’s Gate was not without its criticisms. Pathfinding was extremely poor and funky to start out. The screen won’t go above 640X480 resolution. And there were some strange bugs and C++ calculation errors occasionally (especially when spawning 50 copies of Drizz Do’Urden!).

All in all, this is and always will be my favorite game of all time. I refuse to let another game come between me and my Baldur’s Gate. In fact, last fall I replayed the game again, this time trying a new combination of NPCs to see how they interact with one another. And in 2007 I replayed it with an evil party but did nice things to see the repercussions.

The Infinity engine (the style of play the game uses), all things considered, was an amazing piece of technology, actually developed in 1996 by Bioware exclusively (Bioware made the engine, Interplay/Black Isle filled in the content) and held up for years. Baldur’s Gate II, Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale I and Icewind Dale II all used it. The Infinity engine saw use until 2002, when Bioware released the Aurora engine for Neverwinter Nights.

Often immitated (Morrowind, Oblivion), but never duplicated (okay, KotOR was pretty damn good and I will say that’s like one pica from being as good as Baldur’s Gate), this game will live on famously as the game that put CRPGs on the map, put D&D back in the hearts of gamers, and spawned so many other games that it’s ridiculous.

Baldur’s Gate died with Interplay, even though Bioware continued to make games on the D&D license with Atari. Bethesda, having bought the rights to Fallout and Baldur’s Gate, is promising. And while Baldur’s Gate 3 (4, technically) has been rumored for years, I shudder to think what anyone who isn’t Interplay might do with it. Also, Bethesda kind of sucks.

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