Baldur's Gate

Title: Baldur's Gate
Platform Played On: PC
Release Date: November 30, 1998
Date Played: Spring 2010
Time Played: 40 hours
Completed (Y/N): Yes
Score: 4/5


Opinion:
It took me a while to warm up to Baldur's Gate, by a while I mean 10 years or so.

Baldur's Gate is the type of game that can only be played with a specific mind set. It is the type of a game that you need to be in a roleplaying mood for. Comparatively speaking it doesn't have much action and instead focuses on character development and rich story telling. This is precisely why it took me so long to warm up to it. My view of isometric games was shaped by Diablo, and as such anything as slow as Baldur's Gate just felt broken.  It wasnt until a decade later that I gained the appreciation of the RPGs that focused on the story and not action. You will find yourself reading page after page of books, descriptions and dialogue.

Baldur's Gate is based on Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition rules, and as such has a lot of confusing mechanics (that were removed in the 3rd edition) , one of which is the fact that lower the armor the better because instead of telling you how much armor it provides it tells you how much damage reduction there is. This was confusing to me for a very long time, until I spoke to someone who knew D&D and they explained it to me.

Thanks to the fact that it features D&D mechanics Baldurs Gate manages to be an excellent roleplaying game. True to D&D your party members react to your actions and can straight up turn on you or each other if they dont like what you did. They are not your minions, they are your companions in the truest sense of that word. They have feelings and thoughts they are not afraid to express. They can die permanently and you never know if one of them will turn on you.

I feel that Baldur's Gate starts really well, with some interesting questions being raised that you are compelled to get answers to; however the middle half of the game drags on as you explore ruins and help strangers. There really isn't any "loot" in this game as you would think of it in a traditional sense, and so there is nothing to keep you going during the rough (boring) story parts, you just have to kind of power through them. There are a few "named" items that you can get through doing specific tasks, but most of the things you find in the world either has no stats at all or are clones of each other. I must have gathered enough identical staves by the end of the game to build a 5 bedroom cottage out of them, and enough generic long swords to arm the Chinese army.

It takes a while to understand how to play Baldur's Gate, and it is better if you have a buddy that is either very well versed in D&D or that has played through the game before. There is only one reason to play Baldur's Gate and that is the story. The best way to approach it is how you would approach a book. A book in which you can read chapters in any order you choose to.

Baldur's Gate is a classic, I feel that it should be played by any Dungeons and Dragons fan, even then since the game is based on the system that is several editions old it may come off as ancient to those that dont have experience with it. If you dont give a damn about D&D though this is probably not a game for you.

PS - I feel that the expansion "Tales of the Sword Coast" added a cool mystery quest to the mix and kept things interesting, it is something 'different' that you can do if you are bored of the main quest line.