Great inventions always spice up life. They give it that extra
something, that something that just makes everyday living a bit
less of a chore. First there was the electric lamp; then the nuclear
bomb, the phone, the TV, the VCR, computer games, and last, but
not least, pen-and-paper role-playing games. Agreed, that is a
slightly abridged list of items invented in the past couple of
hundred years that make life more interesting (like the neat
concept of digital watches, or cable descramblers) - but it outlines
the most important ones. However, people who came too late to
invent any of those things (or were radically dumber than the
inventors, which sometimes isn't that different) came up with the
idea of merging those items into other, more expensive items.
They looked, and saw the light (from the previously marketed
electrical lamp): computer games sell incredibly well, and
pen-and-paper is fun, but doesn't sell too well anymore. So they
merged the two, creating a PC-based RPG niche, rejoicing the
gamers worldwide - even those who think digital watches are a
neat idea. And thus we get to Baldur's Gate. (Maybe we don't - but
introductory paragraphs are supposed to run only a sentence or
two.)
The story of the game revolves around two major cities on Sword
Coast, Baldur's Gate and Amn. The cities are plotting to destabilize
Sword Coast, actions that will possibly result in war. As well, an
unknown plague struck the iron mines, rendering most of the iron
ore in circulation useless - it falls apart after but a few days of use.
Traders carrying iron ore are also attacked, and routes are raided
by well-organized bandits. The armies defending the cities fear for
the quality of their weaponry, and it is a known fact that, lest
something be done, a great evil will befall the population come
winter, as not one artisan will be able to continue his work with his
dilapidated tools. Not a soul knows why this happens, either -
some suspect magical curses, some the city of Amn, others the
trading cartels, others suspect others... the circle never ends, but
no one knows for sure.
This is where the hero steps into the action. You play the role of a
character that was raised by his foster father, Gorion. You know
nothing of your past; you were told of your mother, who (you think)
died giving birth to you, and of your father, you know nothing.
With the way your foster father treated you, you think that you
might be a bit more than another would-be adventurer... and some
things you stumble upon in your travels make you wonder - and
continue the search. But not only are you searching for clues on
who you are - you are also attempting to dig deeper into the
situation plaguing Sword Coast - with two possible agendas: if
you're playing as a good character, then you're trying to, basically,
save the world. If, however, you're playing as an evil character,
your agenda is to gain as much power in this world as possible,
and stop at nothing to do so.
The game environment is truly huge. High-resolution modes aren't
supported, as all the areas in the game were pre-rendered at
640x480; however, to compensate for that, there are about 3500
unique and different areas the player can find himself in,
broadening the experience beyond bounds of conventional
imagination. There are also virtually no movies in the game,
incredible as that might be - there's the intro animation, a few
game animations and an outro - adding up to around 15 minutes of
video. Amazing, since the game is 5 (five) CDs - I, for one, cannot
recall a multi-CD game where movies wouldn't take up 60 - 80% of
the space on the discs. The game allows for caching of the most
recently-visited areas on the hard disk, as well, speeding up
access to them; that involves a substantial free space penalty,
however. The absolute minimum install, which is not
recommended, is about 300 megabytes. The minimum
recommended install is 570, not counting the cache per se, which
can vary from 80 to 1024 megabytes. There's also a full install,
which is about 2200 megabytes - so large, in fact, that InstallShield
misreports the full install size as being 2047 megabytes.
However, all the install woes pay off. This is definitely one of the
best RPGs I've played in a while (except, perhaps, Fallout and
Fallout 2 - but that's an entirely different environment and
gameplay style, so I can't compare much.) The storyline is
detailed, and nonlinear - to a degree. To a degree? Well, some
parts of the story require you to fight a character, say to collect a
letter from his cold, dead body. The problem is twofold: firstly, he
won't want to die easily, and secondly, he has the firepower (or
rather the cold steel) to back his case. There's not much you can
do about it, either - you'll have to run around collecting
experience points for a while longer, even if you want to proceed
with your quest. But don't think you can run around collecting XPs
for a good part of the game and then easily vanquish anyone
around, either - there's an experience cap for the overly eager
collectors. Well... considering just how low it is, it's not for the
eager - it's about for everyone. The limit is about 89,000 points,
which amounts to a level 7 character. That also means mages
won't be able to use Level 7 spells. I'm unsure as to why Bioware
decided to put in an ExpCap, but, according to the word "out on
the street," it will most likely be lifted in the upcoming sequels and
add-ons. According to the "word on the street," as well, there has
been a patch released recently by Razor, which does precisely the
same thing - note, however, that since this is an unauthorized
tweak of the game, Interplay will never support its use. It could,
however, mean the difference between life and death for
someone. Either way, great job.
It was quite hard for me to find gameplay-related defects in
Baldur's Gate. So I went to #baldursgate on Efnet IRC, and spoke
to some hardcore RPGers out there. The following is a quote, and
my comments follow. (credit goes to Woo^2 for his creative input).
[12:03] 1) Story is way too linear, 2) Encounters are not
random, but fixed; 3) Impossible to play solo, parties must be
formed. 4) Too much talk, reminds me of adventure games, gets in
the way of RPGing, 5) Exp caps truly sucks 6) Graphics not up to
par with Diablo - a game released 2-3 years ago. 7) What's the
point of solo or multi ?
As to the linearity of the story, I spoke of it briefly above.
Encounter-wise, I must admit, Fallout 2 had a whole lot more
random encounters than BG. In this game, most encounters are
fairly fixed, for example, if you know that there's ten Hobgoblins in
a certain place, if you load a previous game and head over to that
place, they'll be within a fairly small radius of it. There are real
random encounters - they are much too rare, however, and are
usually of the easier kind. Sure, exceptions exist - but, like I said,
they are exceptions.
In regards to solo play, it's true - I don't think anyone can play the
whole game alone, without party backup. Sure, once you're at
level 6 - 7, you could probably play alone (emphasis on probably) -
but on the lower levels, it's plain impossible. So you have to drag
along a bunch of slackers all the time... and something else I
found very annoying about the experience point system, since I'm
at it: experience gets equally divided among your party members.
By that I mean that say you have five party members and kill a
critter worth 1,000XP. Each character's experience will then
increase by 200 points, and not 1000 points like some may expect. I
suppose it follows true to the AD&D rules... but it sure is annoying
and disappointing in a way.
There's really a lot of talking in the game. But that, in a way, is
expected - after all, you're not adventuring to kill some Lord of the
Land - you're also looking for your own past, and there's no real
way to do that save for talking to individuals. Matter of personal
preference, I suppose.
The graphics, I'd say, are very good. I'm not sure if I could
compare them to Diablo, though - Diablo's environments weren't
nearly as detailed as BG's; however, Diablo ran fine on my
machine, while BG frame rates make me want to get a high-end
Pentium this very moment. It's definitely playable - but it leaves
ample room for improvement.
And last, but not least, a very important (and controversial) feature
of the game, namely, multiplayer. This is the first RPG to have
multiplayer in the last fairly long while, and, I must say, it does a
great job implementing it. And, unlike in Diablo, you don't join up
with a friend to kill Diablo one more time on Hell difficulty - not
only can you save games, but you can go through the entire game
with a friend in multiplayer mode, rather than in single player with
an AI-controlled party. There are a few caveats one should be
aware of, however. For one, when I said 'friend,' I meant precisely
that - friend. Playing with strangers, like our mothers tried to teach
us, isn't necessarily a good thing in this case. When you join a
game controlled by someone else, he has complete control over
your character's inventory. That is, he can remove items from it
and drop items into it at will. What that means is that if you have a
great character with incredible weapons, take care who you play
with - they might rob you of your weapons and inventory, if not the
actual character - the host has control over that, too. There's a lot
of cheating possible, as well - for example, take a character, load
it with expensive weaponry, export it to a file, then switch to
Character Arbitration mode, import the character five times, then
sell all of those weapons - voila 30,000 gold pieces out of thin air.
You can also import characters into a single-player game
(although, blessedly, only at start). I'm not sure how much I like
that idea, either - since one would be tempted to steal a level 7
mage from someone in multiplayer and play the game with it - but
where's the fun, I ask - where's the fun? I understand the standard
argument in this case, that if one doesn't want to cheat, one won't -
but I disagree. Some people don't cheat - until they see the
possibility right in front of their eyes. They'll play Quake fairly,
doing well in it - until someone shows them the cheat codes, and
they won't be able to resist ("... the Power of the ..." uhh.).
importing and exporting characters is a good idea... but I think,
perhaps, it should've been slightly more refined. Maybe they
should be password-protected, as well. Also, when AI-controlled
characters are encountered in a multiplayer game, they always try
to get on you party - and you have to manually refuse them. Not to
mention mixing a good character with an evil one - when the host
tries to help some poor old woman, the guest whips out a
Crossbow of Speed, and sends her to a better dimension - not to
mention that the Reputation drops.
The orchestral score in the game is very good. However, music
cycles, i.e. the music tracks are of a limited length and they loop,
thereby engraving them in one's mind so deeply one ends up
dreaming about them at night. The sounds are quite good, too -
though I sort of miss Fallout's skull-crushing sounds, as they're
slightly (to say the least) tamed in BG. There's plenty of gore
otherwise, though... well, blood notwithstanding. Guess living
things don't bleed much over at Sword Coast.
A few complaints about the character statistics (devout AD&D fans,
please feel free to skip this section). I'm somewhat unhappy with the
Intelligence stat, for example. Why is it, that a
low (or high) Intelligence setting affects things like the amount of
spells one can memorize, but, on the other hand, makes virtually no difference
relative to dialogue choices? I know that in real AD&D, the higher it is, the more
languages the character knows, for one, thus communicating more easily
and fluently with the population of the world. The thing is, there's
only one language in Baldur's Gate, so how come that if the IN is set to
3 or 17, I have the same dialogue possibilities? I mean, the wording of
the queries and responses is so obscure sometimes, that a character of INT 3,
even in medieval times, would very possibly be unable to pronounce the words,
let alone come up with them. In Fallout, the amount of
words like "uhh", "umm", "like", and the like increased as uhh,
your Inteeligenc umm, dropped to uhh, low number. Heh heh.
Intelligence. Cool. Anyway... I do realize Bioware had to adhere to
AD&D rules, so there's nothing they could have done about this -
but nothing prevents me from grudging about it.
Nonetheless, Baldur's Gate represents innovation and style as well
as possible. With true AD&D rules, emmersive gameplay,
incredible depth of the story and graphics to beat, this is definitely
one RPG worth playing. This is, I'd say, "as RPG as it gets" - so if
you're not keen on the whole "do a damage roll: roll 1D6" thing,
you might need to read the 160 page manual that comes with it.
It's worth it at the end, though... and while Fallout is still the best
RPG I've ever played (please, no flame mail about what is defined
as an "RPG" and how Ultima VII is the best RPG of all time),
Baldur's Gate is most definitely a game worth playing.
Bioware's much anticipated and most talked about RPG
has finally hit shelves and caused a mad Christmas scramble to the
local EB to snag a copy. Most stores were sold out within hours
with not only the first shipment, but some cases the second and
third shipments. The hype is definitely there, so lets see how well
BioWare, the creators of the one of the few other big RPG's of
1998, Fallout 2, did with Baldur's Gate.
Baldur's Gate is yet another game set in TSR's AD&D
world of the Forgotten Realms. SSi used to crank out AD&D games
with a frenzy and I've played most of them, so I was looking
forward to returning gaming system I fiddled with over the past
eight or so years. The plot is very vague at the beginning. Your
foster father, Gorion, tells you to pack up and get out of
Candlekeep. Shortly after leaving the city, Gorion is struck down
by a powerful enemy and you must flee. With no real knowledge
of who is after you, you must explore and dig up clues.
Since this is a new adventure, you will start off with no
experience and very little equipment. Like most RPGs, combat and
quests will allow you to gain both in order to better equip your
characters. The quantity of magical items are rather few in BG,
mainly since the game limits character development to level six.
This may seem somewhat low, but it will take you quite some time
to reach this. In addition, an expansion pack is already underway
and should allow you to proceed further.
Anyone who's played Diablo, will find the graphics very
familiar. The view is taken from the isometric perspective. BioWare
has put a lot of effort in to detailing the game, so just like
Diablo, expect well drawn buildings and animations. Graphically,
it doesn't go much beyond what we've already seen from Diablo,
although the world is MUCH bigger then Diablo. The game also
features some FMV cutscenes, but they're not overly inspiring. BG
does feature different color depths from 16bit to 32bit, although it
doesn't benefit a great deal in 32bit. The character portraits were
some of the nicest artwork I've seen in awhile. They're stills, but
they've definitely appear to have been done by some of the
excellent artists that TSR has used for book covers and interior art.
In addition to the detail put into graphics, BG features
some excellent music and sound effects. The environmental noises
are great and are even better if you've got a sound card with EAX
support. The background music isn't overly interesting, but it's
perfect for the game and helps enrich the gameplaying
environment. There's speech in the game, but it's limited to
greetings and party comments. This tends to create a feeling of
repetition and takes a little away from the game. I also noticed,
when talking to commoners, sometimes I'd get a male greeting
when talking to a female commoner.
In Diablo, it was mainly a click click action rpg, Baldur's
Gate expands this idea. There will be many quests and NPC's to
deal with. How you deal with these situations affects your
reputation and also how you must handle problems. BG intends for
you to play as a good character, though you don't always have to
do what's best. Unfortunately, I wouldn't advise you play as an
evildoer. It seems that the game would make you too weak to
protect yourself as an evil character with a low reputation.
Combat is real-time and you don't have real good
control over characters. It does allow you to pause it during
combat to assign orders and even provides setup for auto-pause
(you will definitely want to set up auto-pause). You don't physically
control the characters like in Diablo, it's more of a real-time
version of the turn system used in the old AD&D games.
What makes BG stand out the most, is its interaction with
other people in the game. Since you only start out with one
character, the only way to gain help is to talk other characters into
joining. Some of these may be evil characters and some are good
or some are right in the middle. If you have a party with both evil
and good characters, they'll argue with each other and they can
even end up fighting each other. Evil characters complain if your
reputation is too high while the good ones will congradulate and
vice versa. This makes your party much more interesting than the
old AD&D games where you created your entire party yourself.
Following in the footsteps of Diablo and other isometric
viewed games, pathfinding is somewhat a problem. Baldur's Gate
however does offer a waypoint system to alleviate these issues
somewhat. I'm not one for waypointing so I often found two of my
party members at my desired position while others were stuck or
had taken the long way. Another item I have a gripe with, is the
view in general. It uses a fog of war and line of sight view system,
which in itself isn't bad. My problem is that the area of sight is
bigger than the game screen. I found myself wandering by
things(especially people), that were visible to my characters, but
not visible to me. You, as the player, should be able to see all that
your characters can, without having to scroll around the
gameboard. I suppose that if BioWare would have done video
options higher than 640x480, this problem could have been
averted.
I found BG to be a frustrating game for the most part. My
main reasons early on for coming back to play were for revenge
instead of for entertainment. You will die in BG, and you will die a
lot. Make sure you're saving frequently and are always on top of
your personal character. If he dies, it's game over. The rest of your
party can go to hell in handbasket. After playing more and more,
you will accomplish more quests and it makes the game a little
less frustrating. Some people may like the less focused plot, since
it allows you a lot more freedom in where you want to go. I found
this a little to my disliking, since I more frequently ended up
somewhere I wasn't suitably skilled to handle yet.
It does a decent job of staying with the AD&D world
rules. It expands what influence the rules have over the game
from the old AD&D games. BioWare, apparently, worked closely
with TSR to make sure it stuck to same rules, the real world
version of AD&D does. It does have a few minor qualms, like not
being able to use two weapons. I also seem to remember that
there was a state in between life and death called
unconsciousness, but I didn't see this used like in past AD&D
games. (Hence you die a lot)
Multiplayer supports all the normal types of connectivity
for up to six players. It also includes a version of Gamespy for
Baldur's Gate which allows you to easily find multiplayer games. I
played a little multiplayer and I must say, if you're looking for a
Diablo substitute, this sadly is not it. One player manages almost
all of the game, so unless you're the party leader, you don't have
very much control. This will make it more suitable for playing with
friends than going to a random game on the Internet. I hoped for
more here, but will have to wait some more for Diablo II or
Everquest for some good online RPGing.
Baldur's Gate shows the possible future of more true
RPG's. It gives the isometric view, which makes the game feel
more realistic when compared to games like Might and Magic. It
adds a lot more to where Diablo left us. I'm a bigger fan of games
that have strong storylines, like Return to Krondor, but the weaker
focus in Baldur's Gate allows for more exploration and more free
choice. BG will make you keep playing, it's a long,
time-consuming game, so if you're not one to sit around and play,
then you'd best be looking elsewhere. However, if you want a long
and pretty fulfilling RPG, Baldur's Gate should reign as the new
king.
Highs: a good RPG in an isometric view, good audio, detailed,
long
Lows: storyline lacks, combat is a little complex, easily frustrating,
bland multiplayer
By: 