Review
Very few computer games based upon Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the most influential role-playing game system of them all, have been released over the past several years, and those that did make it to retail shelves have been ill-conceived, substandard products. In that context, it's hardly surprising that Baldur's Gate, which many gamers suspected would finally bring AD&D back to the forefront of computer gaming, has been one of the most anxiously anticipated role-playing games ever.
Many role-playing gamers openly expressed their disappointment when developer BioWare Corporation announced that it was adapting AD&D's turn-based gameplay to its proprietary real-time engine. Stats-loving, rule-abiding, Gnoll-stomping AD&D fans obstinately asserted that AD&D just couldn't be successfully adapted into a real-time game engine. Fortunately, BioWare stuck to its game designing instincts, because no computer game has ever done a better job at simulating AD&D. Character creation and development is steadfastly accurate to AD&D second-edition rules, allowing gamers to create characters from six different races, eight core character classes, and eight specialty mage classes and to advance in experience points and character levels as tasks are accomplished and beasties are slain.
Baldur's Gate is set in the Sword Coast region of AD&D's most popular milieu, the Forgotten Realms. Interestingly, although Baldur's Gate is a party-based game, the storyline is based around a single main character, even in the multiplayer version of the game. The main character has grown up in the monk-infested citadel of learning, Candlekeep. Learning of a mysterious, impending threat, the character is forced to flee Candlekeep early on and is constantly assailed by would-be assassins throughout the course of the game. The motivations of your character's enemies are not entirely intuitive, other than their obvious intention to smack your character's head into applesauce, and uncovering the rationale behind the actions of your character's enemies is your main goal in the game. As in games such as Betrayal at Krondor, the main storyline in Baldur's Gate is divided into chapters, during which certain key tasks have to be accomplished by your party in order to advance the plot. While using a chapter structure creates a more story-driven game, it also potentially creates unduly linear gameplay, where the actions of your characters are arbitrarily limited in order to fit within the constraints of the chapter structure.
Freedom to explore within a story-driven game sounds like the best of both worlds, but the plot of Baldur's Gate is advanced almost exclusively through scrolling text and voice-narrated messages that play at the beginning of each chapter and aren't particularly compelling. Nonplayer characters in the game tend to only give your characters simple messages and basic tasks to accomplish.
There are a couple of dozen nonplayer characters capable of joining your player character to create a party of up to six adventurers, and some of the party member NPCs have particularly distinctive personalities. Unlike in most other RPGs, where NPCs are routinely given colorful introductions and backgrounds that ultimately have no impact whatsoever on gameplay, party member NPCs in Baldur's Gate will vigorously pursue their own agendas, even if they are contrary to your own intentions. Continue to act in a manner contrary to a party member's alignment and that character will voice his displeasure and eventually unilaterally leave the party and attack your character.
If you'd prefer to create an entire party yourself, you can do so by starting a multiplayer game and playing it solo. Baldur's Gate is, of course, also the first fairly hard-core RPG that you can play multiplayer, either over the Internet (Gamespy is included with the game, or you can play it over the Heat network) or using a more local connection. Up to six human players can each control a character, with the host of the game deciding which players are given the ability to pause the game, talk to NPCs, spend party gold, or perform any other action that affects other players. Action gamers hoping that Baldur's Gate will satisfy their cravings for a new Diablo will likely be disappointed with the party-based focus of the multiplayer version of Baldur's Gate.
Baldur's Gate sports detailed, isometric graphics displayable in up to 32-bit color if you have a 4MB video card. Most games that use an isometric perspective are actually tile-based, building their landscapes like a giant jigsaw puzzle, pieced together by a series of individually crafted tiles. Since each tile is usually used over and over again, even good tile-based games, like Diablo, tend to eventually give you the overwhelming sense that you've seen it all before, even when exploring new environments in the game. Baldur's Gate, on the other hand, is not tile-based, and features fully rendered backgrounds, and each new area you explore in Baldur's Gate will look different from the others, since it has been uniquely crafted.
Support for Creative Labs' EAX 3D audio is included and used to good effect. The voices of characters echoing in caverns and thunder from the prolific storms in the game often sound as if they are surrounding your party. The musical score is also of high quality, favoring suitably epic orchestral tunes instead of more subtle tracks. The game's interface is particularly well done, always providing you with several ways to get something done. You can choose to control your characters in real-time strategy fashion by dragging a box around them with your mouse, or you can select one of the available preprogrammed formations.
Not everything works perfectly or logically in Baldur's Gate. While the weather effects are well done, the weather in the Sword Coast seems particularly fickle and uncertain as to the season, bombarding your characters with thunderstorms for days, only to be interrupted by a short snowfall, and then to finally return to sunny climes. The font used for most of the text in the game isn't particularly easy to read. The path-finding abilities of your characters are fairly poor in the initial release of the game, requiring you to micromanage your characters as they wander through underground labyrinths. BioWare has already released a beta patch for the game that purports to fix this problem by allowing gamers to choose the number of path-finding nodes relied upon by their characters. The automapping function is excellent, but it would have been great to have been able to annotate the maps.
Of course, some gamers may not like the AD&D system faithfully re-created by Baldur's Gate. In many ways, while playing Baldur's Gate it becomes apparent why the AD&D system has effectively been superseded by better-balanced role-playing systems. Mages, who have to memorize individual spells instead of relying on a more flexible \"manna\" or spell-point system, are still wimps at the beginning of the game and extremely deadly compared with fighters at higher character levels. But those are all problems inherent in the AD&D system, which BioWare has been forced to duplicate in Baldur's Gate. Within the constraints of the AD&D system, the game has been balanced extremely well. Not only is Baldur's Gate easily the best computer adaptation of AD&D ever, it also convincingly returns role-playing games to the forefront of computer gaming. --Desslock
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