VideoGame A good game that has been surpassed by its sequel and later games
This review is only for the original game. I will eventually post another review for the sequel.
When I was younger, I was excited to hear about a Dungeons & Dragons inspired RPG for the PC, especially since I liked D&D but didn't have anyone to play it with. I enjoyed it at the time, even though I was unable to finish it, and when I more recently came back and finished it, I found that it was still fun, but subsequent games did some things much better.
The story stars you, the ward of a man named Gorion, who is forced to leave your home of Candlekeep under mysterious circumstances. After Gorion is murdered, you set out to meet friends of his, eventually being tangled up in a conspiracy threatening the Sword Coast. There's quite a bit of intrigue and some surprising twists, even if you may already know the main twist.
The game almost comes off as an open world RPG. After the prologue, you find yourself in the middle of the wilderness, and spend the first half hour walking across plains and forests until you get your first story breadcrumb. Unless you're playing with a guide, you'll generally spend much of your time walking around the various unnamed wilderness areas on the map looking for a quest. This demonstrates one of the flaws of open-world RPGs- it isn't much fun to explore a large world if the good stuff is few and far between.
Combat is generally well-done. It's vaguely akin to a real time strategy RPG, but you can pause combat in order to assess the situation and give your party of up to six characters commands. Unfortunately, your characters and their opponents will often spend a lot of time swinging at each other and missing, especially early on. The early game can also be rather brutal due to how fragile your character is, especially if you play a Mage , especially considering that the game immediately ends if the main character dies.
The opening game is also slow-paced, and you'll spend the first few hours fighting weak monsters like gibberlings, kobolds and bandits. Even at the end, you'll only fight mid-tier D&D monsters, with powerful foes like dragons saved for the second game.
The cast is "a mile wide and an inch deep," so to speak. There are enough characters that you can build a balanced party that fits your alignment, but most of their personalities are rather shallow, and unlike later BioWare titles, few party members have anything resembling character arcs or personal quests.
At its core, the game is solid, featuring a large world to explore, enjoyable combat, an interesting story with good twists and some colorful characters, but Baldur's Gate's sequel and other RPGs did what this game did, yet better. It's worth checking out if you're interested in RPGs, but be advised that Baldur's Gate II and newer RPGs may be better choices.
VideoGame Baldur's Gate: A meager experience stretched thin and a prologue to a better game.
When people say they love Baldur's Gate they actually mean Baldur's Gate 2. Baldur's Gate 2 is an RPG masterpiece that is still fun to play 15 years on. Baldur's Gate, on the other hand, is an unfocused learning exercise that straddles the line between engaging and boring, a 3 out of 5 if you will.
The plot of Baldur's Gate is that you're a hapless ward who's cast into a fantasy wilderness, and you must uncover a political conspiracy that unleashes assassins on your arse at every turn. The inner workings of the story are quite interesting although most of it is relayed through letters and books and towards the end, huge clumsy info-dumps. You can choose from a huge number of allies to join you, but beneath their skin-deep personalities they're intended as little more than expendable meat-shields
The combat is based on the 2e D&D ruleset, a self-contradictory and needlessly obtuse system that'll you just have to live with but it's not that complicated. It's easy to get burnt out playing the game as the enemies aren't too diverse, the only real challenge are Mages, and it can be really fucking annoying getting ambushed while resting. You're best weapon is the Quicksave key.
The underlying problem with Baldur's Gate is that its world is too big for the sparse content it has. It's all chaff and little wheat. You can traverse every square-inch of the Sword Coast, and all you'll find is some useless knob who tells a corny joke. Every wilderness area looks the same and there are too many maze dungeons which are a bitch to navigate. There are over a hundred sidequests and they're all bare-bones Fedex jobs which seldom feel rewarding.
If you're going to play this game then get the Enhanced Edition or install mods to remove many of the initial annoyances. Also use a save editor if a quest breaks or your stats suck. Consult a walkthrough if you don't feel like hiking blindly through the woods in search of a lost pair of boots.
Baldur's Gate is only worth finishing once but playing it gave me a greater appreciation for the sequel. Bioware learned from the first game's faults and this guided them into making Baldur's Gate 2 the memorable, hand-crafted RPG epic oozing with charm and filled with adventure that it is today.
VideoGame A game that has to be judged by the standards of its time
Baldur's Gate is suffering from comparisons with its successor and usually not judged on its own merits, which makes an unbiased evaluation more difficult. So, to get this issue out of the way, let's concede the following:
1. Yes, BG 2 is definitely the better game. 2. Yes, from today's perspective (and also a decade ago), BG 1 didn't age that well, unlike BG 2 which still holds up fairly decently despite being almost as old as the first installment.
Given these issues, it's easy to dismiss BG 1 not only as the inferior game, but also as a mediocre experience, and we're not doing the product justice by doing so. Because what often gets neglected when making such an uncharitable assessment is that games also have to be seen through the standards of their time and not those of today, because even those that were once considered masterpieces wouldn't hold up in any way or form two decades later may very well have been groundbreaking in their day. (BG 2 is insofar an exception because it managed to stand the test of time far better than most other games.)
And BG 1 is such a game: it was published in the late 90s, at a time when CRP Gs have run their course and especially the Dungeons & Dragons-license was burdened with a throng of mostly mediocre SSI games. In that era Black Isle's installment felt like a love letter to Dn D, an actual faithful adaptation that actively tried to reflect the world players knew and loved from the Pn P, with its beautiful graphics, its lush and extensive environments, its NP Cs and settlements, its incorporation of the rules (including the magic system) and so on (again unlike SSI where it was normal to cut corners at every opportunity). In a way, unlike its spiritual predecessors, BG 1 felt less like a video game and more like a Pn P experience.
So yes, it might not hold up that well when judged from the perspective of 2010 or 2020. But in 1998 it was head and shoulders above any other Pn P-adaptation I knew and was a similarly novel and exciting experience as its contemporary Diablo was. Would I praise this game as one that has an incredible replay value even today? No. But I also don't regret the countless hours I poured into it back when it was new.