Remember the '90s? They're back—in RPG form! It's been a good year for those of us who believe the late 1990s were the most fruitful time in the role-playing game genre's history. The Wasteland II and Project Eternity Kickstarters have demonstrated that fans have a clear connection with Fallout and the Infinity Engine games. Diablo came back with ambitious goals and mixed results in Diablo III, while the evolutionary Torchlight II carried a more conventional flame. Even Daggerfall can be seen through the continuing influence of Skyrim.
Finally, to end the year, we get the recent re-release of Baldur's Gate, the dominant Western role-playing game of late '90s discourse. From the beginning, Baldur's Gate was treated as the savior of a genre that suddenly and shockingly collapsed in the middle of the decade. Ultima went from superior to substandard seemingly overnight, Wizardry was dormant, and SSI's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons license—which it used to produce roughly 30 games over eight years—had been sold. No wonder fans of party-based RPGs couldn't wait to play Baldur's Gate, a game specifically designed to include the best of video games with the best of D&D. No wonder, when it didn't fail in reaching those goals, that it was considered an instant classic.
Yet despite its reputation, Baldur's Gate doesn't necessarily hold up as well as some of its contemporaries. Its sequel, Shadows Of Amn, was all-around more impressive. Fellow Infinity Engine game Planescape: Torment was a dazzling burst of storytelling, surpassing Baldur's Gate and almost every other game with its creativity. Icewind Dale had the best combat of any Infinity Engine game. Meanwhile, Daggerfall and Diablo are, in retrospect, critical in helping single-character action RPGs to stand on equal footing with the more tactical, party-based style. And finally there's Fallout, which has become the dominant model for Western RPGs due to its morality system, constant character development, and quest hubs.
The Enhanced Edition steps into this simmering not-quite-debate. It's not a remake or a reboot, it's really just Baldur's Gate all over again. If this were released in 1999, we'd be calling it a Game Of The Year edition, with the expansion included and a bit of new content. Thus, the Enhanced Edition could serve multiple purposes: to solidify the game's reputation among fans, to convince skeptics like me of its quality, and to find a new generation of fans (and possibly to show the iPad is a workable platform for traditional RPGs, though that version has yet to be released). Oh, and it could also prove there's a market for an enhanced Baldur's Gate II—even, perhaps, a newly developed Baldur's Gate III.
"If a tree falls in the forest, I'll kill the bastard what done it!"
Baldur's Gate is built on two distinct foundations. First, its overall presentation feels designed to be not just a great role-playing game, but to be the Platonic ideal of a role-playing game. Its tone is that of the ultimate RPG. The story is a straight-up hero's journey: you play an orphan whose adopted world is suddenly torn apart, and you spend the game discovering your true heritage and power. Hell, there's even a 100 percent accurate prophecy that gives the shape of the story away 20 meters from where your character starts a new game.
It's set in the Forgotten Realms, a D&D world that exists simply to be a fantasy world. It lacks the history of Dragonlance, the grittiness of Dark Sun, the horror of Ravenloft, or the weirdness of Planescape. Its music is appropriately epic, a bombastic orchestral-style collection of songs that are quite good—but could also be quite good in a dozen other fantasy epics. The graphics are pleasant and functional, but they lack a sense of style beyond “generic fantasy role-playing game.” It's a Goldilocks game: neither too hot nor too cold, neither too dark nor too cheerful, neither too cool nor too square. A box quote might read “Baldur's Gate is just right for everyone.”
"Poor sod. Takin' a dirt-nap so soon."
In terms of its RPG rules and mechanics, Baldur's Gate turns out to be rather narrowly aimed: it's the ultimate simulation of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition rules. This wasn't a niche at the time. AD&D was the newest form of Dungeons & Dragons, and SSI's barrage of AD&D games ensured computer gamers of the era would have been familiar with THAC0, dual-classing, and Cloudkill spells.
Today, however, much of this feels positively archaic. THAC0 (the dice roll required To Hit an Armor Class of 0), has become a deserved byword for the inaccessibility of the system. It's one of the most dominant stats in the game. Likewise, the permanent stats rolled at the start of the game, rigid class boundaries, and lack of customization options over the course of play mean the single most important decisions you'll make occur before you even start playing. It's all during character creation.
This all takes place in the “Infinity Engine,” which applies the AD&D combat rules to a real-time combat system. The interface is similar to a real-time strategy game like Starcraft, where you loop to select, right-click to move and attack. (Dragon Age: Origins' combat engine owes a great deal to the Infinity Engine.) Baldur's Gate allows orders-while-paused, and includes several auto-pause options, including one at the end of each “turn." That makes it possible to play it as a turn-based game with simultaneous action phases. In theory, this allows the player to micromanage as much as he or she wants. The new mini-campaign, “The Black Pits,” is built around the idea that Baldur's Gate has a good combat system, as it's virtually nothing except fight after fight. But Infinity Engine combat isn't particularly good. In practice, it means spending a lot of time pressing pause and unpause, then watching a bunch of tiny people run around while hoping none of your party members ends up dead.
That hope will be in vain, because your characters will die—a lot. Baldur's Gate focuses on the lower levels of the AD&D experience, where any stray arrow has a decent chance of killing a character. And those characters don't just pop back up at the end of combat—a death tends to require a reload or dragging the corpse back to a temple for an exorbitant resurrection fee. Plus, if the main character is the one killed by that stray arrow, the game ends instantly. The Enhanced Edition maintains the original's very occasional autosaving, so you'll be forced to quicksave often.
One of the constantly cited goals of the designers leading up to Baldur's Gate's release was to recreate the experience of a tabletop RPG, including a slow leveling curve where it can take hours between levels. This has some positive effects. Leveling does feel important when it happens. Destroying enemies who were recently unbeatable is more satisfying here than in most other games. But these are also the rules that make your characters so weak early on and occasionally overpowered if you find yourself in an early-level region later in the game.
"You must gather your party before venturing forth."
The most lasting influence from Baldur's Gate on the role-playing genre? It's an almost accidental manifestation of the design goal to make the game more tabletop-like. The game is multiplayer, designed so others can hop in and out of your campaign. You only create your lone hero at the beginning. If you don't have other humans joining you, you fill out your party by recruiting a variety of different non-player characters, like Imoen the thief, Jaheira the druid, Viconia the cleric, or most famously, Minsc the Berserker and his "miniature giant space hamster," Boo. This model of a lone player-created hero filling his or her party with personality-filled characters has become one of the genre's most prominent features. HK-47 of Knights Of The Old Republic, Fawkes of Fallout 3, Lydia of Skyrim, and Garrus from Mass Effect have all been influenced by Baldur's Gate.
Still, this model of character interaction is largely a simple prototype of what came later. The oft-repeated character cries vary between amusing and annoying (Khalid's “Ch-ch-ch-chia” is especially embarrassing). There's some occasional banter or comment on plot events, but don't expect loyalty quests or long, slow romances. Interestingly, the Enhanced Edition's three new characters are built on the more modern model. They'll talk to your main character more regularly. They'll have their own side quests, motivations, and even possible romances. They're also written slightly differently, with the Wild Mage Neera in particular demonstrating the Whedon-style humor that has become more common since Baldur's Gate's initial release (her shouts of “Eat flaming... or, uh, possibly frosty, death!" were especially noteworthy).
"Evil 'round every corner. Careful not to step in any."
Baldur's Gate's twin motives of being the ultimate RPG as well as the ultimate model of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons led to many of its frustrations. It's both epic and generic, detailed and frustrating. The parts of the game that take place outside of those tensions are where it becomes truly great.
The game's exploration model owes nothing in particular to D&D or previous RPGs, with a geography that consists of a roughly rectangular grid of contiguous regions. Each “square” on that grid serves as its own large region, with a small city filling a single one (though most are wilderness). The best moments in Baldur's Gate come when you get to a new geographical region, see it filled with a black fog of war, and start to work your way through it. Along the way, you'll solve existing quests and find new ones, experience some interesting and funny interactions, or encounter a variety of different monsters.
The fog of war, rare in RPGs but common in strategy games, and the contiguous nature of the map are possibly a unique combination in RPG history. That seems odd because they work very well together. It's possible to crawl through the world of Baldur's Gate and explore every nook and cranny, feeling confident that you've mastered the Sword Coast. At its best, Baldur's Gate ties narrative progression, geographical progression, and character progression together better than any role-playing game before or since. That's enough to recommend Baldur's Gate as a game in and of itself, but it's a pity that it can't always be at its best.
The Good
- Exploration and progression work in harmony
- New characters are interesting and useful
- Returning characters are a critical component of RPG history
- Succeeds at being a generic epic fantasy
- Succeeds at translating AD&D 2nd Edition rules
The Bad
- Infinity Engine combat still a chaotic mess
- Occasional bugs with new characters
- Those accurate AD&D rules mean you'll sometimes have to reload five times in as many minutes
The Ugly
- Winning a tough fight, reaching for the chest and reward, only to be immediately killed by a trap
Verdict: Buy it for its own sake, but also to help get an Enhanced version of its fascinating sequel
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