In 2016 I began to seriously engage in tabletop roleplaying with my friends. As it grew into the lion’s share of my face to face game time, one of the side-effects of this new love has been a new interest in computer roleplaying games, or CRPGs. Since I’ve spent most of my life as a Nintendo gamer, roleplaying has never been high on my list. Unless you count Zelda games, before 2019 the only real roleplaying game I had completed was Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door. (Nintendo, if you read this, I would gladly pay full retail for a remastered version of this game on the Switch.)
When you combine the desire for a CRPG experience with an interest in classic PC games, I suppose it wasn’t long before I found my way over to Baldur’s Gate, the classic CRPG originally released in 1998. Along with the original Fallout, Baldur’s Gate is often credited as the game that made roleplaying games vital once again to Western developers. It was the first game developed by Bioware, who would go on to produce the Mass Effect games and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It also spawned a very successful sequel, and as the first game to implement the Infinity Engine, it served as a template for other classic CRPGs from the turn of the millennium, like Planescape Torment and Icewind Dale. I played the Enhanced Edition, released several years ago from Beamdog Studios. This included several adjustments to make the game just a little more palatable to modern audiences, even bringing it to mobile devices.
I’m not sure I actually qualify as a “modern audience,” but a couple of things made Baldur’s Gate immediately appealing to me. First of all there’s its setting in the Forgotten Realms. A longtime fan favorite among roleplayers, the Forgotten Realms is still the default setting in Dungeons & Dragons to this day. Secondly, the year 1998 is squarely in my nostalgia zone. That’s when I played PC games the most, titles like Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, and of course, Starcraft. Baldur’s Gate is clearly from a world where real time strategy was still a major genre in PC gaming, because that’s basically the control method it uses.
Baldur’s Gate also represents a move away from the tile-based terrain that had dominated CRPGs up to that point. Instead enormous backgrounds were rendered into the game, making the game take up a whopping five CD-ROMs. The character sprites move around the rendered backgrounds, giving the game an almost painterly feel. When you reach the edge of one of these backgrounds, you are presented with a zoomed-out map with every explorable area on it, and you pick the next one to which your party will travel. A huge number of these areas are unnamed and are not strictly necessary for the quest. They are mostly wilderness areas that exist for their own sake, often with ruins or hidden quests tucked away for the player to find on their own. While Baldur’s Gate is far from the first CRPG to really embrace a huge open world for the players to explore, it doubles down on that format as the bulk of the game.
The combat in Baldur’s Gate was also the first example I know of turn-based combat represented in real time, with a pause button used to issue orders. All of the minutia of D&D combat (at least the AD&D Second Edition version of it) is represented here, where characters go in initiative order and make attacks with weapons or spells that are determined through invisible die rolls. It makes sense if you have ever played D&D, though the end result can feel pretty chaotic. The idea is for the player to pause the game and issue orders to specific characters, telling your mage to cast whatever spell on whichever target, or issuing orders to your heavy fighter character to make them attack a particular target.
Baldur’s Gate uses the ruleset from the Second Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which has a few little perversities that make the game hard to learn, particularly for modern D&D players. For one thing, in 2e your AC is better when it is lower. There is also the little matter of THAC0 (meaning To Hit Armor Class 0), the mechanic that determined the success of your attack roles in 2e. It’s actually not too different in practice from what is used today, but it’s a backwards way of figuring it out for the player, and it feels awfully counterintuitive. Still, it was the current version of D&D in 1998, and one of the big selling points for the game twenty years ago was that it recreated the tabletop experience. This in spite of the fact that D&D has never been designed to function as a computer game, something that shows in the final product. There are WAY more magic items and spells than are actually useful, but those things exist in the game because it existed in D&D. Likewise, there is far more combat in Baldur’s Gate than there would be in any tabletop game of D&D, where a single large-scale fight can take up most of your evening. All of these eccentricities lend the game a somewhat woolly quality, as if it placed fidelity to the original ruleset over what might be called good development.
The mechanics mostly get the job done, but in the end they aren’t really the point of the game. Both Baldur’s Gate and especially its sequel have always been cherished as exercises in great video game storytelling. In the first game the player is an orphan leaving their home, Candlekeep, and their adoptive father, Gorion, for the first time. From there you are given some quests and some direction, but you can take it in pretty much whatever way you like. A concrete narrative does emerge eventually, but in the first half of the game in particular it’s pretty subtle. It was certainly engaging, but it was also hard to escape the feeling that it wasn’t totally clear what the overall story was for the first two-thirds of the game.
The truth is that the first Baldur’s Gate has something of a pacing problem. Most of the first half of the game is spent doing things that are actually important, but don’t really feel like it in the moment. Not only that, but the big story goals the game places in front of you are not actually attainable for a while. Players who try to race to the next section of the story will find themselves in over their head quickly, because this game represents a low-level adventure in D&D, and you’ll need to grind for a while. Lots of RPGs require the player to do some grinding, but in Baldur’s Gate the grind feels particularly transparent because of how many wilderness areas there are in the game. In the second half of the game, after the characters enter the city of Baldur’s Gate itself, the plot suddenly picks up and moves at a breakneck pace, cutting off some of the exploration that the huge city is just begging for. The overall story is strong, but it reveals itself in a rather lumpy way.
The combat does the game no favors in this regard. While there is a lot of space to plan and make interesting tactical decisions, the fact that the game is based on rolling dice means that a shocking amount of the time your character will die, even when the odds say they shouldn’t. A human DM might find a way to mitigate this, but the computer doesn’t really care Like many late-90’s PC games, it is recommended that the player make liberal use of the quick save feature, reloading old saves after failure. The rhythm of exploring wilderness, engaging in combat, and save-scumming until you succeed, is what Baldur’s Gate is made of. The combat does get less streaky as your party gains levels, making you less likely to die when facing wolves in the middle of nowhere, but it is still slow going.
This is the Baldur’s Gate experience, and it has been for twenty years. It represents not just a game-changer in the CRPG genre, but the most important D&D video game since Pool of Radiance, the very first D&D computer game in 1988. It’s place as a classic has been established for years now, and I would say it deserves that reputation. That said, this is a long, difficult game with lots of very 1998 design choices. It is most rewarding for the kind of D&D players who learn rulesets and get joy out of min-maxing their character builds. There’s something to be said for the challenge that is present here, but I’m more the kind of player who cares about the overall broader narrative more than tactics. As such I found myself losing motivation to continue playing. Beamdog, the developers of the Enhanced Edition, understood this might be the case, and included in their versions of Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 something called Story Mode. This is essentially an invincibility switch. Your characters can’t die, and the need for save-scumming is basically erased.
No doubt a lot of old fans of the game will think this is an abomination, but it was exactly what I needed to see Baldur’s Gate through to the end. I put in 20 hours of what felt suspiciously like work before basically quitting the game in exhaustion. Story Mode allowed me to return to the experience and treat it like, well, a game. I was no longer annoyed at having to brave my way through huge wilderness areas to find a quest item, or afraid to open a secret door for fear that an army of trolls was on the other side. It’s not a perfect solution, because it makes combat a mere speed bump, and combat is a huge part of Baldur’s Gate. Pursuing loot becomes meaningless in Story Mode, since you’ll never lose a fight or find the need to upgrade your gear. But the positive effect is that it refocuses the game on interaction with NPCs and exploration, two of what the current designers of D&D call the three pillars of roleplaying. It was at this point that I began to really get into the groove of Baldur’s Gate. I felt more free to engage in dialog trees, to accept any quest that was given to me, and to explore every inch of the map. And most importantly, I grew more attached to all of the different characters you encounter throughout the game.
The characters are where I connected with Baldur’s Gate the most. You will meet all sorts of people on your journey, many of which are available to join you on your quest. You only ever get a party of five other playable characters besides yourself, so each game will play out differently depending on who joins you on your journey and what quests they open up. There are some who will be more common among parties than others, like Imoen, a rogue who joins the player in Candlekeep. However, others are hidden in strange places on the map, and sometimes quite far into the game. This is where I can see myself playing the game through again someday, just to create a different party and see where their stories take me. Beamdog also added their own new characters in the Enhanced Editions, though they have proven somewhat controversial among longtime fans. For what it’s worth I had Neera, a wild mage, in my party for most of my playthrough. I noticed that she tended to utilize voice acting for her dialog more than the original characters. Of course there are also tons of non-playable characters in the game too, some of whom are just there for their own sake. I especially liked the guy who, if you talk to him, just follows you around interrupting you until you either leave the map, or just kill him. They didn’t have to put that guy in there, but he’s there, and it demonstrates the attention to character and detail that the original developers got right on the first try.
Beamdog’s contribution extends beyond the game itself. In 2016 they also released Siege of Dragonspear, an expansion pack that bridges the gap between Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2. The original Baldur’s Gate did have its own expansion, Tales of the Sword Coast, but it added more quests to the game, not a new storyline. (Tales of the Sword Coast also adds Durlag’s Tower, a huge dungeon-crawl often celebrated for its brilliantly diabolical design.) Siege of Dragonspear is kind of a mixed bag, though it does provide some different sorts of quests than were in the original game. It revolves around a large-scale war, so there are several large battle set pieces that distinguish it from the original experience. It suffers most of all from a need to take the character from point A to point B, sometimes transparently so. It will occasionally present you with what seems like a major choice, but when you try to do something weird it immediately pushes you back onto the tracks. There’s not a huge sense of agency, in other words. It’s a decent enough campaign if you are interested in the whole Baldur’s Gate saga, but it’s definitely a step down from the games on either side of it.
Isometric CRPGs had their heyday in the late 90s and early 2000s, but they are having another moment currently. Games like Pillars of Eternity and Divinity: Original Sin have given us new entries into the genre, and Beamdog’s own efforts to release Enhanced Editions of all of the old Infinity Engine games has put the classics back on people’s radar. That means that next year, we will get Baldur’s Gate 3, from the Larian Studios, the makers of Divinity: Original Sin. From that standpoint it’s fun to go back and see one of the games that really started established the genre in the first place. Baldur’s Gate is a classic, and it’s been delighting roleplayers for decades now. It’s worth digging into, because it does a great job at giving the player a world to explore and get to know. There are lots of tactical challenges that will delight certain people, but even if that’s not your bag, the Enhanced Editions allow anyone to put in the time to enjoy this epic. If you’ve never dug into computer RPGs before, this is a terrific starting point.
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