Baldur's Gate

The Good
I loved EVERYTHING about this game. The musical compositions rate up there with Carl Orff, sounds like music from something like a Braveheart battle. The music written for this game is classic in itself. I have the intro theme on CD and listen to it as though I would other music. The game was an instant jaw-dropper for me and my AD&D buddies... for once, it felt as though we were instantly submerged in a real-life forgotten realms campaign. The rules and modifiers follow the paper N' pen game to a T. Extremely accurate.

Nothing was cheesy about this game, just a serious hardcore RPG for hardcore gamers. The path is somewhat linear but enough freedom to allow you to explore areas that you would get horribly reamed if you weren't strong enough (Something most RPGs today don't let you do). The atmosphere of the realm is such a beautiful recreation of the Paper N Pen game, some recognizable characters appear such as the almighty human form of Paladine AKA Fizban... the infamous and deadly drow elf, Drizzt.

This game was so addicting to me and my friends, we literally cut the outside world off for a month after buying this classic. I believe it was the first gamed developed using the old engine and its a shame they quit using it because these games blow the new NeverWinter Night style games out of the water. No polygon 3d engine will every produce colors and the hand drawn background art like in this game. The game is huge, many many hours of exploring, fighting and town wandering.

The game has a full day cycle where you can tell if its getting close to sunset or morning. The great thing about this is like the Ultima series, different events happen during the day and night. The town of Baldur's Gate is almost like 2 different towns depending on whether or not you go in at night or day.

I loved everything about this game... timeless. A perfect recreation of how the paper n pen game WOULD look if you could actually see it.

The Bad
Setting up the pause features can get a bit annoying, sometimes you want it to pause after certain events, others not. You have to go back in and change it every time you want to adjust it.

If you didn't do the full install, prepare for some disc swapping. 5 to be exact. Why was it on 5 discs?? The whole game can be compressed and fit on 2.

Much too difficult to play without using the pause features. Especially when you're trying to control 6 guys, 3 of which are spell casters, trying to fumble through your spells, cast them, aim them... it would be much too hard fighting in real time.

Some poor AI path-finding code. I think they addressed this in a patch but there are still some problems even after the patch. If you click to walk too far ahead of the character, the characters will start walking very stupidly, running in to walls and each other. VERY VERY frustrating in combat!

Characters can block each other in tight quarters!! Very annoying. And some of the scenes and areas are too small for 6 people to fight in. One could argue that this is a realistic factor but the AI sometimes makes dumb choices in those events.

Mages you encounter and have to fight are extremely difficult in my opinion, especially towards the end of the game. As though a high level mage should be difficult, sometimes its ridiculous.

The Bottom Line
One of the best RPG's EVER EVER created... a faithful recreation of the Paper and Pen version of AD&D... a MUST PLAY for any RPG fan...a MUST MUST MUST play for fans of the paper n pen version of AD&D!

The Good
Oh how much I wish I could love this game. Before the game was released I eagerly waited it hoping the world would see another oldschool RPG but alas, the result was big load of crap. At the first glimpse the game looks nice, it feels like any epic big RPG, you got a massive world you can walk in, you got many characters and such... the feeling is there. And the music is somewhat nice, although it's way too little of it. I guess that's all the good I can say.

The Bad
First of all... the D&D system. I hate it. When making characters, a player essentially presses reroll a thousand times to gain super stats. The element of race is very weak, and it just seems that Elves has more intelligence and stuff like that, which makes it far too specific. Any mage will automatically select an Elf because he's better with that kind of stuff, that's it, the selection of class controls which race you are. To me, it gives me the feeling that the race element isn't there, the advantages should either be removed (so that real roleplayers can select whatever race he likes to roleplay without thinking about disadvantages) or be non-specific (so that the race only slightly bends in that general direction the player wants to play). You never get the feeling you're growing since you gain levels so darn sloooooow, and there's almost no choices when rising in levels and the stats element is so weak, it just isn't fun. The D&D rules are obviously made for board playing where you have a single game you play for months and months, and this isn't the case with most games (unless you like playing games like Diablo with the same character over and over again in years.). The makers should play games like System Shock 2, Ultima Online, Ultima Underworld, which I personally think are very good examples of games with excellent RPG systems. Another bad thing about the D&D system... dices... most random elements is based on the single throw of a dice. This is a waste, computers are capable of doing extreme mathematical jobs, and combat is based on the throw of a dice??? For instance a game like Jagged Alliance 2 uses very advanced algorithms for calculating the trajectory of a bullet, as the end result the random element is very balanced. This is not the case in Baldur's Gate, you select an enemy and pray to god you hit. Okay, I'll stop with my bashing of the D&D system and actually go onto the game itself, the readers who like D&D system should just ignore this paragraph anyway.

The combat system is insanely simple, you can pause the action with spacebar, and you give limited orders to your characters. Basically almost in every fight you'll just want to click on your characters and click on the enemies and hope you win. There's little element of tactic or challenge... I hate the combat system. One thing which intrigued me at first in the game was the thief element, you go into houses at night and steal stuff... sadly, that element is weak, you essentially picklock the lock, go into and look into each drawer for anything worthwhile. There's no element of sneaking, or anything thief-like. I'm not sure how the element should be like, but anything else besides this anyway would do I guess. Anyway, after one breakin you're doomed to be bored with that.

The game takes 5 cds, and you feel like you're playing a game which is 15 years old when you needed to change diskette all the time... why? Why the heck did they do this? I'm not sure why it takes so many cds, there's not many cutscenes, there's not much spoken dialogue... the only logical solution is that every 2d background is stored like one gigantic bmp-alike file. Which would be simply stupid, since the backgrounds are simple and dull, and in that case why didn't they just go for a tilebased system? This is just a complete waste of space. And for those who don't have big enough harddrive to copy all the cds, be prepared to do a good deal of cd swapping.

The storyline is one big cliche and boring, there's little replayablity value since nothing is different the second time around, the sounds are nothing to brag about... the game is plainly dull.

The Bottom Line
The last line in my "bad" section sums it up nicely... dull, dull and dull. For those who like the D&D system and who like light RPGs with little to offer will perhaps like this game. Hardcore gamers should burn the game at sight. The funny thing is that the crappy engine has actually been used for one addon, two spinoff games, and even the sequel used the same engine, and they all use a massive amount of cds. A waste of space.

The Good
Everything. First of all, the graphics: great, awesome, stunning, realistic, and the ability to import your own "custom" portraits if you don't like the ones the game has to offer, who could ask for more? Next, the sounds: interesting music, every character has their own voice which reflects their personality, and again you can use your own custom voices for the game (I even recorded my own voice speaking my character's lines). Thirdly, the AI: Your characters will become happy or upset depending on their alignment and your actions. I have actually had a couple of evil-aligned party members walk out on me because I kept doing good deeds and raising my reputation to the "heroic" level. Fourth: the game engine. Why can't all RPGs use this engine? It certainly is innovative, and user-friendly, and generally just the best RPG engine I've ever seen. Those who don't like the engine really show that they have not played the game very much. And lastly: replayability. Very much so. There are literally hundreds of side quests, and you will probably play the game several times before you find them all (I've had this game since it first came out, and I still haven't found all of them). Also, the Tales of the Sword Coast add-on adds four or five new areas to explore, with new treasures and magic items which cannot be found elsewhere in the game.

The Bad
The only problem I had with the game was the fact that you could not equip more than one form of magical protection on the same character (like a Ring of Protection +1 could not be equipped on my thief because she was already wearing Shadow Armor). There is nothing in the AD&D rules about this being forbidden. Whose idea was that?

The Bottom Line
If you are a hard-core RPG player, I would not tell you to get this game, because if you truly are, you already have it. Truly an epic game, and already a classic six short years later.