Baldur's Gate

The Good
Oi, pretty much everything is good in Baldur's Gate, but I'll try to keep it short. Well, the character generation is easy and pretty, and yet still detailed enough to make it interesting and fun to play around with. As for in-game stuff, I must say that the control interface is really great, as it gives you the option to assign keys to every action, every spell, every item....you get the point. It's easy and fast, even if you stick with your mouse (but why oh why?) and choose not to use the keyboard commands. Design-wise it is very very tight, with an excellent storyline and non-player characters with personality. You notice their personality as you do things or ask them to do things for you ("Sleep lightly, Taskmaster!", whispers Montaron, whenever you ask him to do something). On top of all this, there are tons of fun and quirky details, which adds alot to the atmosphere.

Combat is a breeze aswell. It takes place in real-time, and all you have to do is click (or press a key) and things will happen. Very simple and neat. But what makes it great is the 'pause' option. By pressing space you'll pause the game while you assign actions to your party. This is essential in most larger battles, as it's real easy to loose track of things. Great feature. As for the graphics and the sounds, they're both great. Really nice isometric world with all the right animal sounds, plus the usual howling and growling.

All in all, Baldur's Gate is a well-designed, detail-rich game with pretty spells and bloody sword-fights. And heaps of quests to finish! Almost the perfect role-playing game (if you're into that kinda thing).

The Bad
The only thing that really annoyed me in the long run was the travelling. Though the system is better than most games (Baldur's Gate has divided the world into several smaller areas, giving you a mix between point-and-click travelling and instant travel), it can still get tedious to walk the realms. But that is such a minor complaint when everything else is so darn good.

The Bottom Line
A great role-playing game that should satisfy everyone from a neophyte of the genre to the hardened AD&D fanatic. Simply stunning.

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
First of all this was the first good D&D based rpg we had in years and it's a tremendous comeback. It sports great graphics, great sound, an easy to use interface and an epic rpg world in which to interact. The storyline in the game is actually very good, sure you can complain that in the end it all comes down to "kill Gonzo" but it's one heck of a wild ride till you get there! The plot makes some great twists and bends and it includes remarkably well constructed political conspiracies (which c'mon, how many of us thought of seeing that in a D&D game?), sideplots, plus the usual quest for ultimate power.

The battle system is really love or hate. It makes the mistake of taking the middle road between action and strategy, it's part real-time, and it's part strategy turn-based. So essentially what you have here is something that the grognards will hate because it's too fast and simple, and the Diablo-lovers will hate because it gives them a headache (no offense guys! ;)). Personally I thought it was great, providing the right balance between action and strategy. Besides quite simply it makes the battles fun, which is a requirement in a game that has so many of them. There's also the issue of party members and their reactions which are incredibly realistic, they react both to you and your other companions in very life-like ways according to their alignment. You can have fights break out in your party, discussions or insults flying at any moment as poor Viconia had to endure, etc, etc. Every possible party member feels realistic and behaves in a very life-like manner instead of just being walking inventories.

Ultimately the game provides lots of engrossing roleplaying, with hundreds of npc's to interact with, lots of detailed and vivid locations to visit, killer production values, and a great storyline. Plus it has the option for those ultimate freaks to place your picture and voices to replace the ones that represent you in the game! How cool is that?

The Bad
Well first of all I completely agree with the previous reviewer that the D&D rules suck. At least on computer games. They are far too redundant and complicated at the same time for a platform where all the hassle of having a dungeon master is eliminated, plus I never liked the far too generic stats (strength is for fighters, intelligence for mages, dexterity for thieves, etc.) The racial distinctions don't work that well, plus there is no point in picking a human since the game imposes an experience cap on you, meaning there's a limit to how strong you can get.

The storyline, for as good as it is is left hanging in the end. You kill Sarevok, see him die and that's it, roll credits, everyone go home. What happened to you? What happened to everyone else? Sure, we learn that in Baldur's Gate 2 but would it have killed them to provide a proper closure to the plot? There's also the fact that there isn't that much variety as advertised in the game. As the popular saying around the net goes, you only need "4 fighters and a six-pack" to get through this game, and it's true. Most of the game is geared towards fighting and cracking heads, and you only need an assortment of potions to get you out of the eventual tight spots. Plus a lot of the subquests are of the 'Fed Ex" type which as you can tell, don't exactly require a lot of thinking.

Last but not least I REALLY hate when game designers take the patronizing posture of limiting your savegames and their usage. This has been forever an issue that the hardcore community has always defended with their "it makes the game more realistic" thing and the rest of us loathe since it's akin to telling us how we should play our games. Nobody tells me when or where I should save, ok? If I want to be able to save every 10 seconds I should be able to do so, just because I want to. And for those of you macho-types that defend this conception and do it so on the basis that is more "realistic" and "challenging", here's a tip: DON'T SAVE. But let whoever wants to do it!

Returning to BG (sorry for that) the game allows you to save anywhere you want, but actually makes the insult of penalizing you for using those saves. Whenever you load a game, all the creatures that were around you respawn, which would be nice if it were a controlled respawning (since you may want to return to do some hack & slash in order to gain experience), but as I said, this is done to penalize you for loading games, so the respawnings are usually ridiculous AND cumulative, which make it downright suicide to save and load on dungeons. On the worst of cases you may have fought 5 kobolds in a corridor on Nashkell but if you re-load for whatever reason you will have to face 10 kobolds and 3 commandos, re-load again and we are talking 17 kobolds, 8 commandos, etc. etc. Lovely, isn't it? Your only answer whenever some bad thing happens to you in a dungeon is to then quit the game and re-load, or re-load and get the hell out as quickly as you can.

The Bottom Line
In the end Baldur's Gate is a great game. Sure, it receives a fair amount of hate because it isn't perfect (but is hailed as such), but let's be serious here folks: Baldur's Gate is a great rpg, and probably the greatest D&D based for it's time. Sure it brought a lot of hoopla with it's "isometric-ness" that surely has all the Wizardry fans in the world screaming in horror, but it is still a great game. Besides where else can you play with a space hamster??? ;)