RPG's are my favorite kind of game, and I liked the old D&D games as well as Fallout and Fallout 2, so I bought Baldur's Gate as soon as it came out. I found it to be enjoyable, strikingly so at first, but I lost interest in the middle of the third chapter, as I became tired of running around with no obvious goal.
Baldurs Gate was an amazing single-player gaming experience for quite a while. The beginning area of Candlekeep is not too challenging, and serves well to get the player into the game. Once the player leaves Candlekeep, the game picks up. The plot is strong and somewhat non-linear, and is well-supplemented by the journal feature. Although there is one action which ends each chapter, the player is free to wander around before completing this action and take part in a variety of quests, some of which are vaguely linked to the main plot, although most are pretty random. This part of the game was fun for some time, even though the quests were usually of the "go here, slay the beast, take the item" variety.
I think what makes this game enjoyable is the characters. You have complete freedom in creating your character, and you may choose amongst a selection of others to fill out the other five spots. The character creation system is a very good version of the D&D system which maintains the same feel as pencil and paper D&D.
In most computer RPGs, the player doesnt have to worry about the characters and their personalities. In Baldur's Gate, on the other hand, the characters have reactions to the world and will say many different comments that go beyond "Aye-aye, sir" and "Let's go". Although their needs are pretty basic (food, sleep, companions of similar alignment, and noticeable progress towards completing the quest), they seem to be more real people than, for instance, the characters in Might and Magic 6 or Diablo. I will never forget the trip to Nashkel where my characters began fighting and arguing about where we were going and when we were getting there, and growing progressively angrier, until I was forced to ditch the evil ones to prevent a fight from breaking out. The little people on the screen were not entirely puppets under my control; they had reactions to their environment which, although they were limited, seemed realistic. The characters also have very funny personalized sayings in reaction to new areas, combat, and a few other things. For instance, Minsc will often tell his miniature giant space hamster, Boo, to "Go for the eyes, Boo!" in combat.
The combat in this game is good, very much like D&D even though it is in real time. Being able to pause or go in real-time is fun and allows strategizing, and works similarly to the system in M&M 6. The combat works well, and seems fairly balanced. The spells look good and work like their D&D counterparts. Hacking and slashing are sufficiently satisfying, especially when you can make the monsters explode from taking too much damage.
A lot of the game can become drudgery if the plot is absent from the section you're in and you have seen and heard all your characters reactions. It takes a long time to walk around the areas, and I could have done with less walking through fields with my hand resting on the space bar, ready to pause at the first sign of enemies. This problem is compounded by the annoying "feature" that makes the monsters in an area re-appear, sometimes in greater numbers, if you load and save too much. The player is forced to choose between saving often and fighting the same Xvarts and Bandits over and over again, or not saving and having to re-play huge sections of the game when they are slaughtered by over-powered mercenaries. I appreciate that Interplay wanted to add realism, but I have always liked it in games when I could clear an area and know it was clear, or at least know that I could run away from pretty much anything random, a la Fallout. I enjoyed the challenging set battles with mercenaries out to kill the party for money, which occurred fairly regularly, but I wish I could have saved the game before these battles without having to fight generic monsters multiple times.
I never played the multi-player in this game because I could not see how it would be better than single player. Maybe if you have some friends who want to play multi-player it would be worthwhile to buy the game and never play single-player, but the multi-player has the exact same plot, maps and enemies as single-player, so I can't see any reason to play both, unless you are absolutely obsessed with this game, which I was not.
One final thing about this game is that it comes on 5 CDs and has a special case for them. My little brother was rough with the case and it wound up breaking, which led to him dropping the first CD a couple times. Once when he dropped it, a piece cracked off, which is something I had never seen before. I don't know if these CDs are extra fragile or if my brother was just too mean to them, but be careful :)
BALDURS GATE 4 IN 1 COLLECTION PC XP/VISTA DVD-ROM BRAND NEW FACTORY SEALED DVD CASE Publisher: Interplay Platform: Windows xp/vista ESRB/Age: (T) Mat...More at eBay
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