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Patient GamersI just finished Baldurs Gate 1 for the first time and really enjoyed it. That's why I want to share my thoughts on. I'm acutally kina fond of the genre and love games like Pillars, KOTOR, Tyranny and already tried BG1 a couple of years ago, but I gave up after some hours (more on that later). In the meantime I finished BG3 twice, played through Owlcat's Pathfinder games and now I wanted to give BG1 another go.
Story: I kinda like it, but it's definitely not on the same level as games like KOTOR 2, Disco Elysium or Tyranny. It's just some plain and simple "someone killed your foster father, now it's time to seek revenge". Actually it is not like really like that, because on your way to revenge you kinda solve the mystery of some evil plot, but at the end it all ties together so you can seek revenge. Overall the story just serves the purpose to let other aspects of the game shine. Talking about those...
Exploration: This is where the game shines the most. The story gives you a really clear path and early on even some urgency to that by introducing two companions that kinda set you on a timer. At least that's what they tell you. AFAIK know there is actually no timer. And that's what kinda set me off the first time I played the game. I was rushing through the story which leads to being underleveld, missing out on XP and some fun side quest. During this try I ignored the "timer" and took my time. I did some side quests, explored some low-level regions I haven't seen in my first attempt and had a lot of fun. And especially with those extra XP the game felt better balanced. I didn't overdid it as I just visited some low-level areas much later in the game, but it felt kinda nice that the game just gives you this much freedom over the whole playthrough. But what even is a big explorable map without some faces to punch...
Combat: Combat can be seen as some mixed bag. In the early game your party is frail as f. It really feels cheesy, how you fight in the beginning. You just kite enemies and kill them with bows and slings and throwing daggers, you enter buildings with a single party member to lure single enemies out of them, Sleep is op end ends whole fights single handedly. But in my opinion, that is another strength about this game. Not because this part of the gameplay is so good. But because the game evolves. Whereas in Wrath Of The Righteous early game and end game fights feel the same (at least for me) and mostly differ by the amount of pre-buffing and high-level spells mostly replacing low-level, in BG 1 the combat evolves over time. Sleep gets useless against stronger enemies. You encounter more and more mages over time, meaning that you can't kite so much and have to react quickly to interrupt them. You gain more spells that you need figure out. Pre-buffs are getting more and more important, but not to the ridiculous levels of Wrath Of The Righteous. All of this might turn people off but I was actually really surprised by the amount of variety the combat offers.
I'd like to mention a particular fight that I remember: I was exploring the red canyon early on and there is that one cleric who fights you with a giant army of undeads. I failed that fight a couple of times, because the normal kiting tactic did not really work. He was using magic, some of the undead were archers und undead are immune to Sleep. So I wondered if I should give up and come back later after some leveling or if iI can find a tactic to beat him. My plan doesn't sound that amazing, but I feld kinda genius at that moment: What if I don't fight this battle fair and square and just beat the cleric, loot him and leave. Because my PC was a fighter/cleric himself and I also had a paladin with me. And both have the Turn Undead ability. So I managed to just scare his army of summons, interrupted his casting with the good ol' Magic Missiles and finished him off with a rain ob arrows. I looted the body and just got the f outta there, because I really didn't want to deal with the horde of undead at this time. Great moment. His loot was really worth it.
After all that praise, I want to get so some "negatives". And those have mainly to do with the game's age. The thing is: BG1 really laid the foundation of modern (C)RPGs. It contains a lot of things that we take for granted these days. But there are also things, the we take for granted, that did not really exist back in the day.
QOL: This is where the game feels kinda dated. I don't know on how many things the Enhanced Edition improved the game, but there are some things, that are really not on today's standards:
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There is no way to see your currently equipped items while you are trading with a merchant. You always have leave the dialogue, switch to your inventory, remember the stats, speak with the merchant and compare. This is really weird.
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The quick bar is really flimsy and not really fun to use for spellcasters.
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The menu controls are terrible. "Load Savegame" kicks you out of the game session. Only click it when you are really certain you want to reload or do a quicksave before. Also: You can exit the inventory or character sheet by pressing Escape. But not the journal. Too many times I went into the pause menu when I did not want to.
Companions: Modern (C)RPGs really put a lot of emphasis on those. BG1 does not. There is an entire army of potential companions (in case you let them die) which leads to them not having long quest lines around them. You really have to use your imagination to bond with them. I actually did not dislike that, because it also took the urge to complete quests for companions I acutally don't care about and just want to complete. But people who start the game with different expectations might dislike that.
Conclusion: If you made it this far, you probably only read this text because BG1 is you favorite game anyways. So yes, it was (probably) groundbraking back in the days, still holds up to this day (in most parts) and is rightfully considered one of the greatest RPGs of all time. I personally am looking forward to play Siege of Dragonspear next and continue with BG2 afterwards. I might even try Icewind Dale. Or Neverwinter Nights. They were all in some Humble Bundle with Wrath Of The Righteous .
Conclusion: If you made it this far, you probably only read this text because BG1 is you favorite game anyways.
Wrong, it's BGII, but we shall watch your career with great interest.
I've also never played the Enchanted Edition extras like Siege of Dragonspear so I hope it's good.
You must gather your party before venturing forth...
Loved the game as a child. Really struggle with the rule system now.
The combat is kind of shallow. There's a lot of tedious kiting, or just rolling the dice and waiting.
The sense of wonder was pretty top notch though.
There have been multiple fan projects to port the Baldur's Gate saga to a newer edition or engine. I think every single port attempt stalled out without releasing anything, though there is a mod floating around out there that changes the Infinity Engine to use a (very limited and buggy) version of the 3.0 ruleset.
I feel like you'd rapidly cross a point of having changed so many rules, you just have a different game with the same story. Which is maybe fine, but at that point maybe just make your own story too.
I'd end up changing like every piece of the rules system if I tried to make it more to my taste.
Yeah, that was a large part of the reason why none of them worked out. You'd need to redesign every encounter to fit with and be balanced for the new rules, and at that point anyone with the required skillset might as well make their own game.
I'd end up changing like every piece of the rules system if I tried to make it more to my taste.
Fortunately someone already did a lot of the work for you. That's one of the mods I consider mandatory for every playthrough and lets you freely tweak a tons of rules.
(@mcforest@feddit.org: this site and its mods might be worth checking out when you move on to BG2, though the big one (the fixpack) is already integrated into the Enhanced Editions and there's a separate mod fixing the remaining bugs.)
Fortunately someone already did a lot of the work for you. That’s one of the mods I consider mandatory for every playthrough and lets you freely tweak a tons of rules.
Oh yeah, the last time I replayed the games I used that. I had some sort of dwarf berserker that was pretty strong, until the end game where being angry wasn't enough.
Wonder if getting it to work on linux is trivial.. Someone did a writeup at least: https://moebiusproject.gitlab.io/mods_on_linux
I've played on Linux and I only remember having issues with case sensitivity when compiling mods with WeiDU, which that tutorial covers. There's also the GemRB project for an open source recreation of the engine, though I don't know if that continued development after the Enhanced Editions came out.
I had some sort of dwarf berserker that was pretty strong, until the end game where being angry wasn't enough.
Ah, the dreaded late-game martial falloff. I had an Archer (a class that can just barely afford grandmastery in one type of bow at the start of the game, making them sniper-accurate when your other party members hit less than half their attacks) that absolutely dominated the first few acts, but became completely useless long before we hit epic levels. It sucks that some builds just aren't viable long-term.
The NPC party members get hardcoded bonuses attached to unremovable items on their character sheet to keep them competitive - even the casters who really didn't need any buffs.
I think Edwin's is the most broken. He has a ring that straight-up gives him 2-3 extra spell slots per spell level, making him far better than any legitimate wizard you can build.
BG1 was a very important game, and it has some charm to it, but I personally don't think it holds up all that well to be honest. The "exploration" involves a lot of just open empty forest zones. The companions are extremely bare bones, both in terms of dialogue/interjections/banter and in terms of quest content. The story is... fine. The whole iron crisis is kind of dry to me, not super compelling. Sarevok was awesome when I was 5, as an adult he's not really all that compelling. The encounter design is pretty crap overall and yes, involves a lot of kiting or spamming Summon Monster.
Fortunately BG2 fixes almost all of that, and ended up delivering a benchmark CRPG that I think still is worthwhile to play and still (largely - it has some exceptions) holds up great.
If you loved BG1, the second game will blow you away. It's a massive step up in quality in every way from the first game.
as much as i agree and love bg2
that first forest tile set post gorions death was just so damn amazing and that feeling of wonder hasn’t been topped for me since
maybe fallout 1 first time you leave the vault
I'm excited. But it will be Siege of Dragonspear first, although opinions on it seem to be mixed.
Dragonspear made by Beamdog, not the original creators. Beamdog have done a lot of good things when it comes to QoL, bug fixing and compatibility in the Enhanced Editions that helped bring these games to a new audience.
One thing they didn't do good at, however, was writing.
Icewind Dale 1 and 2, BG2, Neverwinter Nights and especially its two DLCs, and Planescape: Torment are all just as good, if not better.
Wrath of the Righteous is also hella good, but it also can be overwhelming and there is an insane amount of combat that it can become a slog. But if you get deep enough into it, it basically becomes 3 more games.
Rogue Trader is another OwlCat title that kicks ass (but its WH40k not D&D). Tho I haven't gotten too far in it yet to really give it a full review.
Neverwinter Nights has one massive caveat though - it's not party-based like the Infinity Engine games. IIRC in the original campaign you can only have one other party member at a time and they're entirely AI-controlled. I think you can have two AI companions in the DLCs, which still pales compared to BG's parties of six fully controllable characters.
The DLCs are great though. Hordes of the Underdark is a top-ten RPG.
It is still balanced around basically just your single dude, tho, so it's not like this makes it hella hard like trying to do BG or Icewind Dale with a single PC, and you still get conversations and side quests from the pool of available NPCs (other than mercenaries which are like the guys you can get from Withers in BG3).
Deekin is still one of my favorite companion NPCs in a video game to this day.
Right, but I feel it's still important when recommending NWN to note that it plays differently to every other game on that list. Not bad, it just might not be what people expect going by other D&D games of the era.
(I think Deekin has popped up in a few other D&D products and storylines, which makes me happy. Party on, little Dragon.)
If you made it this far, you probably only read this text because BG1 is you favorite game anyways.
I actually did it because I love reading other people's experiences with old games, even if I don't particularly care about them. So, thank you a lot for this post, it was very entertaining!
I'm a bit sad I didn't play BG1 or many other CRPGs back in the days, because I probably would've loved them. Nowadays I don't have enough time to play big ass games, and games without a compelling storyline just don't attract me the same. But as a kid, I loved wandering around in huge worlds, taking in the sights and finding hidden content/easter eggs.
BG1 only took me 75 hours. That's quite some time, but by today's standards that could be almost considered short. At least compared to the 180 hours it took me to finish Wrath of the Righteous without any DLC. That game was way too long.
A full playthrough of the trilogy (BG1+ToSC*+BG2+TOB) is usually stated as 200-300 hours, for the record. That was before Beamdog's additions so it might actually be much higher now.
* Tales of the Sword Coast, an expansion for the first game that isn't considered a full title like BG2's Throne of Bhaal expansion is.
Thanks for the write-up. I've been pondering Baldur's Gate 1 or 2 in part because I think some of BG3's characters first appeared in the earlier games.
Which edition of D&D rules does the first game follow?
BG1 and BG2 are Second Edition, I had a memory of BG2 including certain aspects of 3e like feats, but that might have been Icewind Dale 2.
Yeah, you're thinking of Icewind Dale 2, which switched to the Third Edition (pre-3.5) ruleset.
I wonder how well I would manage in a 2e world after years of familiarity with 5e, and how difficult it would be to adjust back to 5e afterward.
The biggest mental shift is how in 2e lower defenses are better than higher ones, a completely unintuitive system that they dropped for later editions. Everything else is, while not the same, at least similar enough that you shouldn't get confused.
The lack of cantrips is another, making low level casters miserable to play due to how carefully you need to ration their handful of spells. The lack of bounded accuracy and class-based weapon proficiencies means they won't be any use in melee, so they'll mainly spend their time in combat dealing a few points of damage from a distance using weak slings.
(Though higher-level casters are absurd and can basically solo carry your party, as is tradition for old-school tabletop RPGs.)
Second Edition. It's... not great, especially at the low levels the first game starts you at.
Do you mean that survival is hard at those levels? Were you by any chance playing a wizard?
2e follows an old-school power curve where you're pathetically weak at the start and overwhelmingly powerful at the end, but it takes it to extremes. A single bad roll can be a game over in the first game (especially since this edition loves save-or-die effects), while Throne of Bhaal, the final entry in the trilogy, gives every common enemy a +3 or higher magic weapon just to give them a chance against your party and you still mow them down by the dozens.
The sweet spot in 2e is around levels 7-13, which just so happens to be where BG2's first act sticks you at.
