Baldur’s Gate Retrospective

Now that we had an opportunity to see for ourselves what Baldur’s Gate III will have to offer, a fairly natural reaction is to want to look back and reminisce about the series’ past. As such, you might be interested in this PC Gamer retrospective that takes us right back to the original Baldur’s Gate in all its 1998 glory. An excerpt:

There’s a great feeling of relief when you escape from the rain-battered wilderness into the glow of a warm tavern, resting your weary bones before heading back out into the wild. You really feel like you’re on an adventure, and thanks to an infamously steep difficulty curve, every foray into the unknown feels dangerous. All it takes is one unlucky critical roll to lose a party member.

In a lot of ways, Baldur’s Gate feels incredibly archaic. The bloated interface and incessant item and character management mean you spend a lot of time shifting items around and selling things to merchants. But I actually love this, as time-consuming as it is, because I appreciate having full control over my party. That is, in fact, one of the reasons I love the game so much: How little hand-holding there is. You always feel like you’re in control of your protagonist’s destiny, not just following a prescribed path—even though the story is totally linear.

You can be a saint or a total dick. You can agree to help a farmer find his missing son while sending Imoen into his house to rob him. You can devote your life to defending truth and justice, or screw people over to fill your pockets. It’s a role-playing game in the truest sense, offering not just good and evil paths, but all the grey areas in between.