Life Changers: Baldur's Gate

By Dene Benham

Welcome to Life Changers!

Despite early apprehensions, choosing the game that changed my life ended up being pretty simple. The game that turned me into a gamer was Baldur’s Gate.

Baldur’s Gate made me understand that calling in sick, or struggling through the day like Simon Pegg at the beginning of Shaun of the Dead, was worth it. To play Baldur’s Gate I’d happily miss Shortland Street or an All Blacks test match. It was a game that swallowed weekends whole, then dug its claws hungrily into Monday morning.

However, describing it ten years on just doesn’t seem to do the game justice. Everything in it has been done since. It’s been done bigger and prettier and with more famous actors. So, I’ll try to avoid rattling on about stunning graphics, surprising plot twists, depth of gameplay and technical innovations (ten years is a long time in gaming) and stick to what I remember loving about the game, the game that I played solidly from the end of the last century to the beginning of this one.

From the beginning Baldur’s Gate hit the right tone. It had a humorous book of secrets with the instruction manual and opening screens filled with dragon fire and faux medieval music. It was Lord of the Rings for those who struggled to read The Hobbit. It was a dungeon master for those who didn’t have enough geek friends to play Dungeons and Dragons. From the start of the over-blown, over-dramatic intro it felt like the beginning of a great adventure.

If you don’t know the story, don’t worry. Have a guess and you’d be right. You’re an orphan being brought up by a kindly mage. After a mysterious attack, with tragic results, you’re left alone in the big bad world. Fast forward a few hundred hours of gameplay and you’re a spell slinging, axe wielding, butt kicking god.

But getting to god status was a process that was not only fun and satisfying, it also took patience and perseverance. Often you had to take things slowly and methodically, and a little bit of luck never hurt. There were hours spent tramping across the country side running from Orcs and bandits, and looking for easy to kill Kobolds to gather those last ten experience points to get to level 3. There were slow, frustrating sorties into caves and dungeons. Frustrating because of the poor party AI, the only valid criticism anyone had of the game at the time.

Everything else about the game was brilliant. Although not the first, Baldur’s Gate used the old isometric top down view. Old now but in its day so much better then static pictures and text of the early adventure games or the clunky screen by screen updates of the first three dimensional efforts. And Baldur’s Gate had shadows, and weather, and ambient noise, all of which had to be turned off because you could only dream of getting a processor fast enough to run it at its highest setting (so not everything has changed in ten years).

Also, Baldur’s Gate was simply packed with multiple story lines, actually useful hidden magical weapons and armour, and dozens of memorable characters. During the course of the game you met, and grew attached to, the likes of clingy girl-pal thief Imoen, the arrogant and powerful wizard Edwin (who may possibly have turned into a woman at some point of the game - or that might be some strange dream I had) and Minsc, the thick-as fighter with a thing for female witches and hamsters.

The way the characters interacted gave them all a wonderful sense of depth and history so that dropping them from your party, or leaving them for dead, was usually coupled with a strange sense of regret. That’s right, regret at dropping an NPC from your party, that’s something I haven’t felt about any NPC in any game since.

However, swapping NPCs was an essential part of the game. The whole Baldur’s Gate series was packed with character and class based missions. If members of your party didn’t like each other they’d argue. If they really didn’t like each other they’d fight and if you and your party’s alignment moved far enough away from theirs, someone might end up a charred husk smouldering in a ditch in some far flung corner of the Sword Coast.

Of course it wasn’t only party members you had to worry about. There were powerful wizard clans, demons, beholders, giants and dragons. And who knew that the pretty average ranger you kept in the party because he was funny would be your only hope against high level enemies because of his ability to set traps that couldn’t be defended against even with the most powerful protection spells. That’s right - that’s the stuff you really needed to know in 1999.

Baldur’s Gate was a game I played through to the end, then played again because I knew I could do better. And when I was done I got the Sword Coast expansion pack and had to play the whole thing again. The same happened when Baldur’s Gate II and Throne of Bhaal came out. And then there were all those internet add-ons that kind of worked, but sort of didn’t, each one a perfectly good reason to go back and play it all over again.

After Baldur’s Gate I dabbled in Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights, but went totally console shortly after that. So I missed the Elder Scrolls revolution and the RAM destroying, marriage wrecking, world domination of World of Warcraft. Perhaps I missed out on the genre’s best, but I’m happy to remember the time I hooked up with Aerie the winged elf, the day I got lucky and killed Drizzt Do’Urden, and the day I found out I was a god.

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ReplyPosted by Randomchikster on 3 December 2008, 03:23PM

I remember Aerie, I still have those games and play them again about every two years. I always found the hardest part was choosing which character to replace when another character came along.

 

ReplyPosted by Grunt of God on 3 December 2008, 04:18PM

Lol, my friends still obsessed with this game :p

 

ReplyPosted by Xanithon on 3 December 2008, 04:56PM

man my brother was on this game all the time he had, it was really fun.

 

ReplyPosted by cute_maori on 4 December 2008, 06:58PM

Never played this game before.

 

ReplyPosted by Insanctity on 5 December 2008, 08:52AM

Come to think of it Baldurs Gate was probably one of the first games I got addicted to, that and FF7.
Trust me you didn't miss out on much by not playing Warcraft

 

ReplyPosted by Trentolsen on 7 December 2008, 03:03PM

never heard of this game sound allrite