Review by: Emil Pagliarulo & Pete Hines
Published: January 23, 1999

In the grand tradition of the old Gold Box AD&D games, Baldur’s Gate (BG) from BioWare/Interplay (Black Isle Studios) attempts to recapture the kind of engrossing, “can’t-stop-playing” RPG experience that entertained so many people in the 80s and early 90s. Playable in either single- or multi-player, you guide a party of up to six characters through an expansive world of mystery and danger. The game is set in the Forgotten Realms’ Sword Coast, and your journey is centered around several burning questions, including: 1.) Why is someone trying so hard to have you killed?; and 2.) What or who is behind the problems with the iron in the Sword Coast region? We’re not going to get into the whole area of AD&D rules and describe the specifics of how the game works (THAC0, dice, etc.), but rather stick more to the way BG plays.

At its core, BG is a linear game in that you have a main plot that you need to uncover and tasks you must accomplish in order to progress through the game. However, there are abundant opportunities to embark on various side quests that will take to the far reaches of the game map, trudging through some of the nastiest wilderness you’ll ever see. Quests can be as simple as finding someone’s lost object, or much more complicated and dangerous. How many of these quests you undertake is entirely up to you, and so the length of gameplay can vary widely from perhaps 60 hours to as many as 150.

In the single-player game, you create a single, main character around whom the action will evolve. This character must stay in your party at all times and if he or she dies, your game ends. You can create an almost endless variety of characters using the variables available in the character generation interface. You can choose from different races and character classes, different weapon proficiencies, alignments (i.e., chaotic good, true neutral) and primary statistics (i.e., strength, intelligence). Races bring with them certain special abilities and the opportunity to have a multiple-class character, which has skills from more than one character class. So, a fighter/mage will have the ability to both cast mage spells and use weapons. Character classes also have inherent special abilities, like the thief’s ability to pick locks, detect traps, and hide in shadows, or the ranger’s potential to charm animals in the wild for periods of time.

Not only does the character generation allow you to create a character that is an extension of the player, but you can further customize him/her through the character portrait and sound effects. A variety of character portraits come with the game (they’re actually members of the BG development team or family) and you also have several options for male and female voices for your character. However, if you want to personalize your character(s) even more, you can create your own character portraits and sound effects. Each character has a number of different phrases you’ll hear when you order them into battle, ask them to move, whatever, and there are also random things they’ll say at various points. You can create your own files or grab them from other sources (wouldn’t Stan or Mr. Hat make a great party leader?).

Whether you play a single or multiplayer game, you can add characters to your party along the way, as certain NPCs will offer to join you at various stages. This is where BG can get very interesting. Each character has a personality, and these don’t always mesh. However, instead of simply not liking each other, but having no real effect on the game, the composition of your party can drastically alter your experience. For example, if you have a true good character in your party with a chaotic evil character, they will inevitably begin to bicker with one another and it might even escalate into fighting. You have no control over these exchanges as they are all handled by the individual AI of each character. When the fighting starts, you pretty much have to decide who you want to win and join their side.

Also, the characters in your party have a reputation score, which is a reflection of how they are perceived by the rest of the world. Evil characters start with lower reputation scores than good characters, and the score is adjusted through the game based on your actions, like a particularly good deed, killing an innocent, or donating money to a church. You have to watch your reputation carefully, as evil characters will grow increasingly unhappy in a party with a high reputation, and good characters will not like being in a party with a sullied reputation. Characters that join your party during the game always have some agenda of their own, a quest of some kind. If you ignore the quest that they want to complete, they’ll continually complain until they just end up leaving the party.

One of the really appealing aspects of BG is the multiplayer capability. We’ve played the game in both single and multiplayer modes in order to appreciate the differences between the two. We really liked the multiplayer game because of the ability to generate an entire party and watch the group grow and move through the entire campaign together, much like it was with the Gold Box games. Our multiplayer games, when we played together, were tremendous fun and we loved being able to experience the game together. It is at this point that we should mention how much two programs put out by other companies greatly enhanced our multiplayer experience. We tried both Roger Wilco and Battlefield Communicator, both of which work in unison with BG and never gave us any problems (with some tweaking). The ability to talk to one another, rather than typing everything in the chat box, sped up the game a lot and made things that much more fun.

One of the big differences in the single vs. multiplayer game is the way that the characters in your party interact. We chose to go with a six-character party and forgo the ability to add NPCs to our party along the way. This meant that we didn’t experience some of the challenges inherent in adding NPCs, like dealing with the guy who insists on going to location XYZ to accomplish some task, or the interaction between personalities that clash. In the single-player game, these factors play a much larger role and we didn’t have to go far into the game before we had some serious infighting on our hands and a party character bit the dust in the ensuing scuffle. We found that playing the game in single player didn’t detract from playing it together as a multiplayer game because of the fun factor and the relatively open-ended nature of the game.