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Did Baldur's Gate really have an impact?

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IncendiaryDevice

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Awesome, more quotes to mine:

I did enjoy IWD to an extent but wasn't crazy about it.

Still decent but nothing special and forgettable.

IWD 2 on the other hand I didn't like at all

Today I learned that hordes of shitty skeletons and lizards aren't trashmods.

I have no problem with there being skeletons in tombs or lizard men in wherever you found them.

Why don't you fire up IWD since you love it so much and go kill some skeletons, super exciting gameplay xD

If you're having trouble with the masses of skeletons, lizard men and goblins in IWD you clearly just suck at games in general.

In my spare time I like to fire up IWD and kill skeletons over and over with little to no risk.

I beat IWD once. Not a fan of mediocre 20-25 hour dungeon crawlers so that's all I could stomach.

& I checked all the ratings on all these posts & I gave him a grand total of two :rollseyes: somewhere in the middle there, about when the whole skeletons thing started to prove it was pointless talking to him. & neither were about IWD2. It seems the senile old fucker is confusing me with the half a dozen other people who were rating him Retarded & Shit & etc. Such is life.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the game PEACH let us know what you thought of the monster variety when you're finished :)
 

Freddie

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Baldur's Gate back in the day sure as heck had impact to game scene, for the better and worse.

For lot's of people with PnP background and experience from Bard's Tales, Gold Box games, Ultima etc. fantasy games, I don't think vast majority hardly knew what was happening in cRPG space and had lost all hope for getting anything for years. Also generation that played PnP / Gold Box etc. games back in the 80's were maturing, had other priorities in life. And then suddenly there is this game where press say it's actually pretty decent, then people say it's actually pretty good. In retrospect it had much to do with about people who liked to try if they could revisit their past PnP / cRPG experiences again, nostalgia. Baldur's Gate was right game at the right time to appeal that niche market.

I also think that big contributor to commercial success was that people even get to know about it. IMO Bioware very consciously took advantage of all brand building TSR/Wizards of the Cost had done, much better than SSI back in the day with their AD&D games. This didn't only helped them to reach people who were interested in cRPG's but gamers in general.

How good cRPG in general Baldur's Gate is in comparison to Fallout? IMO Fallout is in much more sum of more than it's parts than Baldur's Gate, but that's beside the point if you think of target audiences of that era, which somewhat reflect audiences whom cRPG's are targeted even today. (It's important to note though that both games were successful enough to have sequels produced).

Baldur's Gate can be faulted for many things. It feels quite a shallow game when you replay it. That said, experience may vary a much depending how much player is immersed and invested in filling thing with player own imagination. Building the world, including characters populating the world Baldur's Gate had much more defined characters (conveyed to player via party banter, graphical presentation etc.) it was light years ahead of old games, which were much more abstracted and managed to hit some sort of golden ratio between players who liked abstraction, either because they liked to imagine everything, or they approach was (game play) mechanical and those who wanted more story, more elements to create their own fantasy. The latter turned out to be, according the information I'v gathered via Codex and other sources, also the birth of certain phenomena, which ironically has destroyed whatever was left of Bioware. Infamous example is character Imoen, who was supposedly had much more active role in Baldur's Gate but her lines got lost due some mishap in Bioware. Bioware however noticed that many players got really attached to Imoen, because she was so passive. This also brought in folks whom had this fantasy about Imoen and main character romance (they are sisters).

Thinking Baldur's Gate as game on today's, perhaps even past standards, makes it IMO a bit shallow experience. It's appeal IMO rest much more on it's characters and overall, things Gold Box games weren't able to represent due technical limitations of late 80's early 90's tech among other things. But we can ask for example, if campaign overall is as good as it's in Pool of IMO Pools campaign if better. Is it better than in Savage Frontier games? Maybe SF games campaigns didn't exactly had much of flesh to begin with IIRC, so yes.

There is also that scope and focus on Baldur's is entirely different. While I can see many commercially good reasons to make main character a Bhaal Spawn, it's whole different situation for developer and player when plot revolves like that around the main character, which is practically players alter ego. Whatever they thought, IMO for developers I think much better practical example of using a character who has some sort of supposed destiny to begin with, is Final Fantasy VII.

Where Baldur's Gate succeeded was making boring progression from level 1 to 3-6 actually bearable considering how much players need to spend their time to 'explore' the map, which is clicking the mouse. I can't fault Bioware for not having a practical solution for issue we still have today. In PnP I was never told as player, or as DM never told to players to do something silly when I detail the route to their destination (even if there were dice rolls for random encounters where they made sense). In cRPG, there isn't this sort of practically instant travel, but players keep clicking on map, imagining he is exploring, when he is actually just repeating very mundane task. Today we have Shadowrun games, where party uses metro, no need to keep clicking the mouse at all. Of course there was Fallout with large world map where player set destinations, or for more traditional approach, Wasteland 2, where player simply set destinations on map which just is in smaller scale and but has hazards.
But back in the day, I can understand that Bioware wanted to show off and create those sceneries where much of nothing happens, which is actually all right and according to rules of Forgotten Realms settings.

Bioware managed to make a lot of things right. Pulling a campaign with focus on dramatic main character, rule system that is leaves a lot to be desired (AD&D). They also managed to give story and especially characters depth, like never before.

In scope of cRPG AD&D history, say Pools of Radiance and it's sequels, Baldur's Gate managed to tell a different kind of story and be a different kind of game. Baldur's Gate manages to tells a story and be a game of some very few from all of those thousands of NPC's in Forgotten Realms. Few who could had in alternative universe as well left from from Hillsfar whom you never know and never care when if fight for Phlan in Pools of Radiance.

Baldur's Gate succeeded commercially because it was like a drop of water on the desert. It wasn't terrible game, not terrific either and succeeded in marketing and filling certain void that gamers felt had at the time in cRPG space. It left legacies which are for the better and worse. The most important thing however, I think is that Baldur's Gate was IMO succesfull where it tried to best Gold Box games, in a small scale. Now there are much better games out there, but I don't think that would necessarily be so, if Baldur's Gate and Fallout (add Final Fantasy VII) weren't been known and liked (commercially viable) products.
 

octavius

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Baldur's Gate was also quite hyped.
Dr. Ray was very active in the comp.sys.rpg newsgroup for example, and it was evident in the year before it was released that BG1 ws going to be big.
 

Cael

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and a beloved dragonkin Codexian comes to the conclusion that there is no exploration in Baldur's Gate at all.

To be fair, and in line with this whole notion of talking about a game for its 'feelz' rather than factual reality, I honestly didn't feel like I'd 'explored' anything in BG1. I came away from the game with no sense of what that region was like nor what kind of people/creatures inhabited it. I remember rocky hilltops & trees & being constantly 'bugged' by respawning random encounters that were either wolves or bears or some low level humanoid, sometimes with go-faster skins, but got no sense that any of them actually lived in those regions, they might as well have been abstracted blobber random dungeon encounters, but a blobber makes up for that with every room & nook and cranny being something unexpected, BG didn't really have much in that regard, a Basilisk camp here, a nutty ghost there, but no knobs to turn or secret panels to reveal.

The city itself is no different, it's like a mass produced government funded estate where one architect writes a basic plan & the builders just replicate it until all the land is used up. The city had lots of NPCs wandering about but felt dead as a doornail, and certainly not the hub of some giant region, which BG2 actually manages to do. Explore one district of BG city & you've explored them all, the same as the wilderness areas.

There's a difference between exploring and just nobbing about in an area & that difference is in the idea that exploration is the hunt for something, usually something new and unexpected where, the further you travel, the stranger things become. BG was just nobbing around, like when you're on the town with your mates and decide to do a pub-run because it's boring to stay in the same pub all night, even though all the pubs are pretty much the same, it just adds a bit of movement into the process.
The problem with BG's outdoor areas is that they are too big for the speed the characters move and also the content they have. It is the same complaint I have with NWN OC's maps: slow movement speed and relatively unpopulated areas. SoU and HotU actually inverted this, with tightly made maps with lots to do in most places. NWN2 backslid a bit, but it was still far better than NWN OC and BG.

It didn't help that BG's pathfinding is pretty bad, and there are a lot of times when the toons take the long way around, or worse, take a path that you haven't explored because the toons magically know the corridors connected. The latter merely made them aggro a bunch of mobs and usually resulted in a lot of arrows or worse sticking out of them (Garrett: Is that my spleen? Sweet Milil, it is!).

However, the game play and the story isn't that bad. It just needed a lot of tightening up or more content to fill up the empty spaces, and better pathfinding. If there was a game that cried out for a real EE, BG was it. What we got instead is a travesty.
 

Dawkinsfan69

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It didn't help that BG's pathfinding is pretty bad, and there are a lot of times when the toons take the long way around, or worse, take a path that you haven't explored because the toons magically know the corridors connected. The latter merely made them aggro a bunch of mobs and usually resulted in a lot of arrows or worse sticking out of them (Garrett: Is that my spleen? Sweet Milil, it is!).

I just beat BG1 and holy shit this. The pathfinding and retarded AI really hurts the game. I had to reload multiple times because my characters would often get stuck INSIDE one another, especially when moving through tight spaces (halls/cliffs). Or when you click a spot that's like directly in front of everyone and 3 people run off in a totally opposite direction??

I agree that movement speed is a bit too slow but I think that about pretty much every game. Having slow movement speed is a good way for devs to inflate playtime so they can write "40+++ hrs content" or whatever on the box. Didn't bother me as much here as games like divinity or morrowind though where I actually cheated to increase movement speed.

I liked BG's story a lot, felt compelling. Also liked that side quests were basically like "Hey you're an adventurer. Can u go kill some spiders that infested my house?". Simple and to the point, I don't need 5 paragraphs of exposition and it fits especially considering BG is for low level DND characters.

But MAN the combat can be a drag especially in tight places where your party is stumbling all over one another because of horrible pathfinding. It's not so bad in open spaces though but needing to pause every 1/2 second to micromanage every motion gets really tiring towards the end.
 
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YanBG

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I just beat BG1 and holy shit this. The pathfinding and retarded AI really hurts the game. I had to reload multiple times because my characters would often get stuck INSIDE one another, especially when moving through tight spaces (halls/cliffs). Or when you click a spot that's like directly in front of everyone and 3 people run off in a totally opposite direction??
You haven't discovered the "Enhanced Edition" maybe?:smug:
 

Cael

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Awesome, more quotes to mine:

I did enjoy IWD to an extent but wasn't crazy about it.

Still decent but nothing special and forgettable.

IWD 2 on the other hand I didn't like at all

Today I learned that hordes of shitty skeletons and lizards aren't trashmods.

I have no problem with there being skeletons in tombs or lizard men in wherever you found them.

Why don't you fire up IWD since you love it so much and go kill some skeletons, super exciting gameplay xD

If you're having trouble with the masses of skeletons, lizard men and goblins in IWD you clearly just suck at games in general.

In my spare time I like to fire up IWD and kill skeletons over and over with little to no risk.

I beat IWD once. Not a fan of mediocre 20-25 hour dungeon crawlers so that's all I could stomach.

& I checked all the ratings on all these posts & I gave him a grand total of two :rollseyes: somewhere in the middle there, about when the whole skeletons thing started to prove it was pointless talking to him. & neither were about IWD2. It seems the senile old fucker is confusing me with the half a dozen other people who were rating him Retarded & Shit & etc. Such is life.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the game PEACH let us know what you thought of the monster variety when you're finished :)
At first I was wondering who you were talking about. So, I had a look. And wished I hadn't.

There is a very good reason why he is on my Ignore list: He lies and makes up stuff about others in order to character assassinate, as you found out the hard way. It is not that he is confusing you with other people. He just plain makes things up and accuse you of it. For example, he accused me of doing bad things using PMs. I disabled that feature about two days after I joined the forum as I didn't want to deal with Codex elitist shits accusing me of being an alt and trying to find information to dox me. With this guy, when you have to choose between malice and senility, go with malice.
 
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Lilura

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Cael is a hyper-aggressive, butthurt turd who struts around the forums spreading misinfo about D&D cRPGs, based on his tabletop charlatanry.

Ask Cael about ANYTHING: the clown is all-too-ready to pose as an expert on literally every field of human endeavor.
 
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BG1 to me is my preferred game of the 2. Blasphemy, I know, but I enjoy low level D&D content. I liked the simple quests, the relaxing atmosphere of exploring the wilderness, even if it a lot of it was empty. The empty spaces also added to the overall atmosphere of the game. You felt like you were exploring real wilderness, not being led from set piece to set piece. You could stumble on things that may not be super awesome questchains of content but that added to the feel of the game. In BG2, it's all too epic. Tons of content, thrown at you right away, some hinting at time limits. Yes it does some things well, but I found the magic to be overwhelming, especially modded with SCS where you had to have so many exact types of spells that it just got overwhelming. It has more in-depth content but lacks the charm of the first game to me. And the way they had you explore all that wildnerness and then introduce a massive, rich city some 50 hours into the game was no small feat, it was genius. It broke up the wilderness exploration with city exploration and I'll never forget crossing that bridge to the city, even if I did first do it in just 2013 with the EE, and exploring every single shop and house in the city. The game is just perfect to me.

BG2 almost has too much content and is too dense. So much banter, dialogue, quests, magical items, huge spellbook; it's too much at times. I like my adventures more relaxing where you can just take your time and enjoy the sights, even if some of it is "empty", it's not empty of feels and atmosphere. Just my 2. And I loved the handplaced loot of BG1, too. It felt like a real handcrafted world you could get lost in, minimal handholding and tons of companions, even if they cut down their story in order to add more party composition choices (which I felt was more important to the gameplay. I'd rather have 20 companion choices who aren't super fleshed out than 10 who have 200k words of dialogue a piece, but that's just me). BG1 just hit all the right buttons for me. I still can't get through BG2 to this day, even after attempting a trilogy playthrough from BG1->SoD->BG2. I always get burned out in BG2 because of the sheer density and massiveness of systems it has. So give me 2 magic missiles and a sleep spell to cast at low level and I'm happy. :)
 
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Harry Easter

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BG2 may have not an impact in terms of gameplay, but with this game everything started you think of Bioware:

Romances and ...

... ehm.

Hmm.

Hrm.

Interesting sidequests?

But seriously, when I read about BG2, people mostly talk about the companions and the romances (and Minsc showing his Boo).
 

octavius

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Before BG2 you had games with companions that had a few banters and hate-love relationships with other companions; games like Ishar, Jagged Alliance 1 and 2, and BG1. I think BG2 was the first one to have quests involving the companions.
 
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Harry Easter

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Before BG2 you had games with companions that had a few banters and hate-love relationships with other companions; games like Ishar, Jagged Alliance 1 and 2, and BG1. I think BG2 was the first one to have quests involving the companions.

Fair point. But it shows that the social aspect is the one thing that is remembered. Nobody talks about the gameplay anymore (although defusing traps was always a good source for XP).
 

octavius

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You could also mention the mage duels.
And I think BG1 may have been the first CRPG that had enemies with moddable combat scripts, making it possible to significantly improve the enemy AI.
 
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Lilura

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the social aspect is the one thing that is remembered. Nobody talks about the gameplay anymore

Bullshit. Maybe stop hanging out on reddit and RPGWatch, fagstick? I have posted 90 game-play write-ups for BG in 2 years. Most 'Dexers talk about the game-play, too.
 
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Harry Easter

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Bullshit. Maybe stop hanging out on reddit and RPGWatch, fagstick? I have posted 90 game-play write-ups for BG in 2 years. Most 'Dexers talk about the game-play, too.

That's for the hardcorefans and charming socialites as you. But I still think that most people think of companions and romances when they think of Bioware. Otherwise we may would have way more D&D - games as BG2 or not clebrated the return of Iso-Games like this little revolution of oldschool-stuff.
 

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