Did Baldur's Gate really have an impact?

[Theldaran]

You tellin' me BG authors were useless hacks who made a lifeless game, and we're still talking about BG3 coming even 20 years down the line? Whatever, man.

 

[DraQ]

Esentialy, it is a open world game, it has many different 'areas' which serve as an open world, you are free to explore the whole area (which just is smaller in scope) like in any open world game.

Except you are not, so it is not.

BG 1 is surely among the best top 10 of RPGs of all time.

Please, stop posting.

You're retarded and your posts are retarded.

there are 4-8h of travel between individual areas so they effectively count as PoIs embedded in the amorphous wilderness devoid of content...

If it was a continuous open world game it could be excused because it would essentially be obliged to portray its entire gameworld although not necessarily to scale.

 

[DraQ]

Baldur's gate 1 story is 50 hours long, and BG 2 with TOB is 100 hours long........ that is a western RPG in 1999, still unrivaled to this day in the ammount of content.

If Morrowind removed the open world and packed its content it would be max 5 hours long of content for comparison, because in Baldur's Gate 2 there is content on every corner.

And if BG featured in-depth ice skating mechanics in place of its RTWP combat...

 

[Darth Canoli]

You tellin' me BG authors were useless hacks who made a lifeless game, and we're still talking about BG3 coming even 20 years down the line? Whatever, man.

Are we not here to talk about video games ?
Even the worst ones ?
The worst ones above all ...

DraQ I'm relieved someone in this thread knows his crpgs.

 

[Theldaran]

Why BG3 and not IWD3 or NWN3? Or Sword Coast Legends 2...

Admit that the BG saga has a special charisma about it. It was also tragically cut short, like the outlined and in-the-works (later cancelled) KOTOR3.

It's always about the third part.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Why BG3 and not IWD3 or NWN3? Or Sword Coast Legends 2...

Admit that the BG saga has a special charisma about it. It was also tragically cut short, like the outlined and in-the-works (later cancelled) KOTOR3.

It's always about the third part.

The longevity of the BG series relies solely on memories of BG2... this convo is about BG1.

 

[Darth Canoli]

Well, don't get me wrong, i played them and somewhat enjoyed the experience once, besides all the flaws, the RTwP shit, the Koveras Sarevok shit and worse, the Imoen / Irenicus drama.

I even tried to replay BG2 to try different characters but i can't take more than 2 chatting sessions with Irenicus.

The plot makes me think about a wacky races episode, except it's worse

 

[HeatEXTEND]

Kingmaker, my boy. Kingmaker.

Once/if this gets ironed out BG will be ready for the trashbin.

Spoiler

Where it belongs

 

[Theldaran]

If you can't appreciate the Koveras thing, you need to seriously play some old school D&D. I mean, any fan instantly recognised it, but it was just a detail.

 

[YanBG]

Ofc it had an impact, there are atleast several clones of it nowadays. It could have been even bigger with better marketing before release, so it's not about if it was a good game or not.

 

[Theldaran]

The important question is: did BG really have trannies?

 

[DraQ]

The only location that's gated off in bg1 without reason is cloakwood. The bandit camp is hidden and you can't find it till find directions. The city itself I don't remember the exact reason, I think it was quarantined? Don't remember. Going back to candlekeep can't be done if you don't have some book you get later on.

Again I'm only pointing this out because you're nitpicking. Even in Fallout 2 it's not like you can walk down to the oil tanker and sail to the oil rig in 10 minutes of game time. Again nearly every RPG or sandbox games has artificial limitations on where you can and can't go. Early TES? Randomly generated garbage.

It was broken bridge IIRC.

Generally areas that are physically inaccessible for some in-universe reason are excusable, same with anything beyond the edges of worldmap.
Still the bridge stretches it, you should be able to find the camp by stumbling upon it given that you can stumble upon everything else, and the Cloakwood is downright inexcusable and shows just how seriously you should take anyone claiming that BG is an open world game.

Also, at least DF has its sheer ambition as an excuse for its less than stellar parts. BG? Not so much.

Or they're fans of games like Morrowind or Icewind dale or NWN 1/2 and they pretend those games don't have all the same problems their criticism of BG can be applied to.

No, they have different problems.

Truth is the BG games were above average to good. They were fun but repetitive. They had alot of shitty characters but quite a few gems. Combat was hit and miss(both in engine and in trash mob encounter design) but frankly better then most of the other trash that people praise on these forums. Most of the complaining either comes from hypocrites or attention seekers.

I haven't played BG2 enough to form an opinion. It seems way more interesting than BG1 in any case and might elevate the series quite a bit.
BG1 is... mediocre. Not awful. An ok-ish game. You won't get neurological damage from playing it for prolonged periods of time like you would with unmodded Oblivion. Nevertheless it's completely inexplicable to have people revere it as some timeless classic - there is nothing to it that would potentially justify it, whether you agree with its importance or not.
I would happily give credit where it is due even if it won't really make me like the game but credit for what exactly?

Care to enlighten me?

As for the combat, IE games are the worst RPGs I would be willing to play in that regard. Unmodded Oblivion is worse, but you need some sort of brain damage to be willing to play unmodded Oblivion (and if you aren't brain damaged the game will fix it soon enough - there are some fine specimens on the 'dex showcasing that).

 

[JarlFrank]

It's not open world, it's an imitation of open world in a time when true open world wasn't established.

Utter hogwash that only establishes your opinion as that of a complete ignoramus.

Ultima, one of the very first cRPGs was already an open world one in 1981 - heck almost all the subsequent instalments were also released long before BG1.
TES debuted in 1994 with Arena, followed by Daggerfall in 1996 and was also fully committed to open world gameplay from the very onset.
Fallouts (and Wasteland before) were arguably open world, especially compared with BG.
You also had Sid Meyer's Pirates! and Elite series firmly establishing the concept of open world in games (in case Ultima was insufficient).

I am sure many Codexers will rush to provide countless more examples but the point have been made:
True open world was well established prior to BG1. In fact it was quite popular way to make large and complex games back when storage media and memory were THE limiting factor constraining amount of unique, hand-made content and scripting.

It still had extraordinary amounts of content for the time (hell, 5 CDs) and you could do a lot of side quests even if they were simple.

If BG's sidequests were enough to declare it an open world game, pretty much every cRPG is one by default.

Yes the main quest is linear but what do you expect?, BG1 wasn't a story-driven game, but exploration was one of its strong suits (POE tries but isn't quite there). Given the shitty stories we tend to have in this kind of game, I really prefer exploration.

Two points:

• "Exploration" as subset of gameplay generally refers to non-automatic activity involving looking around, noticing things and following the noticed cues to discover stuff. In BG you "discovered" stuff simply by covering all the traversable terrain on the neatly delimited, rectangular map to remove the black fog of war, while waving the mouse cursor over every pixel, then clicking on all the reachable edges of the map (at most 4) to uncover subsequent locations. It is as boring and mechanical as it sounds and by any sane definition BG has no exploration.
• Even BG's "exploration" IS story-driven, because you won't get to Cloakwood before the right part of the MQ, because fuck you, that's why. Even if you already have a sidequest sending you there, like reclaiming the sword of some little shit of a halfling.

"Spurious" wilderness is a way to see it, I see it as a good backdrop to adventuring, the core of the D&D experience. BG was a good D&D experience. Each time you found a magical weapon in a dusty cave after killing some wolves was great.

It takes more than a backdrop to have adventures, and BG was awfully starved of one of the remaining crucial components - content.

If it was a continuous open world game it could be excused because it would essentially be obliged to portray its entire gameworld although not necessarily to scale. The thing is that BG is not continuous - there are 4-8h of travel between individual areas so they effectively count as PoIs embedded in the amorphous wilderness devoid of content... except the PoIs too are mostly amorphous wilderness devoid of content.
Even dungeons are deeply underwhelming - Firewine anyone "you are in a maze of twisty little passages all alike, filled with twisted little kobolds all alike"?

Pretty much what DraQ said here.

People who praise BG's exploration don't know what exploration actually is, and even the early Ultimas did exploration better because it wasn't as mechanical and tedious as unveiling the fog of war in all of BG's generic wilderness areas is.

BG2 was a massive improvement on BG1's generic blandness, and removing the mostly-empty-but-filled-with-generic-content wilderness areas was a great decision. BG2 has way more interesting locations that are way more tightly designed and offer way more engaging experiences.

Meanwhile in BG1:
- oh hey a new area
- 50% of it is just empty space
- the other 50% is populated by generic enemy mobs
- there are one or two quests there, but they're all of the "go fetch an item" or "go kill a monster" variety

Most of BG's early quests aren't much more inspired than the typical MMO quest.
"Hey, adventurers, an ogre stole my belt please bring it back!"
"Hey, adventurers, a bunch of hobgoblins stole my ring, please bring it back!"
"Hey, adventurers, spiders made it into my house, please kill them and bring me my boots which I left in there!"
"Hey, adventurers, if you happen to find a certain book on your travels, bring it to me!"
"Hey, adventurers, my son and daughter-in-law went missing, go look for them!"

Wow such creative high quality content.

 

[Micormic]

Meanwhile in BG1:
- oh hey a new area
- 50% of it is just empty space
- the other 50% is populated by generic enemy mobs
- there are one or two quests there, but they're all of the "go fetch an item" or "go kill a monster" variety

Why would the wilderness consist of less then empty space? The more empty areas are actually what I liked about the game. Going off the beaten path and occasionally finding something interesting be it a quest, a fight, loot ect. This gave the game a certain feeling of authenticity to me. I have a feeling alot of people who complained about this have never actually left their house/city where they llive and don't understand not every area in the world is densely populated( I'm aware this is a game but the object of BG in particular aside from telling a story is to simulate that particular region in FR as accurately as possible). Also these areas are completely optional so it's completely idiotic to bitch about them like it's mandatory.



I don't care about debating things like exploration and 'open worlds'. I consider any game with a relatively open environment regardless of certain artificial limitations ( however stupid they may be and DraQ is right cloakwood being gated for no reason is stupid) to be 'open'. Even arcanum, it's not as if you can reach every area in the game right from the start. Again this applies to nearly every 'sandbox' game. Which is why I don't see the point of nitpicking.



As for exploration, give me a break whether you like the game or not that doesn't matter, there's plenty of shit to explore in BG 1 both in the wilderness and in cities.

 

[Darth Canoli]

there's plenty of shit to explore in BG 1

Let's agree on this.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Why would the wilderness consist of less then empty space? The more empty areas are actually what I liked about the game.

 

[Shadenuat]

If you want to play game that follows the rule of always filling every screen with as much content as possible, try Numenera, to see the opposite side of the spectrum so to speak.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

If you want to play game that follows the rule of always filling every screen with as much content as possible, try Numenera, to see the opposite side of the spectrum so to speak.

 

[Shadenuat]

You are repeating yourself. Also, dumb pictures won't prove you anything, you're not on reddit.

Learn from DraQ. He's been defending TES from cow killing xvarts since year 2010 judging by this thread, and still has not run out of steam.

Although at this point it may be just madness.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

Dude, why in all that's anything did you decide to bring NumaNuma into this? I mean, is your position so bad that you need Numa as your 'it's better than'? I mean... really...

 

[Shadenuat]

Can I reply with a picture?

 

[Shadenuat]

Dis is map of BG1

Spoiler

dis is map of bg2

Spoiler

which map looks like an actual coherent game world which you can explore step by step, going from cities to roads that connect the cities and from cities into wilderness and from wilderness into dungeons (muhh d&d ), and which one is an action adventure packed with content only relevant to the story/optional quests?

sometimes you need empty spaces.

but, I am not going to say that BG1 is full of good content, lol. It is just a draft of a game, together with its crude reputation system and shit; but if the formula was made with level of quality and experience, it would have been a solid game, and it would also have been a different game compared to BG2.

Which is why things like this, do excuse me I don't mean to offend

BG2 was a massive improvement on BG1's generic blandness, and removing the mostly-empty-but-filled-with-generic-content wilderness areas was a great decision. BG2 has way more interesting locations that are way more tightly designed and offer way more engaging experiences.

feel like modern journalism to me, especially with "engaging" word.

BG2 is awesome game, but it is the first step to modern Bioware formula - instead of simulating a place, like re-making the Sword Coast, it focused on linear story that takes you from one adventure hub to another; most of which features some major quest. It is not a bad formula, but it is a different formula to re-creating part of a fantasy world with carefully fit, like pieces of a puzzle, isometric screens loosely tied by main plot which you explore in an RTS-like way. And no, there's nothing particularly un-fun clearing fog of war in RTS-like way, meeting NPCs and monsters, it is pretty fun.

I mean, even Sawyer, and he hates IE I think, understood the difference between two of these games and wanted to re-create part of that exploration in PoE1 by making players travel from north to south and act more within actual game world, not in locations heavily disconnected from that world (like whole second half of BG2, for example).

As for Numanuma, the reason why I remembered it was because it is an opposite to "empty" or "half full" isometric worlds. Literally every locations geography in Numenera is designed with some sort of amazing content TM, visually and narratively, which eventually wears you down until nothing is actually interesting anymore.

By the way, game which did a cool take on BG1 and where you explore a more coherent world is Pathfinder
We should all play Pathfinder
We should all buy many copies of Pathfinder

Spoiler

it even has similar shitty writing quality to BG1 in many places!

Spoiler

going to play some Pathfinder now, sorie

 

[DraQ]

Meanwhile in BG1:
- oh hey a new area
- 50% of it is just empty space
- the other 50% is populated by generic enemy mobs
- there are one or two quests there, but they're all of the "go fetch an item" or "go kill a monster" variety

Why would the wilderness consist of less then empty space? The more empty areas are actually what I liked about the game. Going off the beaten path and occasionally finding something interesting be it a quest, a fight, loot ect. This gave the game a certain feeling of authenticity to me. I have a feeling alot of people who complained about this have never actually left their house/city where they llive and don't understand not every area in the world is densely populated( I'm aware this is a game but the object of BG in particular aside from telling a story is to simulate that particular region in FR as accurately as possible). Also these areas are completely optional so it's completely idiotic to bitch about them like it's mandatory.

Dis is map of BG1

Spoiler

dis is map of bg2

Spoiler

which map looks like an actual coherent game world which you can explore step by step, going from cities to roads that connect the cities and from cities into wilderness and from wilderness into dungeons (muhh d&d ), and which one is an action adventure packed with content only relevant to the story/optional quests?

sometimes you need empty spaces.

Again, the problem is not the empty space/irrelevant content.
The problem is mixing incompatible approaches - you should either:

• Try to represent the entire world in full or reduced scale.
• Focus on discrete locations you consider relevant - to the plot, adventuring, finding phat lewt, lore, whatever.

BG1 tries and fails at both, BG2 at least gets it shit together and goes for the latter.
On one hand you have TES games exemplified by Daggerfall or Morrowind depending on exact approach, Arcanum and so on. Everything exists as giant continuous worldspace, necessarily with a lot of empty space and non-relevant content to make finding the relevant content (exploration!) part of the game.
On the other you have BG2, Fallouts (1 & 2) and such. The game abstracts anything it doesn't focus on as parts of travel map and only lovingly fleshes out locations it considers important allowing putting development effort where it matters the most.
Both approaches can be effective, what isn't effective is trying to mix them as their goals are contradictory - to quote myself:

This is how FO2 world map would look like if it was designed like BG1 - unlabeled circles representing large, mostly empty wasteland maps, with maybe an item or two, minor landmark (like semi-distinct rock) or some minor encounter, you'd nevertheless have to walk all the way through and exit on opposite side to resume your journey - at least until you reached the next unlabelled circle and had to do the whole thing again.

Luckily, Fallout doesn't try to give us obligatory individual sample of every bit of wasteland, but simply actual points of interest, with travel between them being abstracted away.

Morrowind has different shtick - though scaled down it tries to give us its entire gameworld as continuous chunk. It then makes the best of it by rewarding players paying attention to the environment with loot, sometimes phat.

BG fails at either approach. It doesn't have continuous world - travel between adjacent maps usually takes around 4-8h, with some exceptions like the area directly south of Beregost that is actually adjacent to Beregost and can be traveled to immediately from Beregost. It also doesn't focus on points of interest with most of the maps being pretty much samples of whatever nondescript wilderness happens to fall under the map icon. As a result you pretty much constantly switch between abstract map travel and having to cross small, mostly empty rectangular piece of terrain manually for no reason. It doesn't have continuity as excuse, neither it does have any rewards for player being perceptive when forced to walk - the only way you can "spot" something hidden is by hovering your mouse over it, it won't look any more suspicious or interesting than generic background object sharing the same bitmap.

It's pretty much the worst parts of abstract travel plus the worst parts of having to actually walk around, with none of their upsides.
And they are mixed in completely arbitrary manner.

And then, even the genuine PoI maps are padded with awful amounts of empty space:

Not padding the map with about 3x as much generic copypasta wilderness as it had actual content would be a good start.

(Sorry about shitty quality, but MSPain(t) cannot into gifs and doing this sort of scribble is much faster with it than with GIMP.)

 

[Shadenuat]

There are no such things as right or wrong approaches in making games. They're all goddamn abstractions.
What feels arbitrary to you (like D&D and classes, lololo) can be perfectly immersive for others.

Mods for example liven up BG1, adding shit like companion dialogue (like, if you treck to where Gorion died, Imoen says one thing, Jaheira says something else, I think you even get an option to bury your dad) and using empty spaces for personal companion quests. It is all in execution.
I love what they tried to do with interconnected isometric engine locations, although I'd prefer they went all the way and allowed full travel everywhere from the start (i.e. no locked locations). However one should also concider the limitations of engine and loading time of pre-rendered high res locations in that era to realise why full continious world approach probably was just not possible.

Fallout is a lot bigger abstraction, and Arcanum is whole CONTINENT (actually, a few and some islands). BG1 map is within ~x hours walks. For small game/adventure this approach can totally work.

As for PoE, they have their mega dungeon filled with copy-pasted monsters so I wouldn't call it a genuine try in making world with decent content.

 

[DraQ]

There are no such things as right or wrong approaches in making games.

Is this the Codex I am reading?

Sure there are wrong approaches in making games!
For starters, whenever you make your shit inconsistent you have your wrong approach right there.

BG1's fault isn't that it didn't do a huge continuous map.
It's that it didn't commit to either only making special locations special enough to not be abstracted away, nor to treating all the locations equally.