I grew up around games, but since I didn't use an OS that got many games, I didn't play many. But ever since it came out, I've heard about Baldur's Gate. It's a much-loved game that adhered firmly to the D&D rulebook, and now it's often referred to as an important step in the development of video games. And yet for a long time, I hadn't actually played it myself.
So when Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition came out for Linux, I jumped at the chance to get it and finally play the thing.
I'll admit it: my first impression of the game was that it was unexpectedly hard. Seriously, this is not one of those times you look back at history and smile quaintly. This is one of those times you look back and shudder at the brutality and coarseness of the Old World.
Most notably, the combat system is very difficult. I think I am secure in saying that I prefer the modern tradition of turn-based combat. The fact that everyone (even the game's own tutorial) says to "pause often or you will lose" tells me that Baldur's Gate meant to have a turn-based combat system, but just hadn't figured out how yet.
The problem with real-time RPG combat is that there is no clear attack, so you end up clicking on every character and then clicking on the target 30 times in a sort of "kill kill kill!" frenzy. Are your characters attacking? are they attacking as much as they could be? Are they attacking and missing? why? can I re-position them?
Re-positioning, or fleeing, is another problem. Sometimes a character gets low on health, so I pull them from the fray. Or I try to, at least. I click the character, I move them away. They start moving, but the enemy follows. Well now I have my character running away, the enemy running after her, and the rest of my team running after the enemy. And since most of them move at pretty much the same speed (unless one has a speed potion), they all have the same luck in catching one another. It makes the ability to flee pointless, and it makes defense meaningless.
On some characters, there appears to be a guard function, but I couldn't get a character to guard anything, and it seems like moving my characters between the enemy and my injured party member pointless, because the enemy just finds a path around my party.
So is all this realistic? I don't know, maybe it is and maybe it isn't, but realism in a point-and-click interface does beg some adjustment. Yes, it is more realistic that combat happens in real time, and it's more realistic that I cannot necessarily hedge in an enemy when there is an open field all around us. But then again, my characters can't hop over a waist-high fence. Nor can they circumvent an enemy as the last flourish of an elaborate distraction tactic that I have devised. So it seems a little unfair that the enemy can circumvent anything, even four or five armed people surrounding him. I don't remember enough about 2e D&D to recall whether there were Attacks of Opportunity, but I don't feel that they're in Baldur's Gate, and anyway the fact that I don't know whether they exist in Baldur's Gate demonstrates why real-time combat doesn't work. If the player isn't aware of what's happening within the time of a turn, then the turn is essentially meaningless, and if a turn is meaningless then much of the D&D mechanics go out the window.
Modern RPGs tend to have the computer act like a computer. In Baldur's Gate, the computer is basically just the DM.
For example, if your fighter finishes off an enemy, and an orc is two feet away hacking away at your wizard, your computer does not move the fighter to attack the orc. He just stands there, watching the party get slaughtered until you tell the fighter to attack somebody new.
That's just not done in modern games. The computer assumes that while in combat mode, every party member should be attacking someone.
Since the mouse interface isn't necessarily the most efficient way to manage every last move of 5 different party members, the Stop Time button is something that Baldur's Gate flat out tells you to use often, especially during combat. I have to assume this is why computer RPGs later went turn-based during combat.
Inventory in Baldur's Gate is, I guess, one of the more realistic systems I have experienced. In fact, it can be frustrating because it's so realistic, but you have to admit that it just makes more sense than inventory systems in most modern games. There are lots of things to love (even begrudgingly) about Baldur's Gate inventory:
Inventory capacity is calculated by both weight and number. That makes sense. I mean, it's *nice* that some modern RPGs permit you to carry 70 things regardless of size or weight, but carrying around 8 spare suits of armour, 7 long swords, 3 axes, 23 potions, and 5 war hammers does start to seem a little...well, computery.
Part of the amazing capacity of some modern RPGs can safely be explained away as pedantic; you can assume the character has a packing horse, or a wheelbarrow, or a place to stash stuff (the new Shadowrun cRPG uses this method: you can carry gear in as many slots you have to fill into a mission, but you can't refresh your supply from your main inventory until you return to HQ). You can only shrug off so much, and modern RPGs definitely lean more toward the convenience of magic inventory stashes than toward any limitation.
Different classes have different inventory limits. I was playing as a thief, and most of my early party members were similar, and it seemed like most of us could carry about 70 pounds. Then I met a half-orc who could carry 500 pounds. Now, this makes sense to me, especially in a fantasy world. I dislike how some RPGs now are trying to minimise class benefits as if a class is just another term for what kind of clothes you wear. Creating class benefits adds variety and limitation to the game. If you want to carry a lot and kill people with a single hit of brute force, then you don't get to be a human thief or bard, you have to choose a beefier class, or you have to assign your attributes and skills to compensate.
In other words, class differences are good, and Baldur's Gate emphasises that. Sometimes, frustratingly so, because it's a game and you do want to have everything. But you can't.
In many modern RPGs, items specific to a quest are added to a special place in your inventory. Sometimes they don't even subtract from available inventory slots. In Baldur's Gate, "quest" items are treated the same as any other item, meaning that they take up space and weight in your inventory, and they can be dropped and abandoned just like anything else. I found this out the hard way when I accidentally ditched a dagger that was supposed to be delivered to a guy in the mines. It would have gained 200 XP, and instead I discarded it because I saw something shinier.
Once again, this makes logical sense. I don't know if it's 100% realistic, because the icon on screen looks exactly the same as any other inventory icon. In real life, I'd have labeled it with a bit of rope or I'd have put it in a separate pocket of my bag, or whatever, so I feel that in-game, there should be a place in my inventory screen for me to put special items that I need to keep track of and not get mixed up with all the junk I plan on selling off to the next general store I come across.
Aside from that, it does add a practical level of realism. After all, if I just needed a dagger to use, and had a dagger in inventory, then I should be able to use it. I wouldn't not use it just because someone told me it belonged to a friend and that I should deliver it to him.
Another lesson from combat has been about acceptable loss.
I think acceptable loss is a multi-faceted concept, and I pretty much am talking about all of it:
Party members are gonna die.
It's a game, you might be able to resurrect them at the nearest temple, or you might replace them with someone bigger and badder. But the fact is, you are going to lose party members, and if you reload every time that happens, you'll never get out of Beregost.
This was a tough lesson for me. In Dragon's Age and Shadowrun, I got used to really holding onto my party members. I developed relationships with them over the course of the game, I gained their favour or I received their critique. We were a team, darn it. No, we were more than that. We were family (that's early-2000 cliché talk for "team").
In those games, it was easy to hold on to your party. If they died on a mission or quest, they'd pop right back up at the end of combat, or once I got back to basecamp.
But it's not like that in Baldur's Gate, and that's OK. Learn to lose party members during combat, and then get thee to a temple or find someone capable.
Don't be afraid to run.
In other games I've played, I always had the sense that every encounter was destined to happen. It was by design. So my exploration of modern games tends to be: walk around and bump into things, and then do whatever the thing tells me to do (or kill it if it triggers combat).
Every encounter, in modern games, afforded me an opportunity to gain XP, or it would send me on a quest, or give me some interesting bit of lore. In Baldur's Gate, some encounters are only there to kill you. It's OK to avoid them. It's OK to scamper through the woodlands quickly and quietly so you can make it to the next town with a temple and an inn. You can choose not to bump into everything on the screen.
Pick your battles. This isn't the same as running, it's the knowledge that some battles are destined to happen, but not yet.
Certainly in modern games, you often get visual cues to distinguish whether you are "ready" for an enemy yet; maybe you see their level floating around them, or maybe they glow orange or red if they outrank you too severely. You don't get that in Baldur's Gate, so you do have to be judicious before you enter into combat. Since there is no way of knowing for sure, that means you get to save often and reload as needed. That's a little annoying, and it's definitely an argument for those visual cues, or maybe it's just part of the game.
Discoverable items in Baldur's Gate do not glow.
Well, I don't remember them glowing in, say, Zelda, either, but I must have really gotten used to the glowing "hot" items of modern games. In fact, I remember just three weeks ago getting annoyed with someone in some random online forum for talking about how stupid it was for video games to make items glow. "They don't glow in real life," the user argued.
There's truth to that, of course, but then again, in the real world, you can pick any item up and do anything with it. In the real world, I could take a barrel and hide in it, or I could break it into pieces, and fashion a club out of it, or if I spent the time, I could probably make a sharp weapon with it, or I could pick it up and clobber someone with it, and so on. In video games, you have a finite number of options, so the fact that I do not have to spend all of my game time discovering what I cannot do with my surroundings is not really that much a drag for me.
On the other hand (and this was an unexpected revelation for me), not having random objects glow around me really does make the world more immersive. It's not something you notice until you think about it retrospectively, but it does make a difference.
Since objects that you can interact with do glow when you mouse-hover over them, you're not endlessly clicking around on every item (this works less well if you are playing a controller-based game; usually I prefer a gamepad, but for isometric RPGs, it doesn't really make sense). So in Baldur's Gate, I'd say this is all handled well.
I found out from Baldur's Gate that looking at goals and actually pursuing them is important. Not only that, but not going after a goal will lose party members who only joined you because they thought you were going after those goals.
This is rather how I started playing video game RPGs when I finally picked them up, and it's what I want to default to, but I feel like a lot of modern ones train you to be pretty flexible in what you are doing. You may be travelling half way across the map to go kill a demon, but along the way you'll encounter three side quests that you may as well do, and those lead you to a big quest that you shouldn't really do but it's within your current level and it'll boost your XP, so you do it... and so on. There have been times in some games that I've completed quests without even realising I was doing the quest yet. Quests just kinda happen.
Not so in Baldur's Gate. When you get a quest, you had better get to it. Concentrate on that quest and see it through to completion, or you may find party members parting ways with you.
This is another kind of practical realism, and I think I mostly prefer it. It makes you turn your brain on and think about what you are doing in the game world, rather than just run around aimlessly collecting loot, killing baddies in random encounters, and stumbling into quests whenever the game decides you have completed a goal.
I don't have any nostalgic respect or fantasy about Baldur's Gate, but playing it has made me admire it for a lot of reasons, and also see some places where RPGs have improved things since. Admittedly, it's a mixture. I see the good things in Baldur's Gate, I see its shortcomings, but it has also helped me understand some things I sensed I didn't love about some modern games.
All in all, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition is worth a play, especially if you haven't experienced Baldur's Gate yet. Just be prepared for a slight shift in play style.
Baldur's Gate, and Baldur's Gate graphics are copyright by BioWare.