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Disappointing but worth consideration

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 5
Date: July 02, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I had VERY high hopes when I ordered this game due to a number of the reviews that I read. However, after installing and playing the game, I was somewhat let down and I find that I'm not excited about continuing the adventure. Don't get me wrong this is a fun game but in light of todays advanced graphics, sound and storylines, this game just seems a little outdated.

I found a very frustrating aspect to the game seems to happen when encountering a new creature. At the initial encounter, I was hardly able to do any damage and I would usually be killed very quickly. However, after restoring from a previous save point, then attacking the same monster....I would prevail without an extremely difficult fight. This seemed to happen over and over again.

Anyway, here is my rundown of the pros and cons.
Pros:
-The game is huge and will take a lot of time to solve.
-Character creation and development has depth.
-Large number of magical items.
-Seems to follow the D&D rules closely.
-Adventuring decisions impact future interactions and character moods.

Cons:
-Character level progression is slow!
-The game is extremely hard even on the easiest setting.
-The numerous restores from save points gets old fast!
-Small inventory for each character requiring you to leave numerous items in dungeons or in the wilderness.
-Accumulating gold for weapons, armor and health potions is very difficult in the beginning.

To me, this game is like a bad movie that you continue to watch in the hopes that things will get better. However, just like the movie, things have not gotten any better and I'm now a little frustrated. Although I have had some fun playing, I was not able to become imersed in the story and I will probably stop playing. If you enjoy challenges, you might like this game more than I do.

Faithful adaptation of AD&D - which may be its fatal flaw

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 9
Date: January 07, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Baldur's Gate has got all the eye candy you'd look for in a modern computer role-playing game. And it's also got a fairly intriguing storyline, which is something you don't see too often on the desktop. With enough horsepower in your system, the game plays pretty well and after applying a patch from Interplay's web site, doesn't crash too often either.

So what's the problem?

It all depends on your past role playing experience and your expectations. Baldur's Gate reproduces the AD&D ruleset surprisingly well. But it also reproduces the feel of most AD&D gaming sessions in that there's way too much combat.

Now, if your AD&D experience is primarily from the premade modules from TSR, then you'll love Baldur's Gate. My own AD&D experience deemphasized combat and focused on character interaction and acting. My dungeon master would routinely lie to me and my fellow players as we unravelled intriguing and sometimes epic plots. We formed attachments to the NPCs presented to us, and would sometimes be on the verge of tears as the dungeon master struck them down before our characters' eyes. Our greatest experience point rewards would come from playing our roles well, complete with accents, facial expressions, and emotions.

The computerized dungeon master that controls Baldur's Gate cannot come close to that experience: sure, the story twists and turns, but the random encounter of 2D4+2 kobalds ruins the flow, and the AI won't appreciate you role-playing your heart out.

That's not to say that if you don't like combat you won't be able to finish the game. You can, if you use the cheat code to summon one or two of the Driz'zt characters, who will happily slash their way through any obstacle. That's distracting, but I did get through the story, and it was a pretty good story in the end.

It Doesn't Get Better Than This

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: January 28, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This Game Is Spectacular!At First, I Was Amazed At All The Things You Could Do. I recieved So Many Side Quests In Beregost I Thought My Head Would Explode Trying To Remember it All. There Are Also Thousands Of Items and Hundreds Of Magical Spells.

The City Baldur's Gate Is Huge. Once You get In the Gate, You won't know Which quest To Take First. There Must Be Hundreds Of Houses!

This Game Has Everything You Need. Great Graphics, Music, sounds, and plot make this game a best buy

The best game ever?! Give me a break!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: December 30, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Baldurs Gate is an entertaining game, but a great one? No way. It has too many major flaws to be a great game.

1. The AI of the characters that you control is quite possibly the worst AI in the history of computer games. The characters can't move more than an inch on the screen without getting out of the marching order. The path making functions for the characters to go from point A to point B is pathetic!!! Sometimes characters will wander around the screen aimlessly, or get stuck in a corner when you need them somewhere. This tends to get your characters severely injured or killed. It is a major annoyance. This game is designed to run in real-time, with the ability to pause, but because of the terrible AI, you find yourself pausing the game every two seconds to micromanage your characters. So much for real-time combat. Turn-based would have been better.

2. This game has scores of encounters that swiftly slaughter your party with no chance whatsoever of you surviving the first encounter. The only way to get past these points is to reload your previous save game, which you will find yourself doing more than a thousand times. After you reload, you cast a bunch of spells to make your characters more powerful, and redo the encounter. After trying enough times, you win. What is the problem with that, you ask? It is pointless to use your wits to better prepare yourself for the unexpected, because the unexpected will easily wipe you out, and you can then reload anyway. It's almost like "cheating". Where's the challenge in that?

3. The game is pretty stingy with experience points. 50-60 hours of gameplay only moves you up about 5 or 6 levels.

4. The inventory system gets annoying. Not enough slots, and a gemstone takes up as much space as a suit of armor. (Supposedly, this has been taken care of in BG2).

On the upside, the combat is fun when things go your way, especially the visual and sound effects created by the spells (I always wanted to know what an exploding fireball looks like). Also, I thought that the plot of the game was very good. The game has a lot of quests and sidequests, which make it nicely nonlinear.

Baldurs Gate is a fun game, but it's too tedious to be a great one.

I'd give a review of the game -- if it worked

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 19
Date: January 23, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I can't review the actual game itself. See, when I got the package, it was in perfect condition. As was the box. However, Interplay decided that 20 cents was too much to spend on a jewel case, and 3 cents was too much to spend on a sleeve. So they put the disks in what has got the be the saddest excuse for a CD container I've seen in my life. This... thing... had paper edges that almost looked like they were designed to scratch the CDs. They don't actually hold the CDs in, though, and they fall out if at all possible. Of the five CDs, ALL of them were visablly damaged, and two were IMO seriously damaged. On top of the scratches, the first CD had some sort of mark on it which I later found out to be some sort of substance on the CD, not a scratch. I neither know, nor care what it is. Despite trying to repair the CDs, the installation CD still freezes my system if I try to install it. If Interplay can't design a working BOX, I have my doubts they can design a half-way decent GAME.

an awesome game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: May 31, 2001
Author: Amazon User

this game is great because of many reasons, the main one being that you totally get pulled into the game and the characters on your team or "party" feel like real because all of them have a unique character, agenda, and background. furthermore, almost everyone you meet has something original to say to you. Of course after a while they will repeat. The game has a wide choice of install size too, from a huge 2 and a-litlle-bit gigabytes which will lower the loading times o a relatively small 317 mb which will make the game's load times long. The game is extremely long and can take from 1 to 5 and more days(depends on your skills, how often you save and whether you only do the main quest or if you do some or all of the subquests) The game is difficult on any difficulty level unless you follow the exact reccomended routes and not wander off to, you know, adventure. But if you save often, get the best armor and weapons for our characters, keep a lot fo potions with you and pause to think out your tactical moves, you should find the game extremely addictive and very fun! if you like Ad&D or if you really like rpg's, you will love this game. If you are new to the genre this will get you in the game and keep you in. If you aren't a fan of rpg's this is a good game to start with. If you want to try computer games, this might be a wee bit hard, unless you have playd AD&D.

BEST AD&D EVER KILLS DIABLO

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: August 01, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This is the best game I've ever played on my computer. The only thing that I can see even comes close to eat is Age Of Empires II.

The game begins innocently in a monastery but the plot gets so involved this game took me 100 hours to beat and it's the 3rd best RPG I've ever played. I thought Xenogears and Final Fantasy Tactics were a little better and their plots were more thought provoking but Baldur's still has a great plot. This is a lot better than that Diablo Blizzard developed. The ability to go into towns and take them over by force with Drizzt is something no other game has either. The police are a great addition too. The ability to go back through the game as a different class gives this game almost unlimited replayability. All in all, pass up Diablo and Diablo II and get this and Baldur's Gate II

the fix that you need

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: December 30, 1999
Author: Amazon User

I loved the game. I started playing it on a slower processor and found it very plodding. Once i loaded it on to a faster machine, the game got moving. Its challenging enough, but not untill you've got experience playing the game. You can save it pretty easily so if you make a mistake (which the game will punish you for) if you were smart, you won't have to redo much if any. If you also have Sword Coast, it will take care of some of the quirks of Baldurs Gate. Also, to make it easy for you, try for a full install. This way you dont have to be switching cd's. You just put in #1 and go from their. If you are any kind of Forgetten Realms fan or just an RPG fan, this is a must. It is trully the fix that you need.

What Went Wrong

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 11
Date: July 13, 2001
Author: Amazon User

There are three major problems with this game.

1) The CDs get scratched coming out of the box. I read about it in the reviews, and then it happened to me. When I returned the game, the EB guy knew exactly what the problem was and was nice enough to get me jewel cases for each CD of my new copy. A nice guy, but I suspect this happens a lot. As you can read below, why they get scratched is just a dumb idea by Interplay.

2) It's based on AD&D rules. You can either love this or hate it.. A lot of the rules are just plain stupid and make no sense, and magic is just too powerful. The universe is basically a poor man's Tolkien's world through the eyes of an attention deficit disorder child (ADD ... concidence?), making it seem not very believable. But the main problem with CRPG AD&D as I see it is there is really no point to doing anything you do but to get more stuff and get more experience so you can fight bigger guys. As a result the whole game is geared around combat. Personally I enjoy interacting with NPCs and other elements of the world to give me a bit of immersion into an RPG. AD&D just doesn't really seem suited for that, as it's hard to make believable characters in a world that is just ridiculous. It would be one thing if I found the combat rules extremely thrilling as in Final Fantasy Tactics but I just don't. Death is extremely common and is nothing more than an annoyance for the most part -- the worst thing is hauling all their stuff back to the Temple when you resurrect them.

3) The Infinity Engine. Ok here is what the problem is. They tried to make a great looking engine to run the story AND combat in real-time. Well it is a great try and almost works. But basically the problem is in order to make the graphics so detailed, they had to make the area maps small. In order to make it so you couldn't see all the way across the area map (actually I don't see why not if the land is flat), they keep visual range to a square about the size of the screen. This is what seriously hinders combat IMHO. Battles are spontaneous clashes that happen basically at point blank range. There is no planning or getting into formation, except for maybe hauling your mage behind some cover. The computer AI is bad, mostly because the game is pretty complicated. For examples mages, who should know the danger of the Fireball spell, tend to stay clumped in groups instead of splitting up. So basically ... in order to win the computer relies on surprise, striking first, and generally being more powerful than your characters. As a result you tend to die quickly the first time you face a boss. Repeated saving and loading and you figure out a way to win, which usually comes from stuff you learned in previous deaths. I hate that in any game but especially RPGs as it REALLY takes you out of character. There are no real epic battles either which I found very disappointing.

Furthermore, the Infinity Engine is just not good for telling a story. There is some speech in the game but not very much, and dialogue trees are very brief. You're really left to your imagination when dealing with NPCs. The plot is frequently advanced through a text excerpt read by a mediocre narrator. That really should be the last resort of any game -- saying "You are very scared" is the easy way out when you could illicit the same response with music, dialogue and graphics. The problem here is, the plot is REALLY good. But the poor story-telling just ruins it. Allowing you to play any character, good or evil, any race, any class, forces the NPCs to generally treat you ambiguously. It makes the universe broad but thin. People relate to you in pretty much the same way they do as in Final Fantasy 1 or Legend of Zelda.

Finally, I did not think it was that big a game at all. It was very detailed graphically and was filled decently, however the tiled nature of older games like "Lord of the Rings" (which Interplay released in 1990) allowed it to be just as big in my opinion, though it's been a while since I played. No way is it bigger than any Final Fantasy game.

One battle sums up pretty much the whole game for me. Another party at a bar started a fight with me for no reason whatsoever. It would have been understandable if it was a small scale rumble or just fists, but no, this is AD&D and the next thing you know it's an all-out 5 on 5 war and I'm summoning undead and he's casting lightning bolt -- all in public for no reason. His lightning bolt tore through my party, killed 4 guys minding there own business at the bar, including the bartender/innkeeper, and even killed the cook at the end of the hallway. Now while that's funny, it was stupid because only an incredibly evil or insane person would be casting area effect spells in a crowded public situation. Also because the bartender was dead I could no longer use that bar as an inn, so it was basically closed from then on. You would think an event like this would be talked about, but in true AD&D manner it's just another battle. I would argue that if it's too complicated for NPCs to comprehend events like this is in any manner then simply don't allow them to occur. I would rather have a game that feels real that is limited in scope than a game where you can do whatever you want and nothing matters.

But for all I've said, Baldur's Gate is a decent game. It has good graphics, a good plot and is fun to play early on at least. I don't recommend it to the casual gamer but if you're an AD&D fan or a hard core RPGer then obviously this is a must have. Baldur's Gate is basically a couple of AD&D sourcebooks dropped into a computer with a nice graphics engine. The allure is being able to do whatever you want in an AD&D universe. Personally I prefer RPGs of smaller scope but with more depth.

kill, get item, give item, reward, kill, get item, give ...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 7
Date: September 09, 2001
Author: Amazon User

At first I liked this game. Especially because of the books I found and my encounters with interesting characters. But after a while it got more and more centered on combat. Even though the combat system is great, I got bored with it after chapter 6 or 7. after a while I got really sick of the 'find the bad guy, kill the bad guy, get some stuff from his corpse, give it to the good guy, get something for yourself' style quests. The game is simply TOO REPETITIVE. After chapter 6 or 7 I uninstalled it even though I suspected I was close to the end of the game.
Alltogether, I had good fun playing this game the first week, but after that it got annoying. For a good story I would recommend PlaneScape: Torment.

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