T w e n t y S i d e d
I was expecting many things to happen in the year of Our Lord 2019, but the announcement of a third entry in the Baldur’s Gate series was not one of them. After all, the last entry in the series, the Throne of Bhaal expansion, is now old enough to buy cigarettes in most states. There was said to be a third game in the series planned back in 2003Working title The Black Hound., but it was never made, and is now consigned to the history’s what-if pile alongside a third Black Isle FalloutAlso never made, working title Van Buren.. Since then, Beamdog (developer of the BG and BG2 enhanced editions) has occasionally made noises about making a sequel, but their resources were never equal to the task.
But lo, it has returned. A franchaise last seen in 2001. That was a whole different era. Having Baldur’s Gate III announced at this late hour makes me feel unmoored from linear time. It’s like if Al Gore ran for president, or Phil Jackson suddenly announced he was getting Shaq and Kobe back together again. For RPG fans of a certain age, Baldur’s Gate is one of the four gospels of the Infinity Engine era, along with the two Fallouts and Planescape: Torment.
What’s more, it’s to be made by Larian Studios, a developer with both a strong pedigree and a healthy reserve of audience goodwill. Given all that, I should be more excited than I am. That’s probably partly down to the lack of gameplay footage, or indeed any kind of information at allLarian is not even willing to say whether the game will be turn-based or real time with pause., but it’s also down to three questions:
- Is the Baldur’s Gate series as good as everyone remembers it being?
- Is Larian the right developer for this game?
- Is today’s world as interested in Baldur’s Gate III as we think it is?
The fanboy in me answers all three of the questions with an enthusiastic “yes!”, but the cranky old goat in me craves longer and more detailed answers. My attempts to find those answers will be the subject of this upcoming Saturday series of posts. Of course, they can’t be answered with a simple yes or no, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be answered at all.
Answering each is also best accomplished by looking at certain games: the Baldur’s Gate series, the Divinity: Original Sin series, and the Pillars of Eternity series, which is closest thing to a “modern” Baldur’s Gate to be found. So thorough and detailed will be my analyses that at the end of the series, I will successfully predict BG3’s metacritic score to within a margin of error of three points.I may be overestimating my own powers of prognostication.
As luck would have it, I was planning to replay the series before the E3 announcement, and am currently polishing off the last bits of BG2 and getting my opinions on it in a row. Next week we’ll start with that. There’s also the possibility that in the course of writing this series new information about the upcoming game will come to light – if so, I can cover that as well. See you soon.
Footnotes:
[1] Working title The Black Hound.
[2] Also never made, working title Van Buren.
[3] Larian is not even willing to say whether the game will be turn-based or real time with pause.
[4] I may be overestimating my own powers of prognostication.
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
Could Have Been Great
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Are Lootboxes Gambling?
Obviously they are. Right? Actually, is this another one of those sneaky hard-to-define things?
What is Vulkan?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
The Biggest Game Ever
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
You know, if you’d said “three orders of magnitude,” you’d be guaranteed a correct prediction.
Well, technically they could give it any score they wanted, but even if they stuck to a 0-to-100 scale, 0 would be outside 3 orders of magnitude of …, well anything other than itself.
Yes, but Metacritic uses a 0-100 scale, and in a 0-100 scale, especially a criticism agglomeration, 0 is so unlikely as to be statistically impossible. (I assume without actually doing any math to check.)
Bob just needs to run this series until about a month after BGIII releases and have a very loose definition of “predict”.
Besides Black Isle’s Baldur’s Gate III (AKA The Black Hound), there have been at least two additional attempts to create a third Baldur’s Gate game – one attempt about a year after The Black Hound’s cancellation that never got off the ground, and an Obsidian-developed Baldur’s Gate III in 2008 that also didn’t get far.
P.S. Fix your HTML Shamus – everything is italicized!
Shamus didn’t write this.
Yeah, but he is in charge of the site’s template.
We are ALL Shamus!
Maybe the real Shamus is the friends we made along the way?
It’s Shamus’ all the way down.
Not to forget the original Dragon Age would have become BG III if not for the lack of rights to the D&D & Forgotten Realms IPs, if my memory serves me right.
Hear, hear! DA:O was very much a spiritual successor of BG, and the series’ degradation is an important story that should shape everyone’s perception of BG3.
I don’t think that’s true. BioWare always wanted to create a new IP. Not sure it was meant to be a Baldur’s Gate spiritual successor at first either – I think that’s something they took a few years to decide on. The game was kind of vaporwarey for a long time.
I can buy they wanted to create a new fantasy IP, but wouldn’t Jade Empire predate work on Origins?
I’m the right age to be one of those Baldur’s Gate nuts, but somehow I never played either game. Not sure why. Probably because I was more into strategy games–4X and RTS–at the time. Also, my experience with 2nd edition AD&D on the table top didn’t fill me with enthusiasm for a computerized version of the same.
I have played Divinity: Original Sin, however. It is very good, except for the writing, which is so-so at best. (I hear the writing in the second one is better.) I dearly love the combat. I’m not sure how it compares to to contemporary D&D combat.
Only briefly played #1, and heard it was kind of cliched and didn’t take itself seriously. Divinity:OS2 is basically Baldur’s Gate 2/Torment with a 4-person party and turn-based combat. Which makes me wonder, will this Baldur’s Gate 3 be turn-based? I wouldn’t necessarily mind.
I’ve played the first D:OS. It was so-so. Especially the writing was juvenile and forgettable.
I haven’t played the second one, because it’s not on Linux. *looks straight into camera*
That would be one of my reasons I pre-emptively don’t like that announcement. Larian has been pretty crummy to Linux users.
The first can’t meaningfully be answered. The first and third also don’t matter. The second is the only question that matters and can’t be answered until the game releases.
You know what we do on this site, right? :-)
I’m interested in seeing what Bob has to say about it and reading the resulting comment threads, even if you are correct and the answers don’t really matter right now!
Question no.3 does matter immensely for Larian, and for us, the RPG fans, assuming we like what they offer as BG3.
If the game gets delayed, eg in order to deliver it to the level of polish it needs to be, whoever is funding it could decide to pull funding and the game never gets cancelled, due to their impression that the world isn’t as interested in BG3 as it needs to be to keep funding.
Or the alternative: refuse to allow the game to slip, refuse to increase the budget / timeframe, and release anyway, a la No Man’s Sky.
Larian Studios self publishes now. They made so much money on Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2 thanks to using Kickstarters to self publish that they are easily funding the development of BG3 themselves.
They made 85 million dollar in 2017 alone from one game, Divinity: Original Sin 2. They went self publishing to avoid the very sorts of publisher BS you fear, the side effect was that they got to keep the profits instead of giving it to a publushing company.
So now they have 4 studios (they bought 3 other companies), 200 internal devs, 27 writers, 100 external devs all working on making Baldur’s Gate, all funded by Larian Studios. And if that wasn’t enough they made a deal with another company, Logic Artists, to make a Tactical RPG based on Divinuty: Original Sin 2, called Divinity: Fallen Heroes, which is coming out soon. Larian Studio wanted all of it’s resources on making Baldur’s Gate 2 as good as they could so they out sourced Divinity: Fallen Heroes to Logic Artists.
So Larian has no issue with funding at all, no pressure to rush, cut corners, ect…
Baldur’s Gate is roughly as long as Divinity: Original Sin 2, but with with way more optinions/replayability asIunderstand it.
We could pretty much answer the first question by replaying Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 to see if they were as good as we remember.
I’ve replayed them over the last two years or so and in my very personal opinion the answer is no. The writing is baseline but solid but I mostly did not love the games mechanically. To be fair I’m not the greatest fan of “real time with pause” combat but I think in this particular case the translation of tabletop rules makes it all a bit messy and the character progression is fairly uninteresting.
I can see why we loved it back in the day, it was D&D made (digital) flesh, the interactivity of companions was exciting, even the romances were novel, but since then it’s been done a lot and if I judge the game not as the founding father (that it admittedly is) but as one of the representatives of the genre… well for me it just didn’t quite live up to the nostalgia.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny
Baldur’s Gate II is one of my favourite games ever and this news just makes me groan internally. There’s absolutely no (artistic) reason to make a sequel now, so what is this other than a cynical attempt to sell me my own nostalgia or a desperate attempt to attach a name to a product that can’t stand on its own merits? A new D&D RPG seems like a fine idea but just make it something new so it doesn’t have to carry the baggage of the previous games…or live up to their legacy.
Yeah, it should be noted that the Throne of Bhaal expansion had all the main story content they planned for BG3 (however flawed in execution it may have been), so from a story perspective, the Bhaalspawn trilogy in the increasingly-inaccurately-named Baldur’s Gate series was completed.
Put another way, this is much the same story difference as between Fallout 3 and New Vegas.
This seems to be even worse. Even if different Fallout games have no connection story-wise, they have a unique post-apocalyptic 50ies-retro-sci-fi world. But Baldur’s Gate has no monopoly on the Forgotten Realms setting (which in itself seems already rather generic). I really don’t see how you would distinguish a Baldur’s Gate 3 from a completely new game series in that general area of the Forgotten Realms.
I have been saying this ever since I saw the trailer on Arch Warhammer’s channel. The mainline Baldur’s Gate series needs a third entry about as much as the mainline Lord of the Rings series needs a fourth entry.
It’s over, it’s done, it’s finished, and stop ruining great things by adding needless cruft.
As I understand it, it’s a Baldur’s Gate game because it takes place in the city of Baldur’s Gate, the same way as Dark Alliance did. It will have little or nothing to do with the Bhaalspawn saga.
I’m hoping it’s a combination of everything good from the Golden Age of D&D games*, but I’m trying not to get my hopes up too much.
*: Specifically…
1. Turn-based gameplay with a full custom party (Temple of Elemental Evil)
2. Solid story, lore, and setting development (Baldur’s Gate)
3. Excellent dungeon and encounter design (Icewind Dale)
4. Toolkit support fan-created mods (Neverwinter Nights)
However, I highly doubt it will hit all four of those targets, particularly number 4.
For me, the good things from those older games (and the ones that Larian specializes in) are:
1. Multiple ways to approach goals. (Move boxes and sneak past. Do questing. Convince people. Lay traps everywhere and lead the bad guy into them. Just murder everything. Charm the ads to kill the bad guy. Run away. Smash down the door because you’re too tired to go look for the key. Use dynamite. Jump down a hole and hope for the best. Make and drink a hundred health potions. Steal a uniform and pretend you’re a guard. etc.)
2. The game is largely agnostic to which way you pick, but it notices to at least some degree.
3. Combat that moves quickly. (Does not necessarily mean real-time combat. For my money, the turn-based combat in Original Sin 2 moves faster than the real-time-with-pause combat in BG.)
4. Lots of meaningful build choices.
I replayed both BG games not too long ago, and aside from the still-enjoyable creepiness of Jon Irenicus, I found the games were rather dull, heavy-handed, and didn’t really have much in the way of truly interesting story.
Plus DDO has completely spoiled me for traps and I have little patience for games with the Red Zone of Trappiness.
Reading that made me rather angry. If Larian continues to stay the course I will have to add them to my list of devs to avoid.
While it’s cynical marketing, let’s not go over board over it. Larian Studios is one of the few good big studios out there.
This. I’m very lukewarm on the idea of BG3, like some people above I don’t think this series needs a sequel and the use of “Threeeeee” in the title makes me wary that this is particularly a nostalgia grab. I mean, if it’s not a sequel to the storyline just do it as a “Baldur’s Gate: Something”, and I’m saying this as a person who likes to have their series numbered and ordered, or if you’re just doing a license make a “Forgotten Realms: Baldur’s Gate Something or Other” title (I honestly think the BG part is unnecessary but if they’re desperate for that “city name in the title” thing…).
On the other hand I am quite giddy for another Larian game, especially if I’ll be able to play it with a friend (and I see no reason for it not to be the case seeing how it’s both a thing that was in the original BG games and a thing that Larian does) so I’m keeping an eye on this one.
It’s worth noting that the proposed BG3: The Black Hound was also not a direct sequel. But we may see familiar characters and situations, or even fallout from the Bhaalspawn saga.
Although the Forgotten Realms setting has kinda run off the rails in recent years, so that may be an issue.
I think Mr. Case forgot to close a tag on his bio.
(Edit: actually, I found an unclosed em tag in the second footnote, that might be the problem.)
Larian Studios lost all goodwill with me when they had a random cat murder with no warning, no reason, and no resolution in Original Sin 2. No one would pull that crap with a dog and cats are no different.
I’m also just pretty burned out on modern game development. I may just be too old for video games.
I’m 80% sure I fixed this tag. The open tag was inside the footnote and the close was outside, and that… doesn’t work.
Hopefully fixed.
Looks fixed to me.
Oh yeah! That can happen!
In retrospect, I like that it’s possible (and you’re not missing out on much because of it), but yeah, the first time it happened to me I save-scummed that kitty back to life.
Cats are literally the reason I’m still alive. Don’t dismiss my trauma with “you’re not missing out on much”.
I love cats. How did the cat save your life?
So am I, actually. Is this in real life, or did that kind-of-gimmicky spell you unlock for keeping the cat alive in Divinity OS:2 help you out?
Nice, I’m happy we’re getting more Bob so soon.
I’m a console gamer so I have no vested interest in Baldur’s Gate in specific or the genre as a whole in general, but I’m interested in hearing your take on them. It’s interesting to have an actual sequel to a franchise after such a long time. It happens more these days than it used to, but I still feel like it’s mostly spiritual sequels.
We’re now seeing game sequels for the same reason we’ve been seeing so many film remakes and “re-imaginings”. Games, like movies, are now fantastically expensive to produce and thus fantastically risky. Making a game part of an existing franchise is supposed to (partially) mitigate that risk. It’s easier to sell a new game in a beloved (or even just moderately well-known) franchise than it is a game representing a totally new IP. There’s a new Baldur’s Gate game for the same reason there’s a cinematic adaptation of the board game Battleship. In the movie business, making a movie out of a thing people have heard of–be it an older movie or a reasonably well-known board game with no cinematic qualities whatsoever–puts butts in seats on opening weekend, even if the reviews are lousy. I’m guessing that Baldur’s Gate III gets you more pre-orders than, say, Double Divine Divinity Divination. (Honestly, Larian is not good at naming video games. Even Original Sin, which is one of their better names, only starts to make some kind of sense when you’re fairly far along in the plot.)
Spiritual sequels, on the other hand, are a thing because games have now been around long enough for there to be developers who want to make games like the ones they played when they were kids or teenagers. To be fair to Larian, a lot of the staff there probably played and loved the Baldur’s Gate games. In that sense, Baldur’s Gate III may just be one of those lucky spiritual sequels where the rights to the original IP happened to be available and moderately priced.
Hey, Larian has improved their naming skills considerably. Because there’s pretty much nowhere to go but up after “Divine Divinity”.
To be fair, I believe that was an imposition from their publisher, who had a thing for alliterative titles. The name of the game was supposed to be something like Divinity: The Sword of Lies.
Which, to be even fairer, is still terrible.
You might also add “Pathfinder: Kingmaker” to that list in the next-to-last paragraph.
Yeah, in my list of fave recent-ish RPGs I’d go:
1) Pillars of Eternity 2
2) Pathfinder: Kingmaker
3) Shadowrun: Hong Kong
4) Tyranny
5) Shadowrun: Dragonfall
6) Pillars of Eternity
7) Shadowrun Returns
8) Divinity: Original Sin
I haven’t played DOS2, but it isn’t out on Linux so it gets added to the bottom of the list for me.
If you can run Google Chrome on Linux, then you can use Stadia, so you should be able to play BG 3.
Wait, is Kingmaker that good?
Hong Kong, I agree, it’s the best from the series (to be fair, the first was testing waters and the second is also good)… too bad the partnership went to other IPs (mechwarrior looks nice, but my machine can’t run it somehow)
Tyranny is the saddes from the bunch, because it was a very interesting game (maybe the characters were forgettable) but I don’t see a sequel in the future…
Have you played the Numenera game?… actually I don’t know if it’s in Linux…
IMHO I think that Pathfinder: Kingmaker is more worthy of this title (even if I prefer PoE as a game, P: K is a more faithfull renewal of the first BG experience).
Or if it’s an isometric game at all. Since Larian is trying to become a new BioWare, it’s possible that they might create a more action-oriented title.
Baldur’s Gate series at this point is more of an idea of a game – light-hearted fantasy in over-the-top, but charming enviroment (while PoE, for example, is way too heavy for that). There’ll always be an audiences for this. But as much as I would like to see this game as a turn-based (or even rtwp), I don’t think it’s something that many would consider to be immanent for this kind of experience.
Anyway, looking forward for the new series, I was hoping you’ll do something like that.
> the Pillars of Eternity series, which is closest thing to a “modern” Baldur’s Gate to be found.
Your knowledge of the RPG scene seems to be outdated. Google “Pathfinder: Kingmaker” or better yet, get it on a disount now, and get a feel of its combat system. Pillars of Eternity is not even close to the Infinity Engine games, nor did its Lead Designer ever want it to be close to them. Pathfinder: Kingmaker on the other hand, is very close.
…wat.
It isn’t D&D, but aside from that it’s 100% IE. PoE2 strays a bit further with the turn-based battle mode, but still.
I figured Kingmaker would feel more like Temple of Elemental Evil, but I haven’t played either game. I was just going on the tabletop lineage.
I agree 100%
As someone whose played through all of Pillars of Eternity and the first couple hours of Bladur’s Gate, I can say with some confidence that they are extremely similar, and any claim otherwise is splitting hairs. The biggest difference is that Pillars uses it own system instead of directly adapting DnD, which doesn’t much matter if you’re not a purist.
As someone who has played all of BG 1&2 several times, and PoE twice, I can confirm that PoE is VERY much a spiritual successor to BG. It is closer to BG2 than BG1 (darker in tone, more limitation in where you can visit but locations much more detailed than BG1). When it was Kickstarted, the team explicitly touted it as a spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate and Planescape Torment, only to back off on comparisons to the latter when Torment Tides of Numenera was announced.
Yeah, Pillars doesn’t use D&D… and neither does Pathfinder (obviously), so you can’t use that as the reason one is better or worse than the toher.
Though there’s not a large air-gap between D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder.
In fact that was rather the point of Pathfinder. To be D&D 3.75 for people who didn’t like the direction of 4e.
Is it weird that I turned this into a classic Bob Case video post in my mind? The format follows that form exactly. Including asking three questions. That’s a good thing.
Remember I was disappointed in Baulder’s Gate as a kid, because Planescape: Torment was A, the game NOBODY ever talked about, B, nobody ever seemed to own, C, they kept raving on how capital G Good the BG series was…
Oh, and D, Planescape: Torment was the first game I ever bought with my own money, so it gave me a TON of false impressions just what an RPG ‘should’ be like, and what quirks and quality level I thought I could expect from the genera. I mean, shit, if THIS was the forgotten failed fart of a franchise, how good must the 2 games + 2 expansions series everybody raves about be?!
…Yeah. Got a reality check, once I tracked down a BG collection box, alright.
Don’t get me wrong, still love the genera, and BG is a fine series… but I never got why it’s seen as such a pinnacle & water mark for the genera.
In that dispassionate light… I’d honestly say Lorian is a pretty much the best pick for studio out there, right now. Not only do they already make highly acclaimed & selling games with lots of combat, but their writing is a pretty good fit too. Big, horrid threats spanning millennia & dimensions, only a one of cursed/blessed bloodline may stop, interlaced with the odd bit of mundanity slash comedy bit, and all that.
Oh, and bonus points I sure would perk my ears on, were I a rights holder: Lorian actually grokks that movement & utility spells can be just as cool and game-changing as Fireball or Finger Of Death.
Speak-With-Animals. Flight. At will telekinesis. Magic that only costs a cool-down (cough, 5e cantrips, cough). Being able to transform yourself for new attacks…
All things Bio-ware slash Obsidian has all but ignored for decades of access to the IP—fairly sure outright sworn can’t be done in a computer game in the case of flight, pass-wall, and so on.
I mean… were I that rights owner? I’d be a bit peeved, and taking notes on some B-list studio from Europe pulling all of that off—and making players rave about how cool it was to boot.
This.
Primarily because of their combat – they actually put in a lot of effort to mix encounters up, make them interesting, keep the player engaged. And if I had to describe my main sentiment with RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, it would be: ‘great story, but why is the combat such a boring, repetitive chore?’
But Larian? Larian put in the effort. Far better than the old ‘Copy-paste MOAR enemies in!’ approach of old.
They also VASTLTY improved their writing quality for Divinity:OS 2. Up to Baldur’s Gate standards, you ask?
No idea, I haven’t actually played them (see ‘repetitive combat’ above) so I can’t say. But I liked it, for whatever that’s worth.
And this. Getting access to the teleport spell in D:OS2 genuinely does change the gameplay a lot.
And when the enemy have it too…
Holding my fingers for cantrips being done justice myself.
Currently running a Tome/Celestial Warlock in my first ever P&P game, and Prestidigitation, Mage Hand and Mend has let me have so many cool little moments it’s bonkers! I’d LOVE to have a PC game capture even a fraction of that cool factor!
Oh, and ritual casting. Also something I’d never, ever expect from any other studio, but I’m really hoping Lorian manages to put it in.
Because they are holding off on the grognard backlash when they reveal it is a 3rd person action game. I’d bet money this is actually Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance 3 in practice (spiritual successor, or whatever you want to call it) rather than any way related to the original games, beyond the FR setting and a few probable references/Easter eggs.
The flames of the Internet will approach French Revolution levels if that’s the case.
(I agree it’s the most likely reason for the radio silence.)
Eh, just call that the 1-sigma estimate and as long as you’re not more then, oh, 3–5 sigma off it can be explained as a fluke.
I am in the category of BG fans that am cautiously optimistic for BG3. I have never played any of the Divinity games that are Larian’s claim to fame, so I will abstain from making any “ayes” or “nays” with regards to whether they are the right choice of developer for BG3. I will say that I VASTLY prefer Real-Time with Pause over Turn-Based for my RPGs these days, but if Larian chooses to go with Turn-Based for BG3, so be it. Apparently most of the Divinity games are turn-based, and I’d rather than Larian produce an excellent TB BG3, rather than a clunky RTwP BG3 because it’s not a design they’re familiar with.
My second concern is the way that illithids were used as the “face villains” for the trailer. To me, that’s not what the illithids are all about. They are the puppetmasters in the dark, the ones pulling the strings two or even three layers behind the scenes. For them to launch an all-out attack on a surface city like this is HIGHLY irregular for illithids. That said, Larian has hinted in further interviews that the illithids are NOT the “true” adversary in BG3, and that BG3 will shine a lot of light on a very misunderstood race. What exactly this means is as yet unknown, but I suspect that this might hint towards a “Thoon” storyline where the illithids (or at least this particular group of illithids) has fallen under the sway of the mysterious entity/philosophy known as Thoon.
My final concern was something Larian mentioned in some early interviews about how BG3 will have heavy Stadia integration. That worries me because if you might recall, Stadia is essentially a gaming streaming service. If BG3 is run entirely on Stadia (an admittedly unlikely scenario), it would mean that BG3 cannot be modded. Ever. And I think most of us would agree that tweaking the hell out of RPGs with mods is half of what made classics like Baldur’s Gate, the Elder Scrolls series, Dragon Age, the Witcher etc. so much fun.
I myself would prefer a turn-based game, which would work better with some of the modern edition’s mechanics, especially Opportunity Attacks and Bardic Inspiration. The BG games were always 2nd Edition with a few 3rd Edition trappings like the classes. Neverwinter Nights instituted Attacks of Opportunity into a real time system, but they were always a bit wonky with the AI and the system also had to turn Friendly Fire off as the default due to limitations of the game.
I always thought that the reason Neverwinter Nights disabled friendly fire by default is that you couldn’t control your AI companions and prevent them from blundering into the area of effect.
That would be a limitation of the AI. Also, when Friendly Fire is turned On, enemy spellcasters will accidentally nuke their own allies too, which can cause issues with treasure, XP, and more if they kill them.
I think it’s both…
But yes, the Neverwinter Nights system was a pretty terrible mix of turn-based and real-time. Sneak up on someone and roll initiative badly and not only would your carefully-planned sneak attack fail, the animations would show your character running up to the enemy in real time and just standing there waiting for the enemy to hit them.
Characters slid across the floor without moving due to animation bugs, there was little-no animation for multiple attacks (like the Cleave ablility) so enemies would just keel over at random…it was a mess.
My defining moment with that system was when I told my barbarian to break a wooden crate open with his axe. So he spent thirty-odd seconds circling around the damn thing shouting battlecries, sidestepping, bobbing and weaving. He would attack once every 6 seconds, then go back to the battle taunts.
And wouldn’t you know it, he missed that bloody crate 4 times in a row.
So yeah, turn-based combat would be MUCH better.
I’ve got a soft spot for Neverwinter Nights because I played the ever-loving heck out of it in the days when I couldn’t afford a new computer or new games. A lot of the problems people have with the single-player portion (the original campaign, the companion AI, etc.) are probably the result of the game being designed principally for multi-player. I.e., you don’t need to write great companion AI if the companions are all going to be other people. That doesn’t excuse them or mean that they aren’t problems–obviously they are–but in my view it does make them more understandable. Suffice to say that they didn’t bother me as much as they did (and do) some people. I’ve heard in various places–oh, how I wish I could cite sources for this–that Baldur’s Gate was originally intended as a multi-player game. So from a certain point of view we’ve already had a Baldur’s Gate III and Neverwinter Nights was it, as it was the game that Baldur’s Gate was supposed to be all along.
The friendly fire thing has to be it. I forget which spell it was, the rain spell where the shards of ice contacting an entity would freeze them temporarily. Well in one play through the AI was favoring that skill while friendly fire was enabled but when disabled it wouldn’t cast that spell at all. So I focused on resistance against that spell because it was so ridiculously effective.
What? BG didn’t have 3rd edition classes. It had a smattering of kits, which was a 2nd edition thing and the meat (IMO) of the class splatbooks released early in its run.
Kits were pretty obviously an ancestor of 3rd’s prestige classes, fulfilling largely the same role. Though they were less game-breaking, since kits were also often a background thing picked at character creation and not really stackable.
If I recall correctly, you could play a sorcerer in BGII. Was there a Second-Edition version of spontaneous spellcasting?
They bodged Sorcerers and Monks in in BG2.
They are not terribly well balanced. Sorcerers have no stat controlling their casting, so you can make a minimum-int/cha sorcerer and they’re just as good as one with 18/18, and monks have a ridiculous number of restrictions that they barely get anything to compensate for. Playing a monk is the sad times club, and the EE monk NPC mostly exists to soak up XP so you level slower because he has all the downsides of a monk and crap stats.
With the equipment and bonuses available in BG2 my monk was pretty much soloing all bosses on max difficulty (no tactics mod though, maybe will one day play with it). You cannot be restricted in any way, have pretty much 100% magic resistance, AC in ~-30, over 200 hit points, self-heal and that’s just beginning. Monks just cannot be killed with all their defensive bonuses when correctly equipped and do pretty much few hundreds damage per turn ( I think like 6 punches each doing ~40-50 damage?) without even activating ultimate skills. That’s in Throne, but even in base game monk were just as broken… I left my character untenanted for test purpose with Irenicus in final battle for like 10 minutes and he still was unable to kill a monk who was just standing there.
My dual-wielding Berserker never came close to damage and defensive potential of my monk. I don’t think monk in any other isometric DnD RPG comes even close to power of monk in BGII.
Also, the offshoot series Icewind Dale had straight 3e in Icewind Dale 2.
“For RPG fans of a certain age, Baldur’s Gate is one of the four gospels of the Infinity Engine era, along with the two Fallouts and Planescape: Torment.”
Please, please, add Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura to the pile! :-)
I guess this means I need to finish my playthrough of the Enhanced Edition. I’m in Chapter 6, at least.
I am one of these hardcore grognards who bought Baldur’s Gate 1 on release day because I love tabletop RPGs. But even if my memory is not perfect, I remember it being … not perfect. The setting is very rote, the gameplay was mediocre at best, and the latter games and expansions are a lot like Mass Effect 2: A bunch of very cool smaller story lines, but the overall plot is full of holes and not very engaging.
Divinity:OS 1 and 2 were pretty good, but again, Larian’s Divinity setting is not exactly inspired. But at least the combat system is interesting (though do we need so much combat – are there no other game mechanics?)
So I’m rather torn. Either this sequel ignores the first two games and expansions and pulls a Prey (and then why does it even bother with the name?) or it follows in the original’s footsteps, then most people won’t be able to follow its story, and it will be full of cruft.
Really I would have preferred if Larian had just made a completely new and original game similar to D:OS2.
And for the record: Real Time WIth Pause is an abomination of a combat system. Just make it turn based instead. And for the love of Baator give me different buttons for pause and unpause so I don’t accidentally unpause when I meant to pause. I cannot believe that the UX guys have not yet figured this one out.
My guess is that they’ll split the difference and the plot will basically be some sort of spin-off from the original Bhaalspawn Saga – in way that can be explicated fairly briefly at or near the beginning of the game and not matter if you haven’t played the originals (which I guess hardly anyone will have done).
But I concede it is entirely possible that it’ll have nothing to do with the originals whatsoever, aside from the name and setting. (And to be fair, BG2 had nothing whatsoever to do with Baldur’s Gate!)
My other prediction is that by the time it’s released they’ll have dropped the ‘3’ from the title and it will be called “Baldur’s Gate: Shadows of Subtitle” or whatever, so as not to alienate the many many people who haven’t played the originals.
Formatting! Saying Shadows of Amn has nothing to do with Baldur’s Gate is just silly, so I assume you meant the city.
I’d certainly expect Minsc to show up, though. Dude shows up (or maybe showed up) in Cryptic’s Neverwinter, which is set a few centuries after the Bhaalspawn Trilogy in 4th Edition Forgotten Realms.
This will be interesting! I don’t really have any childhood memories with this game (mostly because it’s almost as old as I am) and the first time I played it it was the Enhanced Edition, and I absolutely loved it (as well as the sequel)! It was a bit of a hurdle getting past the interface, but I’m the kind of person who plays Dwarf Fortress so it certainly wasn’t a dealbreaker.
I look forward to seeing a more retrospective type analysis.
Let’s be honest people. As long as it has Jim Cummings spouting crazy lines as Minsc (and Boo), it’s going to be successful. Wizard’s is still pushing the character in video games, comics and tabletop modules.
I remember playing the series in 2010-11. Loved the first one (low levels turn it into tactical strategy not unlike Brigade E5, where each level up and new armour felt meaningful, and in order to survive I had to trick enemies with various tactics; plus the story is surprisingly full of detective investigations and not without pretty smart plan for a villain), 2nd and expansion were entertaining (mage duels, man).
Pillars of Eternity, sadly, were a downgrade from any of BG games. Not terrible, but overtly average
I’m… Not sure if Larian up to a task, though. But I hope to be proven wrong
The first rumors of Baldur’s Gate 3 being developed by Larian date back to September last year, but at the time Larian said they weren’t working on it.
Pathfinder: Kingmaker is MUCH closer to Baldur’s Gate than the Pillars games. Yuck, no need to stir that diarrhea with a stick.