Why Baldur's Gate Is Still a Delight to Play

Hey hey folks, and welcome to my critique of Baldur's Gate. I've attempted to play through it numerous times over the years since its release in 1998, but for some reason, I always bounced off around Beregost. I think it was seeing all the houses in the town and being intimidated at how long it would take to explore through them all. It’s a good thing I never saw the city of Baldur’s Gate right?

All these years later, with the release of the Enhanced Edition and some CRPG experience behind me, it was finally time to tackle this genre classic. Spoiler alert, but I loved it. I considered playing through the sequel immediately, making a video on the whole series. After a viewer poll and some consideration however, I decided to cover the base game plus the Siege of Dragonspear expansion in this video, and save Baldur’s Gate 2 for the future.

This critique is a series of anecdotes and observations about my time playing the Enhanced Edition, released in 2012. The first section is about levelling up, and how small changes to numbers affect success and failure. The second section is about my chosen class and companions, and the third section is about the game's plot and how it relates to pacing and progression. It's also where I discuss the reason why I found Baldur's Gate so enjoyable to play all these years later. After I wrap up, I’ll let you know the games for the next critique poll, and share some ideas that didn’t make their way into the main video. Let me know your thoughts in the comments, and don't forget to subscribe and give the video a like if you enjoy what I have to say. This discussion contains minor spoilers for Baldur’s Gate and Siege of Dragonspear, so viewer discretion is advised. Now, let's talk about levelling up.

The Importance of a Few Numbers

I think RPG fans take levelling up for granted. In many games, the levels hit quickly, exciting the player with that dopamine rush of their power increasing. Maybe it's more health and better stats, or maybe it's a point to spend in an upgrade tree, but while levelling up is always exciting, there's a paradox that the more levels a game throws at a player, the less important each level itself feels.

That's why playing Baldur's Gate over the last couple of months was such a revelation. Levels in this game are scarce, and because of this, each new level carries with it a sense of accomplishment, alongside a shift in the balance of power between the party and their enemies. I'll give two examples of what I mean. A few hours into the game you need to assault a bandit camp. My party was level 2 at this point. Despite many reloads and trying out different strategies, the guards patrolling the outskirts of their camp were destroying me. This series of defeats led to the decision that it was best to go elsewhere and complete side quests in order to reach level 3 before I tried again. I explored new areas, found a dungeon in a ruined bridge, and by the time I had cleared it, my party was level 3, and had better gear. I went back to the camp, and decided to use a conservative strategy to pull single enemies towards my group, clearing the camp one grunt at a time, but this caution was no longer necessary. With the increase of one level, my party was getting hit a lot less, and their weapons were inflicting large amounts of damage on everyone foolish enough to stand in their way.

The second example is an encounter that happened hours later in the base game, but didn't pay off until the Siege of Dragonspear expansion. There's a cave I walked by with a terrifying bloodstain leading into it. Armed with the spirit of adventure, and the ability to quicksave, I decided to see what lay beyond the cavern's entrance. It was a wyvern nest. I had been able to take out some smaller Wyverns in a random encounter, but this was a horde of them, and there were big ones in there. I had no chance. I reloaded, and moved on. Fast forward 20 or so hours, and I'm exploring a wilderness zone in Siege of Dragonspear. I walk into the fog of war and the game reveals wyverns. I freaked. Here were a few of the creatures that had caused me such trouble all those hours ago. What I didn’t consider was that even though it was hours ago, it was many levels ago as well. My party killed the Wyverns so easily, it was almost unbelievable. I had been so scared of running into what I felt were high level creatures, that I had forgotten my party were now high level creatures themselves. I didn't even have to bust out any spells or strategies.

The reason I bring up spells and strategies is a few years ago I made a critique video on Pillars of Eternity. I talked about how it was easy to get into a familiar rhythm of how to approach combat encounters. Each party member had a role, and I knew what abilities would get the job done. A problem occurred when I would come across encounters where using that familiar strategy no longer produced results. These encounters forced me to scour the spell descriptions of my magic users, and the ability descriptions of my other members until I found something I hadn't been using that would result in success. When it worked, I would add these new skills and spells into my rotation until I hit the next roadblock. Rinse and repeat.

In Baldur's Gate, this rotation of skills and spells used in the majority of combat encounters, is replaced by relying on the AI scripts. I think this is feasible because I played the game on its easy difficulty setting. A couple years back I made a video on Persona 4 Golden, about how playing on the ‘very easy’ difficulty made the game more fun due to the ease of combat, and the increased money and experience. Since that video, while I still prefer to play games on an easier difficulty, I no longer prefer the easiest. I like moving down one notch from normal instead of moving all the way. The reason is that while easy difficulties put the games' numbers in the player's favour, it still utilises most of the games' systems, which a story mode might get rid of for greater ease of play. For example, in Baldur's Gate, story mode does not allow the player to be permanently killed in battle. Playing on easy, there were combat encounters like my bandit camp escapade that were threatening or insurmountable. Encounters that I even, gasp, had to reload.

The reason I play on easy is it lessens the difficulty of the majority of combat. One way it accomplishes this is that the AI scripts are more useful than they would be otherwise. With the numbers in a player’s favour, the majority of random encounters can be handled by every member of the party using melee or ranged attacks. AI stops me having to reassign a target every time a foe dies, instead of party members just standing around after a kill scratching their rears. Even if I have the spellcaster scripts on and my magic users start using buffs and attack spells without my input (which I think is a strong argument to turn the AI off), since there's little penalty for resting, you can get those spells back once the fight is over. The main danger is that once an enemy is spotted, with the AI on, your frontline fighters will rush towards them, sometimes springing traps in the process, but any strategy you have that hinges on positioning benefits from controlling the party yourself. So while I preferred to leave the AI on for the majority of the game, I did turn it off or toggle it in tough encounters.

And though playing on easy massages the game in my favour and makes relying on the AI a reliable strategy, numbers still dictate the flow of battle. To bring it back to the Wyvern fights and the importance of levelling up, the reason the AI scripts are so useful, is because the stats that determine hits and avoiding damage, THACO and Armour Class, turn most fights into a binary affair. Are you a high enough level, or is your gear strong enough for this encounter? If so, you’ll rarely be taking damage and you’ll frequently be hitting the enemy. The rest is up to the dice rolls to determine how many combat rounds the encounter is going to take. If you're too low level like I was at that bandit camp, or have bad gear, then the inverse will happen. The enemies will be taking chunks out of your health and avoiding all your damage. At this point it's time to reload and either work out a strategy to make up for the fact your stats aren't high enough, or it's time to travel elsewhere to level up.

This is how the majority of combat works in Baldur's Gate, and if that was all there was to it, it would get tedious, even with the AI scripts automating the process. What keeps combat exciting up until the final boss, are status effects and magic users. Any spellcaster in a group of enemies should be your primary focus. Even when your party has low THACO and Armour Class numbers (because these stats are better the lower they are), the wrong magic can spell disaster. Anything affecting morale or autonomy is the worst. Web to hold you in place, fear to make you flee, and all manner of spells to charm or confuse a party member so they wander off, or even worse, start attacking an ally. With how quickly a fight can go tits up when afflicted by these effects, I'll take a disease or poison side effect anyday. At least those are easily treated.

Speaking of status effects, let’s talk about Basilisks. Baldur's Gate is a low level AD&D campaign, meaning the player isn’t going to be fighting dragons, or horrors from another plane of existence. When I fought the final boss, my characters were levels 6-7, but the toughest fight I had in the whole game was a few hours earlier underneath Candlekeep. To exit the Candlekeep Catacombs, you must fight your way past two Greater Basilisks. Their main attack is a petrification gaze. If you fail a saving roll, you're a statue. The character is dead. Game over. And these Greater Basilisk bastards shoot this gaze at you relentlessly. There are simple ways to negate petrification, such as the level 1 spell, ‘Protection from Petrification’, but I somehow never came across it. I had one potion of mirrored eyes and a couple fire and lightning wands. After many many many quickloads, I managed to best the wretched beasts and was able to leave the catacombs intact.

So for as many combat encounters that felt easy to breeze through with the AI, there were those like the basilisks where I only succeeded thanks to strategy, taking advantage of the spells and potions I had available, and a solid heaping of luck. The final encounter with Sarevok is another example. He’s ridiculously strong, and has allies that are just as big a pain in the ass. A beneficial tactic I only learned late in the game is that you don't have to see an enemy on-screen to shoot area of effect spells like fireball. What a great way to bring Sarevok past all the traps of the room you fight him in. Combined with the right special arrows, a couple monster summons, and some clever use of attack spells, buffs, debuffs, and drinking potions at the right time, I was victorious. With all the reloads it took, I breathed a sigh of relief as I enjoyed the ending cutscene.

It's memorable that I beat the final boss through the skin of my teeth, but what I took away from that encounter was that despite reaching the credits, I knew little about how to level up and equip a party optimally in Baldur’s Gate. There was a feeling that if I wasn't playing on easy, I wouldn't have had a chance. It made me want to know more about what the best gear is, where to find it, and who the best companions are. About halfway through my playthrough I was thinking of other classes I'd love to try, and what weapon proficiencies, skills and spells would result in an unstoppable force. In my opinion, that’s one of the marks of a great RPG. When it's done I say to myself "Ok, I know a little more about how the game works. Now I want to play through it again, and break it with how powerful I can become". With that in mind, let's talk about my character and party choices, and where I think I may have gone wrong.

Attachment Through Utility

Last year I had a hankering to play through Baldur's Gate. I knew that with how long it takes me to make videos, and seeing the games covered are chosen by the viewer poll at the end of each critique, it'd take a while to get around to it. In preparation I read some of the Forgotten Realms novels, the most engaging of which was the Dark Elf Trilogy by RA Salvatore. Reading the story of Drizzt Do’Urden locked in the idea of what I wanted to play in Baldur's Gate. Since I couldn't play as a Drow, I'd choose an Elf, and it just so happens that an Elf is a great race to play the Ranger class.

I should have chosen an Archer cause I hardly used any of the Ranger's abilities. It was also annoying to have my main character in the backlines of party composition. Sure he was invaluable raining down arrowed death from afar, but I still wanted him to be out front. Luckily I found other companions to fill out my party while Imoen and myself took potshots with our bows, but I kept thinking about playing a melee class so I could fulfil that frontline fantasy, leading the party and conversing with all the quest givers. Sure the dialogue choices are the same no matter who is talking (not counting for the party leader’s charisma stat), but this is a "role playing" game, and not having my own character initiate conversation was ruining the illusion.

It didn't take long to lock in the party I would use for not only the rest of Baldur's Gate, but Siege of Dragonspear as well. The sole exception was Imoen not being available in the expansion, so the game gives you Safana, who I referred to as "We have Imoen at home". It turns out by happenstance, the party I ended up with is the canonical party, the one that the player starts Baldur's Gate 2 with. I had two couples along with Imoen and myself. Khalid, Jaheira, Minsc, and Dynaheir.

I feel I need to talk a little about Minsc. A friend of mine kept quoting his lines to me over Discord as I was playing through the game, and I had no idea what he was referring to. See, when I played this game for an impressions video years ago, one of the first things I did was turn off the voices. I found I could read the scrolling text faster than it was spoken, and I found the constant lines when characters are selected, moved, or in battle, annoying. With the voices silenced, I could read at my own pace, and when the characters were talking, I had my own concept of what they sounded like. This is why the wacky lines of Minsc talking about his space hamster Boo didn't resonate with me. I sometimes saw his text appear in the box at the bottom of the screen, but none of it made any impression on me. Siege of Dragonspear handled this better because text boxes often appear above character's heads on the game screen, and the companions converse amongst themselves a lot more in the expansion, but any attachment to these 5 characters I had in Baldur's Gate was solely due to their utility.

Dynaheir and Jaheira were my magic users, with Dyna leaning more on wands than spells. Jaheira buffed and healed the party, and often I would use Flame Blade or Shillelagh to boost her combat skills. Khalid was my tank, Minsc my damage dealer (who needed the most healing out of everyone in the group), while Imoen and Davv my Elven Ranger pelted the enemies with arrows, with Dyna aiding this barrage with her sling once I cast enough spells. And I would be remiss to discount Imoen's utility at recognising traps, disarming them, and unlocking chests with her thief skills.

Reading some online guides afterwards, I learned that most of my party members are far from the best choice for their roles as tank, healer, damage dealer, or spellcaster. There are 25 possible companions. I ran into a chunk of them during my travels, but never wanted to replace the members I’d already learned how to use. Initially I kept my party around for narrative reasons. Khalid and Jaheira were asked to look after me if anything happened to Gorion. Imoen is my character's childhood friend, and well, something about Minsc had me bring him along, and after I helped him rescue Dynaheir, they seemed a good pair that I should keep around. As I wasn't hearing them talk throughout the game, this initial reasoning gave way to the aforementioned utility, and by the time the expansion rolled around, I wanted them in my party because they were familiar. Jaheira joins the party late in Siege of Dragonspear, Khalid even later, and it was a joyous reunion to welcome both of them back. The initial narrative reasoning was enough, and then an entire game of exploring, questing, and overcoming adversity with these characters endeared me to them. My feelings about Baldur’s Gate’s narrative follow a similar arc.

Baldur’s Gate’s Narrative Gets Out of its Own Way

For most of my time with Baldur's Gate, I didn’t care about the narrative. Gorion being killed after fleeing from Candlekeep is a intriguing setup, but the question of why you're being pursued is then put on the backburner until the final act. Sure you keep encountering bounty hunters and mercenaries trying to cash in on your corpse, but without a reason, it turns into just another thing the player has to deal with. It feels a lot like the plot thread of the iron shortage. First you're travelling to Nashkel to investigate why the iron in their mines is tainted, before following a bread crumb trail of conspiracy through bandit camps, forests, and secret mines, all the way to the city of Baldur's Gate. While it was this conspiracy plotline that lead me through all these locations, systematically dismantling the leadership of the shadowy organisation responsible, the reason this plotline feels as sparse as the bounty hunters that show up from time to time, is that the Iron shortage has little to do with my character. I’m going through the motions of pulling on this thread because finding the next person in charge to interrogate and kill before being pointed in a new direction is where the meat of the game takes place.

It feels like the iron shortage conspiracy is used as an excuse to guide the player to new locations, new dungeons, and all manner of sidequests. It's remarkable how many folks are just hanging out in open areas with fun diversions to take part in. I last played D&D in my college days (which is quite a while ago), but I imagine in a lot of play sessions, there are fun characters the dungeon master sprinkles along the game path to lead the party off on tangents to gain experience, loot, and most of all, a good time as they're working their way towards the larger purpose of the campaign. These in-between moments when I found myself a dungeon, a new area to explore, or some people to help, were when I was having the most fun.

Now I've already talked about how important levels and gear can be to surviving combat. Each increase in numbers (even a single digit) can drastically change how easy or difficult an encounter is, and it's the fact that experience trickles in over time, and gear upgrades are a rarity that adds a further excitement to the act of adventuring. A dungeon has enough traps, enemies, and chests to guarantee that a party is going to leave it stronger than when they entered. Successfully completing quests offers the highest experience gains, and as a new player, I was able to indulge in the act of exploration that I find the most enjoyable, that I didn't know what would be around the next corner.

For example, on the way to the Cloakwood mines, I had to work my way through Cloakwood itself. It's a forest with traps just out in the open. When I first triggered a web trap and was beset upon by spiders, I thought the guy who had just given me a quest to save his brother had set me up. I didn't come to the conclusion that there were traps until it happened again further in the area. The concept of traps being in an outdoor space was so foreign to me, that I couldn't believe such a thing was happening. It made me paranoid for the rest of the entire playthrough, wondering what would be the next innocuous area that would cause a headache because I wasn't scouting ahead with my thief.

But once I keyed into the rhythms of exploring an area, winning battles, finding treasure, clearing quests and levelling up, I saw Baldur's Gate in its best light. Candlekeep is the bookend of this style of play. You leave it after the tutorial, and this freeform adventuring (following the iron shortage conspiracy from location to location) continues all the way to Baldur's Gate itself. The city is full of sidequests, too many districts, and the most confusing sewer system I've come across in a game. After returning to Candlekeep and escaping the catacombs below, your party are wanted as fugitives, so the sewer is the best way to get around… if you can work out how all the screens and ladders in and out of it connect. It never made sense to me. This is probably when my class changed from Ranger to Fallen Ranger. I started killing the guards when they were set upon me. I didn't think too much of it, until after one fight I noticed the majority of my party had left me. I'd never even considered the reputation mechanic until this moment. I guess that's what I get for travelling with do-gooders, says the guy who can't ever bring himself to attempt evil playthroughs of any RPG.

After returning to Candlekeep however, the plotlines of the iron shortage conspiracy, and why your character is being hunted merge (the same figure, Sarevok being responsible for both). What follows is a mostly linear affair of returning to Baldur's Gate, spoiling Sarevok’s plans to rule over the city, chasing him into the Undercity, and emerging victorious. After the hours spent without significant revelation, this final section after returning to Candlekeep feels like Baldur’s Gate is speedrunning its ending. The plot has always been time-sensitive, but the pace of the adventuring has been anything but. One aspect I think adds to this sense of taking one's time when out in the world, is that sidequests are removed from your journal upon entering a new chapter. It makes it so the player doesn't want to tackle whatever their next task is, shifting the priority from the main plot to everything else the game has to offer.

What's ironic about this push and pull between the immediacy of the plot and the leisurely approach to adventuring taking precedence, is that I wasn't thorough at all in my completion of sidequests, or exploring the Sword Coast. I didn't engage with most of the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion, and if I didn't know how to finish a side-quest thanks to the vague hints in my journal, I left it alone. Now in Siege of Dragonspear, I started to alt-tab, to look up how to complete side quests in the Baldur's Gate wiki. I think I decided to do so because of Dragonspear’s focus on narrative over the freeform adventuring of the original title. In Baldur's Gate, there was always enough sidequests and places to explore that I felt I didn’t need to be a completionist. I was charting my own path through these lands, and the game was accommodating. In Siege of Dragonspear, it felt like I needed to tackle everything I came across, because there wouldn't be many other options or opportunities for adventure.

Conclusion

So why did Siege of Dragonspear leave me feeling cold while playing Baldur's Gate excited me? Part of it is that Baldur's Gate has a satisfying ending, while Dragonspear ends on a cliffhanger meant to lead into Baldur's Gate 2. And of course there's the 18 years between the base game and this new piece of DLC, explaining the difference in design philosophy between the two. I give Dragonspear credit for having entertaining and complex dungeons that were a joy to play through. The Lich dungeon early on was a highlight. I loved how dangerous the lower levels were, and how I had to use some brain power to not only work my way through, but to defeat the Lich at the end once and for all. In contrast, most of the dungeons of Baldur's Gate that I played through were mines, or mazes full of trap-heavy corridors. But while the dungeons in the base game are lacking compared to Dragonspear, Baldur's Gate is full of outdoor areas to explore that are populated with characters, sidequests, loot, and interesting encounters. It champions player-driven adventure in a vast explorable world. Dragonspear has such areas, but they're constricted, and they're all on the game's narrative path. Baldur's Gate gives the player the freedom to explore at their leisure, Dragonspear whisks the player along its narrative, only allowing small diversions. I hope I've made an adequate case in this video, that the small diversions are the entire point. The secret sauce. This spirit of adventure, of allowing a player the illusion of charting their own path and having their own experience, is why Baldur's Gate is so special, and is still a delight to play all these years later. Thanks for watching.