Game:

Baldur's Gate (1998)

Duration: 8:38:22

0 views

0

Part 5. So, I told myself this year I was going to play some games that are outside of my comfort zone. I have never really gotten into CRPGs, but I have always heard fantastic things about Baldur's Gate. I had tried previously in the past to play this game and felt that it started to slow. So I decided to finally sit down be patient and play the game. The beginning for sure is a slog and I felt that I needed the tutorial to really understand what I was doing. It made it a bit rough, but by the end we had a well learned fighter in Dirky M'Lady. The game starts at a snails pace and since I am new to the Dungeons & Dragons universe and gameplay approach it was a rough go. I slowly adapted and became more comfortable with the game. I still dislike how you can consistently miss attacks when enemies are standing right in front of you. There is so much going on in this game it is extremely intimidating. People were nice enough to explain a lot of what I didn't know, but I still know that I was just scratching the surface. The game is way bigger that I thought and there is an absolutely massive amount of stuff you can do. I spent over 100 hours in the base game and didn't do even close to all of the quests and another 65 or so in the expansion Siege of Dragonspear. The game itself is fun if not very slow paced, which is nice and you can take your time exploring the Sword Coast. Every new area has lots of stuff to discover from quests, recruitable characters, caves and dungeons to explore and enemies to slaughter. I liked the world, I was not so much a fan of Baldur's Gate city proper. The city is too big for its own good and it seemed that I spent just as much time wandering around there and getting lost as I did to the rest of the world. The game was already slow, but when I hit Baldur's Gate progress came to a grinding halt. I had fun with the game and tried to finish every quest I came across, some were fun and some were mindless. I do love world building to an extent and this game is all about explaining things down to the smallest detail. The overall story isn't all that great, but it's a set-up game for the big sequel. The big bad here was silly and just sort of pops up at the end of the game and were supposed to hate him for reasons. It's a bit forced and poorly executed. For as much as this game loves its story they could have done a better job fleshing out the antagonist. There really is too much going on in this game for me to really flesh my feelings out in this small space. What I can say is that the expansion Siege of Dragonspear is way better than the main game. It took a lot of my gripes and improved on them. Fleshed out companions, rather than the silent zombies they were in the main game. And a much more interesting antagonist. It's more linear than the main game, which is fine. There are still a ton of things to do and waste your time on. I don't know that I could call this a classic, but I can certainly see the influential ripples this game has caused since its release in modern RPGs. It's a game that doesn't seem that it has held up all that well over the years. I'm sure that if I had originally played this at release and maybe had a love of D&D I would adore this game. For me it's hard to go back to something like this after experiencing all the modern trappings and quality of life improvements made to RPG games like this over the years. The graphics are fine for being pre-rendered and the music is solid for sure. I played on console and thought that the controls worked about as well as they good for a game like this. To all those that say this game wasn't meant to be played on console they are wrong, it plays just fine on the Switch and I'm sure on other consoles. The one caveat is that the game crashed multiple times just about everyday, and if I was saving or loading it deleted my save, that is an egregious oversight and is something that should be remedied. It ran fine otherwise. It's fine to have a preference, but at the end of the day it doesn't matter how I enjoyed the game just that I played it. And for those that say I am missing out on mods I would argue that is a terrible idea for a first time experience. I'm glad I played this and finally gave it a real chance. It's not great but it was still fun. Enjoy my blind playthrough.

You can find my Twitch channel here:
https://www.twitch.tv/cereal_ki11ah