Baldur's Gate - Original Opening Cinematics, Character Creation & Prologue

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Nerdly Pleasures (Great Hierophant)

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Published on July 13, 2020 4:32:52 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCk2DCtSLFs

Game:

Baldur's Gate (1998)

Duration: 33:13

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Here I have taken video from one of my favorite western-style RPGs, Baldur's Gate. Most videos of this game these days use the Enhanced Edition remake from 2012 but I wanted to show the game running much nearer to how it would have in 1998-99. I show all the animated logos, the Opening Cinematic, Character Creation and finally go through the Prologue in Candlekeep.

Baldur's Gate is running on my Pentium III 600EB computer running Windows 98SE. The video card is a Voodoo 3 3000 PCI and the audio card is a Diamond Monster Sound MX300. I have 512MiB of SDRAM and a 120GiB hard disk drive in the system. I did a full installation of the 5-CD version of the game, not "The Original Saga" 3-CD release which uses compressed resource files. I meant to apply the official patch but I forgot.

I have not installed the Tales of the Sword Coast Expansion. When I have previously played Baldur's Gate, I always installed Tales of the Sword Coast and began doing those quests just before the end of the game. Tales can make the main game a little easier, even if you do not perform the quests that the Expansion adds, because it raises the experience cap to allow your party members to earn an additional level or two.

Baldur's Gate originally ran in a 640x480 resolution like most of its contemporaries. While there are ways to increase the resolution via mods, I have not installed any. I set my Windows desktop's resolution to match, even if 640x480 is not ideal for Windows 98SE. My Datapath VisionRGB E1s capture card can capture a remarkably faithful rendition of this resolution, but it has a bug where the bottom three lines will not be displayed unless the refresh rate is set to 75Hz. Most Windows 9x games are really 60fps (or less), but the extra refresh rate makes a CRT much easier on the eyes at higher resolutions. I captured at 60fps and did not see any issues.

I configured the A.I. updates from the default of 30 to 40. At 30 the game feels annoyingly slow, 40 makes it much more tolerable. Unfortunately the developers did not account for A.I. updates above 30 for the scripted Gorion and Sarevok fight, thus the event happens quicker than it should and Gorion and Sarevok talk over each other when they should not.

The Company Intros and the Opening Cinematic may look rather cheesy by today's standards, but they were decent by 1998s standards. Beamdog's movies' are almost completely static.

In Character Creation, I did not want to spend a great deal of time on the ability scores. You can spend hours trying to get 18/00 Strength on the random rolls. Fortunately there are one or two ways to increase Strength during the game. Of course, it's very easy to export a character, hack their stats and import the character back into the game.

I have not played Baldur's Gate in quite a while, so my run through Candlekeep in the prologue is far from efficient. The Prologue is not as light on the combat as you might expect, given that there is an illusionist willing to summons up lots of monsters for you to practice combat. As the video was running for almost thirty minutes by this point, I elected to keep the optional combat to a minimum because it does not give you much experience.

Running the original version of Baldur's Gate on a modern PC can be a little challenging. The installers included on the original CDs are so ancient that they will not work in Windows 10. You will need some workaround. Then there are likely to be graphical issues, the fog of war may look wrong, the green character selection rings and boxes may flicker or may not be fully drawn. Usually the software graphics compatibility options in the game can reduce these to a tolerable level. For running the game on my Windows 98SE machine, I do not need any of the compatibility options. Also, Baldur's Gate is a 16-bit color game, the 32-bit color option is present for compatibility.

Baldur's Gate does support Creative's Environmental Audio Extensions, but the support is not impressive and a bit buggy. EAX was very new in late 1998 when Baldur's Gate was released. My Aureal Vortex 2-based Diamond Monster Sound MX300 can emulate EAX 1.0 with driver version 2041, but I installed version 2048 which removed the support. I do have a Sound Blaster Live! card but it is not installed in this system. There is noise in the audio from this recording, I will investigate the source and try to eliminate it for my next recording from this machine.

I have considered playing through the game and uploading to Youtube, but if I were to do that some things would have to change. This video turned out to be huge, nearly 55GiB before processing and 7.5GiB uploaded to Youtube. All I did for the upload was to resize 3x to 1920x1440. Baldur's Gate does not look particularly great when resized via nearest-neighbor scaling. A DVI capture would make for much easier compression due to the lack of analog noise present in any device.

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