Product Description

The grand saga of a massive gaming experience awaits you in Baldur's Gate! Isometric, top-down view gives a birds eye view of the action 3D height maps for realistic travel over terrain - actually climb stairs, fall into pits, and traverse rocky areas Dynamic full color lighting effects Realistic day to night changes in the lighting of the world Rain, snow, fog, lightning, all occuring in real-time Dynamic changes in character appearance - as you change a character's weapons and armor

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9262 in Video Games
• Brand: Black Isle Studios
• Model: C95-625-0
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platforms: Windows Me, Windows 95, Windows 98
• Format: CD-ROM

Features

• The plot line of the game involves the regions around the cities of Baldur's Gate and Amn
• These cities are involved in a plot to destabilize the entire Sword Coast and precipitate a war
• Chaos threatens to overwhelm the Sword Coast
• The state of Amn is under siege to the south, the High Moor is being overrun in the north, and the region around Baldur's Gate is in turmoil
• 5 CDs filled with prerendered backgrounds, compelling music, and gameplay

Amazon.com Review
Baldur's Gate is a near-perfect adaptation of the classic tabletop, role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Six separate races and eight core character classes, from which the player can create a completely original character, are available. The game world is well painted, and players are free to explore this wonderfully textured game environment in any way they see fit, all against the backdrop of a thoughtfully conceived and versatile plot.

You begin the game as a young orphan living with your stepfather within the safe confines of a scholarly community. It is a happy and idyllic life until your stepfather is killed and it becomes clear that you are intended to be next. You, as the young protagonist, then set out to discover just what kind of a mess you're in. During the adventure, you recruit a number of personable allies, battle foes, delve into dungeons, trek across wilderness, solve puzzles, and complete a plethora of epic quests that are seamlessly sown into the fabric of the overall plot. The story line unfolds in response to your choices to reveal your character's true identity as well as the nature and motive of your enemies.

If the Lord himself were to ask me what games he should have in his home game collection, the first two words out of my mouth would be Baldur's Gate. This 1998 Role-Playing Game of the Year is a masterpiece and the standard by which all such games will be judged for the foreseeable future. Groundbreaking 32-bit graphics, 3-D sound, multiplayer options, and a friendly real-time game engine are blended with a depth of plot in a way that redefines the genre. --Joshua B. Coombs

Pros:

• Versatile and responsive plot
• Entertaining character interaction
• Huge game world
• Friendly game engine

• Nonplayer characters exhibit little free will

GameSpot Review
Very few computer games based upon Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the most influential role-playing game system of them all, have been released over the past several years, and those that did make it to retail shelves have been ill-conceived, substandard products. In that context, it's hardly surprising that Baldur's Gate, which many gamers suspected would finally bring AD&D back to the forefront of computer gaming, has been one of the most anxiously anticipated role-playing games ever.

Many role-playing gamers openly expressed their disappointment when developer BioWare Corporation announced that it was adapting AD&D's turn-based gameplay to its proprietary real-time engine. Stats-loving, rule-abiding, Gnoll-stomping AD&D fans obstinately asserted that AD&D just couldn't be successfully adapted into a real-time game engine. Fortunately, BioWare stuck to its game designing instincts, because no computer game has ever done a better job at simulating AD&D. Character creation and development is steadfastly accurate to AD&D second-edition rules, allowing gamers to create characters from six different races, eight core character classes, and eight specialty mage classes and to advance in experience points and character levels as tasks are accomplished and beasties are slain.

Baldur's Gate is set in the Sword Coast region of AD&D's most popular milieu, the Forgotten Realms. Interestingly, although Baldur's Gate is a party-based game, the storyline is based around a single main character, even in the multiplayer version of the game. The main character has grown up in the monk-infested citadel of learning, Candlekeep. Learning of a mysterious, impending threat, the character is forced to flee Candlekeep early on and is constantly assailed by would-be assassins throughout the course of the game. The motivations of your character's enemies are not entirely intuitive, other than their obvious intention to smack your character's head into applesauce, and uncovering the rationale behind the actions of your character's enemies is your main goal in the game. As in games such as Betrayal at Krondor, the main storyline in Baldur's Gate is divided into chapters, during which certain key tasks have to be accomplished by your party in order to advance the plot. While using a chapter structure creates a more story-driven game, it also potentially creates unduly linear gameplay, where the actions of your characters are arbitrarily limited in order to fit within the constraints of the chapter structure.

Freedom to explore within a story-driven game sounds like the best of both worlds, but the plot of Baldur's Gate is advanced almost exclusively through scrolling text and voice-narrated messages that play at the beginning of each chapter and aren't particularly compelling. Nonplayer characters in the game tend to only give your characters simple messages and basic tasks to accomplish.

There are a couple of dozen nonplayer characters capable of joining your player character to create a party of up to six adventurers, and some of the party member NPCs have particularly distinctive personalities. Unlike in most other RPGs, where NPCs are routinely given colorful introductions and backgrounds that ultimately have no impact whatsoever on gameplay, party member NPCs in Baldur's Gate will vigorously pursue their own agendas, even if they are contrary to your own intentions. Continue to act in a manner contrary to a party member's alignment and that character will voice his displeasure and eventually unilaterally leave the party and attack your character.

If you'd prefer to create an entire party yourself, you can do so by starting a multiplayer game and playing it solo. Baldur's Gate is, of course, also the first fairly hard-core RPG that you can play multiplayer, either over the Internet (Gamespy is included with the game, or you can play it over the Heat network) or using a more local connection. Up to six human players can each control a character, with the host of the game deciding which players are given the ability to pause the game, talk to NPCs, spend party gold, or perform any other action that affects other players. Action gamers hoping that Baldur's Gate will satisfy their cravings for a new Diablo will likely be disappointed with the party-based focus of the multiplayer version of Baldur's Gate.

Baldur's Gate sports detailed, isometric graphics displayable in up to 32-bit color if you have a 4MB video card. Most games that use an isometric perspective are actually tile-based, building their landscapes like a giant jigsaw puzzle, pieced together by a series of individually crafted tiles. Since each tile is usually used over and over again, even good tile-based games, like Diablo, tend to eventually give you the overwhelming sense that you've seen it all before, even when exploring new environments in the game. Baldur's Gate, on the other hand, is not tile-based, and features fully rendered backgrounds, and each new area you explore in Baldur's Gate will look different from the others, since it has been uniquely crafted.

Support for Creative Labs' EAX 3D audio is included and used to good effect. The voices of characters echoing in caverns and thunder from the prolific storms in the game often sound as if they are surrounding your party. The musical score is also of high quality, favoring suitably epic orchestral tunes instead of more subtle tracks. The game's interface is particularly well done, always providing you with several ways to get something done. You can choose to control your characters in real-time strategy fashion by dragging a box around them with your mouse, or you can select one of the available preprogrammed formations.

Not everything works perfectly or logically in Baldur's Gate. While the weather effects are well done, the weather in the Sword Coast seems particularly fickle and uncertain as to the season, bombarding your characters with thunderstorms for days, only to be interrupted by a short snowfall, and then to finally return to sunny climes. The font used for most of the text in the game isn't particularly easy to read. The path-finding abilities of your characters are fairly poor in the initial release of the game, requiring you to micromanage your characters as they wander through underground labyrinths. BioWare has already released a beta patch for the game that purports to fix this problem by allowing gamers to choose the number of path-finding nodes relied upon by their characters. The automapping function is excellent, but it would have been great to have been able to annotate the maps.

Of course, some gamers may not like the AD&D system faithfully re-created by Baldur's Gate. In many ways, while playing Baldur's Gate it becomes apparent why the AD&D system has effectively been superseded by better-balanced role-playing systems. Mages, who have to memorize individual spells instead of relying on a more flexible "manna" or spell-point system, are still wimps at the beginning of the game and extremely deadly compared with fighters at higher character levels. But those are all problems inherent in the AD&D system, which BioWare has been forced to duplicate in Baldur's Gate. Within the constraints of the AD&D system, the game has been balanced extremely well. Not only is Baldur's Gate easily the best computer adaptation of AD&D ever, it also convincingly returns role-playing games to the forefront of computer gaming. --Desslock
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of GameSpot is prohibited.

From Maximum PC -- Subscribe now!
Baldur's Gate, an isometric-perspective RPG, breathes new life into the tired Dungeons and Dragons titles. Set in the world of the Forgotten Realms, Baldur's Gate is a nonlinear adventure of epic proportions.

Packed on five CDs filled with engaging music, clever banter, and meaty gameplay, Baldur's Gate quickly sucks you into its alternate world. BioWare's proprietary engine delivers gameplay that looks and feels similar to Blizzard's Diablo, but has far more spells, monsters, magical items, and NPCs. While the game is filled with uninspired pixel-based characters, the glorious pre-rendered backgrounds make up for that shortcoming. The point-and-click interface is intuitive, making it easy for first-time RPGers to jump in feet first.

On your journey, you'll run into 25 different NPCs who'll offer their services, leading you on quests and subplots. The AI is such that NPCs will abandon you if your actions go against their alignment, or applaud when they concur with your choice.

The only gameplay flaws involved the NPCs' pathfinding skills and monster reactions. In one instance, the AI had NPCs navigating their own way to destination points in dungeons instead of following your lead. And offscreen monsters idly stand by as their comrades are mowed down. Hardware-wise, you don't need a 3D accelerator for this 2D game; however, the game tends to slow way down on lower-end systems when the screen fills up with activity.

Baldur's Gate's penchant for customizability, replayability, and fluid story lines makes this game an instant classic. Kenn Durrence

Watch as your enemy's bodies rain down upon you in a shower of bloody chunks.

Rating: 9/10

©1999 Maximum PC

Customer Reviews

AD&D the way it is supposed to be
After rereading the `Lord of the Rings' series, I had put myself back into a fantasy state of mind. It had been many years since my brother and I wielded stacks of paper, dice and books to an imaginary game that was so intriguing because as a player you had such dynamic freedom of action and decisions. I wanted a game that would make me feel like that, and I found it when I stumbled across Baldur's Gate. It is the most perfect AD&D game I have played to date.

You create your main character and customize him or her to your liking. All other characters must be encountered and often convinced to join. There are well over twenty characters that I encountered in my game play, although your party can only consist of six characters at a time. Once a character joins your party, you have complete control of them (unless your actions violate their alignment). One of the greatest benefits of controlling the characters with a computer (as opposed to on paper) is that it is much easier to control and remember all the variables that each character and class has. When in control of a character, your icon controls are specific to that class; so it is very easy to quickly switch your thief into stealth/backstab mode, to have your cleric turn undead, to have your bard sing an inspiring battle song, to have your ranger charm an animal. Also with the computer, you don't have to worry about all the little variables that affect a characters abilities; weapon proficiencies, THACO, abilities granted by magic items. This makes for a much cleaner enjoyable game.

The gaming world is huge. Each new area you enter is completely original with beautiful new graphics, random monster encounters, and so very many sub-quests. On average, I think that each area on the map had at least 3, sometimes 4 sub-quests to be completed. But only if you want to, the progression of the game is completely non-linear, YOU DO WHATEVER YOU WANT! Fight or talk, steal or buy, fight the bad guys or join the bad guys. There is a major plot line that your main character is forced into. You simply remain ignorant of new areas on the map until you have completed a chapter by ending a major quest. My only complaint of Baldur's Gate is that there are so many variables in the game play, I wonder what all I've missed.

Upon completion of Baldur's Gate, your character is saved so that you may load him into Baldur's Gate II. (In Part I, you are only allowed to progress to Level 7 or 8; this is why) . I strongly recommend playing Baldur's Gate first and not jumping straight to Part II. Part II has much that Part I does not: another two years of technology, AD&D 3rd Addition Rules, Character Kits, Ability to get a stronghold (castle). You would be selling yourself short by missing the development of your own character, as well as one of the best games you would have ever played. I am pretty certain that Part II will blow Part I out of the water, as far as being the greatest game. As great as Part I seems to me now, it would be terrible to play Part II, fall in love with the game, decided to play Part I, and then think that Part I was not very good in comparison.

PLAY `BALDUR'S GATE' RIGHT NOW!

Go forth and conquer
Baldur's Gate finally consumates the promising mariage of computing power and role-playing games. However, it's not for everyone.

I cut my RPG teeth on pen and paper geeking out in my buddies' basements. In the post-Commmodre-64 Era, I slogged through all of the original Ultimas and developed a high-patience threshold playing "Bane of the Cosmic Forge" on my Macintosh classic. (Imagine the bit-mapped dungeon slogging by on a tiny Mac screen, the horror.)

When I finally took the plunge last year and delved into the modern world of computer gaming on a newly-purchased PC I was overwhelmed with the fast action, fabulous graphics of most of the games out there. But Baldur's gate is the game for an old foggy like me who can't get up to speed with the methed-out the hyper-activity of circle-strafing Quake II enemies.

First, it's cerebral. This is not the game for people who enjoy the thoughless slaughter of Quake II. If you like puzzling over the right combinations of weapons, armor and magic, you will love Baldur's Gate.One of the things I enjoyed most about Diablo was this puzzling ("Would the battle axe of the moon be better than...") but I hated when you ran out of weapons to acquire in Diablo. Baldur's Gate has six characters to juggle equipment with and when you add that to the AD&D limitations on who can use what you have some wonderful tinkering.

Second, it's immersive. There is this feeling that you can go and do whatever you want. You are tied to a linear storyline but it will always wait for you to return from the numerous side quests. Go explore the woods to the east storm the Gnoll stronghold, it's up to you.

Finally, your actions have consequences. The choices you make in selecting party members and interacting with NPC's impacts how the story unfolds. This is the most compelling aspect of the game for me. If you chose to slay that guard over a stolen haubrak the evil characters in your party will rejoice will the lawful good paladin will decry his association with you.Your reputation will rise and fall based on your actions and this will affect game play down the road. Finding the right balance of allignments and actions is a pleasure and in encourages and entire replay of the whole game.

The game's main shortcomings lie in the party AI. Sometimes you have to babysit your characters negotiation of obstacles. Some people complain about the combat but I disagree, tinkering with various tactics against new enemies is part of the game's joy.When you get some tactics down for a certain baddie just let the AI take over and open a beverage.

In reading some of the other customer reviews I've seen two different players: Those who hate Baldur's Gate because it's slow and tedious at times and those who love it because it is a graphic incarnation of the beloved AD&D rulebook. Gamers who cannot swallow thier need to run and shoot, maim and kill will probably not like Baldur's Gate. However, if you enjoy tinkering and exploring a vastly varied world in style you will love it. And hey you won't have to dig up your 32-sided dice.

After 6 Years It Remains One of The Best
I unearthed this gem among my collection of old games after a recent move, and I promply popped it in to play out of nostalgia after experiencing a string of disappointing RPG's on the PC. 2 Weeks later I emerged to write the review this wonderful game deserves.

The game is set in Faerun, of the Dungeons and Dragons fame. Don't worry though you will not need to know basically anything about Faerun at first to enjoy the land and it's people, which is why this game is so wonderful. Once you are in the game and playing you will not feel out of place at all. If you are looking for a unique and seamless fantasy setting then you have found it. This is a beautiful world teeming with life and unique characters and once you finish Baldur's Gate, I know you will read up more on this "Faerun." It is that immersive.

Soundwise, this game was a breakthrough in video game entertainment. Bioware outdid itself with its ambient environmental effects. Enter a forest area and you can hear birds and natural wildlife along with trees swaying and wind blowing. When rain comes, it comes with excellent audio. I'm telling you, crank up your fancy speakers and listen! You will become immersed. The towns are constantly alive with sounds of commotion and people shouting. Masterful. The combat sounds such as spell effects and weapons hitting flesh along with the music is commendable as well.

You all play CRPG's for the story right? Even as a couple of Diablo fanboys scamper out I'm going to tell you that the Baldur's Gate saga is one of the great storytelling achievements not just in videogames but literature as well. Call me crazy but I enjoyed the story that much! Oh and don't read the crap novels based on this game the author did it no justice. Baldur's Gate follows the player character as he/she sets out from his warm, cozy lifestyle in the fortress-library of Candlekeep and takes off into the unforgiving land of Faerun. This comes on the heels of your foster father Gorion's urgent warnings. You are sent out into the world fresh for adventure, and there are many twists and turns along the way including one at the start, which will hook you for the rest of the game. Even in Candlekeep things aren't what they seem and without spoiling anything I can tell you that the story blossoms as you advance. You will never feel like saying "What the hell am I actually doing here?"

The gameplay is simple and intuitive. Party navigation is a breeze, and over 15 NPC's can be recruited into your party of 6 as you progress and their unique "banter" amongst themselves really never leaves you bored with your party. Combat is simple and the weapons are fun. Character development is one of the richest ever found in an CRPG. As for all this anger about the rules of D&D and how they "suck" in a CRPG, I can safely say that you should not worry one bit if you are looking for a rich roleplaying experience. I never bothered with 2nd edition 3rd edition and all that crap, the rules are fine and everything is calculated "behind-the-scenes" for you so it never takes away from the experience. Everything is seamlessly done and for a person looking to immerse themselves in a wonderful world the rules should never come up and detract from your game. You DO NOT have to be a Dungeons of Dragons fanatic to pick up this game and enjoy adventuring. It really is quite a masterpiece by itself.

With a lot of areas to cover and hundreds of quests and mini quests (I'm not kidding) you are looking at least 30 hours of gameplay, 20 if you "powergame" and rush through. That's real value for the 10$ max you're paying.

Graphically the old game is showing its age, I must admit. The 640x480 resolution and low-bit sprites are all here, but strangely enough it did not detract from the overall experience one bit. For all you "What are you crazy, 640x480? This ain't the stone age!" people who might pass up on this game because the graphics are dated, do no despair! There is a great mod/upgrade for Baldur's Gate called BGtutu which converts the engine to the newer Baldur's Gate II engine, with dramatic effect.

There's no reason to doubt me and countless other gamers out there that consider this the Holy Grail of CRPG's, there is a reason for that. The reason is that Baldur's Gate is one of those special games that you will be proud to own and look back on it in another 20 years as the "genre-reviving","genre-breaking" masterpiece that it truly is.

There's not much left to say, except that if you are a person that is reading this review right now, in front of your computer, and searching for that different RPG, that is not just hack and slash then end your search my friend. You have found your gem and it is called Baldur's Gate. Give it a go, and when you're done and well on your way to installing it's sequel do what I did and recommend it to someone.