- 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 Coast and precipitate a war.
- Chaos threatens to overwhelm the 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.
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 s 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
.com
----
Baldur's Gate is a near-perfect adaptation of the
classic op, 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 stepher
within the safe confines of a scholarly community. It is a happy
and idyllic life until your stepher 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 Cons:* Nonplayer characters exhibit little
free will
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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 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 (Game 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
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 autoping function is excellent,
but it would have been great to have been able to annotate the
s.
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. -- GameSpot Review
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