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Baldur's Gate II's Five Year Anniversary
This year is the five year anniversary of the venerable Baldur's Gate II, and Gamebanshee is celebrating with a series of walkthroughs, an interview, and game art displays. From the interview with co-lead designers James Ohlen and Kevin Martens: "I have two primary memories burned into my mind from the Baldurs Gate days. The first memory is the horror of crunch time. Shadows of Amn was an enormous game with so many plots, characters, items, spells, places, etc., that it took a lot of work and passion to get that beast out the door. That leads to the second memory: creative fulfillment. I think the stars aligned for Baldurs Gate II in a way that they probably wont again. We had a finished engine that allowed us to focus on content rather than basic functionality. We had enough staff familiar with the engine that we could iterate content very quickly. We shipped it at a good time, shortly before the Christmas shopping season. Our system requirements were low, and a lot of basic machines could run it when they couldn't run the latest 3D marvel. It was a good environment for getting content into a game, as the result has shown."
Nobody seems to mention that the following games all use various incarnations of the same engine (is this Bioware's Aurora engine, or am I confusing it with something else?):
:p
Baldur's Gate I & II (the series we all know and love)
Planescape Torment (more of an adventure game from what I saw - good article in a recent issue of The Escapist)
Icewind Dale I & II (like BG series except you create your whole party, and the games are shorter; I inexplicably preferred these over BG myself)
I've played them all but only ever managed to complete Icewind Dale I (with both of the expansions). The rest all left enough of an impression on me to end up on my ever-growing "would love to come back to eventually" list of games.
To those who would like to play both BG games: don't play the second one until you've beaten the first! The intro movie of BG2 spoiled some of the ending of BG1 for me, and I've still never managed to finish BG1...
Off-topic: That linked GameBanshee site redirected me to some stupid spyware scanner site that wouldn't take no for an answer in regards to performing a scan on my system. I was saved from its intrusiveness at the last second only because I use Firefox. In addition, I don't trust any ranking that puts Deus Ex out of the top 25 PC games
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
You're close. "Aurora" is the name of the Neverwinter Nights (3D) engine. "Infinity" is the name of the 2D engine used for Baldur's Gate et al.
Random and weird software I've written.
This game is the ultimate in CRPGs. For the old-school pen & paper D&D fan, this game had it all. There was action (lots of it), tons of story, billions of quests, compelling NPCs that got more interesting the longer you played with them and the game wove all this together beautifully. For a fan of the series it got even better. The arc that covered the Baldur's Gate franchise was one of the best continuous stories I have every experienced in a game. I won't spoil anything for those who would still finish playing the 4 games, but I would definitely say that the plot builds up steam every minute of play until the final expansion which, I feel, finishes things off a bit expectadly, but appropriate nonetheless. If you like D&D or like CRPGs (not FF clones) then you owe it to yourself to "suffer" outdated graphics but gorgeous art to experience the whole collection of games.
if you want to play BG1, use BGTutu, which lets you use BG2's superior engine to play the first with minor quirks.
one google link