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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."
Yes! When I first read the quote in the article about the stars being in the right place, all I thought was: Why on earth could we not be in that position again, now? All they had then, we still have today; all we need is some people to decide that gameplay is a lot more important that using all the features of graphics cards we can't even buy, yet.
Besides, those waving grass effects in NWN looked pretty good, but overall, I thought BGII looked a lot better. With a fixed perspective, it is simply easier to produce big worlds that don't look the same all over -- you can have artists draw any kind of environment, and it's there. You don't have to make sure it looks good from whatever angle or zoom-factor you look at things. A single, good drawing, is all you need, instead of having to make a big mosaic of textures you have to re-use.
But I suppose that the screenshots in magazines, and demo's on gameshows, are more important to sell a game than long-term playability, so if it looks good at first glance, that's OK. Even if the rest of the game looks exactly the same.
Jan
You owe it to yourself to finish Planescape Torment.
Let's see.
* Huge: you could burn 200 hours going through the sidequests and other neat encounters (like the Twisted Rune door you had to have a Rogue Stone to get through)
* NPC Banter: From Viconia's jokes about Minsc's "fingerpainted face" to Edwin's snide remarks, to the inanity of Jan Jensen, there were a LOT of classic and hilarious characters. Reading the NPC-to-NPC banter was more fun than talking to them yourself.
* Multipath: lots of opportunities to be evil, and a lot of moral ambiguity.
* Soloable: for the maniac, this game was possible to solo; you could leave the party behind. Over time as I replayed I solo'd with a Sorceror and with a Kensai/Wizard multiclass. Fun stuff.
* Epic: the storyline was huge, and tough to beat, especially when you factor in the expansion back.
* Mods: There are add-ons galore. New NPCs, tougher big boss encounters (many of which were done by David Gaider, one of the designers), even huge chunks of new content (look for Return to Windspear, for example)
Plus, there's a real thread that runs from BG1 to BG2 to ToB. You can play through all 3. There's a hack now that lets you "play" BG1 using the BG2 engine so you can play the class kits added in BG2, but in BG1.
This game remains a legend. It will undoubtedly stand the test of time and sit alongside classics like the Gold Box games, Ultima VII, Eye of the Beholder, and others. It's sad that Bioware is not involved in NWN2 (although Obsidian should do well), because it would have been nice to see them really take THAT engine and enhance it and apply it to yield the sort of improvement that BG1->BG2 showed. (Not that NWN doesn't have a certain niche all to itself, but it had a lot of weaknesses... BGII did not)
As Greg Kasavin of Gamespot said, "It's a definitive role-playing experience, and the only reason it can't be called the best game in its class is because in a sense there's nothing available that compares to it."
Well put.