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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."
Baldur's Gate II is still up there as one of my favourite games of all time. The fact that a huge proportion of the quests could be completed more than one way made it great fun to play through the game a second time as a different alignment. Loved telling the white dragon I'd help her and then stealing her eggs to feed to a demon :D
BGII soaked up hours, nay - weeks, of family time. We had four PCs going at some points, with all of us (mom, dad and kids) dealing out justice to those that would harm the innocent.
To this day we constantly quote lines (mostly Minsc's) during "normal" conversations. When playing hide and seek with my son (who was not old enough to even view the screen well during the many gaming sessions we had), if he cannot find me witin a decent period of time, I'll even go so far as to shout "I am out of sight of others!".
ToB kinda killed the whole "offspring of an evil deity" story line pretty well (a bit tedious). And I really, *really* hate vamipres.
I'm playing DS II now and if there were only some cool characters (i.e. on the level of Minsc and Yoshimo) and a slighly more developled and expanded storyline it would be a kick ass game (note: I hated DS I, but overall enjoy playing DS II for some reason).
I realize Neverwinter is kinda the sequel to the BG stuff, but we'd buy expansion packs or even new games that used the good ol' BG II engine. You young whippersnappers can keep your 3D. Give me adventure in glorious, well-made 2D any day!
So, kudos once again to the BG II team on the fifth anniversary of one of the most entertaining series of games I've ever played.
Mind the gap...
For a good chunk of the game (and about 4 months of the 6 months it took to finish it in real-time), I loved how you could just wander the countryside and delve into little mini-quests: clear a dungeon, or explore ruins, or take back the family castle, or solve the mystery of the caskets, or anything else that wasn't the main plot. sigh. its nice to have strongly plotted games (KOTOR, Torment, IWD, etc), but I do miss the fun of that wide open section of the game.