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."

Comments

Boo!

[FourStarGeneral]

Ah, yes, we all remember the Miniature Giant Space Hamster. Boo lives!

A true classic

[Kazzahdrane]

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

A hit...to much effect!

[hrbrmstr]

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.

Re:A hit...to much effect!

[HunterZ]

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?):
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 :p

Re:A hit...to much effect!

[Cecil]

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.

Re:A hit...to much effect!

[jhdevos]

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!

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

Re:A hit...to much effect!

[DoctaWatson]

You owe it to yourself to finish Planescape Torment.

Re:A hit...to much effect!

[Perky_Goth]

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

Where has the time gone?

[steveo777]

I introduced this game to my roommate back in late 2000. He promply bought it and played it for 8 to 12 hour stints durning the week. The weekends he usually didn't shower or bother to put on clothes. We dubbed some of these days "Ultimate Saturdays" as he never dressed, never showered, slept in, and got other people to pay the pizza guy for him.

Last time I talked to him was last new years eve. He was still playing the game for 4-6 hour stints, even though his in grad school for quantum physics or something else extremely complicated.

My love and tears to that old friend Luke-dogg.

Truely a model CRPG

[theantipop]

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.

One of the best open-ended games EVER

[dtolman]

BG2 is still a real rarity in RPGs - a game that, at least for a period of time, lets you actually role-play and doesn't force you to take any particular action...

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.

Truly a classic

[MattW]

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.