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10 Years of Baldur's Gate
RPGVault is running an article commemorating the 10th anniversary of acclaimed RPG Baldur's Gate. They sat down with members of the Dragon Age: Origins team, some of whom worked on Baldur's Gate, to talk about their experiences with the game and what made it so popular.
"The other thing I was responsible for was balance testing. It was a constant fight between me and the Interplay testers; they were always trying to make it easier, and I was always pushing back to make it harder. At one point, I got so frustrated with the final battle with Sarevok that I created a 7th level Minsc, gave him some weapons and armor, and then began to spawn in Sarevok's — mowing through them like a hot knife through butter. After I'd killed six or seven of them, I spawned in a final one and took a screenshot, with the fresh one standing among all his slaughtered predecessors. I edited it and put a bubble above Minsc's head that read 'Sigh... another one of those pesky Sarevoks' and then e-mailed it out to the company. Growing up playing D&D with James Ohlen (the Lead Designer on BG, and now on our new MMO), I knew that would piss him off to no end, and suffice to say he was much tougher when I tried to fight him the next day."
Baldur's Gate and the sequel are my favorite games of all time. And I've played a lot of games.
Well, it seems it is good only as a DAO advertisement. But still, it is good to see it is good for that, at least.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, watch it! I'm huge.
I remember replaying this game, over and over and over with different characters....even just playing the beginning segments, and experimenting with things that I could do. And then cheat codes, and playing around with those (e.g. try and build the most munchkin character I could). Simple pleasures, sure, but I *was* maybe 15 when I first played this game...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
With a spacehamster on his side, Minsc can take on hordes of Sarevoks!
Epic games series, how we miss Black Isle Studios..
You sir deserve +1 Hilariously Drunk
I just happened to have picked up Bauldur's Gate I && II recently from Amazon for some entertainment on my laptop. It's a reasonably powerful machine, but it's starting to show its age a bit as a gaming machine. So, having never played these games despite being a huge RPG fan, I picked them both up on the cheap.
Obviously, the game shows its age in some ways, but its still fantastic fun, and sometimes deeper than more modern games (requiring explicit 3D visualization of everything in the world sometimes has its disadvantages). I'm just starting out, and I'm already having a blast. I can't wait until I get a bit deeper into the story and see what unfolds. The only hangup for me was I had gotten used to the more streamlined D&D v3 rules (never played with 3.5 or 4, at least yet), so dropping back to v2 was sort of strange.
The stories about "100 hour work week" caught my eye as well. I was working in the game industry since about that time (coming up on 11 years for me), and attitudes by management certainly were a lot different then. Many companies just figured, "that's the way it is" in the industry while routinely exploiting the hell out of their workers. Most developers were young, having fun on the job and willing to work stupidly long hours, especially as one could be fairly easily replaced. Still, make no mistake, 100 hour workweeks are nothing to be proud of by either side. One side is exploiting, and the other is enabling that exploitation.
I've been through crunches - and not even as bad as others have experienced. There's nothing good that comes out of it except a burning desire to get far away from the company that just finished putting you it (at least for me). Eventually, one comes to the realization that crunches are simply the result of bad scheduling, unrealistic expectations, continually shifting targets, or a combination of this and other issues. In other words, it means your project is a mess. I've seen multiple instances of a team that, quite literally, completely disintegrated at the end of a death march. Is a single project worth destroying a development team?
Fortunately, attitudes are slowly changing in the industry for the better. Many of those who stuck through it have grown up, married, and have kids. We no longer will put up with demands to sacrifice our lives, and fortunately, occasionally have enough experience and clout to push thing in a saner direction. Some developers put through the wringer years ago are now in leadership positions, and vehemently fight against this sort of nonsense (this describes my current bosses, I'm happy to say). Keeping developers happy, not too surprisingly, is a good recipe for long-term success.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Check out the mod section on Pocketplane.net, there's all sorts of mods. Probably the most popular thing to do is to bring BG1 into the BG2 engine along with the classic BG1 mods like DSotSC, this allows you to play the whole saga+mods as one giant game. I'd reckon about a 400+hr experience!
I did that about last year, (un)fortunately I managed to screw it up somehow by installing a few other smaller mods as well. I got about 50hrs in and when I attempted the side quest mod in question it caused a crash. My previous good save was more than 10hrs old so I lost interest, thereby saving all my weekends for what would most likely have been all the past year and probably a year ahead too!
Nick
I loved the Baldur's Gate series, and while I rate them among my favorite games of all times (and just bought them again in the D&D collector's edition) they lived in a weird place, where I both wished they were longer and shorter games.
At a certain point, I enjoyed just wandering to some random place in the world, and having some sort of encounter there. HOLY CRAP, there's a red dragon! And then figuring out how to beat it. But some sequences, especially and unfortunately in the main quests, could really drag. In BG II, once you travel to this island, you're basically on a railroad for the next 20 hours of your life. You end up traveling through three full acts of the game until you're allowed to re-emerge on the world map, travelling through a mage's tower (where you lose one of your party members permanently... which bugs the hell out of me when games do that), then underdark adventurers, then a full city of a drow that you have to navigate through before finally being able to emerge, blinking, on the surface, where there's still a few more adventures on rails before you're allowed to travel back home with the 3000 pounds of loot you've been accumulating the whole time.
Best bug in BG II - an unsigned short underflow on magic item charges when fighting those monsters which eat magic. A sword with 32k charges of haste? Yes please. Especially since the price of an item is proportional to how many charges are left in it. =)
I kind of wish that they'd have gone the extra mile and done a BG III instead of devolving into the pit of crap that is Neverwinter Nights and related games and expansions.
I bought this game when I was 12 and I still replay it every couple of years. The depth and length (100+ hours playthrough) of this and other games (planescape torment, fallout) is something you don't see anymore. It's a shame bioware never topped their early classics.
"Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the eyes!"
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
I still love playing this game.
Was I the only one who got intensely frustrated with Baldur's Gate? Towards the end it was just an unpleasant grind of dopplegangers casting that damn "speed" spell and clobbering the hell out of you.
I gave Baldur's Gate II a try and actually enjoyed it for a time..until the vampires came along who hit you with the double-whammy of "speed" and "level drain" all at once. After dying and reloading about a thousand times I realised that this was just not fun.
Now Planescape: Torment...that's a different story entirely.
You don't want to make too many custom characters (or you miss out on the great dialogues between the premade characters in BGII), and that means some of your players will have to sit back and watch for the first half hour of gameplay until you've built a full party, but the remaining dozens (hundreds) of hours of the games are possibly the most fun you can have in multiplayer cooperative gaming.
That's just talking about the basic games, too. I had no idea there were active modding communities until I read this thread. It's a shame Slashdot has no "+1 Earned Deep Gratitude" score option...
Some parts of BG seem simple now, and many perceived character relationships were outright imaginary. The players imposed their own perceptions on those tiny sprites and unrecorded text.
This engaging the player's imagination is a very powerful tool since it allows each person's experience to be personal. Here is how they describe Dragon Age
With full quality voice and cinematic visuals, the characters provide a huge array of responses in no uncertain terms.
I fear the uncanny valley also apply to exposition. The more you anticipate how the relationships between the characters could go, the more artificial it could seem to the players, because it will only reflect what the designers think could happen.
AlwaysOnGames Arcade
I did some of the AI for the new enemies in the Ascention mod, and it was a very interesting experience. David Gaider, senior engineer at Bioware, basically showed up on a Yahoo group one day where we were working on teaching ourselves the scripting system, with the hope of "smartening up" our the standard BG2 enemies.
We made considerable progress, and Gaider was impressed. Then he unloaded on us something that he had been working on - the "proper" ending for Throne of Baahl that Bioware just didn't have time to include. We coded up some pretty good AI for the enemies, to the point where, in a fight of equals, the AI almost always beat identically-endowed players, and without cheating.
I still think that the final sequence in Ascention is the gold standard for party-based RPG fighting. It's definitely not easy, but by the time you get that far into the game, you should be skilled enough to construct a successful strategy.
As someone who was heavily involved in all aspects of the modding community five years ago, and a CS guy myself, I find the following to be a gem:
The crime against nature bit could not be more true. Now, five years later, I know who I have to stab.
Seriously, introducing myself to modding that game, learning to script in that crap before hitting college... *gripe* *gripe* *bitch* *moan* ... Writing God-awful Visual Basic code to edit binary files before I knew what I was doing, having weighted "IF" conditions in BGScript that had weird fucking results if the weights didn't total 100%... Oh, hell, I love all things BG!
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
you should get your apostrophes right.
I recently had the opportunity to fly up to Edmonton to visit Bioware and get a peek at the new Dragon Age toolset (I'm in the middle here). While it was interesting to see what the new game engine could do, the most fun was just spending time with the Bioware folks. I do software development for a healthcare organization, so it was a treat to see how thing were run in a gaming company. Many concepts were the same, but there was indeed a big break room full of food and gaming systems. I also was pelted during a Nerf shootout by the toolset developers. Their goal for the day was to see how many visitors they could get in a day.
The gaming industry has come far with Dragon Age. The technology has improved immensely, along with the effort required to make high-quality games. From what little I've seen, I'm hopeful Dragon Age will indeed be the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate.
I'm by no means a multiplayer only kind of guy, and I've spend countless hours on my own in the three Fallout games, but when it comes to Bioware the only game of theirs I've played on my own, and enjoyed, was Kotor.
It might just be me but the main reason I loved both the baldurs gate games was because I played through them with one of my childhood friends where we controlled half the party each and I have to admit that my hype died completely once I read that Dragon Age wouldn't include multiplay.
"You and me and Boo, hamsters and rangers everywhere, rejoice!"
sigh... another 10 year anniversary. Like Christmas isn't miserable enough, you need to bring up the passing of another 10 years :-/
Live by the sword, die by declining revenues.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
I'm really interested in buying this game, but don't want to leave my house to do it. Any suggestions for a safe transaction online? This is not a joke, and please spare the nerdy snark.
Some friends of mine, a couple, love to play Baulder's Gate together on their PS2.
They just recently acquired a Wii, and wanted to know if there are any equivalent games for the Wii?
I tried to do some research for a 2 player simul dungeon crawler but honestly couldn't find anything.
Anyone got any suggestions?
Thanks in advance for your time,
-DavidPFarrell
Cube On! (http://stores.ebay.com/PuzzleProz)
Along with Fallout II, and simcity, this was the last game that I really enjoyed. The funny thing is that one of the things mentioned in the article is one of the reasons that I stopped playing video games.
They simply got too hard. I seemed to me that the developers kept trying to impress reviewers and hard core players with new, near impossible, challenges. Somewhere along the way they lost a lot of players. About the only company that I will pay for games from is spiderweb software http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/ , the graphics are terrible; but, the games are playable and relaxing.
The games have gotten too hard. Before you make comments about being a whiner; remember, what I am is a lost costumer.