Baldur's Gate Series... nothing compares to :(

I had high hopes for Dragon Age but alas, it wasn't even remotely close to the complete and perfect world of BG.
Will it remain beyond reachable forever?
I'd really like to see something similar and with good graphics (like in Crysis ).

 

nope never happening. I still haven't played Dragon Age but my friends lending it to me soon.

 

Dragon Age has its fun, for sure, and the graphics is good. But it feels like a clone, and a very short one, lol.
Still, pick a mage and unlock the Arcane Warrior - you'll be amazed

 

Alrighty I'll do that. Thanks.

 

Pretty much BG and planescape torment is untouchable right now. The witcher is close but still not in the league imho.

 

agreed, and I feel yeah, there currently is no possible scenario that any game developer will consider an ADND based game with 200+hours of game play(more if you include the whole series, probaly close to 500-600 play time). The Confidience is zip and the expenses to make something marketable to everyone would be outrageous unless they kept it 2D(not that I would care a whole lot, since SCII looks awsome still), and what was the last 2D game you remeber that was worth playing?

 

/Agree with top post.

There's just so much that the BG/Infinity Engine games deliver as far as gameplay, storyline, immersion, and that little thing called roleplaying, that has somehow just been lost by modern-day so-called "RPGs". It's such a striking surprise that people can give the sorts of praise that they do to Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Granted, ME2 and DA:O were genuinely good games (ME1 would be if it was at all fun to play). But they're praised for exactly the things that fell so glaringly short of BG et al.

I'm currently in the midst of a playthrough of BG2 as we speak (going slowly due to SC2), and it's got an appeal that is totally absent from modern 3d RPGs. For one, you get to roleplay. That means you get to play a character, you get to play out your own personality, you get to have your strengths and weaknesses, you get to fight your battles as you want to fight them.

There aren't just two polar extremes of personality you get to play (paragon or renegade, good or evil, or the dumb "approval rating" of your traveling companions).

And the games don't mistake being Evil for just being a jerk (more accurate names would be paragon or jerk, good or jerk...).

And one of the best parts, there are a ton of different ways to play the game. You have several party members to choose from, each with a different style of fighting, making for tons of effective strategies to win each battle. And because each group of enemies has their own strengths and weaknesses, you had to think before a tough fight.

In DA:O, ME1&2, et al., there are only a small handful of ways to "build" your character or party, and the enemies would pretty much always go down to the same tactics every time. No variety, no thinking, no fun.

This thread gets rep.

 

+rep to you sir. You know what the difference between BGII SOA and ME2 is? I've been playing BGII for years, and I'm still playing through all the possible combinations and discovering some side quests I missed before. One or two walkthroughs of the measily 25-30hours of gameplay is all you get from ME2. Like you said, ME2 and ME1 have their place, and shepard is hawt, but being the spawn of the god of murder has it's advantages too.

 

i dont think we will go back to the isometric look and gameplay of the old BG games unfortunately. that kind of interface and gameplay immersion just doesnt translate well to consoles and we all know what that means

 

Dare I say that I like the Fallout 1 and 2 games more than BG (which is a great game, no doubt)?

Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about Fallout 3 -- that one sucked bigtime.

 

Why do I feel guilty to admit that graphics =are= important to me when I play games, but not at the cost of the story and everything? A good game to me has good graphics and a good storyline...preferable equal amounts of each.

Then again, BG is a bit of an old game...

Mr. Mysterious

 

When I first saw BG (it was BGII at that time) had a lot of complaints regarding the graphics. But after 10min of play I was hooked up... for years to come, exactly as Lozz said.

It's just that very rarely, a masterpiece is born that is simply beyond. It's complete. And has a strong soul in it.



Now, for those who played the game, -

What's your favorite class?

I finished the game with every possible single/dual/multi class and always have a tough time picking one.

Kensai/Mage, Mage/Cleric(dual), Berserker/Thief, Assassin(halfling), Fighter/Thief(halfling) - those are the ones I played the most, it seems.

 

I enjoyed my Monk playthrough. Not so much in the early stages, but I just like the idea of punching evil in the face while getting all sorts of bonuses for the class.

But my heart lies with the spellcasters - I'd rather face evil using my brain than using boring old brawn! - and in my current playthrough I'm trying out the Wild Mage kit that was added with Throne of Bhaal. It's pretty fun - and funny, when a wild surge makes me cast something totally different than I wanted to, though that is often fatal in the tougher fights. The random +/- to spell level when cast always makes things interesting, especially when I'm abusing Doom and Chromatic Orb.

@Aikimox: Berserker/Thief? That sounds scary as hell!

 

Ah, spellcasters are so powerful.
If you dual a mage to cleric at the right level, you'll get the best of both, - so many more powerful tactics.

Berserker/thief is interesting for those having fun backstabbing while having decent THACO and immunity to spells like imprisonment.

But the worst munchkin is Kensai/Mage, IMHO. With the staff of Magi you're practically invincible,...till TOB.

Wild surges add so much fun to the game... I liked the raining cows, lol.

 

Raining cows!? I have not seen this one!

*Rushes to load up game and starts casting every spell in the spellbook on any suspicious-looking NPCs in sight*

 

wow, that's tough, I think I'd have to go for sorcerer/cleric as being my favorite, but for all out stupidly damage doing, Kensai/Mage as you suggested, it's basicly unstoppable with the staff of the magi

 

I don't have a strong preference for one class in particular but some of my favorite include :

Fighter/mage, or basically any multi-class or dual class that has a decent amount of fighter levels but it just makes the game way too easy at times, characters with more than one class are way overpowered in AD&D. Fighter-Thief is also a lot of fun with backstabbing and blows the Stalker away.

Occasionally I enjoyed playing with a sorcerer or a swashbuckler as my main character too. The swashbuckler while not really outstanding can hold its own in fighting skills and really shines at high levels when its bonus give him crazy AC & damage bonuses and it becomes able to wear full plate though I can't remember for sure if you were able to pick whirlwind as an advanced skill in ToB, because if not that would kinda blow it underwater.

Most hated classes included pure thief (absolutely useless) and pure mage (it lacks usefulness when compared to a specialist or a sorcerer). I felt pure cleric was kinda lame at higher levels compared to their multiclass counterpart but that applies to pretty much everything unfortunately.

 

I never played this game but have always wanted to. Do any of you know if the Baldur's Gate 4 in 1 Boxset will be play on Windows 7 64-bit?

 

Not forever, but for the foreseeable future, yes. I also had high hopes for Dragon Age and while it was OK, I didn't have anywhere near as much fun with it as I had with BG2. I thought about why this was the case and came up with a few reasons:

1) The Baldur's Gate series was something genuinely new. Sure, there were games with some similar characteristics before and of course the other Infinity Engine games (Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale series) were similar and in fact did some things better, but nobody had done anything quite like it. In fact, the same can be said of the Fallout series from the same gaming epoch (though I personally liked them less, they were also original).

2) It had a lot more content than anything thereafter. Sure, the graphics were 2D and not the entire thing was voice acted, but this meant that it was possible to have more of everything -- more areas, more characters, more dialog, more monster types (none of that ridiculousness of not having female Turians in Mass Effect because the Xbox 360 has less RAM than a netbook).

3) The rule system was complex, but well explained. I still remember BG2's 250+ page manual that they somehow made interesting enough to read, but even if you did not want to read it, there was enough info within the game to understand what's going on. Not everything was correct or documented, but there was enough for understanding without needing to go online to hunt down basic details. Most modern games fail miserably at this just because the rule system is pitifully simple. Dragon Age somehow managed to have a complex system and leave out all but the most rudimentary descriptions (practically everything numerical). I'm sure some charitable soul has put it on a wiki by now, but there was much confusion when it was first released and it's much less convenient than having it in-game.

4) It did not suffer from being followed by a stream of paid downloadable content. I wouldn't mind if they just sold extra weapons and abilities to those who lack the skill to make do without, but they also put pieces of plot in there and, worst of all, the quality is generally worse than the original. The biggest problem is that it is not well integrated (again, because they can't just have a character say something without rehiring the original voice actor). Of course, one can simply ignore the DLC, but that makes discussing the game difficult.

It can be done, but it might not work out of the box depending on your hardware. Google "baldur's gate windows 7 64 bit" without the quotes and you'll get a bunch of forum threads where people made it work.

 

that's why there are no female turians? oh wow.. how fail is that. Even worse since ME1 and ME2 were *huge* PC titles.

well, I'm not sure we could comment on that. DLC is only a recent conception ever since Digital Media has become so popular. BGII is a decade old. DLC didn't exist back then because 1) everyone was still on 56K and 2) expansions were the "DLC" material and production costs weren't outrageous necessitating developers to extract everything possible out of their titles. Given the amount of content in SOA, I would not be surprised at all if it had *huge* amounts of DLC considering it's already massive amount of content. Were it released today.

 

Yes!

There are some configuration tweaks to be made that can help it run more smoothly. There are guides online as to which settings are important to change to avoid graphical glitches and slowdowns.

As well, I would recommend checking out the BG2 Tweak pack (or any of the other tweak packs or fixes from Gibberlings Three) before you start playing. There are tons of fixes, some more necessary than others to really enjoy a full experience of the game. It takes time to install, but is totally worth it for enriching the experience.

There is also a widescreen mod at Gibberlings Three, and I would highly recommend installing that after installing any tweak packs or other mods. It will let you play the game at just about any resolution you would want to, even 1080p (though I recommend a maximum of 1600x900, more than that and stuff starts to look pretty small).

You gotta have patience to get the game completely set up and ready to go for the best experience. I had to re-install everything twice! But it is easily worth it.

 

Quite a few people asked about this after ME1 was first released (the other species are sort of explained away in the setting, but you'd expect to see at least a few female turians). Bioware's answer was:

Since they caught a lot of flak for this and it looks like there still aren't any in ME2, I would guess that the reason is more due to hardware constraints than time.

You are right, but those are the reasons why we won't get that quality of game any time soon. Instead of giving us a large game to begin with and then maybe an expansion, they give us a smaller game and then nickel and dime us for tiny pieces that are naturally less integrated. Expansions were OK because they mostly took place after the original and they involved bringing all of the voice actors back for production so it felt like a natural extension of the game (rather than having characters who really should say something at certain scenes mysteriously becoming mute...).

 

This thread is awesome. And very telling. So far only a relative few of us have posted comments, but each one of us values these old Infinity Engine games as equals to - if not greater than - current games of the RPG genre. I love the BG/II games, as well as IWD/II and Planescape. I don't know about the rest of you, but I will often turn to BGII when nothing on the market catches my fancy. I think it's saying something just because these games ARE a decade old; they are horribly out of date, yet still so addictive. I've looked for this quality in modern games, but I swear it's harder to find. I'm not saying Assassin's Creed didn't have it's allure. I'm not saying Mirror's Edge had no free-roaming flair. But there's very little reason to really DIG into those games. Baldur's Gate continuously made you want to go back and do it again. And again.
And again.

 

You're absolutely right.

I can see myself in 5, 10 years going back for a re-play of Baldur's Gate or Planescape: Torment. I can't say the same for Dragon Age, or Mass Effect, or even The Witcher. They were good games - certainly above average (average being pretty low, since the majority of game studios sometimes appear to be staffed by drooling idiots or sinister sadists). But they're not 10 out of 10 material.

 

It's actually quite simple:

The undertaking of something as large as BG or BGII with modern-day production-value standards is ASTRONOMICAL.

These decade-old games, with tiny graphics, low-quality audio, and lack of complete voice-acting, were GIGABYTES in size. Gigabytes of content instead of resources. To do something as big as what was done with the Infinity Engine today would use an entire hard drive, and the unfortunate truth is, with the way games move today, content won't expand; production-values will.

In a few years, instead of having a Dragon Age-looking game as big as BG, we'll have a photo-realistic game as big as Dragon Age.

 

100%

You know, it doesn't have to be as big. Make it a 40hrs preface, but make it ... complete and many will follow, and crave for more.

 

You're onto something Kierkes.

There's a definite point that voice acting is a real issue, now that lazy gamers are too lazy to read some text and imagine the voice. We have to have everything read to us now (and often in gratingly terrible voice acting, anyway!).

However, I'm not convinced that you can just throw a general "production-value" catch-all toward describing the problem. Character models do take up a lot more space than sprites, and a lot longer to design them, but BG2 didn't have an extraordinarily large number of characters compared to some modern 3D games (not counting those limited by console constraints - see ME Turian female issue). In the same vein, while locations could take a lot of modeling and, thus, hard drive space, this value can be reduced in several ways. Neverwinter Nights (not the sequel) did this by copying set pieces and even location tiles over and over. NWN took this to the extreme, and the set was drastically more boring than BG2, but more recent games have seen better compromises.

I think a much bigger problem lies in the play style of DA:O. Namely, that combat consists of: click on enemy, press 1, press 2, press 3, wait for cooldown on 1, repeat. Occasionally it would be a bit more complex than that, especially if you need to coordinate spellcasting.

I have a lot of issues with combat in DA:O, and even Mass Effect. First of all, when the hell did cooldowns become mandatory for any spells or skills? This is a remarkable phenomenon in gaming, similar to the regenerating shields/limbs of shooters. Except that regenerating limbs was implemented to replace health pickups, which were kinda dumb, while I have no idea why we still use spell cooldowns. They don't make sense, they have no logical game-world purpose, they disrupt gameplay, they feel artificial, they're dumb, and they're totally unimaginative! I would MUCH rather the game designers use (what's left of) their brains and think of some other incentive to keep us from spamming one spell over and over. There are tons of ideas here, and I'm going to leave it up to the reader to think of a few.

Another issue is that there are so few ways to go about combat in modern RPG-type games. Games give a lot of incentive for specializing, so your fire mage is better off focusing on flaming and fireballing your opponents to death, instead of trying to throw in a few lightning spells or support spells into the mix. As a result, you end up with only a small handful of useful spells. I can't for the life of me understand why a game would encourage this, because it really limits how you can play! In BG2, how many times have you lost a battle horribly, but then tried it again with totally different tactics to find the battle almost a cakewalk? How much preparation did you do before fighting your first dragon, and how many times did you have to take a totally different approach? Now compare that with battles in DA:O. Your fire mage fireballs the enemies, your healing mage heals your tanks, and your tanks... well, do their thing. You take out the enemy one by one, you wash, rinse, and repeat on the next mob of enemies. There are no alternative tactics to try out.

Add to the issues the idea that games now force you to categorize yourself as good or evil (jerk), or force you into one of two choices for every goddamn quest. It makes the non-combat parts feel fake, and it ruins the idea of role-playing.

Don't get me wrong, DA:O, et al., are good games. But as far as I'm concerned, they're not role-playing games.

 

You are definitely onto something as well!

I just figured that if you built BG in the DA:O engine, it would be completely unfeasible, space-wise.

In a couple of years, someone will make the same point but say instead: "If you built BG in the [hypothetical] DA:O 4 engine, it would be completely unfeasible, space-wise."

What made me use Dragon Age as the standard (not the best looking game, but when it comes to good fantasy action-rpg games, it's the most recent) instead of, say, The Witcher, or even NWN (not 2; that thing STILL doesn't run well on great computers. -_-)?

People are trapped in the mindset of what we have today, and since the gaming industry realizes that they can milk the industry by creating higher-production values by mindlessly throwing more photo/audiorealism into the mix, instead of actually using their noggins and coming up with something as massive as BG, the use of these "epic" 20-30 hour games is going to stay the standard for "epic."

If some developer recreated BG using the NWN engine (I forgot the game) it would instantly become my favorite game of all time. "BG: Remixed" LOL. Because it is expansive. Because it is a universe I can lose myself in.

I can start games of BG on a whim (thanks TUTU!) and play them through (although I have to resist and do more productive things with my time), but I try to complete another game of Dragon Age. I can't do it. I played through it once, and that was enough for me.

I've been planning to replay Mass Effect to get my Shepard into Mass Effect 2 (I lost my complete save file in a HD crash), and I vowed to never play ME2 unless it was with my own Shepard, but I can't bring myself to do it! I want to experience Mass Effect 2 so badly, but I can't bring myself to complete it again. I give up after rescuing Liara (which I do first, since I want to take her to Noveria) and delete the save file again in a fit of I'm-wasting-my-time-doing-this-again.

These games don't have the splendor of the Infinity Engine games. And there's something about how content can be created on a whim for that engine.

In the near future, I want to see a game that looks as good as just DA:O or ME, but is something as large as Baldur's Gate. I imagine Candlekeep in the DA:O engine, and I feel amazing. Because then, I see Beregost, the Nashkel Mines, Baldur's Gate itself, in it.

But in ten years, I'll see Baldur's Gate in whatever photo-realistic game engine is out then.

I'm aware of the problem, but it doesn't mean I transcend it. I'd probably still settle for the less advanced graphics if I could play Baldur's Gate again, especially like that but I, like so many others, am caught up the the standard of the game's presentation.

So hopefully, I'll just get lucky, and miracle technology will come out. VR VR VR VR VR...

 

Actually, I've been continuing my playthrough of BG2 some more and thinking about your post. You know... I'm not actually convinced that it's that much larger than NWN2! If at all! It might be a bit bigger than DA:O (I can't remember, the game lost me when I found out that playing a warrior was 5 times easier and 100 times more boring than playing a mage). But it's within reach if anyone had the will to do it.

It just seems huge, and it certainly has lots of areas, but the areas are relatively small, most of them are packed with content and quests (though several consist of: open door, kill monster(s), loot room). So it usually takes you longer to get through an area in BG2 than it would in DA:O. This, in addition to thousands of lines of text and more varied and interesting quests, makes the game feel epic, even though there isn't that much more physical area in the game's environment. Heck, I'm not convinced that Crysis doesn't present a larger world, it's just that you run through it so quickly in comparison.

I hear you regarding a 3D, modern-engine Baldur's Gate world! But personally, I'd give my left nut to see Planescape: Torment re-made in a proper engine.

And don't worry about Mass Effect 2: you're not missing much. The story only goes forward in about three short narrative bursts. The rest of the game is side-quests, most of which feel pointless. Seriously, I played for a few hours without getting distracted by side quests, and then for the rest of the game (about 80% of my play time), it kept bugging me that I need to follow the portal to the end game. Which consisted of a single short, disappointing ground mission and the dumbest boss fight I've ever seen in a game, period.

 

yeah, that boss fight totally destroyed any suspense the game had been building up to that point 'what the heck' doesn't even being to do it justice.

 

While I do enjoy the BG games, the AD&D 2.x rules kinda blow.
While everyone likes having a potent character... some combos (like kensai/mage) were just plain wrong. D&D peaked at 3.5 as you could build potent characters, but you gave up something everytime you added a class or feature. (and then went into the toilet at 4 were it became vastly oversimplified)

Frankly, I was glad for DA:O's removal from the tired Forgotten Realms world...

I would like to see such a game in a lower-fantasy world where magic is potent, but relatively rare. (forgotten realms has magic extremely common)
Where even a +1 sword has a backstory, and every town doesn't have public-use insta-transporters everywhere.

I would like to see the detail and love and memorable characters that went into the game and story of th BG series. "Go for the eyes boo!"

 

Kernal, I agree on all counts. +1.

 

I played DA:O and it was my best game ever, had a lot of fun on it and the voice acting was superb imo, but I haven't played any of the BG series, when i tried BG 2 it looked too old, I just couldn't stand it, maybe because im a youngster. New generations have to be satisfied with what they get, BG series is alrdy too old, nobody will get into it nowadays, only those who enjoyed it on their time.

 

For those of you looking for something that'll give you some of that old school glory, pick up Dungeon Siege and play through Ultima V: Lazarus and the Ultima VI remake. Those are pretty tremendous - there are definitely limitations and irritations of the engine, and they're not professional projects, but the Ultima series is without a doubt one of the all-time RPG greats, and these are excellent remakes/reimaginings of the original games.

 

ULTIMA FTW!!! Oh my god, I totally forgot about that series! Granted, Lord British (the guy, not the character) is a cocky , but I remember watching my brothers play - and then playing, myself - Ultima 1 through 4. Then I saw 6 before 5. Then I picked up 7 and it was ON! In fact, I still have a copy of 7 that I use DOSBOX to play. Oh man, good stuff!

 

I think it's really sad if this is the case. These games way better than most "modern" games for storyline and immersion and I don't think the grahpics are bad at all. Sure they aren't 3D, but so what? The backgrounds still look amazing, especially on a large monitor where you get to see more of the area at once. I have a lot of unplayed games in my Steam account (Bioshock 2, ME2, Overlord series) that I bought during the recent sales bonanza and I still fire up BG when I get in from work rather than any of those! I'm sure when I do start them I will like them, but I don't think in 12 years time I'll still be up half the night trying to get ME2 to run on the latest and greatest PC, whereas I am pretty sure I will be up trying to get Boo to squeak in 12.5 surround sound or whatever we will have by then!

I played the original BG for weeks on a PC that didn't have enough HDD space free for a full install... Swapping those CDs each time you move areas was not fun! About once a year I will play though the series again, using different mods and add-on quest packs. I'm currently dispatching the Wolfweres on Balduran's Isle. The next time I play through I want to try the Dark Side of the Sword Coast mod.

I played the IWD series too, but I didn't get as attached to it as I did BG for some reason.

I think to youth of today is just too lazy to get into a truly large game. They want instant gratification in all things, I see it in my other main hobby, RC car racing. So many people want to buy the ready-to-run cars nowadays rather than build them from a kit cos that takes too long.

Sorry, I seem to have turned into a grumpy old man somewhere in that post! In summary, BG rocks and everyone should play it.

 

+1 Couldn't agree more with this post and the conclusion!

 

Someone needs to create a universe like A Song of Ice and Fire for a video game, stat.

 

Lol. The game is actually coming after season 1 of new HBO series "Game of thrones".

By the way I enjoyed Ultima and Wizardry series since childhood and I'm playing BG1+2 right now. Honestly I think DAO is the best of both worlds. There were some compromises in all aspects but really as good as it could have been based on feasibility.(time, budget...,etc.) However it was a very long project and one can hardly expect big companies to invest in such massive project in a recession.

DAO is far from a traditional RPG but it's the game that I had the most fun with ever. I played it through 6 times. It does have some limitations and the designers did sacrifice some real RPG elements in exchange of better visuals but overall I think it's all worth it. Compare to Mass Effect 2, DAO did miss out a bit on the lack of voice acting with the main PC. However, they put that into DA2 and dropped all the best elements DAO had......

BG1+2 are still fun to play but honestly the graphics and interfaces are really out of date. To really enjoy them you have to have good imagination. It's like reading a song of ice and fire versus watching "Game of Thrones" on HBO.

 

I have played BG1 and 2 plus expansion, Planescape:Torment, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter nights on their release date back in 1998-2002? ..

2011 is way too late, and one will have a biased opinion on such great titles. These days, PC gamers are often refered to as FPS gamers, which is sad..

 

I recently bought BG1 & 2 and I'm going to install the Big World Project mod to make them both playable using the BG2 engine from the beginning.

I haven't played yet, and I'm wondering, is BG an open sandbox type of world, like Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim, where you can completely go wherever you want?

Also, can you ignore the main quest forever if you feel like it?

 

This thread is 11 months old. No need to necromance old threads dchen2k.

 

Bards Tale and Eye of the Beholder 1 and 2 are still some of my fav games ...

If you can go really really old school, Gateway to Apshi ... hahaha

 

also Final Fantasy 3 ... mmmm tastey

 

Besides revisiting this old thread, which has great opinions I should say, I find it difficult to understand the sacrifice of RPG elements for visuals. It would be more logic that better visuals = shorter games (anyone can ask Gears of Wars about it ). But no, the RPG sacrifice is two handed: one is lazy design and the other is streaming for a bigger audience.

Just my 0.02 USD