Stunning graphics paid for in loss of speed
Baldur's Gate is a monumental tribute to the grand-daddy of all role-playing games (RPGs) - Dungeons and Dragons (D&D).
It is the most faithful presentation of an RPG modelled after D&D I have seen. Combine this with a great story line, and Baldur's Gate has the potential to be the best RPG of the year.
The story, which is set in the Forgotten Realms campaign from Advanced D&D, is quite complex, and is slowly revealed in the course of the game. It is punctuated by countless mini-quests that add a lot of flavour to the game.
It is a long game. Some people have taken about 100 hours to finish it and Interplay has just announced the development of an add-on pack that promises at least another 20 hours of play.
You play the leader in the party and pick up party members as the game progresses. You can choose to drop party members or ask them to rejoin at any time. Character generation follows the pen-and-paper version of D&D more closely than a +2 dagger can shave.
The 'professions' that you can choose from include Fighters, Wizards, Clerics, multi-classed or even dual-classed characters.
Races include all the classic D&D races of Humans, Elves, Dwarfs, Hobbits, and so on, complete with their individual advantages and limitations. The characters who join your party are well drawn and each one has a splash of personality that adds to the game.
Your view of the game world and other characters is angled from above, similar to Diablo or Fallout.
The graphics are beautifully rendered and incredibly detailed, which explains why the game comes on five CDs.
But this detail comes at the price of speed. Moving the party means the hard drive goes crazy reading the next bit of graphics. RPGs are about moving the party around the game world, so all that disk access was driving me crazy, too. I was a little disappointed with the slow performance - and on a fairly serious machine. Do not play this game without a fast machine, a speedy hard drive and a lot of Ram.
The music and the sound effects are brilliant and match the events of the game. When combat begins, rousing battle music pushes your party to victory.
Combat is handled very well, giving you an interesting mix between real-time and turn-based combat. Baldur's Gate runs combat in real time, but you can pause the game to give specific orders to each party member. A fight can be over before you know it. It took me a few fights to get used to pausing the game to issue orders, but I love the system and hope I see it in following games.
Baldur's Gate is not perfect. Many of the pre-recorded speech greetings do not match the accompanying text, and monsters you have slain have a habit of resurfacing when you retrace your steps. This is frustrating as it means having to fight the same battle twice. I hope they change this in a later patch.
