Baldur's Gate
by Black Isle Studios
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Video Game Reviews of Baldur's Gate
Customer Review: This is an awesome game!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great game! It has the best plot and good graphics. You can easily play this game for hours and never get tired of it. Although the graphics cannot be compared to today's, they are still very beautiful and amazing to say the least.
Baldur's Gate is a must-own game for anyone who enjoys role-playing or fantasy games!
Customer Review: Baldur's Gate
Summary: 4 Stars
A lot of fun for RPG players. The graphics are a little dated, but that doesn't really detract from the total story of the game. In fact, story is the key point of the game and it has a lot of it, enough to keep any player busy for hours. Overall its a lot of fun, especially on older computers which can run more modern games, but with games like Baldur's Gate who needs modern games anyway...Customer Review: a landmark RPG, if slightly dated by 2006 and with some technical issues
Summary: 3 Stars
Baldur's Gate has the personal distinction of being the very first computer game I owned, and at the time it was simply amazing. It's aged fairly well in the six years since then, and I still play it sometimes. Of course, it can't compete with recent games in terms of graphics and sound...but what true RPG gamer cares about those more than story and character, eh? In these areas BG is still among the best, seven years after its release. I would recommend it for fans of Dungeons and Dragons and fantasy in general, though if all you're looking for is 3-D wonderment, you may want to try something newer.
Gameplay: Very good. The interface is smooth and easy to learn. The game is from 1999, so the graphics are of course not very "advanced" by today's standards, but they are beautiful nonetheless, each map area having been painstakingly painted in 2-D. The sound is good, especially the environmental background sounds (rain, snow, wind, wildlife, the chattering of city crowds, etc.), which really make you feel as if you're "in" the game, especially when wearing headphones. The voice acting is mainly limited to NPC dialogue, dream sequences, and chapter introductions, and while it's very good, it gets a little repetitive after a while (I quickly got tired of hearing "wife's been gettin' prickly on me arse" and the like whenever I'd speak to random people in the towns, for instance).
The interpersonal relationships between party members are one of the game's best features; they will bicker, banter, flirt, and occasionally brawl with one another. How you act in the game, and which particular NPCs you have in your party will affect how other NPCs react to you. I will say though, that you can't really play the game as an evil character, regardless of which alignment you select during character creation; you're more or less forced to take a good, "heroic" route through the game, and acting too evil will eventually make it impossible for you to finish the game. Overall, however, BG is very fun to play. There are a myriad of subquests to keep your interest up, and the main storyline, though somewhat linear, is engaging and always leaves you wondering what will happen next.
There are some things I didn't like about the gameplay. The AI of party members leaves a lot to be desired, for example: either the AI is turned on and the party members will attack enemies immediately on sight (which is quite a hassle when your characters are invisible or hiding in shadows), or it's turned off and you have to do everything manually. I found the "custom" AI scripts available to be next to useless and pathfinding (especially in dungeon areas) was oftentimes terrible. The wilderness areas between towns were another sticking point. I know that random encounters out in the wild are one of core elements of most role-playing, but after the fifth or sixth time I had a level 1 party get wiped out by gibberlings in the first or second wilderness area, I got very frustrated. The experience cap was also something I'd rather not have seen.
Technical Issues: Some. I've had two separate copies of BG installed, both on my old Compaq, running on a 350 MHz processor with 32 MB of RAM (later upgraded to 96 MB). The first install went smoothly. The second, over a year later, did not, and required four separate attempts before it was successful. I was unable to install the game to my second physical hard drive, and had to use the first drive (older, slower, and smaller). After installation, the game would sometimes crash for no apparent reason, especially when several magic spells were being cast simultaneously onscreen. When my party was fighting more than about five enemies at once, the game would occasionally slow to an absolute crawl and the animation became choppy and jerky; if this lasted for more than a few minutes, the game was almost certain to crash. This happened even after I installed an additional 64 MB of RAM (and I note that it's never happened with Baldur's Gate II, which is installed on the very same system), but it was an inconsistent problem. There were also a few instances of the game crashing at key points in the story (such as the beginning of the final battle), forcing a restart. Though these issues did not prevent me from enjoying the game, they were annoying enough for me to rate it 3 out of 5 stars overall.
All in all, Baldur's Gate is an excellent game. The story is deep and involving, the party system is a joy to explore, and the sound and graphics (though outdated by today's standards) are wonderful for a game that was released in 1999. If not for the minor gameplay issues and annoying technical problems, it would rate a 5 out of 5.
Customer Review: Best Game, ever
Summary: 5 Stars
I bought BG about 6 or 7 years ago, I loved it. Now (2006) I started again playing... even if the graphics isn't as good as the later games, it's still an incredible game, and I believe it's even better than BG2 and all those other ones like Icewind Dale or Neverwinter Nights...
Baldur's Gate (1 & 2) have a LONG Gameplay (I read it was about 400 hours) but you will never get tired of them!
I can assure you that, if you like fantasy, D&D and stuff like that, you must have this game; and even if you don't REALLY LOVE fantasy, you will like it.
By the way, it works fine on Window$ XP without having to use comatibility...
Enjoy!!!
Customer Review: A classic.
Summary: 5 Stars
If you like RPGs this is a great game. It's dialogue heavy and there are a lot of choices to make. It really immerses you. The combat is pretty fun; pause-and-play style. It's the characters and the story that really makes me like this series.