In 2022, I spent 200 hours clearing the Baldur’s Gate series

More than 20 years later, “Baldur’s Gate” still does not need to take off the crown of CRPG.

foreword

It’s time to update the CRPG column that no one has read. “Baldur’s Gate” is a milestone in the history of CRPG, and it took nearly 200 hours to prepare the content of the “Baldur’s Gate” series. In 2020 I cleared Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, and finally found the time to clear Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition this year. In order to write this article, I also refer to the “ADND 2E Player’s Handbook”, “Varo’s Guide to Baldur’s Gate” and other media’s evaluation of the “Baldur’s Gate” series. At the moment of customs clearance, I think these are all worth it. I think it is still fun after 20 years. It is the highest evaluation of an old game. It is inevitable that there will be some omissions in writing. Corrections and additions are welcome.

Enhanced content

At the beginning of the article, let’s talk about the difference between “Baldur’s Gate” and “Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition”. Now, what is sold on Steam is not the original version made by the original developer BioWare, but through another manufacturer Beamdog. Remastered and enhanced version. Beamdog did not significantly modify the original content, but carried out image quality upgrades and operational optimization on the basis of retaining the original content. With their unremitting efforts, the image quality of “Baldur’s Gate” has been greatly improved. The newly added The quick-access file function of the game also further enhances the player’s gaming experience, which is indeed a veritable enhancement.

Part of the content modification made by Beamdog is the addition of four plot teammates (Baldur 2) Mad Mage Nera, Sun Soul Sect Monk Rasad, Black Guard Donne, Vampire Rogue Hexet, and also modified a lot of bugs in the original version . It is worth mentioning that until now Beamdog is still persistently modifying bugs and optimizing content, and the game has now reached version 2.6.

In hindsight, these contents were not all satisfactory. The plot of the four teammates Riniera did the best, and her personal character creation was also very successful. The plots of the other three teammates did not touch me too much. Their personal plots were not closely related to the original plots, especially the two characters of Hexet and Donne, one was gay and the other was bisexual. Interestingly, the comments of foreign media also praised this point. It is hard not to make people think that this is because of political correctness. Some old players are also dissatisfied with the newly added characters.

And the bug fix makes “Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition” closer to the core rules of “Baldur’s Gate”. The most widely circulated online “Baldur’s Gate 2 Details Guide” lists many bugs. I found it while playing. Most of the bugs have been fixed, such as gaining experience from false conversations, ignoring saves outside the field of vision of death cloud, and infinite gems from drinking potions, etc. Similar bugs will destroy the balance of the game and masters will not choose to use them. Most players praise these bugs. .

The contradiction arises from some genres based on bugs. The most representative one is the simulacrum projection summoning stream. Currently, version 2.6 cannot use simulacrum and projection to break through the upper limit of 5 summons, and mythical summons such as angels can only be used. Summon one. Some players may agree with this balance modification, but this will directly abolish an interesting gameplay, and it is reasonable for some players to be dissatisfied. The same is true for modern games. The design of “Rage of Justice” to expand the strategy of stacking DC is also considered a bug by many people, and the same thing may happen in the future.

The enhanced version of the official Chinese would like to thank the localization of the volunteers of the TROW Forum. In the Chinese language interface, you can see all the people who participated in the localization. The sinicization of BGEE was launched very early, but the sinicization of BG2EE was not launched until the 2.5beta version. Maybe Beamdog is not very interested in Chinese and may have other concerns, but the result is good, there will be official Chinese for Chinese players to play in 2022. Compared to those game companies whose volunteers took the text and asked the official to add Chinese or ignored them, Beamdog still took some thought.

In general, I still recommend players to buy the enhanced version. Beamdog has no credit or hard work. I didn’t encounter Chinese omissions and malicious bugs during the game. The game experience is much better than I imagined.

Pioneer of modern CRPG

After the content of the enhanced version is finished, let’s talk about the significance of “Baldur’s Gate” at that time. The original definition of CRPG is no longer applicable, but at that time, many Western CRPGs were subject to DND (Dungeon and Dragon) Inspired, there are “Witchcraft”, “Might and Magic”, and “Genesis” earlier than “Baldur’s Gate”, but unfortunately these three kings have already drained their blood. There are also games based on the DND rules, such as the “Evil Eye” series and the “Pool of Light” series, but these games are not as influential as “Baldur’s Gate”.

IGN gave “Baldur’s Gate” and “Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadow of Amn” a very high score of 9.4, and many years later put “Baldur’s Gate” in the TOP 100 RPG (of all time) 2: The Shadow of Amn was placed in third place. The top two were Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger. In other words, in IGN’s mind, “Baldur’s Gate 2: The Shadow of Amn” is the best Western RPG ever made.

From 1992 to 1995, the development of American-style RPGs stagnated. During this period, there were not enough representative works to hold up the banner of American-style RPGs. Observe the release list of role-playing games during this period and you will find the number of Japanese-style role-playing games. It was so amazing that some people pessimistically said that Western RPG was dead, until “Diablo”, “Might and Magic 6” and “Baldur’s Gate 1” came out a few years later. Bioware, a new company, can stand on the podium with a group of established JRPG manufacturers, which is more proof of the gold content of “Baldur’s Gate”.

Compared with the old predecessors mentioned at the beginning, “Baldur’s Gate” is technically crushed, and most of the media praised “Baldur’s Gate” for its excellent graphic effects. In the eyes of players, the image quality of the enhanced version is like a moving mosaic, but at that time, the convenient UI design, exquisite graphics modeling, and spectacular spell effects of “Baldur’s Gate” were all convincing. They used the visual effects created by the Infinite Engine to improve the level of CRPG graphics, and even now that BioWare has gone to do 3A, their technical skills are still very high.

Now to today (2022), my personal view is that Baldur’s Gate is the forerunner of the modern CRPG, and the CEO of Beamdog directly praised it for “redefining what a Western RPG is. It showed other game companies that CRPG can The optimal solution at the time (maybe it is now?), players are evaluating some modern CPRGs such as “Divinity: Original Sin”, “Rage of Justice”, “Solasta: Crown of the Mage” and “Pillar of Eternity”. Compare Baldur’s Gate.

In addition to the high-quality graphics of the game “Baldur’s Gate”, the changes to the DND rules are obviously more meaningful. BIOWARE’s task is to reproduce DND on the computer as much as possible. Their predecessor Strategic Simulations has already made achievements in this regard. . However, BIOWARE is determined to make a real-time multiplayer RPG game, which means that it is difficult for them to draw some inspiration from their predecessors. Before the release of “Baldur’s Gate”, some DND fans also questioned whether the real-time system could perfectly restore the first Second edition rules.

“Baldur’s Gate” used action to dispel players’ doubts, and IGN directly called it the best DND game ever. “Baldur’s Gate” restores AD&D second edition rules in every detail, including some seemingly inconspicuous details. For this reason, I specially downloaded the player’s manual for comparison. The Mage entry in the player’s manual mentioned that mage wearing armor generally cannot cast spells, but elves wearing elves armor is an exception. “Baldur’s Gate 2” happens to have such a piece of equipment as elf armor. You can also use materials to upgrade it, and the restoration of basic rules such as race, occupation, and weapon proficiency is not to mention. Presumably DND fans will do it for this. cheers.

But is it really a good thing to bring DND rules to the computer as they are? After all, there are differences between TRPG and CRPG. If you browse the player manual, you will find some fairly hard-core rules, such as resurrection. Players will lose a bit of physique after resurrecting. After the physique value is 0, they cannot be resurrected. “Baldur’s Gate” has not been re-engraved. With this rule, players can be resurrected infinitely. Many spells in the 2E spell list require casting materials, but all spells in Baldur’s Gate do not require materials. These positive changes help improve the player’s gaming experience. Some things that require dice to be judged can also be changed to meet the numerical value to pass, such as the charm appraisal in the dialogue, you can’t see the dice in “Baldur’s Gate”, although the dice are very attractive, but everything is done with dice. It would be quite inconvenient to do it.

The real-time combat of “Baldur’s Gate” has also affected a series of CRPGs that follow. I don’t want to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of real-time and turn-based combat. Personally, I can accept these two combat modes. Advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of real-time system is that the battle will be very fast, and the most difficult battle in the “Baldur’s Gate” series is difficult to exceed two minutes. Many battles can be directly leveled A to let the AI ​​automatically operate, and it is very comfortable to play below the core difficulty. Of course, the real-time system also has the problem of inconvenient operation. If you fail to operate in time, you will lose some action rounds, and repeated pauses are also a headache. What I am most dissatisfied with is that even the enhanced version of the spell does not have a range display. In a real-time environment, the distance can only be judged by experience. It is commonplace to accidentally injure teammates, but even so, the battle of “Baldur’s Gate” still brings me a lot of fun.

In short, the success of “Baldur’s Gate” has pointed out the way forward for many game companies. How to adapt DND rules to adapt to video games and how to design game battles can be found in it. On this basis, each game company can find the answer. There are different understandings. “Divinity: Original Sin”, “Pillars of Eternity” and “Rage of Justice” have different feelings for players. In recent years, CRPG has also experienced a revival, but these rising stars cannot hide the light of “Baldur’s Gate” .

seek epic

“Epic feeling” is a rather subjective and abstract concept. Even a successful CRPG is easily criticized for not having an epic feel, such as my favorite “Divinity: Original Sin 2”. Lack of epic feeling is also a common reason for bad reviews, although players are keen to pursue epic feeling despite being invisible and intangible. Although “Baldur’s Gate” is an old work 20 years ago, it can become a milestone work of CRPG, and it must have a sense of epic. Being able to feel this epic sense up close also gives me unlimited motivation to play.

After spending more than 200 hours to experience this epic adventure, combined with some CRPGs I have played before, I feel that in order to create an epic sense, the following two points must be satisfied. First, the entire adventure needs to set a high-profile goal, and the second is The script layout of the game itself has to stand the test. The high-profile goals are not difficult to understand. The main body of DND groups and CRPGs are basically adventurers. Of course, adventurers will do some dangerous things to seek profits or challenge themselves. Yes, that sounds cool doesn’t it? Even though most people in real life would choose to be content with the status quo and can only satisfy their inner throbbing through imagination, this feeling will still make people want to stop.

And CRPG’s millions of texts are a test of the script layout of the production team. Cleverly arranging more foreshadowings and episodes in the process will definitely help the player’s plot experience. If only the most basic plot experience can’t be guaranteed, then What about the epic sense? The entire series of “Baldur’s Gate” is quite amazing in terms of plot layout, from “Baldur’s Gate 1” to “Baldur’s Gate: Legend of the Sword Coast”, to “Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadow of Amn” “Baldur’s Gate 2: Throne of Baal”, the player’s story experience is quite coherent. Just watching the plot of “Baldur’s Gate 1” is difficult to touch the players, because the outline of the first generation is that the protagonist’s adoptive father was killed, and the murderer was the protagonist’s cheap brother. After the protagonist defeated the cheap brother, he informed the protagonist of Baal’s son. identity.

But this does not mean that the plot of “Baldur’s Gate 1” is not important. When I defeated the boss in “Baldur’s Gate 2: Throne of Baal”, my mind returned to Candlekeep and the protagonist. The day my adoptive father was killed. It is precisely because of “Baldur’s Gate 1” that the experience of the protagonist/Chanem is so legendary, from the ordinary youth of Candlekeep to the legendary son of Baal and even the new god of murder, the adventure of the protagonist. There is no missing piece of the puzzle in the journey, and each player can also create his own legendary adventure with more than a dozen teammates.

It is worth mentioning that the ending of the official novel of “Baldur’s Gate” is not the same as that of the game. The reviews of several novels are only better than “Throne of Baal” and the others have been whipped for years. More than a hundred years after the end of the story, the protagonist became the beloved archduke of Baldur’s Gate, and there were only two sons of Baal left in the world. But another son of Baal came to him, and the two sons of Baal fought to the death, and the final outcome was the resurrection of Baal, the protagonist. In “Baldur’s Gate 3”, players can also see Baal’s holy emblem, and most players can’t accept the fact that the protagonist died.

With a solid foundation in words to finally talk about, Baldur’s Gate does those things to give players an epic adventure to remember. After reading the article of the game designer dissecting the design of “Baldur’s Gate 2”, I had some ideas. The author mentioned that the important task of the plot design of “Baldur’s Gate 2” is to keep the player at the core of the story. All stories should Revolving around the protagonist, this may be the truth of the epic feeling. I think this concept can be summed up in three words – a sense of substitution.

To explain that the sense of substitution may have to return to TRPG and role-playing, the first part of the AD&D 2E and DND 5E player manuals is to create character cards, and the first step in playing CRPG is character creation. This character creation is not simply to choose a protagonist, but to create a comprehensive character, with races, backgrounds, and characteristics. After that, you have to play the role you created to run the group. If you want to play the role you created, you must imagine that you have become a role in the character card, put yourself in the role of thinking instead of doing whatever you want, then come to CRPG You can gain a sense of substitution by substituting yourself into the protagonist in the game and then acting.

However, the game experience of CRPG cannot be exactly the same as that of running a group. Although CRPG restores the process of creating character cards, it does not have the interaction between people and the imagination of DM geniuses. In order to restore that experience as realistically as possible, BIOWARE has made the following efforts. The entire teammates follow the lead of the protagonist, which ensures that the direction of the story is controlled by the player (although most of the main storyline cannot be changed), and many tasks are provided to the player. Good and evil approach (with relatively little order and chaos), which in turn have different effects on the world. This corresponds to the nine camps that the player chooses when opening the card. When the player chooses, in addition to the quest income, there is more behavioral thinking of the character itself, which can increase the player’s sense of substitution.

Your teammates are not dead during the journey. Baldur’s Gate can be said to play the teammate system to the extreme. Your teammates will continue to speak over time, and they will even complain if you stand in place for too long. You can help teammates complete their personal tasks and even fall in love with teammates of the opposite sex. When you make a choice, your teammates will also express their opinions accordingly. Players and teammates will naturally become more involved if they have more interaction. These designs It has also influenced many latecomers, and “Pioneer: Wrath of Justice” perfectly inherits this mechanism.

The last and most important thing is the world depiction of “Baldur’s Gate”. The richer and more realistic the whole world is, it will definitely increase the player’s sense of substitution. I think this is also the advantage of CRPG. Everyone in the group can only imagine the appearance of the whole world through the description of the text background and DM, while CRPG can directly present the whole world in front of the player’s eyes. As mentioned earlier, BioWare’s technical strength is very strong. There is no doubt about the high picture.

Then in terms of background, the background of “Baldur’s Gate” is “The Forgotten Realm” in the DND setting, which is the Faerun continent in the planet Toril. Having a reference setting makes BioWare take a lot of detours in the world view, but the huge background of DND is bound to face the pressure of restoration. In addition to restoring the landmark buildings, it is necessary to consider the local customs, power distribution, and the background of the times, not DND The world knows that it is extremely incompetent and will definitely be criticized by core players.

Under the heavy pressure, BioWare has far exceeded the expectations of players. Take Amn in “Baldur’s Gate 2” as an example. Amn is a famous country in Faerun. Its social structure is that the six-member council formulates policies. , the state does not prohibit any religious beliefs, including Cyric, business is extremely developed, so many people believe in the goddess of business, Woking. In the game, players can see the building of the six-member council in the administrative district of Amn, and the Temple of Woking is everywhere in Amn, even in the most remote areas. Although players in the temple area can’t see the church of Cyric, the prince of lies, there is a crazy priest of Cyric in the dock area. You will be warned by the masked mage if you release the sale in the open area of ​​Amn. The production team also took into account the era background of the game. The timeline of “Baldur’s Gate 2” should be 1369DR. More than ten years after the end of the turbulent year, a lot of things happened in the turbulent year. Cyric became a god and died three times. The death of the god, the disappearance of Woking, and Azus being captured of the spark of divinity, when the protagonist talks to the priest of Woking, he will mention why the goddess Woking is missing and some people worship her, which fits the background of this period.

The forces that appear in the “Baldur’s Gate” series include the Iron Throne, the Knights of the Flame Fist, Shadow Thieves, Vampires, the Masked Mage Guild, the Red Robe Wizard Guild, the Harper Alliance, the Zhentarim Guild, and the legendary ranger Cui Sturt and Archmage Elminster helped out. These well-known forces and characters have all made part of the epic road of “Baldur’s Gate”, and now if you want to reproduce and experience this epic adventure, maybe you can only Counting on Larian’s “Baldur’s Gate 3” to achieve something in the subsequent chapters, it seems that even 20 years later, “Baldur’s Gate” is still the best way to get “epic”.

Relaxed and unobtrusive gaming experience

Before playing “Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition”, I was worried that it would be difficult to walk because of the high difficulty, because most of the guys on the post said that the game is difficult, even if I chose the normal difficulty recommended by the official, I was still a little nervous. I think Baldur’s Gate is difficult and should be a false proposition. If you have never played any CRPG, then any CRPG (including “Divinity Original Sin 2”) is very difficult for players to get started, but as long as you have experience in similar games and choose a suitable difficulty to get started Still no difficulty.

Looking back carefully, only the search task gave me a lot of headaches. Frankly speaking, the guidance system of “Baldur’s Gate 2” is not very good. It has quite a lot of tasks. Will also leave. Although many quests have log records as reminders, it is still difficult to complete the quests only by relying on the prompts, and some follow-up quests also take a lot of time to find NPCs. Fortunately, the strategy of the current game is quite complete and the tasks will not cause too much trouble to the players. “Baldur’s Gate” has a large base of players both at home and abroad. To take a step back, even modern CRPGs face the task of guiding this problem. The problem doesn’t seem to make much of a difference, and this little flaw doesn’t hurt to think about it.

After reading the player’s manual, I can’t comment on which of the second and fifth edition rules is more complicated, but the content of 5E is definitely richer than that of 2E, with more races, more occupations and variants, and a specialization system. Video games will definitely lead to more consideration in the construction of game characters based on the 5E rules, at least you have to choose one more specialty. The build link of “Baldur’s Gate” is relatively easy. The second edition does not yet have a specialization system. Players don’t need to consider it. The only thing that can be manipulated in terms of occupation is job transfer and part-time job. Skill selection, most of the time players need to do is to choose a career and then desperately click the upgrade button, the production team arranged for the player more than a dozen teammates also cover most of the occupation, do not worry about the lineup match. If you’ve played any modern CRPG, playing Baldur’s Gate should not be too much of a headache.

But the simplicity of building does not mean that the fun of “Baldur’s Gate” will plummet. The rich equipment matching and unique spell selection of “Baldur’s Gate” still allow character builds to have a lot of in-depth content worth exploring. I mentioned earlier that “Baldur’s Gate” worked hard to restore the DND background. In fact, the production team also collected quite a lot of well-known equipment. Kna is a fairly well-known evil deity in the world of Greyhawk, and it is unknown how its equipment ended up in Faerûn. There are also various items of great practical value, such as deformed cloaks and simulacrum helmets that transform creatures. With the equipment building system, players can use many artifacts to arm themselves. Most of SOA equipment will not be eliminated when they reach TOB. With these equipment players can play quite a lot of tricks.

The spell system of “Baldur’s Gate” is what I think is the essence of the game. The production team has selected more than 200 kinds of spells, more than 100 kinds of divine spells and more than 20 high-level skills. Studying these spells makes me I enjoyed it, and after in-depth research, I found that the spell selection idea of ​​”Baldur’s Gate” is not the same as that of other games. Take “Rage of Justice” and “Divinity: Original Sin 2” as examples, in the spell slot of “Rage of Justice” The regulars are usually augmentation spells, such as majestic, prophecy, and ice body. If you don’t go to the ray genre, the mages basically assume auxiliary functions. Because of the use of the double armor system, most of the spells in “Divinity: Original Sin 2” are harmful spells. , Wrath of the Earth, Corpse Explosion, Bloody Storm, etc.

“Baldur’s Gate 2” is different. The production team selects very few boosting spells, and most of the boosting spells can only be released on yourself, which means that it is difficult for you to use buffs to stack the AC of the warrior brother like “Justice”. “Rage” is so exaggerated, and there are very few practical damage spells. Before learning withering death spell and dragon breath, spells lacked effective group attack methods. However, the caster class is still the best in the experience of “Baldur’s Gate 2”, because the existence of sequence spells and magic breaking spells is still the core of the team. The sequencer is a spell that players can’t find in other games. It allows players to combine the effects of three spells and cast them instantly, such as combining the three skills of Disaster Book, Poison Spell, and Finger of Death. The skill greatly enhances the spellcasting ability of the caster’s profession, and the choice of spells has become more strategic, as well as time still, transformation, wishing, imprisoning (TOB is immune to a boss), which is not common. The spells are fun to play.

Destruction is the core of the battle of this game. The difference between “Baldur’s Gate 2” and other games is that the buffs are filled up when the enemies of other games appear, and many of its enemies are only buffed after the battle, and the There are many kinds of buffs, such as ineffective spells, spell traps, protective magic weapons, protective ordinary weapons, super golden bells, and players have a lot of magic-breaking spells. Dispel magic, remove magic, metaphor, see through magic, see through protection. Shield, Spell Bash. This spell system based on anti-magic and magic-breaking increases the depth of the game’s combat, because players will not prescribe the right medicine to break the magic. Your team may not be able to deal a single bit of damage to the enemy, and the difficulty of fighting the Lich in the early stage is that it is difficult for you to break the protective spell on it. Corresponding players can also take advantage of protection spells. When fighting a lich, tearing a scroll of protection from undead can be beneficial. In addition to the magic-breaking game, there are more spell strategies that can be studied in anti-pouring and anti-anti-poking. This spell game experience can be described as unique, and perhaps only in Baldur’s Gate can you feel this kind of fun.

end

Personally, I often play some old games. I prefer to play these old games myself, but when you look at many old games from the perspective of modern games, these “old antiques” may not match. The appetite of modern people, after all, the progress of the game over the decades is not limited to the screen and UI. But after more than 20 years, I can still praise the “Baldur’s Gate” series from the bottom of my heart. Compared with many later generations, it is not too much. I think this is truly worthy of the name of the masterpiece. . However, in a pessimistic view, this may indicate that the CRPG after “Baldur’s Gate” has not developed further. If the CRPG column will be updated next time, it may be “Hacked Ranger Detective”/”Pillar of Eternity”.

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