Released to critical acclaim in September 2000 by the Black Isle studios, and developed by RPG moguls Bioware, the Baldur's Gate games were a shining example of how wonderful the two's partnership could be, the second, tweaked and improved, game following on not long after the first left off, even with the option to import your previous game, something often seen in RPGs today.
Usually I would give a synopsis of the story as it begins, but everything screams 'no' within me at this, all I can bring myself to say is how the first game starts; you take the role of a character of your own creation, who has been brought up by his or her adoptive father in the closed off, scholar filled walls of Candlekeep, a town so obsessed with knowledge that one must donate a rare book to their extensive library before they will be allowed entrance. All you know is that your father is planning to take you on a journey, something which he has been keeping very secret, and that you must finish what studies you can as well as buy some road worthy equipment before you meet him. So begins what, in this writers opinion, is the greatest series of RPGs ever made.
I don't want to dwell much on the story, however, as I believe that in this case it must be played through and experienced, in whatever form it may take. So I must move on to what is usually my last resort when reviewing a game; the graphics. I've bumped this up my list of priorities because, well, they're beautiful. Not just by the standards of the early millenium, where every 3D character looked more like a series of cubes stuck together, I mean the game could most likely stand up on its graphics today, people would complain about the isometric viewpoint and the lack of ability to customise your characters cheekbones, I'm sure, but the graphics themselves are timeless, and whilst the character sprites may give away the games age, everything about the environments, the colours, the contrasts, the textures, gives off a beautiful, if slightly aged look, almost like the art deco of gaming. I must admit, it's not often I'll gush over the graphics of even a new release, a comment, perhaps, but nothing too interested, but then, when these games are past their tenth birthday, like Shadows of Amn is, will we look back on them the same way? Or will they seem like crude crayon drawings when compared to the probably photo-realistic graphics we'll have by then.
A brief skim over the essential gameplay mechanics because, really, that's not what I'm here to talk about, the same system was used in 2009's Dragon Age: Origins and, well, frankly it has aged terribly, being auto-paused just in case you want to reassess your strategy every time you take a bit of damage got annoying even at the time, and though watching your party destroy whatever enemy you were against with a flurry of spells and abilities that left the entire battlefield devastated would feel oh-so rewarding, sometimes it just wouldn't be worth the effort when you would mostly be fighting bandits. So no, combat is not what we want to talk about, what we want to talk about is characters and their interaction, the partial voice acting in the game was an impressive addition when it came out, though games such as Deus Ex (2000 as well) boasted the full voice-acting, and even limited dialogue options, that most games have today, the sheer amount of dialogue to be had in Baldur's Gate blew it out of the water, the way characters would interact within your party independent of you, or stop to question you on some matter, and the answers boiled down to more than the bog standard 'saint, neutral, jerk' options that I loathe about the dialogue wheel. At one point you could even claim you were on a quest to find 'the holy ground-hog'. Even if the game did use an utterly superfluous alignment system, it was more of an aid than anything, if you really wanted you could make a Lawful Good character who insulted people at every opportunity, it would be pointless and I'm not sure why you'd want to, but you could do it.
It was this freedom that made Baldur's Gate seem so wonderful, perhaps lacking when compared to more modern, open worl games such as Morrowind and Oblivion, but something to be commended for its time, and a brilliant demonstration of how the RPG genre should be.
Definately well worth whatever pittance is being charged for the entire series in one pack.
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