Important, but too tedious, flawed and archaic
Baldur's Gate is an important game in the history of PC RPGs, but is too tedious, flawed and archaic to wholeheartedly enjoy with a modern gamer's sensibilities and expectations.
The 1998 title by Bioware uses a Dungeons & Dragons rule set, which will feel opaque and unnecessarily dense to the uninitiated. In fact, I grew up playing the 16-color "gold box" D&D games by SSI of the late 1980s and early 1990s -- count me among the initiated -- and still felt the D&D elements of Baldur's Gate were painfully clunky. An in-game encyclopedia of D&D terms and mechanics or more detailed hovering mouse tips would have gone a long way toward helping the player understand the underlying system at their own pace.
As it is, the player is thrown into the deep end from the get go. You begin by creating a character from scratch and are faced immediately with making a lot of critical, irreversible decisions on dozens of variables including alignment (good or evil, chaotic or lawful), class (paladin, cleric, mage, etc.), and race (human, elf, halfling, etc.). You also have to "roll up" your character, that is, let the computer generate some random numbers based on dice rolls for your character's key stats: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, charisma. All of these decisions can have major impacts on game play and character development and are likely to leave you with regrets a few hours into the game as those impacts become more apparent.
The game provides a lot of descriptive help text on these variables and throughout the game, but colorful writing flourishes often oversell the importance of what's being described and often conflate the functional, nuts-and-bolts information about game play. For example, after multiple frustrating restarts -- largely due to the aforementioned buyer's remorse -- I settled on playing a chaotic good, half-elf ranger. The help text said wisdom was a key stat for rangers, so I maxed it out and pushed it well over the natural limit with permanent buffs found during the game. Until pouring through D&D wiki pages and forums, I was unable to discern what effect such an extremely high wisdom stat had on game play. The answer? Not much, given the game's experience cap.
The plot is interesting, putting you in the role of a young ward of a wizard-scholar who grew up in a library-fortress in a fantasy setting. Heavy-handed foreshadowing lets you know your character has some kind of dark, mysterious past. Your quest to discover your past and right a personal injury overlaps with a regional power grab conspiracy. After the initial hour or so of tutorial-like gameplay within the library-fortress, the world opens up and you can explore or pursue side quests or the main quest as you please. You'll find companions along the way that will join up on a whim. You're allowed a party of up to 6.
Exploration feels slow and extremely tedious, and suffers further from poor pathfinding. And, it is pretty much a necessity in order to get better gear and gain experience to take on the main quests. While essentially mowing the lawn to explore outdoor maps, encounters with high-level enemies that will crush your party occur frequently and unpredictably. There's an autosave feature, but you'll still lose a lot of progress as you explore until you get accustomed to manually saving before rounding each corner, entering each new building, taking each flight of stairs, and so on. Pathfinding in enclosed spaces is particularly bad and requires a lot of micromanagement. The open-world aspect of the game comes with a fair amount of jank, too, with lots of ways to break scripted quests by stumbling upon quest items or quest characters out of sequence.
Combat is functional, but disappointing. The underlying D&D system is turn-based. Baldur's Gate, like many later BioWare RPG titles, plays it out in faux real-time, leaving the player the option, or rather necessity, to pause combat and issue individual commands to your party at any time. The system has the potential for deep, tactical combat, but in practice, encounters typically play out through very brief, chaotic orgies of missile, spell and melee attacks lasting only a few seconds. In most combat encounters, your party's initial volley of spells and attacks are likely to be the only tactical decision you'll need to make. Your tactical considerations are largely relegated to pre-combat preparation and equipment selection. In enclosed areas, combat is much more tactical, but it also magnifies the annoying pathfinding issues. Hallways and corridors wide enough for three characters often get jammed up by only one, negating your melee characters ability to join the fray and forcing you to micromanage movement.
Some elements of the game have a cobbled-together feel. For example, the dialog of some characters you encounter is written with medieval/renaissance fair-like 'thees' and 'thous' and similar affectations. Others read like plain, modern English. What little voice acting there is in the game is extremely bombastic, silly, anachronistic and over-the-top, but kind of charming. Very abrupt transitions from key combat encounters to dated-FMVs between the game's seven chapters feel awkward and unsatisfying. The endgame is particularly abrupt and unsatisfying.
For completionists, there are dozens and dozens of hours of gameplay in Baldur's Gate, though much of that time will be spent hauling loot back and forth, waiting for your characters to slowly walk across a town map, awkwardly clump up in front of a door frame until the game recognizes the party is within an invisible radius, and finally transition to the building's interior.
Playing Baldur's Gate, I found myself longing for the overtly turn-based combat system from SSI's gold box D&D games, which gave the player much more precise control and tactical finesse. Despite being heavily text-reliant, the gold box game developers were able to intuitively and relatively unintrusively convey how much of the D&D system worked with 16 colors, text, and pc speaker bleeps and interesting, though less sophisticated, stories. While Baldur's Gate is important for marking a major transition into an era of richer, more fully realized worlds within RPGs and for D&D in particular, RPG nostalgists should skip Baldur's Gate. Instead, I'd recommend Sierra's Hero's Quest (a.k.a. Quest for Glory), or SSI's gold box games such as Curse of the Azure Bonds. Or, skip the nostalgia altogether and catch up with the modern era of RPGs.
