Applying the Bioware Formula to ‘Baldur’s Gate’
The fascinating foundation for better things to come.
Intro
Baldur’s Gate isn’t Bioware’s first video game. That honor belongs to the mech simulation title, Shattered Steel, a title with its own development issues, including infighting among the original six founders of Bioware. Baldur’s Gate is the studio’s first major hit though. Initially released for Windows PC in North America on December 21st 1998 as an RPG based on the most famous Dungeons and Dragons setting, The Forgotten Realms. It rocketed the studio to fame, with roughly a million copies sold within the first year. That may sound paltry by today’s standards, but at the time this was a number which kept it in the top 10 best selling games for all of 1999, finding success with folks not typically counted among “hard-core role-playing gamers” as Desslock puts it in their review of the game on Gamespot.
Baldur’s Gate didn’t begin life as a D&D product however. Bioware was actually working on Battleground: Infinity, which was influenced by D&D, but initially turned down by publisher Interplay. Eventually, Feargus Urquhart, the head of Black Isle — the RPG focused subsidiary of Interplay — sat down with the demo Bioware wanted to show off and was impressed. Urquhart had already been working as the producer on Shattered Steel from the publisher side, and as he reveals in his interview with Matt Barton, was even doing a fair share of writing on the game. Having already signed up for two other D&D titles, Bioware’s new computer RPG, or CRPG, was then brought into the Forgotten Realms. Battleground: Infinity was a rather different idea in a number of ways, from playing into various real world mythologies to being a multiplayer driven experience. This base informed where Baldur’s Gate began and of course the engine it would run on would be known as the Infinity Engine, which Bioware not only used for Baldur’s Gate II, but licensed out to Interplay to be used on Icewind Dale 1 and 2 as well as Planescape Torment. In that same interview, Urquhart explains that his biggest contribution was the name of Baldur’s Gate which Bioware co-founder, Ray Muzyka, allegedly described as “the dumbest name ever: as Urquhart explains in Barton’s interview.
Talking about Baldur’s Gate in the modern day can get complicated. First and foremost, which version do we talk about? There is the game released by Bioware in 1998 for Windows 98. Then there is the 2012 Enhanced Edition (EE). The latter is the product of a different developer, though Beamdog’s founders are ex-Bioware employees. EE isn’t a complete remake in the way that Resident Evil 2 or Dead Space have received in recent years: it still largely looks like a game from the late ’90s though significant alterations were made like new companions, touched up visuals, and new cutscenes. Some quality of life improvements such as being able to zoom in and out and proper widescreen support, as well as other such modern amenities can’t be forgotten. Even on a mechanical level, not everything remains the same between the two versions. New classes as well as rebalances are present in EE, which also features far more difficulty options, including a story mode that makes the player character and their party unkillable. We’re running into a sort of Theseus’ ship paradox here, but to have played EE is to have played Baldur’s Gate at the end of the day.
Ultimately, I decided for the purposes of this piece, I am playing EE. The original game is dated in some ways that make it more of a hurdle than I care to engage with, and discussing the core tenets of the Bioware Formula is not significantly hindered by playing this version. The changes between each version are well known and making observations around those dividing lines can be done so with relative ease.
To briefly summarize the purpose of this piece and the larger series it fits within, Applying the Bioware Formula is an attempt to analyze the games developed by Bioware that fit within the company’s familiar formula. Such is made up of six pillars I will define shortly, and how I analyze these games is through a few different lenses. First is through one that seeks to discuss these cultural works in a broad understanding as a piece of media criticism. Second is from a historical perspective, as I will regularly pull in sources to back up my claims as I seek to piece together where each game fits into a larger narrative about Bioware and the games industry. Lastly, there is a game studies adjacent viewpoint. I have no formal education in games studies, I am merely a writing arts dropout who has spent an non-insignificant amount of time reading or listening to folks in and around the field. Of the three, this is by far the one I will do the least of, given my lack of expertise. But I am unable to think about Bioware without also thinking about games studies.
To define what I mean by the Bioware Formula can be quickly summarized in a few sentences, or more broadly expanded upon as I’ve done here. The pillars are:
An Expansive Journey: A lengthy quest that takes the player across a large section of a setting’s world to create the sense of true adventure.
A World With History: Deep lore regarding, but not limited to, factions, nations, races, and their intermingling politics.
A Home Space: The place the player and their companions call home, for example the Normandy of the Mass Effect trilogy.
Small Party Combat and Exploration: The act of traversing the designed spaces of a game and the action that takes place alongside companion characters.
Dynamic Relationships: How dialogue and choices with NPCs, especially companions, can evolve into friendships or romances.
Choice Driven Narrative: The player’s ability to co-author the story, make big and small decisions alike that affect what part of the branching narrative they see.
An Expansive Journey
For those like myself whose experience with Bioware begins with the company’s entry into consoles, this is an area that may seem fairly unrecognizable. Yes, the section of Faerun, which Baldur’s Gate takes place in, feels relatively small scale by comparison to many RPGs, but that isn’t the biggest difference, it’s the structure. Instead of a few big locations to go to with their own subplots, the game has a map with dozens of sub-locations that will be revealed over the course of play. In theory, players could opt not to head toward the area of the main quest and explore the world from zone to zone, as most locations are accessible from the moment you leave the tutorial area of Candlekeep. To the modern player it may not immediately read like an open world, but it sure does play like one–just with a whole lot of loading between sections.
The plot of Baldur’s Gate is a traditional one in many ways. You begin as the ward of Gorion, a wise old monk who took you in at a young age after being orphaned. You’ve spent most of your life at Candlekeep, a repository of knowledge with a circular walled, monastic college of sorts at its heart. Life in Candlekeep has been a typical one you’d expect within a cloister of scholarly monks. Your character, whose relationship to this constraint depends on your choice of class and other background info, is destined to leave their small town equivalent before too long. As soon as you take control of your character your first quest is to meet Gorion, who immediately informs you that the both of you will be leaving under the cover of night for fear of a threat upon your life. And so you depart but are shortly interrupted by a group consisting of an imposing bunch who cut down Gorion as you flee into the forest. This is the motivation by which the player then begins to explore the mystery of the player character’s past, who seeks to murder them, and a fiendish series of political machinations set to unravel the Sword Coast and the city Baldur’s Gate.
Upon Gorion’s death your main quest is to go meet up with some old friends of his at the Friendly Arm Inn, who are optional party members, and then head to the Nashkel Mines to investigate the corruption of iron across the region. Despite the pull of the main quest there is ample room for the player to forgo such. After all, if you’re the target of assassination, you’ve got bigger problems than trying to sort out region wide resource issues. This can then lead you to poking around all the optional, and not so optional, areas at your own pace, many of which the main quest will never lead you to.
For much of the game, the journey feels small in scope. You’re not fighting some world-ending threat, you’re tracking down those responsible for a series of false flag operations and political machinations that include the aforementioned corruption of iron, and roving bands of brigands drumming up fear along the roads. All of it being conducted by the Iron Throne, a powerful organization of merchants who are setting themselves up to be the heroes of Baldur’s Gate and gain a whole lot of political power within the city. There isn’t a ton of gussied up presentation to any of this outside of the cutscenes, which are fairly simplistic. It’s rare to come across a scripted moment that is more than a character walking up to yours and initiating conversation without any sort of camera cuts or extra flair.
Much to the game’s detriment, the grounded narrative gives way to a dead god of murder, grand destinies, and big confrontations of good and evil. In a journal that feels like any of the other dozens of notes you read throughout the game, the player character’s true past is revealed with a casual nature. They are Bhaalspawn. The true face pulling the strings of the Iron Throne is revealed to be Sarevok who then reveals himself to also be a Bhaalspawn, or a child of the dead god of murder, Bhaal. Sarevok’s plans aren’t about gaining economic or political power, they’re about creating as much chaotic bloodshed as possible all in order to resurrect the spirit of Bhaal and become the new god of murder.
Is there something to be said about how easily corrupted business and governments are to unadulterated evil? Absolutely. But is framing greed and abuse of power as merely evil reductive and disabling in regards to better understanding and fighting it? Also, absolutely. To have the focus shift away from corruption to one of destiny born out of genetics is immensely disappointing, not because a story about destiny can’t be compelling, but because here it means largely tossing out all the interesting long-term plot ideas for something cooked up mostly at the last minute outside of the vague teases within the dream sequence cutscenes that have a great deal of dissonance from the bulk of the game. Will you, like your half-brother Sarevok, be doomed to follow in your unholy father’s footsteps? Probably not.
A World With History
Easily one of the biggest flaws of the Baldur’s Gate series up through its most recent release is how it introduces Faerun. I have very little background knowledge of The Forgotten Realms setting, and Baldur’s Gate has very little interest in helping anyone in my position with catching-up. There is such a large assumption that players are coming in with a deep familiarity to the setting and to D&D in general, but more on that later. What is the relationship between almost any pairing of races? Where do they even come from? What does the world beyond the Sword Coast look like? To get a vague idea of anything, one must hunt down conversations from random NPCs like a content vacuum. Sometimes you’ll come across interesting snippets such as how the Friendly Arm Inn was established, often though any bit of broader lore will leave you with more questions unanswered than answered. Or, you might get some classic fantasy racism. For example, the dark elven people known as the Drow have long been racially essentialized, and this is not an issue unique to them. The rule of thumb up until Third Edition D&D was that Drow should be chaotic evil on the alignment chart. Third Edition changed the standard to neutral evil. Frankly, this highlights one of the many issues with the alignment chart, but really, when you create a world where sweeping statements are made about entire civilizations being evil, well…
Easily the meatiest of all the world building comes directly through the main plot. The city-state of Baldur’s Gate paints itself as a sort of place for people to be free from the restrictions of wherever they come from. The surrounding area is a “wild frontier” and the city of Baldur’s Gate sits as a sort of libertarian version of a medieval fantasy town, where those “willing” can rise to greatness. Afterall, the city itself was founded by Balduran, who fits the mold of a great man of history. But the truth is that repressive class politics dominate. The wealthy elite hold all the power and the poor struggle from day to day. While the game doesn’t dive deep into this, it’s absolutely there. Taking time to explore the city you’ll quickly find the disparity even if it’s handled in a somewhat tokenistic way.
A key to understanding the setting of Baldur’s Gate is to dig into two statements. One from the game’s director, James Ohlen, and another from Gary Gygax, co-creator of D&D.
In a retrospective interview with GamesRadar’s Craig Ritche, when discussing why Baldur’s Gate was chosen as a setting, Ohlen states, “This was mainly because Baldur’s Gate was underdeveloped — no novels, game modules or much at all. RPGs are about allowing the player’s created character to be the hero of the story.” I can understand why Bioware chose to go with Baldur’s Gate. As revealed in Alex Kane’s Boss Fight Book entry on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Bioware had the option to develop a Star Wars RPG set alongside the then currently in production prequel films, but opted to jump back roughly 4,000 years because they didn’t want to worry about big names like Skywalker or Kenobi. Working with a big IP owned by a big company can lead to obvious issues of creative control, so limiting that where possible is understandable.
In the February 1979 edition — of Dragon Magazine, Dungeons and Dragons creator, Gary Gygax wrote the following in a piece titled Dungeons and Dragons: What Is It And Where Is It Going.
“Our modern world has few, if any frontiers. We can no longer escape to the frontier of the West, explore Darkest Africa, sail to the South Seas. Even Alaska and the Amazon Jungles will soon be lost as wild frontier areas. Furthermore, adventures are not generally possible anymore. The frontiers are receding into memories, modern communications make all of the world available to casual travelers, and the most backward places are becoming more and more civilized. Certainly it is still possible to go scuba diving, mountain climbing, auto racing, sky diving and so on. These are expensive and risky for no real purpose in most cases. One can also have adventures as a criminal, or possibly as an agent of the government (if one is sufficiently qualified), but the former is distasteful to say the least, and the latter is most unlikely. Americans, with more leisure today than ever, crave entertainment…. It is therefore scarcely surprising that a game which directly involves participants in a make-believe world of just such nature should prove popular.”
Now, Gygax was speaking broadly about D&D, and not specifically The Forgotten Realms, as it wouldn’t be officially published until 1987, but if we consider this with the previous description of the Baldur’s Gate area as a sort of wild frontier, and Ohlen’s statement about the player character needing to be the “hero,” there is a lot to chew on. Firstly, oh boy, that’s a lot of settler colonialism attitude from Gygax. What a shame it is that us civilized white folks are losing all of our fun little exotic adventures into savage lands… Boy do I hate how technology has caused the world to be more interconnected so that we maybe will learn a thing or two about other cultures instead make sweeping, racist assumptions.
Okay…
Now about that idealism of frontiers and the “heroes” who explore them. This directly ties to the great man of history theory which states that the world is shaped by the exceptional few who are capable of driving civilization “forward.” It’s a pervasive view of history that can be easily seen across colonial powers inserting themselves into “wild frontiers” of the world and painting narratives of heroism about those often at the heart of the most powerful and corrupt forces of humanity. Playing in the space of frontier heroes is a troubling one to see approached so casually, but more on that later.
(Insert something from Games of Empire or a similar academic book.)
Oftentimes one is left with wide gaps in between the bits and pieces of worldbuilding present, where you can make the assumption some standard fantasy trope exists. To be fair, the game is a lot of standard fantasy. In part because, Forgotten Realms is influenced by J.R.R. Tolkein’s Middle-Earth as well as other genre defining fantasy. D&D, which officially came about in 1974, operates in the wake of such material. Forgotten Realms does too, and in the years since both of their publications, they too have defined what fantasy is. So especially for someone coming to Baldur’s Gate — without much prior knowledge — over two decades later, it can be difficult to see the nuances when there is hardly any light shone upon them.
But for Bioware, this was the point.
“D&D for us was the kitchen table. It’s your friends doing something fun. And occasionally one’s a jackass and does something weird and you roll with it. The intent of the simulation was not a fully realized medieval world. It was a simulation of playing Dungeons and Dragons,” says Bioware writer Luke Kristjanson, in the book Bioware Stories and Secrets From 25 Years of Game Development. The book then goes on to summarize that the intent was not to make a serious fantasy for serious people, and I can’t help but hang on the line “kitchen table.”
The invocation of the gathering space of the kitchen table presents images of, as Kristjanson explains, friends sitting around a communal space. Friends who are young and hanging out at one of their family homes late on some non-school night, or later than they should on a school night. Somewhat famously, as it is documented in Bioware Stories and Secrets and a number of other places for many years now, a fair few of the characters and ideas for Baldur’s Gate came from a long running campaign hosted by Ohlen. In fact it was a several year old tabletop group that he and his friends, including Cameron Tofer who was also hired at Bioware around the same time, had been running since high school. This group continued into Ohlen’s days managing a comic book shop, in which a friend of a friend at Bioware knew him as “a good dungeon master” and so he got the job based on such.
Baldur’s Gate doesn’t have all that detailed world-building I desire, because it isn’t supposed to. It’s meant to be fun genre fiction. It was created by a bunch of people who were roughly college age or a little older trying to do something none of them had ever done before and probably had little notion about what it means to create media for an audience that isn’t only your group of friends sitting around the kitchen table. And they were fine with that. Baldur’s Gate is fine existing as “bringing the kitchen table to your computer,” as it is put in Bioware Stories and Secrets.
A Home Space
When initially setting up the larger project of “applying the Bioware Formula to games” I had to decide whether Baldur’s Gate would be included. It wasn’t an easy yes, in part because a number of key design aspects of the Bioware Formula don’t exist within it. There is no Home Space in this game. No place to rest and chat-up your companions as you do aboard the Ebon Hawk, the Normandy, or in Skyhold. Partly, because chatting up companions does not exist in the original release. The closest equivalents are the inns or random camps you can make along the way, but they only exist as little animated single shot gif-like cutscenes of a cozy fire burning. They allow you to heal up and recharge any spells and abilities that have limited use. But there is no space to wander around.
This lack of a place to kick your feet up means you’re always in questing mode. Always looking towards the next objective in the chain. An experience I think is fairly typical of other games and especially other RPGs, but the vibing and chatting times are what came to define a lot of Bioware’s strongest bits of storytelling. Baldur’s Gate’s is a game most concerned with the adventure and with the limited inter-party conversations the need for a home space isn’t present.
One could fairly argue that the later Bioware cinematic approach is less filmic than it is episodic. With individual planets in Mass Effect or KotOR taking an hour or so, and possessing their own plots rather seperate from the main one. It’s what makes these titles very bingeable in the way seasons of a television show can fly by throughout a weekend off. In Baldur’s Gate however, even with side quests and subplots within the main considered, much of the game feels like a string of continuous quests.
Small Party Combat and Exploration
Party size in the Baldur’s Gate series is the largest of any Bioware RPG. At six in total — the player character and five companions — there can be a lot to manage. Given the lack of a home space, companions not in the party aren’t patiently waiting at a convenient central location. Some have set locations, others will stand exactly where you dismiss them. On one hand, the sheer amount of potential companions, the fact that you will likely not recruit them all, and the additional fact that few companions feel like their lives revolve around the main quest gives them a sense of life and independence. But then the lack of personality combined with their standing around in the middle of nowhere make them feel rather hollow.
With so much to manage, combat gets chaotic quickly. There is no better embodiment of this than the action log zooming by with several actions in a second often being the norm. Which is where real-time with pause comes in. While Baldur’s Gate is not the first game to use some form of it, it did help to popularize the mechanic in a big way. As Bioware cofounder, Greg Zeschuk puts it in an oral history published in Retro Gamer issue 188. “Ray was a big fan of turn-based games, the Gold Box games, and my favourite genre was real-time strategy — I played Warcraft 2 and StarCraft more than you can imagine. So it came from having to have a real-time game that satisfied fans of that genre, but also satisfied turn-based fans.” In that same publication, “Maybe I shouldn’t say it,” reveals James (Ohlen) nervously, “but I was never a fan of Fallout and Fallout 2. I liked the story and the world, but the fact it paused and took turns for moving, I never liked that. RPGs are about immersing you in their world, so the closer you get to the feeling of real, the better.”
This is an odd perspective, both reaching for the idealized imaginary of the immersive game, while speaking about realism in a world of fantasy where characters shrug off fireballs and multiple direct hits from swords, arrows, spears, axes, and the like multiple times per fight. And if they die, there’s a decent chance they can be magically resurrected. I think what Ohlen is actually trying to speak to is a frantic sense of pace. The feeling of being in the midst of action which moves quickly and having to make equally quick decisions to survive.
Given the sheer chaos of average Baldur’s Gate fights and the absolute disinterest to get players acclimated to a — now very dated — version of D&D’s ruleset, both the original and EE have lacking tutorials of their own. The original comes about in the form of optional conversations with NPCs around Candlekeep. While some of those NPCs are out in the open, it’s entirely possible to walk right by about every one of them. In EE, a new tutorial was added that is separate from the rest of the game and a message appears in the menus urging all new players to try the new tutorial first. Neither does a terrific job at explaining the intricacies of spells and abilities, resistance, and whatnot. Honestly, playing Baldur’s Gate 3 first, which benefits greatly from its combat legibility because…it’s turn based, helped me a fair deal in understanding the broad ideas of the original’s design. But some of the specifics elude me even after a second playthrough of EE.
In Josh Sawyer’s GDC 2016 presentation, Pillars of Eternity and Proper Attribute Tuning, he talks about how Obsidian approached Pillars of Eternity’s — a throwback CRPG released in 2015 — character building. Speaking to the idea of viable vs optimal character builds and how in older versions of D&D there are strict limitations with regards to what numbers skills should be at for certain classes. He gives the examples of the reasonably intelligent wizard and reasonably strong fighter whose intelligence and strength skills are at 14 respectively. He explains that despite 14 not seeming like a low number when the highest you could initially roll was 18, the exponential math behind the systems of D&D meant the difference was drastic. In some instances too low of a score would lock you out of classes entirely. In older versions of D&D, and the games under its influence, you really wanted optimal builds. Whereas in Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian wanted the viable range of build types to be much larger to allow for experimental builds such as a highly intelligent barbarian to be viable. Baldur’s Gate is a game that definitely prefers optimal builds but also doesn’t even explain what those looks like to anyone not already familiar with its ruleset pulled from an outside source.
For all newcomers, pound it into your head that you need to rest regularly. This is a combat heavy game and burning through your party’s allotment of daily skills and spells can be done in a few, if not one, fight. Mages especially become useless if they haven’t rested to regain those spells and given the amount of trash mobs in any zone, the amount and type of micromanaging one would have to do to prevent them from using those limited use spells in a fight isn’t particularly interesting.
To best illustrate some of the game’s oddities, let’s talk about the time in my first playthrough where Imoen died during a raid on a gnoll base. Shortly after Imoen gets cut down I try to remedy the issue. I know from Baldur’s Gate 3 scrolls of revivify are a thing that exist in this world at some point in some version of the ruleset. I go to some merchants, no luck. I head to the temple, no luck, but they do offer to revive the dead. Great! For whatever reason I don’t have access to it. It’s grayed out, and I have no idea why. Maybe I have to make donations to the church first to get into their good graces and then they’ll let me pay to revive my companion. No. At least not after 500 gold which is what I had. I would have known what donations actually do if I had not missed one of the tutorial monks at Candlekeep. Now what? I reload. I inevitably have another character die some time later and decide to look up how to revive people. Turns out my issue at the temple was that I had not selected on the right hand side of the screen to take control of the dead character as if they were alive before talking to the priest. Problem solved! No, because they don’t spawn with their gear. So now I have to travel all the way back and loot their corpse. Now, in the future I could theoretically circumvent this last issue by simply looting the dead companions inventory upon their death. Trouble is, even with a party of six the total inventory isn’t very big, especially when you have to consider the needs of bringing back other looted items, secondary weapons, extra spell scrolls, potions, and the usual RPG goods.
Death isn’t actually that interesting. Ultimately the best solution is to have a cleric and make sure they learn the ability to revive companions ASAP. But maybe you don’t like any of the clerics. Maybe you’ve not come across one that fits your party. None of this is enjoyable friction that serves as anything more than tedium that has since been standardized out of other games. Simply knocking party members out for the duration of the fight and having them get back up once it is over with minimal health isn’t necessarily interesting, but it is less annoying, and ultimately where Bioware themselves would implement in future games.
In his video A Thorough Look at Baldur’s Gate, Noah Caldwell Gervais remarks upon the aspect of the systems driven automated dungeon master whose goal is never anything less than total annihilation of the player and their party. How such can create a frustrating departure from the tabletop experience controlled by human discretion where a dungeon master can be swayed by the players to not be so vicious or they can choose of their own volition to maybe take it a little easier on players for reasons outside the game.
For a game so reliant on random number generators to be so unrelenting, even in the most mundane combat encounters, well, it turns into a bore as you watch characters swing away and miss. Maybe they manage a hit or get hit and explode into bloody gibs. Any death of the player character is a game over. Any death of a companion is a matter of hoping death is not permanent and that you’ve unlocked the ability to reverse disaster. Realistically, you’re probably abusing quick saves. Meanwhile in the tabletop space, death can be a fail forward matter. The tabletop session doesn’t stop. Maybe the dungeon master creates a fun quest for players to go on to revive their departed ally. Maybe the player brings in a new character to the story. As Noah Caldwell Gervais puts it “ if you put a year into a character and they get eaten by an enormous demon and digested, the whole party mourns for it. It’s the end of a performance and the end of emotional investment.” In Baldur’s Gate however, death is almost never more than a mechanical inconvenience.
One of the bigger faults of the Baldur’s Gate series, even in the most recent rendition, is the world can leave a lot to be desired, especially for those not already familiar with The Forgotten Realms. Many of the zones are rather dull looking Euro-centric medieval fantasy guff. Plenty of areas are simply space, and without distinct art direction, enjoyable traversal, or much of anything going on in these zones, they become padding. Most of the mainline areas aren’t particularly memorable either, with a penchant for following table top design, there are number of dungeons, such as the Nashkel Mine, Baldur’s Gate’s sewer system, and the caverns beneath Candlekeep, that are a web of identical looking hallways, that mostly exist to increase the often arduous affair of working your way through tough fights and brutal traps.
One of the boldest decisions at the time of Baldur's Gate development was to avoid the tile based maps that games such as Ultima relied on. Instead, programmer Scott Grieg presented Bioware co-founder, Ray Muzyka, with a different idea. To leverage Microsoft’s new technology, DirectX.
“We could just paint whatever we want on here, and then we could just smoothly scroll around and have the characters walk on it” Grieg recalls in Ben Lindbergh’s retrospective How Bioware’s ‘Baldur’s Gate’ Saved the Computer RPG for The Ringer.
Muzyka’s only question was “how many CD’s will that be?”
For the members of the audience who are unaware of this ancient PC gaming tradition, games would come on ye olde compact discs and require installment onto your PC before being able to play. Sometimes the install process would require multiple discs. Grieg’s estimate was on the money as Baldur’s Gate shipped with five discs.
On very rare occasions, companions will have ambient dialogue triggered to express their feelings about a place. It, like much of the game, is the obviously foundational block to what Bioware would go onto in the future, where characters not only have meaningful things to say about a location, but engage in conversations with other companions while traveling. Here, it rarely serves as more than a bit of set dressing to further elaborate on the tone of an area. Enter somewhere with rancid vibes and someone might state as much. More often than not, you’ll be hearing them either demand they rest or repeat the same combat barks over and over.
To touch back on the RTS inspirations. The most you’ll hear from the majority of companions are their responses when being clicked on or told to perform an action. It’s an odd addition given the player of a CRPG does not occupy the same narrative space as they do in many RTS games. In the latter, units respond with “yes, sir” and “something needs doing” because the game situates the player as the leader of their faction. However, in Baldur’s Gate the player is not narrativized in the same way, or at all. This speaks further to the confused notions about the need for real time action and the liberal borrowing from the RTS genre. Oddly, this stuck around in Bioware games for years to come.
Furthermore, maps are more often than not large squares viewed from a fairly zoomed out isometric angle, especially if you’re playing the EE, but rather claustrophobic in the original game. Theoretically, one could power through the main story in a dozen hours on the lower difficulties. But a playthrough that lines up with the intended approach on the standard difficulty could take 30, if not 40+ depending on how well you grasp the mechanics of combat. That’s if you’re mostly focusing on the main quest, but if you do the side content, that number can climb up to 50–60 or possibly 80–90 for completionist types. Much of the run time, and clearly part of the developer expectation for players, is that they would spend time exploring many of the zones they come across, journeying to all four corners and everything in between in order to stumble across side material. It’s an inelegant process, but one that scratches the itch of a certain mindset. How the map is revealed through player movement is not dissimilar to fog of war and map reveal of the RTS genre, especially of the 90’s. There is a methodical process of walking back and forth from side to side, painting in the blackness of the map until all is revealed. Does it feel like truly exploring and letting what sights interest you draw your attention? No, absolutely not. Is the contentification of it satisfying on a base level? Most assuredly.
The one area that genuinely impresses me is the city of Baldur’s Gate itself. Whereas other towns and villages are all a single square zone, the city is a combined eight with a number of interiors and sewer systems to explore. After hours of trekking through largely flat green countryside, forests, miserable mines, and standard looking towns this is genuinely overwhelming. It’s a smart instance of Bioware holding back their punch for a moment where it could really make an impact via scope and detail, especially for its era, giving the sense that you have truly arrived in the big city.
Dynamic Relationships
As I hinted at before, the original release of Baldur’s Gate did not have companions to chat up. They have very little personality too. In an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun in October of 2023 Ohlen expanded upon this by saying. “I’m very competitive. I went and played Final Fantasy VII and was like, ‘Oh my good god, these characters make ours look like a bunch of cardboard cutouts. This is terrible.” Which in turn motivated Bioware to create truly memorable characters, a pillar of their design that has made the developer so memorable.
At no point can you walk up to a companion out in the field and experience the chat-em-up of latter Bioware. No discussing their pasts, their views on the conflict at hand, or bathing in the ample worldbuilding, which so often became the purpose of companions. Don’t know anything about the Quarian race in Mass Effect? Well, you can be damn sure by the end of your first conversation with Tali that you’ll know enough to at least write a 6th grade book report on them. Conversations in Baldur’s Gate are almost entirely limited to when you first encounter them. For the most part they remain silent outside of combat barks, canned dialogue triggered by specific environments, and remarks on your alignment.
Alignment is where the relationship really comes in, and I don’t mean romance or even friendship, as all that would be rather hard to do given the lack of dialogue. Straight up, there is no developing any sort of relationship with your base game companions. However, based on the moral choices you make, companions will remark upon how they think you’re doing. It’s never a meaningful line, but more so a mechanical heads-up that they approve or disapprove of what you’re doing. If they disapprove, they will eventually leave the party. It is also possible to have a companion leave if you keep them hanging on their personal quest, though the timing on that is rather forgiving.
Of course all of this requires them to be living. Baldur’s Gate has a lot of companions. In the base game there are 25 and four more added in with the EE, and then another four are available in Siege of Dragonspear, the expansion which takes place between the first and second games and was released by Beamdog in 2016. Though Dragonspear cuts down on the number of total available companions for a tighter group. In the base game you are never going to have all 25 companions in your party. As previously mentioned, there can only ever be five in your six person party. The reason why there are so many companions comes down to a few things. One, because there wasn’t much writing to do for them, they could simply make more. Secondly, Bioware wanted to make sure you have access to a variety of different classes no matter your reputation, given that companions whose alignment conflicts with yours will eventually leave the party. Lastly, no one but the player character is required to finish the game. Given the often unforgiving nature in combat, companions die quite often. Fortunately, only when they are exploded into gibs, vaporized, or otherwise physically dismantled do they die for good… that still happens a fair deal and you will probably need to replace them.
There is little to no reaction to the death of any companion, even from those who come as a pair. For example if Jaheira is turned into a pile of ash, Khalied gives no reaction to this despite them both being long time traveling companions who both serve within the Harpers organization.
However, all of this is complicated by the four companions added in EE. They will come up and chat with you, and you can hear their life’s story within minutes of meeting them. You can even romance them and their companion quests are far more fleshed out than the bulk of the base game’s. Which is interesting to think about in terms of how authentic is EE to the base Baldur’s Gate experience. What is the line between remaster and remake? Most intriguing, what aspects of Bioware’s design post Baldur’s Gate, felt necessary and possible to add to in 2012?
Going back to Baldur’s Gate is an imposing idea, especially for those who didn’t grow up in its era or came to love Bioware during the seventh generation. Companions who talk to you, have tortured pasts, and might give you a smooch are now inseparable from many people’s notion of Bioware, and difficult to navigate around for other developers in the genre. When Obsidian released Pillars of Eternity, it did so without romance. While the game was well received as a throwback, there were certainly folks who were disappointed by the lack of romance. With the game’s sequel, Deadfire, they added romance. Or look to the recent revival of Baldur’s Gate itself from Larian Studios, who not only included romance in Baldur’s Gate 3 but made an incredibly horny game that launched to incredible sales numbers in part because they leaned on the sexual content quite heavily in pre-release.
The additions by Beamdog are an admission that the audience of 2012 expected companions to adhere to such. The game does not flag any of these characters as EE content, and it does forward them over a number of the original cast. Neera is in Beregost, the first significant town you arrive at which is only a couple hours in, and Rasaad is right on the main road of Nashkel which is only an hour or so later. Of the four, only Baeloth is slightly off the beaten path. And to be frank, all of them are interesting enough that when I recruited them, I engaged with their conversations and made a point of seeing their quests all the way through. They won’t make up an entire party, especially given their alignments, but even one breathes life into the adventure that doesn’t exist in the base game.
In the Retro Gamer oral history Ohlen states. “I was talking to Dermot Clarke, who was a go-between between us and Interplay. I was high on the success of Baldur’s Gate, including our story and characters. He told me they weren’t really as well-developed as the characters in Final Fantasy VII.”
For the better, Bioware learned a lot from Baldur’s Gate to Baldur’s Gate II. It’s odd to think about the possibility where Bioware didn’t become a character focused storyteller. Obviously, having 25 companions fleshed out is a tall order. To have them have dynamic relationships on top of that, seemingly impossible. Which explains why II, a game with true characters who have relationships, cuts the base game cast down from 25 to 15.
The original Baldur’s Gate doesn’t simply leave room for player headcanons to flesh out its cast, it downright demands them to fill in the blanks on characters created by high schoolers such as Tofer’s character Minsc, who has since gone on to become one of the series most well known characters. He’s since been given so much dialogue to flesh him out that, as boring as he is in Baldur’s Gate 3, he is undeniably an actual character.
Choice Driven Narrative
The idea of the player’s role as a co-author is critical to the Bioware Formula. While choices made during dialogue are the biggest way they can shape the narrative, there is one that more explicitly engages with the player’s headcanon: journal entries, which was added in EE. While pre-written entries from the player character’s perspective appear as new information about quests are learned, the player can write in the journal as well. There is nothing stopping them from typing out nonsense or a list of chores they need to do in real life, but clearly the intent is to let the player roleplay their character more explicitly and intimately, whether that be filling in the blanks of character relationships or expanding upon the interiority of the player character.
One of the first choices players make in an RPG is character creation. Interestingly, Baldur’s Gate lets you fiddle with a number of options with regards to race, class, and alignment, but it also uses the roll for your stats rule of D&D. Meaning you don’t get to choose aspects like strength, intelligence, or charisma. In the tabletop world this is an interesting way of taking control away from the player when they’re designing their character. This forces players to try out different types of characters. Of course this is an admittance by design of Baldur’s Gate that the most compelling or important things about these characters are their stats through which they interact with a largely combat focused world. Even something such as race or morality becomes a number
When creating a character you have to choose an alignment from the classic D&D chart of lawful good, chaotic neutral, neutral evil, and so on. Mechanically, it allegedly behooves you to play towards your alignment. Realistically, alignment can affect very simple mechanical obstacles such as available classes and of course those with non-evil alignments will have an easier time with NPCs and non-evil companions who will bring down your reputation if they’re in your party.
The whole reputation mechanic is trivialized by the fact you can merely donate money to a church to fix your reputation. And it’s so easy to have an absurd amount of gold by the halfway point. My reputation had taken a hit approaching the last third of my initial playthrough, but it didn’t feel earned. I mean, I did break out of jail when the flaming fist corrupted by Sarevok falsely imprisoned me. I also had Dorn in my party, but never made an evil choice. I fixed it by donating a third of my gold to the church and then went back to Baldur’s Gate and the guards no longer cared that I was an escaped prisoner. Is there maybe something to be said about how wealth is a power that can keep you from being held accountable and that organized religion has played a role in the powerful getting away with heinous actions? Sure. But the game isn’t really speaking to this directly as much as it is offering an easy fix to a frustrating mechanic.
So reputation matters, but it’s not a very interesting system. If it hits a certain point, -4, all guards in all towns will attack you on sight which makes the game a bit of a hassle. One because you’re constantly having to deal with guards when you’re in town. And possibly the townsfolk who can turn hostile as well. Also, any companion who is a generally good natured person will leave the party. Better reputation / charisma does mean less hostile interactions with characters, but this is a combat heavy game, and despite your choices, so often they lead back to bloodshed. But the game doesn’t always set that up well, often giving an air of other possibilities. You’re not simply trying to talk your way out fighting people who are your enemies as designed by the plot. Sometimes it’s just some random folk and it really feels like there should be another way. Later Bioware games, despite also often returning to combat, are better about making that inevitably more natural.
Baldur’s Gate isn’t purely a numbers game though. It’s one that defined the style of conversations within games for years to come. Dialogue is laid out in a large black box and given the limited voice acting, what you read is what the character being controlled says. While a number of dialogue options exist per conversation many serve two purposes. First is to allow the player to roleplay good, neutral, or evil alignments. In many cases the lines are so extreme to whatever point in the morality scale they aim for that they can be fairly dull and without much individual character. Meaning that the nice response isn’t always the nice response my character would say, but the prescribed response that all of their alignment would. The other purpose is for humor. The game can land some of its jokes fairly well. It leans into this being an object of fun in the way a D&D session with friends can be. It is also at times rather dated and so good morality or intended to be funny dialogue can throw some real curveballs at you. Such an issue isn’t always a matter of a work being dated, but there is a certain sense of humor to pre-Mass Effect Bioware games, and this falls under that umbrella.
The game rarely draws attention to any given choice over another. In later Bioware titles, especially something like Mass Effect, you have the more cinematic camera movements that highlight the tension. Through the downplayed nature of Baldur’s Gate dialogue boxes and the lack of many cinematic techniques, sometimes you make a choice and move on, rarely thinking back upon it, because it was just another plot beat in a string of hundreds. This isn’t to say all isometric games are inferior to those with high fidelity graphics and a more grounded camera. What I am saying though is what needs to carry these moments even more in an isometric title is the writing. The writing, as I have gone over in several sections, is a bit of a mixed bag. There are compelling little bits of world building or minor NPCs, but the large scale world building and the characters are barely present as the result of a creative direction Bioware chose to go. The political machinations are compelling, but choosing to go the route of the fantasy epic playing in the mold of the hero’s journey undercuts that.
As more of the plot is teased out by the vague dreams and the self-insert character of Forgotten Realms creator, Ed Greenwood, and their ever annoying prattling, it becomes clear the player character is more than meets the eye. They have a fate, which is still up in the air, but one that they need to confront. That being their birth and can they resist what is “in the bone” as Elminster -the self insert- puts it. The question of will you be unable to resist following in your true father’s — Bhaal — footsteps remains. So from the ground up, Baldur’s Gate is a story about agency. But is also a nature vs nurture story given the difference of upbringing between the player character and Sarevok.
Oddly, there is no outro. No denouement where you get to see how the world changed due to your choices and where key characters end up, not even in E.E.. The final confrontation with Sarevok ends with four choices that all feel equally weightless and rudimentary. They are:
1.“Reviving a dead god is wrong and I’m going to stop you.”
2.“Reviving a dead god is wrong and I’m going to kill you.”
3. “You don’t have to do this, I can help you come back to the light side.”
4.“Actually I’m going to kill you so I can revive the dead god and become all powerful.”
Again much of this relies on the quality of writing and the headcanon it motivates out of the player, but after 35+ hours I barely felt more attached to this world or those that live within than I did at the very start.
“RPGs are about allowing the player’s created character to be the hero of the story….When working within an established universe, you don’t want to set an RPG in a place that is already the focus of movies/TV/novels, because then you’ll have significant restrictions. Those restrictions make it difficult to tell an epic story where the player’s actions can have a significant impact,” states Ohlen in their interview with GamesRadar.
Now, for someone deep in the Bioware trenches like myself, this statement is such an interesting contextualization on so much of their catalog because well, I think it’s an unimaginative take. One I would expect said in the early 2000’s, not in 2019. There are undoubtedly freedoms afforded by crafting a story in a place or time frame that is relatively untouched, but the implication of what is being said in design philosophy of RPGs is that the player character has to be the not only the most important, but the most powerful person in a story. That they need to be a force of will, always capable of shifting the world around them, which isn’t even true of all of Bioware’s output. Dragon Age II is a game explicitly about how even as the protagonist Hawke gains more power relative to the city of Kirkwall, there are always bigger forces outside of their control.
As Ohlen states in the Retro Gamer oral history, “…we wanted the player to be able to create a character not only for the first game but the entire trilogy.” It’s interesting to think about this in perspective as to where Bioware would end up going with the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series. The thought of a contiguous story that respected the player’s agency, even as little as the jump from BG1 to BG2 does, was a driving force of design from the earliest days of Bioware’s existence.
Critical Conclusions
In an interview with PCGamesN Oster said “I’ve been asked a few times, ‘Are you trying to build BioWare 2.0?’ The answer is no, I’m trying to build kind of a ‘Bioware 0.6 Mark 2’. A small team, oriented at the sweet spot of RPG development with a commitment to making great games as our first priority. Basically trying to recapture the awesome feeling of the early days of BioWare with the benefit of nearly 20 years in the industry to lend us direction.”
Beamdog’s future is not exactly clear these days. While the bulk of their work has been modernizing classic games such as Baldur’s Gate & Baldur’s Gate II, Planescape Torment, and Neverwinter Nights, they have had mixed success with their own creative properties. Siege of Dragonspear, was met to mixed results. Now some of that stems from the harassment campaign, Gamergate, who not only criticized some of the alterations to dialogue and character portrayals in the original game, but the inclusion of a trans character within Dragonspear. Good faith criticism certainly was a factor too as reviews were also somewhat mixed.
In an interview with Den of Geek, Tofer stated “What did we learn? Expectations. People want more of kind of the same. It’s hard to describe. It’s like I want more and I want different. Yeah. So it’s just like, don’t give me the same stuff, don’t give me different stuff…The familiarity is so important. You play Baldur’s Gate, you loved it, and then you think about coming back, it’s like what was there?”
Mythforce is their latest original game, which launched on September 12th of 2023, but currently sits at a mixed user reception with a mere 139 user ratings. Only a week later, it was announced that 25 employees of Beamdog would be laid off. Their parent company, Embracer, continues to grossly mismanage the many companies it has gobbled up in the last few years and the people who work for them. Beamdog has sadly not escaped the incompetence of capitalism. They have attempted to create sequels to these classic games its developers have long had a hand in. For example, in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, David Gaider revealed he attempted to pitch a Planescape Torment II. It also seems safe to assume they had designs on doing Baldur’s Gate III at some point as well.
EE came to claim a positive legacy though. Not only has it made the game more widely available and approachable to modern audiences, it helped spark a CRPG renaissance in the early 2010’s that has continued on to this day. Among this resurgence is the aforementioned Pillars of Eternity from Obsidian, but also Divinity: Original Sin from Larian Studio who of course went on to make Baldur’s Gate 3. Amusingly, EE launched a mere several months after Diablo III which helped show isometric RPGs could still be a blockbuster. A reflection of the original Diablo and Baldur’s Gate launching back in the late 90’s and helping to revive the CRPG genre. Of course in 2023 this amusing trend continued with both Diablo 4 and Baldur’s Gate 3 launching to ridiculous success, proving there is still an audience ravenous for the Bioware Formula, in fact, one that is even larger than it had ever been under Bioware.
Throughout Bioware Stories and Secrets the production is described as developers taking on work above their experience level. The team was too “stubborn and stupid” to fail despite their ambitions. Ambitions such as 900,000 words for the script and in-game descriptions. This was the team’s second game, but first attempt at a complicated genre with open-ended design such as an RPG, especially one trying to simulate the TTRPG experience. For a portion of the game’s development, founders were not taking a salary and were still doing their jobs as doctors at a clinic. As Muzyka puts it “ We were all so tired. We were working seven days a week for months on end.”
The book then frames this crunch as “worth it” given the massive critical and commercial success of the game. While there is no turning back the clock to ensure Baldur’s Gate was developed under more sustainable conditions, it is worth criticizing the normalization of this sort of overwork as it came to define many of the studios future projects and greatly hindered not only the games but the people working on them. The attitude of diving in without a sturdy plan and having to crunch to make it all happen is what has been described as Bioware Magic. An approach to development that Mark Darrah, former head of the Dragon Age series who joined Bioware during Baldur’s Gate development, lambasted after his departure.
“The journey was good. It was. But business and software development is all consuming, even more than medical school,” said Bioware co-founder Augustine Yip in an interview with the Royal College of Psychiatrist in 2017.
That being “locked in a room with 50 other geeks for 18 hours a day and having little besides pizza and soda for all three meals” was not for him. On top of expecting his first child and desiring a more stable life, which lead to his decision to return to medicine, Yip criticizes the tech industry for its demanding hours and often low pay.
While Baldur’s Gate has undoubtedly had a major influence on the industry in plenty of positive ways, we cannot forget how it played a role in the unsustainable creation of games not only at Bioware but around the industry.
Baldur’s Gate is an extremely ambitious game for its time. The sheer size of the script, the smooth scrolling backgrounds made possible by cutting edge technology. It took its inspirations of Ultima, Gold Box RPGs, and RTS titles such as Jagged Alliance and made a bet. That this little team that at the time development started, had little to no experience in developing games being told western RPGs are dead, and said, actually we’ve got this. As expressed by Muzyka in the the 2010 GDC talk reflecting on Baldur’s Gate not only did they have a guy whose credentials were “some friends say he’s a good DM,” but one of their 3D modelers was hired because they carved really impressive duck decoys so they figure he had to have a good grasp on 3D space even if his experience with computers was extremely limited.
“I don’t know if you should put someone straight out of school in charge of your entire gameplay systems” says Darrah, in Bioware Stories and Secrets, who was brought in as a programmer. In his video Baldur’s Gate- Memories and Lessons, Darrah says “Probably more than a year. Most of the time that I was on the project, we were working overtime. This is probably the longest crunch I’ve ever done on any project.” He explains this as a combination of nativity, Bioware’s lack of reputation, negotiating power, and the expectations of deliverables from TCR / Wizards of the Coast. Apparently they had eaten pizza so many days that Darrah did not have it four years after finishing Baldur’s Gate. A sentiment that can be seen from a number of developers reflecting on the crunch.
Throughout the GDC retrospective, both Muzyka and Zeschuck keep expressing “we didn’t know what we we’re doing.” That they had an enormous scope and kept blowing past planned release dates. Things like building a usable engine from the ground up and having an organizing structure for localization were not things they had any experience with either.
Not much was expected of Baldur’s Gate by Interplay given Bioware’s lack of fame and the failure of Interplay’s previous D&D games. Initial marketing was light, a magazine ad or two, as Lindbergh notes in their retrospective on the Ringer, which then quotes Scott Grieg saying “We had been putting our heart and soul into this thing, and it’s like, oh, you’ve got to do something better than that.” According to Greig, Bioware employees took it upon themselves to start hyping the game up in places such as D&D message boards online.
While its development was arduous through a lack of internal experience and planning — as well as industry norms — Bioware did manage to help revive a tentpole genre of the industry. In the process they became one of the most beloved developers of the late ’90s and early 2000s. What eventually became a team of roughly 60 people at launch would go on to employ hundreds in Edmonton, Montreal, and Austin. It’s deeply unfortunate that with the increased scope, experience, and development conditions were never consistently healthy at Bioware to this very day. Developing incredibly ambitious and technologically advanced games with complicated open-ended systems has continued to be the norm and so have internal issues as well as pressures from corporate masters.
While planning the broader Bioware Formula project I came up with a large list of games that fit within the design pillars. Baldur’s Gate wasn’t an immediate addition though. The differences and lack of a lot of defining aspects of The Formula arguably make it a progenitor to it but not necessarily an easy fit. The sequel serves as the point where the formula was truly solidified. Ultimately, I decided to begin at the closest thing to an origin point, even if there was some evolution to come. To understand the bigger picture of Bioware and specifically the Bioware Formula, Baldur’s Gate needs to be included in this conversation despite the imperfect fit. It paints the picture of Bioware’s future. One where story driven games with player agency and authorship took centerstage. Of a developer who would forever struggle with scope, ambitions, and creating a sustainable work environment. But there are also some truths that buck the common perception of the studio, especially of that as a unified vision for the desire to create great single player role-playing games that eventually “succumbed to the evils of EA, and fell off.” A view of the company that excludes works outside of their big AAA choice driven RPGs and how Bioware experimented on the formula within them. How the games have long been compromised yet, still thoroughly impressive more often than not. How multiplayer has been a part of Bioware from day one. That spirit of capturing the experience of the kitchen table on your computer has never truly left from those days where Baldur’s Gate was still Battleground Infinity. That such is also something Bioware both struggled with internally at times and had to convince fans far earlier than you might suspect, that Bioware would not be leaving the single-player focus behind.
In an interview for the Ukrainian magazine, Home PC with Alex Ptytsia at the European Computer Trade Show held in 2000 in the city of London “And what about the “losers’’ who have no internet connection at all, or whose connection quality leaves much to be desired? The vast majority of players in our country cannot boast about their online victories for this very reason” asks Ptytsia.
Muzyka replies “Neverwinter Nights will not be without a single-player storyline, don’t worry.”
In the GDC Europe 2010 talk, Zeschuk remarks about what might have come of Bioware had they initially gone with the original idea for Battleground: Infinity and that it was an MMO before MMOs were really a thing. He compares it to MUDs, multi-user dungeons as well. An obviously more risky plan that well, maybe Bioware would have been just another ’90s PC developer who faded away in the early 2000’s had they gone ahead with it. It’s interesting to think about in the context of a narrative that ex-Bioware fans often lean on. EA came along and started forcing this developer who loved making single-player story rich RPGs to do multiplayer for purely greedy reasons, and because of that Bioware suffered. That Anthem was an EA idea and not really a Bioware one.
But in an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Ohlen refutes this idea while also explaining that the fracturing within Bioware is ultimately why he left. “It wasn’t just EA leaning on Bioware — there were lots of people within Bioware who wanted to do something different.” Multiplayer has long been an interest because Bioware is not only made up of people who like making single player RPGs but creatives who may like to try out different ideas and genres. Its founders were inspired and pulled out of the tabletop scene and though Baldur’s Gate has its fame for its single-player experience, multiplayer exists because multiplayer has and forever will be a part of Bioware at the foundational level.
It is impossible to look at Baldur’s Gate in a world where Bioware went on to do all the things it has and not constantly compare them. To include companions and then note just how little is going on with them or how numerous they are and the range of morality that they span. To note the lack of a home space or romance. The fact that exploration is painting in the map until you stumble across something as opposed to being drawn in by purposefully designed eyecatches. The lack of big obvious story branching moments with all the pomp and circumstance. And I will not stop beating the drum of truth about Bioware’s longtime multiplayer desires. Baldur’s Gate once existed as its own thing, no longer. It is the humble beginning further humbled by what would come next, both immediately with Baldur’s Gate II and in the many years to come. Viewing it critically now means seeing its place in the grand structure that is Bioware’s body of work. It’s place as the foundation, laid out wide and sturdy for which all of what made Bioware, so beloved and reviled, to be built upon.
Notes: Here is a detailed Google Doc with a list of sources used for this piece.
The final version of this piece will be available on my YouTube channel. Consider this a beta of sorts. The video will be slightly expanded in the aspects already present here, but will contain discussion of Tales From the Sword Coast, Siege of Dragonspear, and multiplayer.
Thank you to Baxter for providing feedback during this creative process. Please check out their terrific work.
