A review of a rerelease of a 15 year-old game on Steam. What has the world come to?

There’s plenty of old games on Steam these days. GoG has many of them cheaper and more easily moddable to work with newer operating systems, but Steam is the more appealing platform if you’re a developer/publisher both because of the large in-built audience and the DRM. This means it’s Steam which gets a lot of the XBLA HD rereleases like NiGHTs (which I will get around to downloading and playing one of these days), and it also gets Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition¹, an update of the original Baldur’s Gate (and expansion) to work on modern computers at modern display resolutions with a whole host of bugfixes and even some extra content.

Oh, also they released it on the iPad because they like having a license to print money or something.

Now, an updated version of Baldur’s Gate doesn’t sound like an awful idea given that the original is one of the greatest RPGs of all time, but there’s two significant caveats with this particular execution of the concept. One is that many of the features in the update – the bugfixes and modern display resolutions – were already available in the form of mods for Baldur’s Gate and its sequel, most notably the Tutu mod which ported the whole thing into the Baldur’s Gate 2 engine. This means that if you have a certain baseline level of comfort with modding games² and already own the Baldur’s Gate series you can get most of what the Enhanced Edition provides for free, and this is a rather significant consideration when you consider the other caveat, which is that they’re flogging this thing on Steam for a rather eye-watering £15. That’s a rather dear price for what amounts to a few new characters and the privilege of owning a Baldur’s Gate game on Steam; I’m not sure what the exchange rate is these days but I’m fairly sure that for £15 you could buy both BG and BG 2 on GoG and mod them to your heart’s content, neatly obviating any need to invest another £15 in the inevitable “enhanced” edition of Shadows of Amn.

So that’s the main drawback to the Enhanced Edition, then; it may be an update of one of my favourite games ever but that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the fact that it is not a good deal unless you really want to play Baldur’s Gate on an iPad. While I appreciate that it’s a somewhat boutique product and the developers have to eat, I can’t really say that what you get for your money here is worth it, especially since there are still bugs in the goddamn thing. I’m not saying its riddled with them or anything, but you don’t get to advertise “over 400 bugfixes” when Kagain repeatedly asked to rejoin the party roughly once every second after I kicked him out, forcing me to put him down in order to continue the game. Or the crash to desktop when my player character got iced by the first assassin outside the Friendly Arm inn. Or any one of the other half-dozen CTDs I experienced in ten hours with the game. It’s not a perfect update by any means.

Now that I’ve gotten the moaning out of the way, is there anything that the Enhanced Edition actually enhances? What exactly are you getting for your hard-earned £15? The answer is:

• An improved UI that attempts to render the second edition D&D rules on which Baldur’s Gate is based slightly less obtuse. I very much appreciated having detailed breakdowns of my party’s to hit rolls and damage values on the character and inventory screens, allowing me to instantly judge whether or not the +2 warhammer was going to be better than the +1 flail.

• A quicksave button in the main UI. More useful than it sounds, believe me.

• New hand-drawn animated sequences that replace the clunky 90s CGI of the original. These mostly fit into the game very well, although they get off to a bad start because the animation style is completely inappropriate for the game’s intro.

• Three new fully-voiced characters and associated sidequests that take place in brand-new areas of the map. One of the new characters is a monk, and low-level monks in 2^nd edition D&D defy the laws of physics by both blowing and sucking at the same time so he’s never going to get used, but the other two are welcome additions to the lineup. Neera is a wild mage who is less annoying than every other mage in the game bar Edwin, and while that’s a very low bar to clear she manages it with aplomb. Meanwhile, Dorn il-Khan is a Blackguard with a natural strength value of 19. Again, you need to know D&D 2^nd edition to understand just how completely broken this makes him as a character (except this time it’s in the fun direction), especially at low character levels where the damage bonus lets him instagib pretty much anyone he hits. He’s no slouch when it comes to dialogue and party responses, either.

It’s this last point that comprises the bulk of the new content in the game; thanks to the very basic nature of the NPC characterisation in the original BG the new characters fit in more or less seamlessly, and it’s only the fact that they’re fully-voiced at all that marks them out as being different. The quests associated with them are workmanlike rather than spectacular, but they’re still a nice addition to the game. On the whole the new characters add a bit more life to what was by far the most lifeless portion of Baldur’s Gate, and I would have appreciated a few more of them instead of the inexplicable Black Pits challenge mode which takes place outside of the main game and is basically just combat combat combat. That sort of thing may be cheaper to make, but it’s completely missing the point of what Baldur’s Gate is.

Otherwise it’s the same old story at a higher resolution³. There’s a whole host of minor cosmetic improvements like archmage Gorion doing more than just casting Magic Missile before Sarevok cleaves his head in twain, and the more powerful magic items having names and descriptions rather than just being a +2 variety of a longsword, and the odd new spell here and there, and probably a few more things that I missed (Baldur’s Gate is a big game, after all); it all makes for a much smoother experience compared to the clunky interface of the original. While I’m sure that my generally positive reaction is down to how much I like Baldur’s Gate rather than this Enhanced Edition being particularly good, I’m not exactly unhappy that I spent £15 on it. Your mileage may vary, though. Think of it as one of those collector’s editions where you spend an extra £10 for a badly-painted pewter figurine of a samurai and you’ll probably get along with it quite well. Just don’t treat it as an actual new game, though, because that’s the one thing this most definitely is not.

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Not only a great game, but it also had a properly swashbuckling soundtrack.

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My reasons for liking Baldur’s Gate are very much personal ones. I totally get why most people consider it to be the inferior game; it doesn’t have quite the same level of polish, focus or epic feeling as its sequel. It’s a rougher experience that sprawls more and arguably does less. The player character is a poor schlub who has lived in a library their entire life rather than a world-bestriding colossus. There are twice as many NPCs but they’re all one-dimensional. The early battles are notoriously unforgiving and you always have to be on your toes. But you know what? This is exactly why I like it.

Baldur’s Gate is the last game I can remember that cast you as just An Adventurer. You’re not the last scion of an ancient bloodline (yet) or a member of a secret order, you don’t have any special forces training or secret mystical knowledge. If you pick a mage character, the pinnacle of your magical ability will be the Grease spell. As far as the mechanics and much of the game world is concerned there is very little that is special about you at all. I find this remarkably freeing. It means that the story of Baldur’s Gate is, to a large degree, the player’s own; there’s much less of a feeling that you’re running along well-greased narrative rails laid down in advance and you’re free to explore and uncover the weird and wonderful encounters that await you in the countryside. And you can explore in Baldur’s Gate; you don’t need to be told about a location in order to visit it, you just go off the edge of the map and bam, new area. Baldur’s Gate 2, great as it is, was the beginning of Bioware’s slide towards the infamous narrative constraints of their later games. By contrast Baldur’s Gate is almost the ideal of what D&D should be: an open world of exploration and true adventure.

Venturing off the beaten track does have consequences, though. Everyone who has played Baldur’s Gate has a story about how they strayed from the road barely seconds after starting the game and got eaten by a wolf. Not a dire wolf, or a winter wolf, or a shadow wolf. Just a regular wolf. Your character starts at level one and is hilariously inept as a result; even being armoured in chainmail from head to toe won’t stop a lucky hit from prematurely ending your adventure. Wolves are dangerous. Ogres seem like insurmountable threats. Even the genuinely weak creatures like gibberlings and xvarts tend to turn up in vast hordes that overwhelm your tiny adventuring party. When you run into one of the assassins the game scatters in your path as part of the main plotline, it’s you that needs to use weight of numbers to split their skull with a lucky sword blow before they annihilate your party with powerful magic.

Being so weak at the start of the game puts a lot of people off, but I’d argue that it makes your subsequent character improvement mean something. There comes a point around level four or five where your party is now strong enough to see off some legitimately tough monsters. Killing a sword spider is a real achievement that would have meant nothing if you hadn’t soiled yourself with terror upon encountering one for the first time. It’s a sense of progression that I really feel was missing from the sequel, where you level up so much that it ceases to really register past some numbers being slightly bigger. And of course there’s the fights with other groups of characters similar to your own; the assassins outside the Cloakwood mines is one that’ll always stick in my mind because it’s the first time you fight a thief with Boots of Speed, an item that was practically standard equipment in BG2 but which gave that one guy what seems like a terrifying advantage over you. Later on you can start barfights with rival adventuring parties where broken furniture is the least of the landlord’s worries compared to the Fireball spells being thrown around the room. You go from being a couple of chumps ejected into the wilderness to fend for themselves to a seasoned party of adventurers, and while it’s tricky to bludgeon your way past the difficulty level to get that far it’s feels like it’s genuinely been worth the effort once you’re there.

Finally there’s the plot, which is decidedly low-key in comparison with what usually passes for RPG plots these days because the stakes are so small. Sarevok isn’t some ultimate evil overlord, he is (like you) just a guy. His goal isn’t to take over the world (yet), it’s to inveigle himself onto the ruling council of Baldur’s Gate using a combination of political intrigue and mercantile pressure. Sarevok’s organisation, the Iron Throne, is a merchant house, not some shadowy league of assassins. It’s the sort of plot one group of adventurers could conceivably foil and entirely appropriate for a novice party’s first foray into the world of DnD; I actually regret that the Bhaalspawn stuff is shoehorned in at the end of the game because it makes the whole thing seem so much more clichéd than it otherwise is.

Sadly Baldur’s Gate doesn’t do itself many favours with the early quests you’re called upon to fulfil. The assassin at the Friendly Arm inn pisses a lot of people off because he can one-shot your entire party. If he doesn’t, then the assassin at the Nashkel inn will. If she doesn’t, you then have to clear the Nashkel mines of kobolds which is one of the worst dungeons in RPG history, just below Irenicus’ dungeon and Fallout 2’s Temple of Trials. Most players – certainly most players playing the game for the first time today – would justifiably give up there and go on to the sequel, which I think is a bit of a shame. As computer RPGs go Baldur’s Gate is the one which is truest to its DnD roots, and this actually makes it quite unusual in its general aims and the overall tone of the thing. When I was a kid imagining the kind of fantasy computer game I’d like to play I imagined something much like Baldur’s Gate. It’s a very traditional, old school interpretation of fantasy, and this is what I find so appealing about it. Baldur’s Gate 2 might be superior in terms of characters and writing and dungeon design, but I’d argue that Baldur’s Gate is the better game of the two.

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