Backtracking is a blogging project that I’m embarking on in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.
Why I Chose This Game
You could probably come up with a few guesses as to why I chose Baldur’s Gate. Perhaps the most obvious is its relevance to a recent moment in modern video game culture: the monumental success of Baldur’s Gate 3 (which, I’m so sorry, I have not played at all). Starting with the roots of this juggernaut series is a great way to think about its history.
Additionally, Baldur’s Gate has an important place in the legacy of Dungeons & Dragons and its many excursions into computer RPGs. Baldur’s Gate launches the Infinity Engine, bringing a modified version of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons system into an explorable isometric world that could seamlessly contain both exploration and combat. Tabletop RPGs are a topic of interest for me; Baldur’s Gate’s modified AD&D is an interesting lens through which to explore a classic touchstone of the hobby.
And finally, this choice was also an opportunity to stretch my genre coverage for this project. So far, my selections have spanned my taste and comfort, from JRPGs to rhythm games to proto-immersive-sims. Playing a classic computer RPG was a great way to delve a little further out of my element without losing too much familiarity.
What I Thought
I’ve been trying to keep these posts relatively brief, but this game is long and I have a lot to say about it. I’ll try to keep it focused.
Zoomed, but not Enhanced
I have to preface my thoughts with a crucial detail: like my previous Backtracking picks, I opted to play as close as I reasonably could to the original release. Baldur’s Gate is sold on gog.com via its modern, enhanced edition that additionally bundles in a relatively untouched classic edition (including the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion, but I ignored the added content).
Playing this version was, most likely, a huge mistake. Baldur’s Gate: The Original Saga, as it’s titled, is deeply frustrating to play. In a humorous echo of D&D itself, my experience of the game involved far more “combat” than I wanted; which is to say, I spent a lot of time fighting with the interface, the camera, and the truly insufferable path-finding system. Navigating any narrow space or close-quarters encounter was an irritating nightmare of characters stepping on each others’ toes and getting stuck on scenery. The heavily-zoomed camera routinely turned crossing large maps into a frustrating combination of waiting around and actively intervening to unstick characters.
Inventory management also became a trail, because the original game cannot be paused while in the inventory screen. Occasionally, I would need to frantically move a potion between characters or resupply ammo while my characters were getting hit.
Ultimately, I found my way to liking but not loving Baldur’s Gate, and I’ll explain below how I came around on many of its quirks. But it must be said that the constant frustrations of the classic version were a huge drag, and they needed to be overcome before I could really enjoy the game at all.
Beating the Odds
The early sections of the game were especially brutal, full of swift and punishing combat. But as the game expanded and my character creation regrets began to recede (my mage was horrendously useless early on), the game presented a surprisingly dynamic combat system, grounded in a few core baselines despite its awkward complexity. Combat can be described as “real-time with pause”, functioning like D&D combat that advances automatically, in which each character makes a basic attack with a selected weapon by default. Each character’s actions proceed in “turns” that have a certain real time duration. The game can be paused at any point (even automatically, according to configurable triggers) to reassess and issue new commands.
Combat required a good deal of tinkering. I confess that I never fully got my head around the math behind the game’s concepts of AC (Armor Class), THAC0 (To Hit Armor Class 0), weapon speed factors, and so on, despite having a working knowledge of D&D 5e’s combat system. Baldur’s Gate’s real-time combat produces a higher frequency of “turns” than an analog gaming table would, meaning lower odds of successful attacks but a greater frequency of attempts; lots of swings, few hits. Because combat is so dense with dice rolls, it essentially reduces to a kind of Math Soup. So, rather than deeply understand the math soup, I took to simply stirring it around with what I might call Tactical Fuckery.
See, the combat encounters that the game presents often felt deeply unfair: kobold commandos with devastating fire arrows posted up across a gulf, powerful wizards who melt my main character with a single spell, greater basilisks who can instantaneously turn party members to stone. So many fights were ridiculous and brutal, unraveling my relatively weak party of 6 that I’d been spreading XP across for most of the game.
And yet, Baldur’s Gate gave me a lot of tools to throw at these problems. Spell-casting formed the backbone of my aforementioned tactical fuckery, especially since my party wound up weighted (too heavily) towards casters. These tricky combat encounters became exercises in odds-stacking and party maneuvering, a race against time to either disempower enemies or rush them down. Once I got the hang of it, many of these trickier fights became compelling, if grueling, challenges.
My acts of defiance against fate itself did not stop at mere combat encounters. Upon leveling up, every character randomly rolls hit dice to improve their HP, but I could load a save and retry when they inevitably rolled 1s or 2s to ensure that their health pool grew meaningfully. Overland travel between areas has a random chance of leaving your party “waylaid by enemies”, thrust into fights that typically overwhelmed me. These odds, too, could be circumvented with shameless save scumming, often reducing the trip to small increments and quick saves until I reached my destination without a fight.
Sword Coast Adventure
There’s a degree of tonal inconsistency across the storytelling in Baldur’s Gate that seems to suggest the multi-faceted vibe of a group of friends around a gaming table. It’s a spectrum from comically-overacted joke NPCs with silly one-note voices all the way to grand monologues and pure fantasy melodrama. A group of bandits announce their presence with a chorus of identical voices irreverently shouting “So I kicked him in the head until he was dead! Haha!” (just in case you weren’t sure how to feel about bandits)… and in the next moment, the combat soundtrack bursts to life with booming drums, blasts of low brass, and dramatic strings — it sounds, dare I say, “epic”. To someone outside the tabletop hobby, I have no idea if or how these disparate elements might cohere.
Because of these vacillations, Baldur’s Gate’s storytelling leaves a complicated impression. The exaggerated voice acting, devotion to inane comedic bits, and frequent fourth-wall-breaking is irritating, but it ultimately fades into background noise. Beyond that, the actual writing does the most of the legwork. In its endeavor to mimic a D&D campaign, Baldur’s Gate suffers most when it leans on humor that would play better at a table of familiar friends. The majority of sidequest writing was unmemorable and, when it wasn’t absurd, meaninglessly dour. The most interesting side content comes in later parts of the game, when exploring the city of Baldur’s Gate itself and the relationships between the sorts of people who live there.
But when it focuses on epic campaign storytelling, it tends to finds its footing. The story begins with a disastrous escape into the open world and a simple rumor to investigate. Following this thread, the adventure spirals out into far-reaching political intrigue: widespread supply shortages driven by conspiratorial forces, enigmatic villains making maneuvers in the shadows, corrupted merchant guilds operating in plain sight, their strings pulled by worshippers of forgotten deities. Cliches and tropes abound, but they shine because of their audacity and the attention to detail and consequence. The world feels meaningfully affected by the changing circumstances of the story. It’s a respectable crack at a notion of classic tabletop storytelling: an escalation from localized problems into vast and sinister ones, unraveling in step with the characters’ advancing capabilities and appetite for danger.
The story is bound together by juicy second-person narrations the leap suddenly onto screen during chapter breaks and subsequent dream sequences that occur after resting in a new chapter. They’re dramatic, flowery bits of prose, delivered in the impeccable bass of Kevin Michael Richardson’s Narrator voice, a loving simulation of the moment when the DM at your table leans forward and delivers a theatrical establishing monologue about your progress so far and your trials yet to come. This voice is the “serious” mode of DM, looking at you across the table and drawing you into the fiction of the story, reiterating your grand destiny as an adventurer. It’s the complete inverse of the silly NPCs with their stoner drawls or overwrought accents. It’s over-the-top in the best way.
Despite this, I can’t bring myself to ignore the unavoidable ick of the forgotten realms moral worldview. D&D’s ongoing struggle against the legacy of its alignment system is a topic all its own, but Baldur’s Gate instantiates it as a fundamental, immutable, and racially-deterministic truth. It might be easy to dismiss it as a quirk of its time, but there are narrative consequences to this notion of ontological good and evil that color the way that Baldur’s Gate is conveyed as a setting. It’s a disappointing backdrop to the more nuanced reputation system, which produces various changes to interactions across a number of systems. It’s unfortunate that those deeper systemic ideas ultimately get sanded down to the hyper-transparent binaries that Bioware would move towards in games like Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect.
Reflections
Baldur’s Gate was in many ways a serious trial for me. The months between this post and the my previous Backtracking post in late June attests to how much it got away from me (I originally hoped to keep a roughly monthly cadence, but we don’t need to talk about that). It’s the game I’ve spent the longest on so far by a fair margin. Some of this came from the sheer clunkiness of its packaging, and a gradual acclimation to the kinds of save scumming nonsense that make it manageable, but some of it was simply the game's scale.
Baldur’s Gate was a critical lesson with regard to remakes and remasters. For the entirety of this project, I’ve endeavored to play original versions of the games I choose. I’ve certainly benefited from emulator save states here and there, but I’ve tried to at least ensure that the game itself was minimally altered. The most pronounced effect of that choice in prior games was System Shock: crucially, I found the keyboard-driven input constraints to be highly impactful to my play experience (despite reducing my pace of progression). Like before, I hoped to find something productive in the gaps between the original and its upgraded version, an interesting friction that made the game compelling in ways it might not otherwise have been.
Well. I did not. I found a lot of meaningless tedium and frustration. Many folks will tell you that Baldur’s Gate is an eminently playable game by modern standards; I promise you, they are talking about 2012’s Enhanced Edition. The classic version simply did not produce the same kind of distinctive play experience that System Shock did. If you play Baldur’s Gate in 2024, I’m begging you to avoid my misguided notion of “purity of experience” and play the enhanced edition. There are still plenty of interesting aspects of its original moment to contend with.
For my part, I’ll have to be more thoughtful about these decisions with future games in this series, especially as they intersect with different genres.