Some game design points of interest: Baldur's Gate 1 4:20 Grounding the player 4:48 It's a low level adventure 6:15 A quality open world with plenty of depth 12:22 Conversations between party Npcs 14:04 Alignment system 14:48 Everything is genuinely dangerous but needed for tension. 16:07 Automated dungeon master cruelty probably what turns off modern players. 17:37 Dice controlled combat makes it boring, thaco is overly complex 20:09 Difficulty slider gives more options than choosing combat grind or interactive fiction 24:04 Ludonarrative dissonance (drink) 31:31 Assumes most people play as good, supports this more narratively Siege of Dragonspear 35:43 Characters over detailed 40:03 Moral commentary 41:02 Characterization, dialogue and SJW backlash 43:10 Self expression in D&D 46:55 Biggest problem with Beam Dogs writing. 47:31 Adding dimensions to straight forward character made them good 47:47 Romance independent of player makes characters good 50:18 Illusion of choice instead of choice 52:30 Needed to introduce villain in an unhurried way Baldur's Gate 2 1:00:11 Best thing about it is how it balances side content with main plot 1:03:25 No leads to follow so you have to adventure 1:05:06 Some of the best questing in rpg's 1:06:24 Difficult due to deadly and infuriating spell effects, story mode combat is boring 1:08:31 True Bioware companions first used here but timing is off 1:13:20 Romance of Viconia requires roleplay to work and is interesting 1:15:43 Failure to take no for an answer from player 1:17:30 Betrayal cliche' done right by adding forgiveness 1:18:07 Good quest design 1:20:35 Genuine hero's dilemma 1:21:21 Bioware mid game high stakes mission 1:23:11 Different play styles/multiple solutions accommodated 1:26:09 Half goodbyes before climax Throne of Bhaal 1:30:17 Wonderfully uncomfortable position for player 1:43:31 Time and emotional investment rewarded
I think one of the reasons people have a low number of steam achievements is that many of the people who bought it on steam are rebuying it and thinking "I'll get to that one day", and then they never do because that's how Steam works, it sells you games you'll never actually play. If someone's even opened more than 50% of their steam library once they're doing well.
As I recall, they actually changed that five or six years ago. Used to be, you could actually use the, "yay, you opened the game," achievements to judge roughly how many people ever played the games they bought. Now, you need to actually launch the game in order to have your achievement progress calculated into the total. Meaning, 9 out of 10 people who fire up Baldur's Gate never leave Candlekeep. No idea on how many of those are people who did finish it in 1998, or are newbies that got put off by the character creation system, however.
Sure, you won't see the people who bought it and never opened it, though there's also first-levelitis. Which is probably more likely to affect the nostalgia purchasers, where people start a new game and think "I'll do another playthrough of this old game I love" but actually they do the first level and then never do it again. I know I've done that a couple of times with Baldur's Gate, installed all the discs, put the Trilogy mod in, and then just played Candlekeep. Deus Ex is a super common one too, every time Deus Ex is mentioned on the internet someone installs it and plays Liberty Island again.
I think people get hit by nostalgia, install the game, and then very soon (after the nostalgia hit wears off) they realise that they can't be bothered to play an 80 hour long game all over again. Happens to me pretty often.
They(EE's) also didn't originally have achievements in the first place. I have over 100 hours between the two and my first achievement was tonight. Started a new character after not playing for quite awhile. The games came out in 2013, but didn't get achievements until 2016.
When the late Roger Ebert maintained that video games could never be art, he opined in the comment section on his website that if they were, then someone familiar with other art forms, like literature and film, would have written a definitive treatise on video games. Honestly, it feels like Noah is that person. I could imagine his essays collected in a doorstopper book, much like Roger Ebert's movie yearbooks or his "Great Movies" essays. Except this one would be about the "Great Games" or something similar.
@@Dresdenstl magical, mechanical and alchemical alterations to the body are hardly uncommon in forgotten realms, you can meld aspects of other species into your own with the right tools. Someone becoming partially or wholly a different gender would be simple, whether on purpose or by accident, by choice or not.
I mean I respect it a lot more in Baldur's Gate cause it was genuine. It wasn't cool to be trans in the 90s and early 2000s. The devs actually paid a price for it for including it.
@@etcetera1995 i don’t think that was their point. i didn’t get the sense that they’re calling transness a trend or something. or that it’s “cool” and “popular” today. just that it was much worse in the 90s and early 2000s- and it was. trans people were often the butts of jokes in completely unrelated stories. crossdressing characters were made to feel embarrassed in fiction. a common libel piece was just labeling random celebrities as trans. that’s their point, i think. maybe i’m wrong. but transness was like, especially taboo during that time period. there was a huge cultural focus on it in a negative way, in ways that honestly were not so common even before the 90s. it was a weirdly hateful period in a pop-cultural sense rather than an ignorant sense.
I've played the saga 29 times... Yes, that's entire BG saga with both expansions 29 times. I did speedruns, solo runs, fiddled around with mods, made some small improvements myself, played with my girlfriend aaaand so on... And still till this day it is the only game that never bores me and also it's the only game that made my cry like a little girl. When? Do you guys remember (SPOILER) the ending of ToB? You know, after you make a choice about your future? There are epilogues for your party members. There are just written, not animated like it would be done nowadays, and while narrator is reading each epilogue, this specific, amazing but sad music plays... And it hits me every time... Playing entire saga is that awesome, HUGE (I mean... seriously...HUGE) adventure that you take with your friends (npcs). You grow with the character and with the companions that are part of your team... So reading those epilogues, learning about how your friend lived after you left them, and how they died is so emotional that all I can do is cry. I missed them... I missed Minsc (and Boo), Khalid, Jaheira, Sarevok and all of the others... I also miss Jon Irenicus. The best "bad guy" I've ever seen in video game. Baldur's Gate saga is, for me, video game equivalent of Lord of the Rings. It's the best RPG of all time, and i'm saying that not because of nostalgia but because... it just is. Sorry for my english and long post. I just love this saga so much.
Epiloges. Where can I find a complete epiloges video? Steam version will only show me those videos I reached thru gameplay and I want to watch the epiloges. TH-cam searches either just give one character at a time or have some video stream of the person talking embeded. Hate that and cant watch it. ----Otherwise--- Stumbled over this video and got to say I like this Noah. Think perhaps there are a many of nostalgia players who bought this game who simply dont have the time or attention span to actually play it anymore as it deserves. So we put it down for a day when we will have time. I mean. MMOs like WoW I play with other people so it keeps my attention and the Civilization I can play while doing other stuff. For Baldurs Gate to be enjoyed by me will require my full attention. So I keep picking it up, playing for abit then something else comes up and I have to put it down. Time passes, I forget where I was and lose the storyline, start over again then rince and repeat. Its no critique of the game, it is what makes it great. I never really played proper D&D so its pure storyline for me. Oh and nostaligia is not a bad thing as long as it dont turn into rose tinted glasses ;-)
The sad thing is they just don't make RPGs like they used to. To this day no RPG offers the freedom that BG did, the graphics, voice acting and art have all improved but the actual game mechanics and freedom granted to the player have gotten worse. Even games trying to emulate BG get it wrong, making the games too linear with almost no choice to be an evil or neutral character.
I've been watching youtube for I dunno how many years. I rarely comment (only ever done once). I've always wanted a baldurs gate Retrospective and wondered why for a game as good and well thought of as important as this one is no one has ever done one. The fact that you did it as seriously and in depth as you did means alot. Thank you.
My memory of Baldur's Gate is spending an entire summer as a teenager in 1999 just brute-forcing myself through the first game. I didn't understand THAC0 or any of the tabletop rules, so I made a two-hand wielding halfling warrior. Didn't get the armor class system, so everyone was adorned in heavy armor with the highest armor class. The magic system was way beyond me, so I just chose spells based on if they had a cool description. If it wasn't for the constant savescumming and the cheap AI kiting, I probably never would have beaten it.
“To recreate Baldur’s Gate; that’s the page you’d have to get everybody back on. And that will never happen again.” - me smiling serenely two weeks after BG3’s release.
@@cömerdark6524 BG3 isn't really a follow up to BG 1 & 2 at all (Bhaal is present but not a central focus, the Dark Urge is wholly optional), I wish it'd been named something else, or even given a different setting (forgotten realms is getting pretty tired and wrote at this point, though I think Larian did a spin on it that's better than most) but I suspect they wouldn't have been allowed or able to make the game without the IP firmly attached to it, likely an executive decision. There's also the matter of the "marvelification" of all forms of media where everyone needs to be quippy and EXTRA and have special trauma or an epic destiny (or both), like nobody in BG3 is just an ordinary person thrust into an extraordinary situation, they're all seasoned warriors, adventurers and badasses mysteriously deleveled by brain worms.
Haha, all that mention of Ed Greenwood makes me smile. I went to visit my parents, who had moved into a tiny town in Canada, and I went to library there. And who is the librarian? Ed Greenwood himself. He looks exactly like Elmeister in real life.
@@VileFemboy Well, he insist on keeping his library job. I can't say if his bank account is bursting with money, but I am pretty sure that he is not in it to get rich. He likes his job, so why not keep it?
@@VileFemboy Sometimes the biggest influences seem the least important outside of them. Man chose a comfy and proud life, as you said it, he created the Forgotten Realms, does he need more to feel accomplished in life? Only he knows.
One thing I didn't like was the idea of the protagonist being beyond mortal concerns after ascending, it is not necessarily so in the Forgotten Realms setting, gods are more like the Ancient Greek ones, incessantly meddling and being part of the world. Which is why it really annoyed me that a a pregnant Aerie, or another lover would just be left in the dust. In my personal head-canon, with that pairing, Aerie converted and became the new head priestess for the man she loved, so that they would never be truly apart, and so that they could be rejoined in death. My character would also create an avatar to visit her as often as possible so that they perhaps could eke out a bit of marital bliss in between all the inevitable future conflict. After all like the Greek ones, gods in FR act all too mortal so it is only fitting.
I played 120 hours of BG II but I have 0 achievements because they added them much much later on (like one full year after the release) ; i think most of the people played, like me, on the release, so thats why the numbers are so low (and the achievements are not retroactive if you load your savefile now)
Viconia's romance is also interesting because if you pursue it as a good-aligned character it has a really fucking tragic ending where Viconia's alignment actually changes to Good and in the epilogue you learn that her enemies eventually caught up with her and ended her life, leaving the protagonist to mourn her death. There's a lot of interesting stuff with Viconia.
I know. I was unreasonably involved with this romance when I played it more than 20 years ago. I was devastated by the ending, but I had the feeling that I saved Viconia's soul.
Ah, I was misremembering the alignment shift a little bit. Still, it's a really interesting dimension to the romance. I wish RPGs would try something complicated like the Viconia romance more often, but I understand why they don't: players want to live out the fantasy of the romance and not have to stress about the obliqueness of actually succeeding at the romance arc. Closest similar case I can think of in the BioWare catalogue is Mass Effect 2's romance with Jack, but even that one is a lot simpler and easier to get through than this one.
Always bugged me that; Who exactly managed to catch up with this now epic level character and kill her? Thankfully I went Jaheira for romance, which is pretty much all happy ending, but it's still irritating to me.
@@GriffinPilgrim If I recall, it was an assassin of Lolth, and she was killed with a special kind of poison. Being epic-level doesn't make you invincible, sadly.
I work at the library Ed Greenwood managed for years while he was getting his Forgotten Realms stuff off the ground! He retired from the library system to focus full time on his writing. I never met him but from time to time customers come in and ask after him and according to them all he was an extremely wonderful person :) As a fan of fantasy stuff i have always been a little honoured to work in the same place he did. Big fan of your videos Noah, thank you so much for all this amazing work you've done. Enjoyed all of your posts immensely :) !
I played this game TENS of times, many times beggining to end. I did solo runs, I played with friends and strangers, played with all possible teammates and character variations, I played most if not all of the classes beggining to end and using cheatcodes and buggs I would jump across the world, killing all npcs and then replace them with my own spawns and then I would use created result to run RPG sessions for my friends as if this was a sandbox game. Ive spend RL months if not years enjoying this game. And until THIS DAY I have not even seen all this game has to offer. I play even today and sometimes accidentally come across a whole new quest line or dialogue Ive never seen. This game is a masterpiece. A treasure. Art. Its not just the best RPG game of all time, its THE BEST game and one of the best stories ever told.
Yes, I just started again today, and it hit me, years ago playing this game for months, I missed out on so many quests and interactions because I just played evil, and there were so many things I did not try.
Likewise, I've been playing the series since very shortly after the original was first released, and cut my teeth on the games. I had an abiding interest in AD&D as a child and marveled at the 80's and early 90's fantasy art style and sheer immensity of the fictional history within the modules but had no friends who played and didn't get to experience tabletop gaming until much later, so Baldur's Gate was my introduction to the ruleset and realms. The amount of times I've gone through the games I've lost count years ago as I frequently revisit it, and the amount of characters I've rolled even if only to store as pre-generated has to be over a hundred. Yet to this day I continue to discover things in both games that I have somehow missed for over 20 years. For instance, just this past weekend I discovered that in Candlekeep, not only the location where the entire saga begins but inside the Inn, the entrance to which the game starts with you positioned directly in front of, there is already a circumstance that I never encountered. Evidently if you speak to Firebead Elvenhair after receiving the tutorial quest from him to collect and return an Identify scroll by clicking on him exactly 30 times, he will give you 300 gold. How could I have not known about this all these years later, about a game I thought I was more familiar with than the back of my hand? Anyway I concur with the notion that it is the greatest CRPG of all time, even if at times I get caught up in thinking similarly about the original Fallout or the second and third Elder Scrolls games. Baldur's Gate 2 in particular is an astonishing achievement, a genuine masterpiece that remains incomparable across the board. The more recent nostalgic isometric pseudo-3D RPGs with rotatable cameras and full voice acting &c are in general being made by people who evidently don't grasp what it was that made the original games so timeless. In my opinion it is the very limitations of the technology at the time and the ingenuity applied to working around them that make these games stand apart; the gorgeous hand-painted prerendered backgrounds, the pixelated sprites, a relative absence of voice acting save for a few phrases, the complexity of the mechanics which reward comprehension in a way no other game has matched, the peculiar narrative tone and subtle sense of humor - these are all to my mind some of the major fundamental aspects of the original games which for several reasons remain in the past despite the revival of the approach in spirit, mainly I assume for the fear of low salability. None of the modern isometric CRPGs offer the same depth of experience as the handful of classics that continue to stand out because they favor showing over telling. In Baldur's Gate and Fallout you would use your imagination as you played to actively develop an internal image of what your character looked like, what they felt like, likewise with your companions and the many NPCs with whom you would encounter, because visually they all appear to be the same several paper dolls or vague, pixelated forms with only shades of color to differentiate them. Fallout 2 even makes a joke about this directly. When you traversed the world map, you found yourself looking at an actual map and an icon representing you or your party would move across it from one symbol to the next, and you imagined the relatively uneventful trip. What I'm ultimately saying is that by being forced to exercise ones own imagination in order to meaningfully engage with a work of art or interactive media, a sense of personal connection is developed which significantly enhances the emotional resonance experienced throughout. When the game you played feels like a personal adventure you went on, despite the fact that it looks practically identical to one everyone else experienced, it transcends the limitations of its format and presentation. The simplicity of the graphics and the use of descriptive narration to provide the details of the environment and its inhabitants conjure visions in the mind exactly as a great book does, whereas with moveable cameras by which you can look upon anything at any angle, and with heavily customizable avatars with visually defined features, everything is being directly presented to your senses and you become more of a passive observer than an active participant. As a final note, to play this game in story mode is to do yourself an awful disservice in experiencing the realization of the tabletop experience in a single-player virtual form. The comparatively high number of combat encounters is a compensatory function to my thinking, and the difficulty is not so intense as many seem to consider it to be. Obviously if you go into the game blind (as I did initially), find the character creation phase to be arcane and roll a character with terrible attributes and skill points allocation, it is going to be a rough time. Something embarrassing to admit is that the first time I played the game as a 12 year old, I didn't even understand what the attribute rolls were or that rerolling was something you did to get a higher total number; I rolled a few times hoping that the points were evenly distributed and my first several characters probably had less than 80 total points. I suppose that these days there are so many video games being released and so frequently, that mastering an outdated ruleset to play an old video game series does seem somewhat pointless; back when the games were new there was not nearly as much variety, and as children you tend to have less access to the necessary funds and so a video game you got for Christmas or your birthday might be the only game you get that entire year. I still prefer 2nd edition because it is what I learned on, and to me it isn't counterintuitive at all, it just took time. The hugely complex nature of the games interpretation of the rules is actually what keeps me returning to it all these years later. The story is fantastic, the companions are probably the most memorable in all of gaming, the soundtrack is remarkable (and as a massive fan of mid-seventies to mid-eighties electronic music, krautrock, disco &c Michael Hoenig being its composer is mind blowing), but it is the incredible variety of characters that can be rolled, and the many approaches to most encounters available, that always call me back. Defeating Kangaxx in the sequel, or the several dragons, are feats that can be accomplished in countless different ways and so much of the appeal is in learning just how deep the system actually is and how much room for creativity is available.
Oh and one more thing, sorry. But Jon Irenicus is the greatest villain in video game history, and by far. I enjoy chasing him even more than I do encountering The Master, even if the latter is clearly the more original. "You've released ALL of my test subjects?! How wonderfully mad of you.." I still have nightmares from the Beholder lair beneath the Temple District, and the spike room in Bodhi's beneath the Graveyard District.
how would you know if this is one of the best stories ever told if you spent your life playing videogames instead of developing your taste in art and literature
Slow experience gain is an understatement. I farmed the shit out of the ant lion looking creatures by the lake area for experience on my first playthrough. Damn it was pretty cool looking back though, kinda like the training montage in a rocky movie.
it's funny how with baldur's gate a single class character will barely be level 8 at the end of the first game, then in icewind dale you'll just skyrocket up in power during the first real dungeon of the game.
Many modern RPG designers can learn from the Baldur's Gate trilogy's storytelling. Rather than make the main plot about some calamity that threatens all of existence, they made the story about you and your character. Sure, there's always a larger threat and a dangerous villain, but you're reminded a number of times (even explicitly in BG1) that your problems are not everyone else', and that the world will continue on should you fail. This made the world seem so much bigger and more convincing, even if it was a fantasy setting. I think Bioware forgot this lesson when they made Dragon Age: Origins.
Seriously? The world feels so static in BG, the fact most times nobody even react to the pile of corpses ive left when visiting a city is so weird. I honestly find the world of DA to be definitively more belieavable, i guess the only quite believable scenario i can recall in BG was the whole iron shortage stuff
@@Jrdotan seriously. I don’t think either game is particularly good at world simulation stuff, but BG’s story feels more grounded to me specifically for the reasons I listed. DA’s setting is certainly more gritty and dark, and in that way it’s closer to reality, but DA’s story undermines that with its chosen one narrative tropes. It’s kind of ironic then that BG, with its more traditional pulp fantasy setting, has a narrative that keeps the stakes reasonably low, with a scope that naturally broadens as the player gains more power.
@@matternicuss i dont really know about it, since sarevok tried to kill me for some reason i already kinda predicted it being a chosen one story and it ended up being pretty much that...
@@Jrdotan I mean, sort of, but not really. In BG, you’re a Bhaalspawn. One among many. The fate of the world doesn’t hinge on your character’s failure or success. Sarevok isn’t trying to destroy Faerun; he simply wants to become the next Lord of Murder. The Iron shortage threatens the stability of the region, sure, but it wouldn’t be the end of life as we know it. In DA, you’re The Warden, and it’s made clear repeatedly that without your character’s involvement, the Darkspawn blight would pretty much wipe out Thedas. See, everything in DA’s plot is made more EPIC and grandiose. Despite the setting’s darker nature, it tells a very standard chosen one narrative we’ve seen in many, many examples of fantasy media. I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad, mind you, just that it doesn’t really feel as grounded as BG’s more localized threats.
So the game awards xp for story goals. So at the point in the story where you get busy with the drow priestess, you earn XP. The rest of the party earns xp. It was hilarious to see several of my party members level up from this, including the possible romance characters. "I got laid so hard, even you leveled up!" :D
Just wanted to thank you Noah. This video opened my eyes to Baldur's Gate again. I played it and became frustrated, put it down and it has been years. I recently gave it another shot after some of the things you spoke about in this video. It made me realize this game could give me a chance to play D&D for the first time in my life.. something I've always wanted to do! I'm currently playing the games in chronological order and having so much fun. I owe you a ton! Thanks!!
It feels funny to be at just the right age -- and gaming age -- where negative AC / THAC0 still feels completely intuitive. That sense of "you've got a -2? SWEET!"
This is quite simply one of my favourite videos on all of TH-cam - Noah's truly a gift to the (slightly academic and analytical) gaming community. Thank you for so much for this.
"Stand down and your friends will live!" "Ok, I'll submit, just leave my comrades be" ... All your councilors: "Don't be silly mr. protagonist man, proceed with the cutscene as planned" ...got me too good xD
Revisiting this video a few years later, I realize your argument regarding the whole "trans kerfluffle" was so compelling that it convinced me to abandon the #gamergate crowd and focus my criticisms on characters who are poorly written and exist just to make a point, rather than just assuming all LGBT-themed characters or "diverse" casting always exists purely to virtue signal. Inclusion really isn't enough and in fact is harmful to progressive causes if the result is just a token. A well-written character can broaden horizons and serve as a counter-point to the common arguments of the alt-right and similar groups. Also, "The only surefire defense against accusations of tokenism in writing is artistic sincerity." I'm saving that quote.
The biggest, and most justified IMO, criticism of the "trans kerfluffle" was how quickly the character shared her story. I know trans people and they are generally very private about the situation and don't bring it up until they really trust the other person. This can be seen with gay individuals for the last 50+ years. Coming out was not an easy choice and staying closeted was the norm. You don't just come out and tell a random stranger "hey I'm gay" or "hey I'm trans." When you disregard the severity of the social anxiety that can and does come with being different and a minority, you are trivializing the idea you are trying to promote. When done like it was in SoD, it feels like classic tokenism. You've put it in and checked the box, but you've done nothing real to further the cause or change the understanding. I said it on day one, Baldur's Gate has that amazing Girdle that led to some very funny, and not politically correct in 2021, encounters. If you really want to write a quality trans character in Baldur's Gate, start there. Make the character a companion, make this Girdle part of the quest, and end it with finding a way to flip the curse of gender swapping in to an affirmative magical solution for the character. The Girdle would only be a temporary stop gap and by making that clear in the writing you are now saying it's not a joke or a gimmick, it's a life changing event and the solution needs to be 100% permanent. This is high fantasy after all where we don't solve problems with medical science, we solve it with magic. My gripe was/is that poor writing and characterization of a trans character in the game. And as Noah said, we could always ignore content in this series, so this is just more content we can ignore or explore. I would argue that by making this optional and burying it in the character dialogue, you can have a real to life encounter with an NPC after building some trust and give players a genuine and unique experience with an individual coming out to you and helping them grow as a character.
Hard disagree. Inclusion by itself is not a bad thing at all. You don't have to justify through theme all physical characteristics of your characters, and in games and film you cant simply omit many of them, so who am I hurting by choosing a diverse cast for the sake of it? Should I have a default set of characteristics for this situation?
@@franciscofarias6385 please re-read my comment above yours for a good answer. It's not enough to check an inclusion box. We can't forget the two tropes in movies of the "token black guy" and "the black guy dies first." These have been panned and/or parodied because it was a laughable gimmick to check a box but offered no real substance. So I would ask, is it enough to say a character is trans and never really explore it? Was it enough for Rowling to say Dumbledore is gay, but never actually dive in to that topic?
@@riffbw It's not a matter of being enough to check a box. It's just that checking a box is better than not checking it I believe. Representation by itself goes a long way in helping normalizing seeing minorities in media, and in making those minorities feel normal. Also, you're otherwise assuming that, unless the story is about being a minority, you should go with white/cis/straight/male by default, which sounds yikes. Furthermore, the examples you gave were of (arguably) bad representations. The faux pas in the trans case or having a black guy dying early in a movie don't need to happen, even if the story isn't about being trans or black.
@@franciscofarias6385 it might be enough for now, but checking a box doesn't fix bad writing and a poor entry point to the inclusion. I stand by what I said. If I was to meet a new person who is trans, I can guarantee when I start a first conversation, they are not just going to blurt out "hey I'm trans" partway through. Beamdog wrote the character in an unrealistic way. I'm not a fan of tokenism when it because a huge selling point for your product. That starts to border on exploitation which is even worse. My issue is and was with the poor writing and I call it tokenism because that's all it is. They put it in there to say they did it and if offered no real substance. It's great if people like the inclusion, I'm not complaining about the inclusion. I just think it was poorly done and I provided a quick and easy alternative quest line that would have made it infinitely more impactful to many people.
I go back and rewatch all of your videos at least once or twice a year, and I have to say your baludrs gate and NWN retrospectives are two of my favourites, thank you Noah, for years of quality entertainment.
Just finished the saga for the first time and feel like a part of my life is now complete. Catching up with these games that I missed in my childhood really is a joy.
I’m the reason those steam achievement stats are so low. I own Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 on steam in the same way most people own the bible and never read it. When it was on sale for $6 I bought it because I thought it was important to have / support it.
I completed BG2 before the first one and still consider it the best CRPG ever made. What I really enjoy about it is the combat system, the need adapt buffs and counter spells for every fight and learning to use each class in the party most effectively. There's insane levels of strategic and tactical combat options for exploiting weaknesses and protecting the party for different opponents in BG2 compared to other CRPG titles. The other awesome thing is conversations between party members. Dialogue is affected by characters chosen into party. The evil intelligent mage trolling the stupid heroic ranger, the virtuous knight going insane and turning against the party for murdering innocent people, advances from female party members if the main generated character is a male and so on. Story, graphics and sound are awesome as well. Very few games have the same feel of adventure, immersion and sense of achievement when you start to master the combat system. It's not just about dice rolls, but how to prepare and best utilize those various spells, skills and items to your advantage in each encounter.
I remember finally getting to the end of Throne of Bhaal after literally years with the series and just letting it run overnight while I agonized over what choice my character would make if they existed independently of me as the player. I wish the market existed still for games that make you really come along for the whole ride of the hero's journey rather than starting at the beginning then fastforwarding to the overpowered endgame.
@@Falcon_Serbia I never managed to get into it. It played well, paid good homage to the crpg golden years and was visually stunning but it never hooked me
Personally I think that the abruptness of BG2's beginning was part of what made it so engaging. The mystery of Irenicus that slowly gets unveiled is a central element of the story, "who is this powerful madman, and why does he act like he does? What does he truly want with Imoen and the protagonist?" By adding foreshadowing in Dragonspear and previous encounters with Irenicus, this central storythread is cheapened. It is no longer the mystery it once was.
Kakreth TMD Before they got jumped and kidnapped, the terrible circumstances that came with the people of Baldur's Gate realizing that their hero who defeated Sarevok and Caelar Argent forced the hero to depart Baldur's Gate. Irenicus framed the hero for murder. Ever wondered why Yaga-Shura in Throne of Bhaal calls the hero the Terror Of The Sword Coast even if you are good aligned? The hero's reputation for the murder that made him/her leave Baldur's Gate is spreading out. The narrator of BG2 hinted that the hero departed Baldur's Gate for reasons that relate to being a Bhaalspawn. Besides, why would the people of Baldur's Gate keep the hero around when they learned he/she is a Bhaalspawn like Sarevok? Before SoD, no one who played BG2 suspected that Irenicus framed the hero for murder to lure him/her out to get kidnapped. And throughout Siege of Dragonspear, Irenicus had to first assess whether the hero is the Bhaalspawn he wants or not before he kidnaps him/her, it makes sense for him to analyze his target first before making his move.
Noah, I just wanted to say that I thoroughly enjoy every one of your videos, but this one specially is about a series that´s really close to my heart, and having you analize it is just perfect. I've even found myself watching videos like the Homeworld critique, not being a fan of that game at all. I'm from Argentina, and english is not my first language (as you can probably tell just by reading this) but you speak with a cadence and a clarity that I can truly understand. I really appreciate everything you do here, and in your written reviews, and if my 3rd world economy would allow me, I'd be a proud patron of your channel. I don't care about frequency of uploads, I care deeply about quality, and your level of analisis is superior to almost every person on youtube right now, as rare are the games you choose to discuss. You'll always have a respectful (and most often silent) admirer in me. Greetings from the other side of the continent!
Baldur's Gate is one of the best - if not the best - rpg series out there. The story, atmosphere and how deeply it's rooted into pen & paper lore is just fantastic. Personally, I dig the combat system, that is very tactical (especially in BG 2) and doesn't require pointless micro management that so many games do nowadays. Micro like abilities with low CD that you repeat and repeat and repeat every single combat in the exact same order... At the same time, BG 1 have one of the most outrageous and unfair battles ever, which was hugely improved in BG 2 not only because we have tougher, higher level characters, but also because the encounters were improved in terms of balance. Giving hobgoblins poisoned arrows for example, when players have very little and limited option to cure it. BG 1 also have some very simple, tedious sub-quests (fetch quests in general), like NPC having a total of four (literally) lines of dialogue: for starting the quest, informing you didn't completed it yet, when turning in and after finishing. Again, improved in BG 2 to the point, where like the first 1/3 of the game is a huge compilation of long sub-quests that you do in any order you like. It's a big mistake to start with BG 1 if someone is new to the series. You don't need to play BG 1 to understand the plot. You will only get stuck on the game and won't feel like starting the second - much improved - BG 2.
Many people won‘t like going back to lower level adventuring after starting with BG2. I believe starting with BG1 is therefore, as well as to avoid spoilers for BG1 in BG2, preferable.
@@markusk2289 You could say that the same "many people" may not like the dreadful beginning of BG1 and drop the series entirely. It's somehow diminished in Enhanced Edition, so for a newcomer I would recommend that, makes a smoother transition between both games as well.
In the wake of BG3, it’s really cool to hear about the earlier games. I don’t know if I’ll ever make it back to play them, but hearing your analysis gives some fascinating context for the new game
In the original BG1, sometimes when traveling between maps you'd encounter a band of thieves with bows that already surrounded you at the start of the battle and could decimate your party in a matter of seconds. Or in any regular fight, if even a regular enemy rolled a critical hit, it could kill a character which was at best a major financial Quicksave can obviously remedy a lot of that stuff, but if you wanted to do a "hardcore" playthrough of the game, you'd have to really break it to survive.
True; but both DMs work when you have time to play, and are off when your busy.... soooo they just emailed you a script and code to compile... And.... Baldur's Gate
Mods are actually a really fun way to spice up Baldur's Gate. There's also a mod in Baldur's Gate 1 that adds dialogue for companions in a similar way as to Baldurs Gate 2 handles dialogue, and Baldur's Gate 2 has an extra dialogue mod, both are very well written.
I like the normal Banter Pack, but I tried some more and ended up with an even more childish Aerie and it turned into a ridiculous soft-porn story in Throne of Bhaal ;).
A factual mistake here: for ThaC0 LOWER IS BETTER: for proof, look at the 'Level-up results' screen at 25:30 - it says THAC0 reduced by 1 - as your char gets better it moves closer to zero
Whilst that's a valid correction, THAC0 is still ass backwards. It's the same basic calculation as later editions would use (roll + modifier vs. target number) but the target number is THAC0, a property of the attacker and the modifier is a property of the target whereas in later editions the target number is AC a property of the target and the modifier is a property of the attacker, which makes more intuitive sense.
It's simply a relic of old pen&paper days, when you had a table in the rulebook on which you looked up class/level of the player and the AC of the enemy to get a number which you had to roll on a d20 (here is an example: 3.bp.blogspot.com/-1BFhlrAlLfo/UdXsFdXbp4I/AAAAAAAAVVU/4UaIbo7Gwpg/s767/1st+Edition+ADnD+Attack+and+Assassination+Tables.jpg). Later on in AD&D, the concept of "THAC0" was introduced as an optional rule - you took the same table and looked up the number for your class/level to hit an AC0 enemy, and noted that down on your character sheet as your "to hit AC 0" number. From then on, you did not have to consult the table anymore, instead you simply adjusted that number upward/downward according to the actual AC of the enemy (subtract from THAC0 if enemy AC was greater than 0, add to THAC0 if enemy AC was lower than 0). That's why it feels so clunky, it wasn't a mechanic the rules designers intended from the beginning, it got introduced later on when someone figured out a way to not have to constantly consult the combat tables at every fight.
Actually, the to-hit number as a property of the attacker and a modifier based on the defender's armor / dodge makes more intuitive sense... your ability to hit something with a given weapon is an attribute of YOU not of anybody else. That number then gets adjusted by what you're trying to hit. I have no problem with THACO whatsoever, the problem I have is subtracting armor class from that, when armor class for enemies after the first couple of levels will almost always be negative. Starting AC as a negative (-10 instead of +10) number and simply adding that number to the THACO makes much more sense.
It's a relic of AD&D 2nd edition being a RPG system held together with bubblegum and duct tape. As someone who loves figuring out ridiculous systems I love it but it's just not a well designed game system and it never was.
There is no reason the players should even have to know their opponent's AC. You subtract your roll from your THAC0 to get the AC you hit (or above) and the DM tells you if that is low enough to hit your opponent. AC going down is more a relic of being based on navel ship classes (first class ship having best armour, second class slightly less, third class slightly less and so forth). THAC0 was simply a way to express the To Hit table without having to print the table all the time.
@@Latinkon and yet, Larian is a dead company. A skeleton of what it was. Alot of angry old fans separate it from LaLaLarian and Larian. tho i hope you guys have fun with the new games
@@Latinkon Larian is an excellent alternative though, I'm also happy that the series is given new life by people who are still actively engaged and enamoured by the RPG genre. The developers who crafted baldurs gate have long left the ranks of Bioware.
About killing Skie at the end of Siege of Dragonspear: you DON"T have to kill her. You can avoid fighting her, which leads to Irenicus telling you are smarter then he thought or something along the lines and killing her by himself.
FYI, all you need to get through the basilisk area is "protection from petrification" spell which Jaheira usually posses or is otherwise obtainable in scroll form from shops or from other mages. Scout ahead with a stealthed rogue (Imoen?) to find out the Basilisks, cast it on your best fighter and send him forth to collect aggro and have the Basilisks focus fire on him. Then use the rest of your party with long range weapons to kill the beasts or assault from behind them. It should be fairly easy to slay them, presuming of course that you're at a viable level with decent enough equipment; basilisks are not goblins, afterall, petrification gaze aside.
IIRC (my AD&D knowledge is a bit dated) you could also cast Bless or other spells that would boost saving throws. Also, it's a videogame, so saving every 5 minutes is kind of expected. The combat is RIDICULOUSLY imbalanced for a tabletop game -- running Baldur's Gate for a similarly leveled party as yours in BG would send them to the morgue after a few encounters. The difficulty curve is only feasible in the game because you can save. I might try to go about a deathmarch / no save run at some point and try it. I love this series and replay it every so often.
Malisa1990 Aye. Later on in the game dying to basilisks' stone gaze is more of a joke on your part for rushing into a fight instead of scouting ahead properly or otherwise doing something wrong. If you check out your opponents and prepare right, you should survive most encounters save the hardest ones.
There's also a ghoul named Korax that you can temporarily recruit into your party as a "seventh" member in the same area as the basilisks. He's immune to petrification, so you can aggro the basilisks with him and be relatively safe from their gaze as they'll generally focus on Korax so long as you don't have him wander off.
This video popped up in my recommendations. Thank you! I am 30 hours into my first playthrough and i'm really enjoying it. I feel like you forgot to mention just how much talent is in the voice acting! The cast is a plethora of A list veteran actors and voice actors! Once again thanks.
LOL I love how 1 minute in Noah got tired of his own intro so he just faded out and started talking over himself. Amazing. I just bought Baldur's Gate 3 on a whim because I'm a Dragon Age fan and know DA was based off BG, so here I am to check out the history behind this famous name.
0.1% have allied themselves with the thieves in Baldur’s Gate 2 (Achievement)... I’m one of them, and it’s weird that this is the lowest achievement, and not finishing the game on the highest difficulty or killing one of the dragons.
Noah, you are the reason I started playing bg1 and I didn't regret a millisecond of those 100 hours, now after a few months off, I'm playing through Siege of Dragonspear before I start bg2 THANK YOU FOR YOUR HARD WORK
@@simbobcrafts4843 take your time, save very often and name your saves. Try to have a party with 2 to 3 strong melee types and the rest ranged even slings are very effective, but you need at least 2 tanks that you can use to pull heat from incoming enemies with to keep the weak classes safe and then the weaker classes can wreak havoc upon the enemies trying to hurt your tanks with bows and slings and spells. Save before every battle, because often losing is the result of an invisible roll of 0 or enemy roll of 20. Hope this helps 😊 also the lower your "THACO" stat in your character sheet the more likely you will hit the enemy so the better armor you wear the lower that number will go its counter intuitive to the norm but it is what is is lol
I’m 14 yrs old in 2021 and I love this. Other games that most modern kids enjoy don’t interest me but older games like baldur’s gate and diablo are just fantastic. They were made in a time where games were made with passion and seen as an art instead of an attempt to seize somebody’s wallet. Truly an amazing experience, so immersive.
There's still a lot of games being made today by people who clearly care about gaming as an art, both high budget and those made in a basement somewhere. Supergiant Games continues to produce experiences that feel like emotional nuclear blasts, for example. I don't think it's fair to discount modern gaming just because EA sucks. EA does suck though. I do agree that it's pretty obvious when a company just wants your money in exchange for a product, and not to show you a piece of art.
I've watched basically all of your videos and left comments here and there but I always forget to just say that I fucking love sitting down to a comprehensive, intelligent, well structured review, and your voice is never grating or annoying like so many others. Thanks for making these videos. I hope you continue, 81k subs is criminally low for the quality of your videos but hopefully you'll find a wider appreciative audience soon.
actually I was just nice to Viconia as well the entire time as well. After I slept with her she did get cold with me (I saw it as her being scared of her feelings toward me because that's not the kind of relationship they have in the underdark) but after a while she apologizes for being cold and the romance continues.
I'm fairly certain the Enhanced Edition is significantly more popular on GoG than it is on Steam. Which would account for the low numbers for those low achievment numbers. One minor mistake. You said the higher your THAC0 the better. No, the lower your THAC0 the better. Level 1 characters start off with a 20 THAC0 and then that number slowly comes down with character levels and additional pluses to hit. But yeah, even though i'm a long time 2e D&D player, I didn't like how THAC0 was handled in Baldur's Gate. It almost felt like Black Isle screwed with the table and stacked it against the player. In BG1 it's easy to say "well you're still low level, so it's understandable you'd miss a lot". However in BG2, your fighters are of a high enough level they should be hitting things consistantly. ESPEICALLY in the first dungeon where a large portion of your early enemies are goblins. They shouldn't have an AC higher than 5. With your characters starting off at about 8th leve, your fighters would have a 13 THAC0. Meaning you have to roll an 8 or better to hit, but when you figure in strength bonuses and proficiency bonuses, that 8 turns into a 3. You need to roll a 3 or better to hit, and it's really frustrating to see how often you roll a 2. Several times in a row you will roll that 2. That never felt natural to me. From what I understood, the backlash stemmed from a joke that came at the expense of Gamergate. Maybe it was also about the trans character. This issue then turned into, it became impossible to criticize this game without someone automatically assuming it was just about the trans character or that one joke. Which as you put it, "is a frustrating bit of blind idiocy". The problem with Safana IS the fact they rounded out her character and gave it more depth. The expansion comes in the middle of the story, so when you go back to the base story, so does her character. For someone that has either never paid attention to her character before, or someone who is playing the games for the first time, this comes off as really bad story writing. It makes Black Isle look bad in comparison. Whereas, adding depth to Khalid and Jaheira's marriage works extremely well and, I agree adds weight to the beginning of BG2. So more examples of the expansion being a bit of an unbalanced mess. Boo is a mini giant space hamster. I attribute the quality of this game 100% to Black Isle and little to nothing to Bioware. While KOTOR, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect 1 were all good games, they all lacked that little something in the storywriting that is found in Baldur's Gate. There are 3 phases of Bioware. Black Isle is phase 1. This is where they learned everything they know about RPGs from Black Isle. Post Black Isle/Pre EA is the second phase. This is where they've done their best work as a solo development company. The final phase is post-EA. This is after EA bought them and nearly everyone that was responsible for taking everything they learned from Black Isle and turned the company into the powerhouse it became, left. Good video man. It makes me want to finally get around to buying the Enhanced Editions of these games despite owning the core games already.
It's hard sometimes to justify my brief free time to sit and watch such a lengthy video vs. so many shorter ones, but I find it's always worth it with these Thorough Looks. As always, looking forward to the next one.
BG2 was my introduction to D&D, and its byzantine rules were a huge part of the intrigue for me. The Forgotten Realms is rich with lore, but its coupling with the AD&D system made it feel like this whole new world I could get lost in. That it was at times punishingly difficult didn't feel like much of an issue when you had quick saves bound to Q by default; I thought "savescumming" was an intended method of play. I've started a play-through recently, well over a decade and a half later, and I'm "savescumming" my way through again. I guess it's my version of "story mode". But yeah, if a party member dies, I load. Maybe if I played through the game again, I'd rely on quick saves less - just another reason this series has near-endless replay value.
This was an amazing video friend, I'm 25 now, and I started Baldur's gate 1, when I was 8...It truly like the taint of Bhaal in the the protagonist left its mark on me growing up.
This video was (is) AMAZINGLY good! You sir, deserve a salute for playing through the whole series, summarizing the plot, it's flaws and cherries, and then telling us what your opinions are in this video. I've watched it from start to finish, now downloading BG1 as a result - since I'll TRY to play through the whole series as a whole. I thank you, for your time and effort!
Awesome retrospective. I'm one of the players not running story-mode, but I can totally understand why you played it. I think it's also worth mentioning that BG has a huge modding scene with some really good quality mod like the one which adds the same amount of character development as in BG2 to BG1. In fact without this modding community Beamdog would not have been possible.
I started playing D&D in 1976. 0 Edition (Chainmail rules) I had almost forgotten how much Baldur's Gate captured the spirit of D&D from the earlier days. So, I have purchased BG1, Dragonspear and BG2 on my tablet, and starting them tonight. (Why not...Not like there is much else to do with the Beer Bug locking us all down) Thank you for one of the most enjoyable videos I have watched in quite a while. At the ending of the video, watching the stories of the companions, I felt a bit sad. Lots of memories tied up in 44 years of tabletop D&D, and the electronic versions of it. Old friends (some gone on to the Outer Planes) Games in the damnedest places (We played D&D in the desert in 1990. One photocopied DMG, a dog eared PHB and rocks, vehicle parts and wires for figures. A beetle wandered onto our "table" and immediately all party members rolled initiative and attacked!) and some truly amazing conversations. I still play online via Discord and Roll20, but I do miss the old days sitting around a table. Anyway, thanks again. i look forward to 120 hours + of gameplay ahead of me.
I'm not sure whether anyone brought it up already, but you can avoid being turned to stone with lvl-1 mage spell Protection from Petrification. Also, you can avoid it with Korax, the friendly ghoul who proposes to join you in this location. He is immune to petrification, though it requires patience to move him before the party because he is positioned at the back of the party, so you need to manage him manually, plus he doesn't reveal the fog of war, which also makes things more difficult. So as you can see, you're not required to use story mode to successfully complete this area. It's not as obvious, as the game doesn't say you to do this to complete this area. Yes, Baldur's Gate does not offer solutions as clear as other modern games and RPGs, but it is common with older games, you just need to investigate the issue by yourself and find a solution using your own creativity.
My first encounter hearing the Hooded Man's voice actor playing through SoD was possibly the most jaw-dropping, bone-chilling, nostalgic feeling I've ever had playing any RPG in the history of RPGs.
The people raging about a trans character in SoDS obviously forgot about the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity. Transitioning is entirely part of the lore. You can transition characters between gender in BG and BG2.
Not really, no. In fact, when she was first brought up, that I recall on the BD forums, most people were asking how you give her the Belt, since, well, they used a voiced line for her. that tends to be something important, given Voices aren't used often in even SoD. Then it turns out, nah, she's some authors agenda piece, and she was ignored afterwards...then the same author started to tell people any problems they had with the game were really about the politics she inserted into it, rather than the story being genuinely bad, and the game being bug riddled and crash prone.
Dude every single video I have seen you have had an amazing song I've never heard before, I wish you made a song playlist. Been binging on your vids so glad I found you.
I nearly forgot about the brutal permanence of death in this game. I remember the first time one of my party members got turned to stone by a basilisk and thinking "didn't I see a scroll for sale somewhere that could reverse that?". Or how I learned that by shattering an enemy after freezing them with an ice wand prevented me from getting one of the more useful items in the game: the boots of speed. I also loved that even uber-powerful characters actually carried items on their person. Such as Drizzt, who, after I learned how to kill by disbanding my party members in strategic positions around him which prevented him from moving (and then proceeding to sloooooowly kill him from afar with a bow), was duel wielding two very interesting swords, Twinkle and Icingdeath, which I "acquired" from him on my second playthrough of the game years ago. And, yes, the game was agonizingly long. But at the time I played it in 1999, along with the TotSC expansion, I thought nothing of spending an hour or two doing things like sneaking around Beregost in the middle of the night with Imoen ("Heya! It's Me, Imoen!") stealing the citizens blind (and I was ostensibly one of the "good" guys!). It was essentially the first real open world game I ever played and the care and attention to providing things to do for those types of players was astounding. Thank you for providing yet another compelling look at a classic game series that I will always fondly remember. :)
The thing often forgotten about Thac0 is that at the time, it was a logical streamlining of the rules. I do understand that the video only use them to illustrate the point about the ADnD ruleset being very esoteric for new players, but I still think that harping on about Thac0 being the worst thing ever is a tad misguided. Though I guess this is a point for "a though look at Dungeons and Dragons". Whatever madman would undertake that task.
I stumbled across this after watching your Fallout retrospective and thought it was fascinating. That said, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't interested in seeing an addendum involving Baldur's Gate 3.
I just started the video, and I just wanted to say that Beamdog didn't add Steam Achievements until 2016, which would likely account for not many people having them yet.
Call the men in white coats if you must, but I found the combat in this series to be fun. To me the swinging and missing was more an elaborate, deadly and nerve-wracking dance of combat. A system far more engrossing and believable than systems like World of Warcraft where every attack hits and everyone is simply a living damage sponge.
Also some of the swinging is only visual, from what I remember. Many characters in bg1 only attack once per six seconds. The only way to attack more than this is under the haste spell, oil of speed, or if you have two stars in proficiency with a kind of weapon. And then it's only 1.5 attacks per six seconds. It would be really boring to have six seconds in between swings. It would involve people spending a lot of time standing and doing nothing. So false swing animations were added to the game to make it look like the characters are doing stuff more often. But. It's not a real attack. This leads you to think you're only hitting once every like fifteen weapon swings or something when that isn't actually the case.
Thank you so much for these videos. I had only heard about Baldur's Gate in passing before. I'll probably never play it, but you talking about its legacy in your signature style really was a treat.
I never played (A)D&D, yet I went into the games with relish around the early and mid 2000s, and as year by year I got older and better at English through my early teens, I figured out more and more and eventually learned the ruleset of the game right from within the Baldur's Gates - right down to the spells, potions, scrolls and items you could find and use to actually deal with those harsh rules. It holds a special place indeed, and even now some 10+ years since last I played any of them, those little epilogue texts got me tearing up. Your final points here also highlight why I'm not particularly excited for the Baldur's Gate 3 that has now been announced and started going through early access - what could they possibly hope to do that merits resurrecting the name of a story that's not only been long finished and wrapped up, but which relies upon world lore of the Forgotten Realms that was on the verge of being distant past edition lore even as BG2 was released? Lovely video anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed this "little" 2 hour journey through such a big part of my gaming past.
Just at a glance I don't see any other comments saying this, so. Around 58:00 when you mention that you were definitely the one that did it and how alignment or choices typically affect the plot but not in this case, that's actually wrong. If, at the trial, you're seen as a hero and convince Belt you didn't do the deed, the cutscene in the cell will show Irenicus having stabbed Skie. Otherwise, if you're seen as a villain, you truly did kill Skie while Irenicus was urging you to give in.
A bit of that was added later, when people found ways of disabling the target rather than killing them, and the cutscene would still say you killed her regardless of her being alive, so Beamdog made it so now there are ways not to kill her, but the Trial proceeds regardless, and you're made a scapegoat for the city's problems instead, especially as Bereaved father figure wants someone's head for it, and it might as well be your's. The result is the same, you out of the city, in a perfect position to be grabbed by the big bad.
Hey Noah, I noticed you're reading some of these comments as of two weeks ago. Keep up the good work, love all your stuff. Hope to see you make a video on BG3 as this is one of my favorites of yours :) Kind regards
I've watched this several times, which for a nearly two hour review hopefully shows how much I think of it (and you, as reviewer). And I think that the highlighting of the genius of the transferring AD&D from TTRPG into a computer game in a way not really seen before or after is done excellently. Also, hardly anyone has talked about Durlag's Tower, which was great. Finally, who ever made the choice about being a 'child of Bhaal' deserves 1000 XP bonus because it meta-games the game into standstill. Brilliant!
41:30 my issue was that Forgotten Realms is a setting with literal gender change magic . Elminster spends half of his first novel turned into a woman named Elmira. Even in Baldur’s gate you can get a belt that does this. I don’t know gender disphoria feels like it wouldn’t be a big problem in Forgotten Realms
The hours I must have invested into this game.... Grew up playing this religiously in the early 2000s as a young boy and still play Enhanced Edition today. Still remains my favorite game saga.
Great look back at BG. I wasn't always trying to kill everyone as a DM as so much trying to give them an immersive experience. I used to create even what fish were in the local lakes and all the drow foods on the table in the dungeon. Described them to see if they would piece it together what they were up against.
I stumbled on this somehow by looking for Wasteland 2 videos. Specifically on how to beat the Tinker boss in the game. And I must say this video is pretty freaking awesome.
@@Luckyluke870 No it's not a joke at all, one friend specifically, she played a girl character in a role-playing game and felt like she was getting really into it, much more than any other character, and she started learning makeup to do makeup like her character for "help with role play" and started exploring more and more femininity until she reached a point of realization that this is who she was.
Ok, so i discovered Baldur's Gate by watching my father play it when i was 5 years old in 2000. It became one of my fantasy home. Your video is an hommage and a true observation of what these games were. Thank you.
Damn, I just stumbled upon this from a link in an extra creditz video about the dungeon design of Durlag's Tower, now I couldn't stop watching it until the end. It's an amazing summary of my feelings for Baldurs Gate and whenever I now get into a debate about someone who doesn't understand why a new game X is not as good as Baldurs gate, I can link them with this video and rest assured that my point is made clear. However, I feel that Noah missed one ... or rather two important points about what made Baldurs Gate special: The 2D graphics in an age where everyone was making the change to 3D graphics made it stand the test of time so well - and second: the soundtrack being one of the most iconic suites of music in gaming culture even today.
I agree u need to never give up and continue to improve ur videos visually and audio so u get more viewers! the content and voice are perfect its just the visual needs a little upgrade
This video was great except for the part where he talked about how Beamdog created a new campaign and let his voice carry a positive tone while speaking those words. Siege of Dragonspear is not and will never be canon in the BG series. It is an abomination that is absolutely untrue to the source material as admitted openly by the person who wrote the script and dialogue. Characters had their personalities changed on purpose because the author did not like them. It would be like somebody doing a new Duke Nukem game and saying, "You know, I think Duke is to rude, brash, and disrespectful in this certain way that I personally don't like. I'll change that." Sorry, but whatever in the fuck that shitty game would turn out to be would absolutely not, under any circumstances, be remotely related Duke Nukem. How about Mortal Kombat without any blood? Why not make Mario tall and Luigi short and fat? Beamdog will go out of business in a few short years for letting a person who shouldn't have ever been anywhere near the writer's chair make core personality changes to core characters. South Park has little kids swearing in it. The Simpsons features a dysfunctional family with a fat, beer-guzzling father. Duke Nukem is rude and doesn't have time to care about anything but kicking ass. And the characters in Baldur's Gate were not, are not, and will never be meant to fulfill some one-sided vision of the political ramblings of a bigot who can't possibly accept any message being sent out through a video game unless it conforms to their own personal biases. Some of the characters you will think are wrong, some you will think are right, and some you won't know what to think of them. The incredibly stupid writer that worked on BG:SoD has no understanding of this at all and should have never been hired in the first place. Good riddance!
I never got into it when it first released, I tried but never really got much further than the first area, i always just gave up after creating a party and getting killed by a random enemy. Recently I´ve been playing it on switch and i finally get it, it´s a very charming game and I plan to finish all of it. Playing Pillars of Eternity opened my eyes to the genre.
He's being incredibly biased towards her, while dismissing the others, like for example Aerie, as someone you just need to be nice with. Apparently he never went too far with her, since if you just go with the flow, be nice and all that, she ends up leaving. You basically need to heal her "wounded heart" not only by being nice, but being stern with her and even stopping her advances when you see her doing it out of desperation. I honestly liked all of the romance options to some extent, they are leagues better than anything neo-Bioware has come up with.
Oh yeah, maybe that's why I never really cared for that chick much... And to think many young women want to be more like her... Great... Just great. 👏👏👏
As a guy who played AD&D IRL for hours and hours during the time that BG was out, I love the ruleset, understand it and dont have much trouble going back to it after all these years.
this is what i come to youtube for - 2 hour discussions about 30 year old games
Agreed
It really is the best part
🤘 same my dude. That and Davaeorn do playthroughs at god tier levels of BG1 and BG2.
@jethro riz You’re thinking of BG2. The original BG game was released shortly after the fall of Byzantium.
2024 and you made me laugh. ty!
@@leonardpaulson
Some game design points of interest:
Baldur's Gate 1
4:20 Grounding the player
4:48 It's a low level adventure
6:15 A quality open world with plenty of depth
12:22 Conversations between party Npcs
14:04 Alignment system
14:48 Everything is genuinely dangerous but needed for tension.
16:07 Automated dungeon master cruelty probably what turns off modern players.
17:37 Dice controlled combat makes it boring, thaco is overly complex
20:09 Difficulty slider gives more options than choosing combat grind or interactive fiction
24:04 Ludonarrative dissonance (drink)
31:31 Assumes most people play as good, supports this more narratively
Siege of Dragonspear
35:43 Characters over detailed
40:03 Moral commentary
41:02 Characterization, dialogue and SJW backlash
43:10 Self expression in D&D
46:55 Biggest problem with Beam Dogs writing.
47:31 Adding dimensions to straight forward character made them good
47:47 Romance independent of player makes characters good
50:18 Illusion of choice instead of choice
52:30 Needed to introduce villain in an unhurried way
Baldur's Gate 2
1:00:11 Best thing about it is how it balances side content with main plot
1:03:25 No leads to follow so you have to adventure
1:05:06 Some of the best questing in rpg's
1:06:24 Difficult due to deadly and infuriating spell effects, story mode combat is boring
1:08:31 True Bioware companions first used here but timing is off
1:13:20 Romance of Viconia requires roleplay to work and is interesting
1:15:43 Failure to take no for an answer from player
1:17:30 Betrayal cliche' done right by adding forgiveness
1:18:07 Good quest design
1:20:35 Genuine hero's dilemma
1:21:21 Bioware mid game high stakes mission
1:23:11 Different play styles/multiple solutions accommodated
1:26:09 Half goodbyes before climax
Throne of Bhaal
1:30:17 Wonderfully uncomfortable position for player
1:43:31 Time and emotional investment rewarded
thanks! click like to get this further up the comment list!
Characters over detailed? Do you mean Characters overdetailed or Characters over detail?
Punctuation matters.
@@Welther47 Are you actually interested in the answer to this or did you just want to give me hard time?
ily
@@porkyorcy1715 And I love you random citizen
I think one of the reasons people have a low number of steam achievements is that many of the people who bought it on steam are rebuying it and thinking "I'll get to that one day", and then they never do because that's how Steam works, it sells you games you'll never actually play. If someone's even opened more than 50% of their steam library once they're doing well.
As I recall, they actually changed that five or six years ago. Used to be, you could actually use the, "yay, you opened the game," achievements to judge roughly how many people ever played the games they bought. Now, you need to actually launch the game in order to have your achievement progress calculated into the total. Meaning, 9 out of 10 people who fire up Baldur's Gate never leave Candlekeep. No idea on how many of those are people who did finish it in 1998, or are newbies that got put off by the character creation system, however.
Sure, you won't see the people who bought it and never opened it, though there's also first-levelitis. Which is probably more likely to affect the nostalgia purchasers, where people start a new game and think "I'll do another playthrough of this old game I love" but actually they do the first level and then never do it again.
I know I've done that a couple of times with Baldur's Gate, installed all the discs, put the Trilogy mod in, and then just played Candlekeep.
Deus Ex is a super common one too, every time Deus Ex is mentioned on the internet someone installs it and plays Liberty Island again.
I think people get hit by nostalgia, install the game, and then very soon (after the nostalgia hit wears off) they realise that they can't be bothered to play an 80 hour long game all over again. Happens to me pretty often.
v
They(EE's) also didn't originally have achievements in the first place. I have over 100 hours between the two and my first achievement was tonight. Started a new character after not playing for quite awhile. The games came out in 2013, but didn't get achievements until 2016.
Noah is the champagne of video game reviews.
When the late Roger Ebert maintained that video games could never be art, he opined in the comment section on his website that if they were, then someone familiar with other art forms, like literature and film, would have written a definitive treatise on video games. Honestly, it feels like Noah is that person. I could imagine his essays collected in a doorstopper book, much like Roger Ebert's movie yearbooks or his "Great Movies" essays. Except this one would be about the "Great Games" or something similar.
More like fine vine
@@Thagomizeri've literally told my nerd friends noah IS the roger ebert of the videogames world
@@tribbybueno The difference is Noah actually knows what he's talking about.
@@Owl90 ???? roger ebert is one of the best and most respected critics of all time lol
You can multi-class however you like but don't you dare take a level in another gender was an absolute gold line
So how does that work in this world? Did a spell backfire?
@@Dresdenstl magical, mechanical and alchemical alterations to the body are hardly uncommon in forgotten realms, you can meld aspects of other species into your own with the right tools. Someone becoming partially or wholly a different gender would be simple, whether on purpose or by accident, by choice or not.
I mean I respect it a lot more in Baldur's Gate cause it was genuine. It wasn't cool to be trans in the 90s and early 2000s. The devs actually paid a price for it for including it.
@@orly3000Dude, it's never been cool to be trans. You think people like being marginalized?
@@etcetera1995 i don’t think that was their point. i didn’t get the sense that they’re calling transness a trend or something. or that it’s “cool” and “popular” today. just that it was much worse in the 90s and early 2000s- and it was.
trans people were often the butts of jokes in completely unrelated stories. crossdressing characters were made to feel embarrassed in fiction. a common libel piece was just labeling random celebrities as trans. that’s their point, i think. maybe i’m wrong.
but transness was like, especially taboo during that time period. there was a huge cultural focus on it in a negative way, in ways that honestly were not so common even before the 90s. it was a weirdly hateful period in a pop-cultural sense rather than an ignorant sense.
I've played the saga 29 times... Yes, that's entire BG saga with both expansions 29 times. I did speedruns, solo runs, fiddled around with mods, made some small improvements myself, played with my girlfriend aaaand so on...
And still till this day it is the only game that never bores me and also it's the only game that made my cry like a little girl. When? Do you guys remember (SPOILER) the ending of ToB? You know, after you make a choice about your future? There are epilogues for your party members. There are just written, not animated like it would be done nowadays, and while narrator is reading each epilogue, this specific, amazing but sad music plays... And it hits me every time...
Playing entire saga is that awesome, HUGE (I mean... seriously...HUGE) adventure that you take with your friends (npcs). You grow with the character and with the companions that are part of your team... So reading those epilogues, learning about how your friend lived after you left them, and how they died is so emotional that all I can do is cry. I missed them... I missed Minsc (and Boo), Khalid, Jaheira, Sarevok and all of the others... I also miss Jon Irenicus. The best "bad guy" I've ever seen in video game.
Baldur's Gate saga is, for me, video game equivalent of Lord of the Rings. It's the best RPG of all time, and i'm saying that not because of nostalgia but because... it just is.
Sorry for my english and long post. I just love this saga so much.
My favorite RPG.....
this series cemented my respect for David Warner, he made an unremarkable paperdoll sprite with a kinda small portrait into something very menacing
I feel exactly the same :')
Epiloges.
Where can I find a complete epiloges video?
Steam version will only show me those videos I reached thru gameplay and I want to watch the epiloges.
TH-cam searches either just give one character at a time or have some video stream of the person talking embeded.
Hate that and cant watch it.
----Otherwise---
Stumbled over this video and got to say I like this Noah.
Think perhaps there are a many of nostalgia players who bought this game who simply dont have the time or attention span to actually play it anymore as it deserves.
So we put it down for a day when we will have time.
I mean.
MMOs like WoW I play with other people so it keeps my attention and the Civilization I can play while doing other stuff.
For Baldurs Gate to be enjoyed by me will require my full attention.
So I keep picking it up, playing for abit then something else comes up and I have to put it down.
Time passes, I forget where I was and lose the storyline, start over again then rince and repeat.
Its no critique of the game, it is what makes it great.
I never really played proper D&D so its pure storyline for me.
Oh and nostaligia is not a bad thing as long as it dont turn into rose tinted glasses ;-)
The sad thing is they just don't make RPGs like they used to. To this day no RPG offers the freedom that BG did, the graphics, voice acting and art have all improved but the actual game mechanics and freedom granted to the player have gotten worse. Even games trying to emulate BG get it wrong, making the games too linear with almost no choice to be an evil or neutral character.
I've been watching youtube for I dunno how many years. I rarely comment (only ever done once). I've always wanted a baldurs gate Retrospective and wondered why for a game as good and well thought of as important as this one is no one has ever done one. The fact that you did it as seriously and in depth as you did means alot. Thank you.
My memory of Baldur's Gate is spending an entire summer as a teenager in 1999 just brute-forcing myself through the first game. I didn't understand THAC0 or any of the tabletop rules, so I made a two-hand wielding halfling warrior. Didn't get the armor class system, so everyone was adorned in heavy armor with the highest armor class. The magic system was way beyond me, so I just chose spells based on if they had a cool description.
If it wasn't for the constant savescumming and the cheap AI kiting, I probably never would have beaten it.
That's fine man I actually understand most of the game and i still need save scumming and ai cheesing lol.
“To recreate Baldur’s Gate; that’s the page you’d have to get everybody back on. And that will never happen again.” - me smiling serenely two weeks after BG3’s release.
Bg 3 is a great divinity sequel but not a good Baldurs Gate follow up. Loved it but its not even close to the old games.
@@cömerdark6524 I haven't played Divinity: Original Sin 2 yet, do you think it'll be a comparable experience to BG3?
@@AustinPaulMusic If you like Bg3 then Divinity is a no brainer it’s basically the foundation for bg3 and in my opinion has a better soundtrack too 👌
I'm looking forward to his BG3 retrospective in 2 years :D
@@cömerdark6524 BG3 isn't really a follow up to BG 1 & 2 at all (Bhaal is present but not a central focus, the Dark Urge is wholly optional), I wish it'd been named something else, or even given a different setting (forgotten realms is getting pretty tired and wrote at this point, though I think Larian did a spin on it that's better than most) but I suspect they wouldn't have been allowed or able to make the game without the IP firmly attached to it, likely an executive decision.
There's also the matter of the "marvelification" of all forms of media where everyone needs to be quippy and EXTRA and have special trauma or an epic destiny (or both), like nobody in BG3 is just an ordinary person thrust into an extraordinary situation, they're all seasoned warriors, adventurers and badasses mysteriously deleveled by brain worms.
Haha, all that mention of Ed Greenwood makes me smile. I went to visit my parents, who had moved into a tiny town in Canada, and I went to library there. And who is the librarian? Ed Greenwood himself. He looks exactly like Elmeister in real life.
Did he sell you mead for rumors?
@@VileFemboy Well, he insist on keeping his library job. I can't say if his bank account is bursting with money, but I am pretty sure that he is not in it to get rich. He likes his job, so why not keep it?
@@iamnotevenanumber3312 He sounds great. I've got the librarian job, I just need to get publishing all my RPG crap now...
'Lowly clerk' indeed!
@@VileFemboy
Sometimes the biggest influences seem the least important outside of them.
Man chose a comfy and proud life, as you said it, he created the Forgotten Realms, does he need more to feel accomplished in life? Only he knows.
@@VileFemboy As far as wild exaggerations go, this one left me temporarily speechless. Not even sure if I should be angry or sort of impressed.
One thing I didn't like was the idea of the protagonist being beyond mortal concerns after ascending, it is not necessarily so in the Forgotten Realms setting, gods are more like the Ancient Greek ones, incessantly meddling and being part of the world. Which is why it really annoyed me that a a pregnant Aerie, or another lover would just be left in the dust.
In my personal head-canon, with that pairing, Aerie converted and became the new head priestess for the man she loved, so that they would never be truly apart, and so that they could be rejoined in death.
My character would also create an avatar to visit her as often as possible so that they perhaps could eke out a bit of marital bliss in between all the inevitable future conflict.
After all like the Greek ones, gods in FR act all too mortal so it is only fitting.
I played 120 hours of BG II but I have 0 achievements because they added them much much later on (like one full year after the release) ; i think most of the people played, like me, on the release, so thats why the numbers are so low (and the achievements are not retroactive if you load your savefile now)
Viconia's romance is also interesting because if you pursue it as a good-aligned character it has a really fucking tragic ending where Viconia's alignment actually changes to Good and in the epilogue you learn that her enemies eventually caught up with her and ended her life, leaving the protagonist to mourn her death.
There's a lot of interesting stuff with Viconia.
Not good, she becomes true neutral.
I know. I was unreasonably involved with this romance when I played it more than 20 years ago. I was devastated by the ending, but I had the feeling that I saved Viconia's soul.
Ah, I was misremembering the alignment shift a little bit. Still, it's a really interesting dimension to the romance. I wish RPGs would try something complicated like the Viconia romance more often, but I understand why they don't: players want to live out the fantasy of the romance and not have to stress about the obliqueness of actually succeeding at the romance arc. Closest similar case I can think of in the BioWare catalogue is Mass Effect 2's romance with Jack, but even that one is a lot simpler and easier to get through than this one.
Always bugged me that; Who exactly managed to catch up with this now epic level character and kill her?
Thankfully I went Jaheira for romance, which is pretty much all happy ending, but it's still irritating to me.
@@GriffinPilgrim If I recall, it was an assassin of Lolth, and she was killed with a special kind of poison. Being epic-level doesn't make you invincible, sadly.
I work at the library Ed Greenwood managed for years while he was getting his Forgotten Realms stuff off the ground! He retired from the library system to focus full time on his writing. I never met him but from time to time customers come in and ask after him and according to them all he was an extremely wonderful person :) As a fan of fantasy stuff i have always been a little honoured to work in the same place he did. Big fan of your videos Noah, thank you so much for all this amazing work you've done. Enjoyed all of your posts immensely :) !
I played this game TENS of times, many times beggining to end. I did solo runs, I played with friends and strangers, played with all possible teammates and character variations, I played most if not all of the classes beggining to end and using cheatcodes and buggs I would jump across the world, killing all npcs and then replace them with my own spawns and then I would use created result to run RPG sessions for my friends as if this was a sandbox game. Ive spend RL months if not years enjoying this game.
And until THIS DAY I have not even seen all this game has to offer. I play even today and sometimes accidentally come across a whole new quest line or dialogue Ive never seen. This game is a masterpiece. A treasure. Art. Its not just the best RPG game of all time, its THE BEST game and one of the best stories ever told.
Yes, I just started again today, and it hit me, years ago playing this game for months, I missed out on so many quests and interactions because I just played evil, and there were so many things I did not try.
Likewise, I've been playing the series since very shortly after the original was first released, and cut my teeth on the games. I had an abiding interest in AD&D as a child and marveled at the 80's and early 90's fantasy art style and sheer immensity of the fictional history within the modules but had no friends who played and didn't get to experience tabletop gaming until much later, so Baldur's Gate was my introduction to the ruleset and realms. The amount of times I've gone through the games I've lost count years ago as I frequently revisit it, and the amount of characters I've rolled even if only to store as pre-generated has to be over a hundred.
Yet to this day I continue to discover things in both games that I have somehow missed for over 20 years. For instance, just this past weekend I discovered that in Candlekeep, not only the location where the entire saga begins but inside the Inn, the entrance to which the game starts with you positioned directly in front of, there is already a circumstance that I never encountered. Evidently if you speak to Firebead Elvenhair after receiving the tutorial quest from him to collect and return an Identify scroll by clicking on him exactly 30 times, he will give you 300 gold. How could I have not known about this all these years later, about a game I thought I was more familiar with than the back of my hand?
Anyway I concur with the notion that it is the greatest CRPG of all time, even if at times I get caught up in thinking similarly about the original Fallout or the second and third Elder Scrolls games. Baldur's Gate 2 in particular is an astonishing achievement, a genuine masterpiece that remains incomparable across the board. The more recent nostalgic isometric pseudo-3D RPGs with rotatable cameras and full voice acting &c are in general being made by people who evidently don't grasp what it was that made the original games so timeless. In my opinion it is the very limitations of the technology at the time and the ingenuity applied to working around them that make these games stand apart; the gorgeous hand-painted prerendered backgrounds, the pixelated sprites, a relative absence of voice acting save for a few phrases, the complexity of the mechanics which reward comprehension in a way no other game has matched, the peculiar narrative tone and subtle sense of humor - these are all to my mind some of the major fundamental aspects of the original games which for several reasons remain in the past despite the revival of the approach in spirit, mainly I assume for the fear of low salability.
None of the modern isometric CRPGs offer the same depth of experience as the handful of classics that continue to stand out because they favor showing over telling. In Baldur's Gate and Fallout you would use your imagination as you played to actively develop an internal image of what your character looked like, what they felt like, likewise with your companions and the many NPCs with whom you would encounter, because visually they all appear to be the same several paper dolls or vague, pixelated forms with only shades of color to differentiate them. Fallout 2 even makes a joke about this directly. When you traversed the world map, you found yourself looking at an actual map and an icon representing you or your party would move across it from one symbol to the next, and you imagined the relatively uneventful trip.
What I'm ultimately saying is that by being forced to exercise ones own imagination in order to meaningfully engage with a work of art or interactive media, a sense of personal connection is developed which significantly enhances the emotional resonance experienced throughout. When the game you played feels like a personal adventure you went on, despite the fact that it looks practically identical to one everyone else experienced, it transcends the limitations of its format and presentation. The simplicity of the graphics and the use of descriptive narration to provide the details of the environment and its inhabitants conjure visions in the mind exactly as a great book does, whereas with moveable cameras by which you can look upon anything at any angle, and with heavily customizable avatars with visually defined features, everything is being directly presented to your senses and you become more of a passive observer than an active participant.
As a final note, to play this game in story mode is to do yourself an awful disservice in experiencing the realization of the tabletop experience in a single-player virtual form. The comparatively high number of combat encounters is a compensatory function to my thinking, and the difficulty is not so intense as many seem to consider it to be. Obviously if you go into the game blind (as I did initially), find the character creation phase to be arcane and roll a character with terrible attributes and skill points allocation, it is going to be a rough time. Something embarrassing to admit is that the first time I played the game as a 12 year old, I didn't even understand what the attribute rolls were or that rerolling was something you did to get a higher total number; I rolled a few times hoping that the points were evenly distributed and my first several characters probably had less than 80 total points. I suppose that these days there are so many video games being released and so frequently, that mastering an outdated ruleset to play an old video game series does seem somewhat pointless; back when the games were new there was not nearly as much variety, and as children you tend to have less access to the necessary funds and so a video game you got for Christmas or your birthday might be the only game you get that entire year. I still prefer 2nd edition because it is what I learned on, and to me it isn't counterintuitive at all, it just took time. The hugely complex nature of the games interpretation of the rules is actually what keeps me returning to it all these years later. The story is fantastic, the companions are probably the most memorable in all of gaming, the soundtrack is remarkable (and as a massive fan of mid-seventies to mid-eighties electronic music, krautrock, disco &c Michael Hoenig being its composer is mind blowing), but it is the incredible variety of characters that can be rolled, and the many approaches to most encounters available, that always call me back. Defeating Kangaxx in the sequel, or the several dragons, are feats that can be accomplished in countless different ways and so much of the appeal is in learning just how deep the system actually is and how much room for creativity is available.
Oh and one more thing, sorry. But Jon Irenicus is the greatest villain in video game history, and by far. I enjoy chasing him even more than I do encountering The Master, even if the latter is clearly the more original. "You've released ALL of my test subjects?! How wonderfully mad of you.." I still have nightmares from the Beholder lair beneath the Temple District, and the spike room in Bodhi's beneath the Graveyard District.
how would you know if this is one of the best stories ever told if you spent your life playing videogames instead of developing your taste in art and literature
@@buffgarfield5250 What are you getting at?
Slow experience gain is an understatement. I farmed the shit out of the ant lion looking creatures by the lake area for experience on my first playthrough. Damn it was pretty cool looking back though, kinda like the training montage in a rocky movie.
it's funny how with baldur's gate a single class character will barely be level 8 at the end of the first game, then in icewind dale you'll just skyrocket up in power during the first real dungeon of the game.
Better yet, go to the basilisks and let Korax the ghoul tank their gaze attacks. You'll reach around 35000 exp just by clearing that map.
I got so spooked when I encountered them the first time. I thought: "I went too far to fast!"
@@toprak3479 That's a good idea, I farmed sirens last playthrough by the lighthouse but that sounds more efficient.
You should play Kenshi, it really gives huge Rocky training montage vibes, besides being such a genuine great game.
You sound like a 1940's world war II war correspondent.
That's because he is.
hahahahaha
Whats interesting is that the transatlantic accent isn't natural, it's taught.
chocograph I thought he sounded like Seagrave Holmes
For me that's kind of the appeal
Many modern RPG designers can learn from the Baldur's Gate trilogy's storytelling. Rather than make the main plot about some calamity that threatens all of existence, they made the story about you and your character. Sure, there's always a larger threat and a dangerous villain, but you're reminded a number of times (even explicitly in BG1) that your problems are not everyone else', and that the world will continue on should you fail. This made the world seem so much bigger and more convincing, even if it was a fantasy setting. I think Bioware forgot this lesson when they made Dragon Age: Origins.
Seriously? The world feels so static in BG, the fact most times nobody even react to the pile of corpses ive left when visiting a city is so weird.
I honestly find the world of DA to be definitively more belieavable, i guess the only quite believable scenario i can recall in BG was the whole iron shortage stuff
@@Jrdotan seriously. I don’t think either game is particularly good at world simulation stuff, but BG’s story feels more grounded to me specifically for the reasons I listed. DA’s setting is certainly more gritty and dark, and in that way it’s closer to reality, but DA’s story undermines that with its chosen one narrative tropes. It’s kind of ironic then that BG, with its more traditional pulp fantasy setting, has a narrative that keeps the stakes reasonably low, with a scope that naturally broadens as the player gains more power.
@@matternicuss i dont really know about it, since sarevok tried to kill me for some reason i already kinda predicted it being a chosen one story and it ended up being pretty much that...
@@Jrdotan I mean, sort of, but not really. In BG, you’re a Bhaalspawn. One among many. The fate of the world doesn’t hinge on your character’s failure or success. Sarevok isn’t trying to destroy Faerun; he simply wants to become the next Lord of Murder. The Iron shortage threatens the stability of the region, sure, but it wouldn’t be the end of life as we know it.
In DA, you’re The Warden, and it’s made clear repeatedly that without your character’s involvement, the Darkspawn blight would pretty much wipe out Thedas. See, everything in DA’s plot is made more EPIC and grandiose. Despite the setting’s darker nature, it tells a very standard chosen one narrative we’ve seen in many, many examples of fantasy media. I’m not saying it’s necessarily bad, mind you, just that it doesn’t really feel as grounded as BG’s more localized threats.
@@matternicuss you may have a point when it comes down to the bhaalspawn not necessarily being a chosen figure
Achievements are now above 25% for the start. Which means bg3 brought players back to bg1.
That's actually pretty incredible
So the game awards xp for story goals. So at the point in the story where you get busy with the drow priestess, you earn XP. The rest of the party earns xp. It was hilarious to see several of my party members level up from this, including the possible romance characters. "I got laid so hard, even you leveled up!" :D
Aerie: "At least I'm an archmage now."
here again before the “how does baldurs gate 3 compare to 1 and 2” video comes out🤓
Just wanted to thank you Noah. This video opened my eyes to Baldur's Gate again. I played it and became frustrated, put it down and it has been years. I recently gave it another shot after some of the things you spoke about in this video. It made me realize this game could give me a chance to play D&D for the first time in my life.. something I've always wanted to do! I'm currently playing the games in chronological order and having so much fun. I owe you a ton! Thanks!!
Howd it go?
This is just a rare form of awesome content. There is no easy way to do this.. you did it very well.
It feels funny to be at just the right age -- and gaming age -- where negative AC / THAC0 still feels completely intuitive. That sense of "you've got a -2? SWEET!"
THAC0 is just like golf - less is more. I really don't understand how it's so difficult to get and I didn't even grow up with AD&D.
This is quite simply one of my favourite videos on all of TH-cam - Noah's truly a gift to the (slightly academic and analytical) gaming community. Thank you for so much for this.
"Stand down and your friends will live!"
"Ok, I'll submit, just leave my comrades be"
...
All your councilors: "Don't be silly mr. protagonist man, proceed with the cutscene as planned"
...got me too good xD
I love the fact that you named your LG Paladin "John Goodman".
His weapon should have been a tree branch
I would have like that, yet he's a NG Wizard Slayer
I loved how you specified LG for a paladin when there is no other alignment option for that class
@@kenny6920 You could argue Blackguard is still a Paladin
@@zyrkugilgamesh only a paladin in skills, but not in heart!
Revisiting this video a few years later, I realize your argument regarding the whole "trans kerfluffle" was so compelling that it convinced me to abandon the #gamergate crowd and focus my criticisms on characters who are poorly written and exist just to make a point, rather than just assuming all LGBT-themed characters or "diverse" casting always exists purely to virtue signal. Inclusion really isn't enough and in fact is harmful to progressive causes if the result is just a token. A well-written character can broaden horizons and serve as a counter-point to the common arguments of the alt-right and similar groups.
Also, "The only surefire defense against accusations of tokenism in writing is artistic sincerity." I'm saving that quote.
The biggest, and most justified IMO, criticism of the "trans kerfluffle" was how quickly the character shared her story. I know trans people and they are generally very private about the situation and don't bring it up until they really trust the other person. This can be seen with gay individuals for the last 50+ years. Coming out was not an easy choice and staying closeted was the norm. You don't just come out and tell a random stranger "hey I'm gay" or "hey I'm trans."
When you disregard the severity of the social anxiety that can and does come with being different and a minority, you are trivializing the idea you are trying to promote. When done like it was in SoD, it feels like classic tokenism. You've put it in and checked the box, but you've done nothing real to further the cause or change the understanding.
I said it on day one, Baldur's Gate has that amazing Girdle that led to some very funny, and not politically correct in 2021, encounters. If you really want to write a quality trans character in Baldur's Gate, start there. Make the character a companion, make this Girdle part of the quest, and end it with finding a way to flip the curse of gender swapping in to an affirmative magical solution for the character. The Girdle would only be a temporary stop gap and by making that clear in the writing you are now saying it's not a joke or a gimmick, it's a life changing event and the solution needs to be 100% permanent. This is high fantasy after all where we don't solve problems with medical science, we solve it with magic.
My gripe was/is that poor writing and characterization of a trans character in the game. And as Noah said, we could always ignore content in this series, so this is just more content we can ignore or explore. I would argue that by making this optional and burying it in the character dialogue, you can have a real to life encounter with an NPC after building some trust and give players a genuine and unique experience with an individual coming out to you and helping them grow as a character.
Hard disagree. Inclusion by itself is not a bad thing at all. You don't have to justify through theme all physical characteristics of your characters, and in games and film you cant simply omit many of them, so who am I hurting by choosing a diverse cast for the sake of it? Should I have a default set of characteristics for this situation?
@@franciscofarias6385 please re-read my comment above yours for a good answer. It's not enough to check an inclusion box.
We can't forget the two tropes in movies of the "token black guy" and "the black guy dies first." These have been panned and/or parodied because it was a laughable gimmick to check a box but offered no real substance.
So I would ask, is it enough to say a character is trans and never really explore it? Was it enough for Rowling to say Dumbledore is gay, but never actually dive in to that topic?
@@riffbw It's not a matter of being enough to check a box. It's just that checking a box is better than not checking it I believe. Representation by itself goes a long way in helping normalizing seeing minorities in media, and in making those minorities feel normal. Also, you're otherwise assuming that, unless the story is about being a minority, you should go with white/cis/straight/male by default, which sounds yikes.
Furthermore, the examples you gave were of (arguably) bad representations. The faux pas in the trans case or having a black guy dying early in a movie don't need to happen, even if the story isn't about being trans or black.
@@franciscofarias6385 it might be enough for now, but checking a box doesn't fix bad writing and a poor entry point to the inclusion.
I stand by what I said. If I was to meet a new person who is trans, I can guarantee when I start a first conversation, they are not just going to blurt out "hey I'm trans" partway through. Beamdog wrote the character in an unrealistic way.
I'm not a fan of tokenism when it because a huge selling point for your product. That starts to border on exploitation which is even worse. My issue is and was with the poor writing and I call it tokenism because that's all it is. They put it in there to say they did it and if offered no real substance.
It's great if people like the inclusion, I'm not complaining about the inclusion. I just think it was poorly done and I provided a quick and easy alternative quest line that would have made it infinitely more impactful to many people.
I always knew John Goodman was a son of Bhaal
Bhallin!
I go back and rewatch all of your videos at least once or twice a year, and I have to say your baludrs gate and NWN retrospectives are two of my favourites, thank you Noah, for years of quality entertainment.
Just finished the saga for the first time and feel like a part of my life is now complete. Catching up with these games that I missed in my childhood really is a joy.
I’m the reason those steam achievement stats are so low. I own Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 on steam in the same way most people own the bible and never read it. When it was on sale for $6 I bought it because I thought it was important to have / support it.
I completed BG2 before the first one and still consider it the best CRPG ever made. What I really enjoy about it is the combat system, the need adapt buffs and counter spells for every fight and learning to use each class in the party most effectively. There's insane levels of strategic and tactical combat options for exploiting weaknesses and protecting the party for different opponents in BG2 compared to other CRPG titles. The other awesome thing is conversations between party members. Dialogue is affected by characters chosen into party. The evil intelligent mage trolling the stupid heroic ranger, the virtuous knight going insane and turning against the party for murdering innocent people, advances from female party members if the main generated character is a male and so on. Story, graphics and sound are awesome as well. Very few games have the same feel of adventure, immersion and sense of achievement when you start to master the combat system. It's not just about dice rolls, but how to prepare and best utilize those various spells, skills and items to your advantage in each encounter.
I remember finally getting to the end of Throne of Bhaal after literally years with the series and just letting it run overnight while I agonized over what choice my character would make if they existed independently of me as the player. I wish the market existed still for games that make you really come along for the whole ride of the hero's journey rather than starting at the beginning then fastforwarding to the overpowered endgame.
Would pillars of eternity be something you like? It’s very similar to this game and pretty new
@@Falcon_Serbia I never managed to get into it. It played well, paid good homage to the crpg golden years and was visually stunning but it never hooked me
Personally I think that the abruptness of BG2's beginning was part of what made it so engaging. The mystery of Irenicus that slowly gets unveiled is a central element of the story, "who is this powerful madman, and why does he act like he does? What does he truly want with Imoen and the protagonist?"
By adding foreshadowing in Dragonspear and previous encounters with Irenicus, this central storythread is cheapened. It is no longer the mystery it once was.
lupusprobitas I think the true mystery was what made the former hero of Baldur's Gate leave Baldur's Gate.
And not to forget: How to get these overpowering skills he used :D
they didn't leave they got jumped and kidnapped
Kakreth TMD Before they got jumped and kidnapped, the terrible circumstances that came with the people of Baldur's Gate realizing that their hero who defeated Sarevok and Caelar Argent forced the hero to depart Baldur's Gate. Irenicus framed the hero for murder. Ever wondered why Yaga-Shura in Throne of Bhaal calls the hero the Terror Of The Sword Coast even if you are good aligned? The hero's reputation for the murder that made him/her leave Baldur's Gate is spreading out.
The narrator of BG2 hinted that the hero departed Baldur's Gate for reasons that relate to being a Bhaalspawn. Besides, why would the people of Baldur's Gate keep the hero around when they learned he/she is a Bhaalspawn like Sarevok? Before SoD, no one who played BG2 suspected that Irenicus framed the hero for murder to lure him/her out to get kidnapped. And throughout Siege of Dragonspear, Irenicus had to first assess whether the hero is the Bhaalspawn he wants or not before he kidnaps him/her, it makes sense for him to analyze his target first before making his move.
Noah, I just wanted to say that I thoroughly enjoy every one of your videos, but this one specially is about a series that´s really close to my heart, and having you analize it is just perfect. I've even found myself watching videos like the Homeworld critique, not being a fan of that game at all. I'm from Argentina, and english is not my first language (as you can probably tell just by reading this) but you speak with a cadence and a clarity that I can truly understand. I really appreciate everything you do here, and in your written reviews, and if my 3rd world economy would allow me, I'd be a proud patron of your channel. I don't care about frequency of uploads, I care deeply about quality, and your level of analisis is superior to almost every person on youtube right now, as rare are the games you choose to discuss. You'll always have a respectful (and most often silent) admirer in me. Greetings from the other side of the continent!
Don't worry about donating anything, I'm doing fine! I'm glad you enjoy them and find them worthwhile.
You're grammar is better than some of my fellow Americans.
Thanks, man :)
didnt know you could ANALIZE baldurs gate
must hurt
I'm sorry. English is not my native language... I believe it's "analyze", correct?
Baldur's Gate is one of the best - if not the best - rpg series out there. The story, atmosphere and how deeply it's rooted into pen & paper lore is just fantastic. Personally, I dig the combat system, that is very tactical (especially in BG 2) and doesn't require pointless micro management that so many games do nowadays. Micro like abilities with low CD that you repeat and repeat and repeat every single combat in the exact same order...
At the same time, BG 1 have one of the most outrageous and unfair battles ever, which was hugely improved in BG 2 not only because we have tougher, higher level characters, but also because the encounters were improved in terms of balance. Giving hobgoblins poisoned arrows for example, when players have very little and limited option to cure it.
BG 1 also have some very simple, tedious sub-quests (fetch quests in general), like NPC having a total of four (literally) lines of dialogue: for starting the quest, informing you didn't completed it yet, when turning in and after finishing. Again, improved in BG 2 to the point, where like the first 1/3 of the game is a huge compilation of long sub-quests that you do in any order you like.
It's a big mistake to start with BG 1 if someone is new to the series. You don't need to play BG 1 to understand the plot. You will only get stuck on the game and won't feel like starting the second - much improved - BG 2.
Many people won‘t like going back to lower level adventuring after starting with BG2. I believe starting with BG1 is therefore, as well as to avoid spoilers for BG1 in BG2, preferable.
@@markusk2289 You could say that the same "many people" may not like the dreadful beginning of BG1 and drop the series entirely. It's somehow diminished in Enhanced Edition, so for a newcomer I would recommend that, makes a smoother transition between both games as well.
In the wake of BG3, it’s really cool to hear about the earlier games. I don’t know if I’ll ever make it back to play them, but hearing your analysis gives some fascinating context for the new game
In the original BG1, sometimes when traveling between maps you'd encounter a band of thieves with bows that already surrounded you at the start of the battle and could decimate your party in a matter of seconds. Or in any regular fight, if even a regular enemy rolled a critical hit, it could kill a character which was at best a major financial
Quicksave can obviously remedy a lot of that stuff, but if you wanted to do a "hardcore" playthrough of the game, you'd have to really break it to survive.
So I kicked him in the head til he was dead, hahaha.
@@balkthor That line was obNOXIOUS
It's like having 2 dungeon masters. One rules lawyer with a supreme authority and another with the knowledge and writing skills of a dozen of people.
True; but both DMs work when you have time to play, and are off when your busy.... soooo they just emailed you a script and code to compile... And.... Baldur's Gate
In Baldur's Gate 2 NPC conversations afaik are on a timer. There's a mod that lets you tweak it.
Oh-ho!
Mods are actually a really fun way to spice up Baldur's Gate. There's also a mod in Baldur's Gate 1 that adds dialogue for companions in a similar way as to Baldurs Gate 2 handles dialogue, and Baldur's Gate 2 has an extra dialogue mod, both are very well written.
I like the normal Banter Pack, but I tried some more and ended up with an even more childish Aerie and it turned into a ridiculous soft-porn story in Throne of Bhaal ;).
@@BhaalTheFleischgolem Aerie is pretty much tailor-made for creepy fanfic.
A factual mistake here: for ThaC0 LOWER IS BETTER: for proof, look at the 'Level-up results' screen at 25:30 - it says THAC0 reduced by 1 - as your char gets better it moves closer to zero
Whilst that's a valid correction, THAC0 is still ass backwards. It's the same basic calculation as later editions would use (roll + modifier vs. target number) but the target number is THAC0, a property of the attacker and the modifier is a property of the target whereas in later editions the target number is AC a property of the target and the modifier is a property of the attacker, which makes more intuitive sense.
It's simply a relic of old pen&paper days, when you had a table in the rulebook on which you looked up class/level of the player and the AC of the enemy to get a number which you had to roll on a d20 (here is an example: 3.bp.blogspot.com/-1BFhlrAlLfo/UdXsFdXbp4I/AAAAAAAAVVU/4UaIbo7Gwpg/s767/1st+Edition+ADnD+Attack+and+Assassination+Tables.jpg). Later on in AD&D, the concept of "THAC0" was introduced as an optional rule - you took the same table and looked up the number for your class/level to hit an AC0 enemy, and noted that down on your character sheet as your "to hit AC 0" number. From then on, you did not have to consult the table anymore, instead you simply adjusted that number upward/downward according to the actual AC of the enemy (subtract from THAC0 if enemy AC was greater than 0, add to THAC0 if enemy AC was lower than 0). That's why it feels so clunky, it wasn't a mechanic the rules designers intended from the beginning, it got introduced later on when someone figured out a way to not have to constantly consult the combat tables at every fight.
Actually, the to-hit number as a property of the attacker and a modifier based on the defender's armor / dodge makes more intuitive sense... your ability to hit something with a given weapon is an attribute of YOU not of anybody else. That number then gets adjusted by what you're trying to hit. I have no problem with THACO whatsoever, the problem I have is subtracting armor class from that, when armor class for enemies after the first couple of levels will almost always be negative. Starting AC as a negative (-10 instead of +10) number and simply adding that number to the THACO makes much more sense.
It's a relic of AD&D 2nd edition being a RPG system held together with bubblegum and duct tape.
As someone who loves figuring out ridiculous systems I love it but it's just not a well designed game system and it never was.
There is no reason the players should even have to know their opponent's AC. You subtract your roll from your THAC0 to get the AC you hit (or above) and the DM tells you if that is low enough to hit your opponent.
AC going down is more a relic of being based on navel ship classes (first class ship having best armour, second class slightly less, third class slightly less and so forth). THAC0 was simply a way to express the To Hit table without having to print the table all the time.
Modern Bioware is a shell of this
That's what happens when companies like EA gets their hands on great developers
*realize that at the time of writing, the writer of this comment could not have known about Anthem
*weep
Larian Studios making _Baldur's Gate 3_ instead of Bioware is yet another testament to this sad fact.
@@Latinkon and yet, Larian is a dead company. A skeleton of what it was. Alot of angry old fans separate it from LaLaLarian and Larian. tho i hope you guys have fun with the new games
@@Latinkon
Larian is an excellent alternative though, I'm also happy that the series is given new life by people who are still actively engaged and enamoured by the RPG genre. The developers who crafted baldurs gate have long left the ranks of Bioware.
About killing Skie at the end of Siege of Dragonspear: you DON"T have to kill her. You can avoid fighting her, which leads to Irenicus telling you are smarter then he thought or something along the lines and killing her by himself.
how
@@Sassy_Witch Just run around and try to not die for some time.
"ThAC0 is wacko, and I want no part of it." Your commentary is so great.
"Oh no, not these assholes" Noah
I miss thaco. Even though ITS WAY TOO COMPLICATED!
There is a learning curve but I was able to understand it as a 12 year old after some time. It is nice and simply, even elegant
Sooooo.... Who else is back to revisit this in light of BG3's full release?
A nearly two hour retrospective of the Baldur's Gate series? Can't think of a better way to spend my time.
FYI, all you need to get through the basilisk area is "protection from petrification" spell which Jaheira usually posses or is otherwise obtainable in scroll form from shops or from other mages.
Scout ahead with a stealthed rogue (Imoen?) to find out the Basilisks, cast it on your best fighter and send him forth to collect aggro and have the Basilisks focus fire on him. Then use the rest of your party with long range weapons to kill the beasts or assault from behind them.
It should be fairly easy to slay them, presuming of course that you're at a viable level with decent enough equipment; basilisks are not goblins, afterall, petrification gaze aside.
IIRC (my AD&D knowledge is a bit dated) you could also cast Bless or other spells that would boost saving throws.
Also, it's a videogame, so saving every 5 minutes is kind of expected. The combat is RIDICULOUSLY imbalanced for a tabletop game -- running Baldur's Gate for a similarly leveled party as yours in BG would send them to the morgue after a few encounters. The difficulty curve is only feasible in the game because you can save.
I might try to go about a deathmarch / no save run at some point and try it. I love this series and replay it every so often.
Don't forget the overwhelming amount of "Potions of Mirrored Eyes" (petrification immunity for 10 rounds) that you get through the game.
Malisa1990
Aye. Later on in the game dying to basilisks' stone gaze is more of a joke on your part for rushing into a fight instead of scouting ahead properly or otherwise doing something wrong.
If you check out your opponents and prepare right, you should survive most encounters save the hardest ones.
Poonchow
Well, you can move the difficulty slider, too. ;)
There's also a ghoul named Korax that you can temporarily recruit into your party as a "seventh" member in the same area as the basilisks. He's immune to petrification, so you can aggro the basilisks with him and be relatively safe from their gaze as they'll generally focus on Korax so long as you don't have him wander off.
This video popped up in my recommendations. Thank you! I am 30 hours into my first playthrough and i'm really enjoying it. I feel like you forgot to mention just how much talent is in the voice acting! The cast is a plethora of A list veteran actors and voice actors! Once again thanks.
LOL I love how 1 minute in Noah got tired of his own intro so he just faded out and started talking over himself. Amazing.
I just bought Baldur's Gate 3 on a whim because I'm a Dragon Age fan and know DA was based off BG, so here I am to check out the history behind this famous name.
0.1% have allied themselves with the thieves in Baldur’s Gate 2 (Achievement)...
I’m one of them, and it’s weird that this is the lowest achievement, and not finishing the game on the highest difficulty or killing one of the dragons.
*Looks around*
"Why am I working with vampires again?"
0.1% of people have the SOLO achievement in Pillars of Eternity...and I am one of them. Booya!
Noah, you are the reason I started playing bg1 and I didn't regret a millisecond of those 100 hours, now after a few months off, I'm playing through Siege of Dragonspear before I start bg2 THANK YOU FOR YOUR HARD WORK
whiff Spiggins I’m about to start but I’m daunted. I’m not sure I understand how to play or make a character
@@simbobcrafts4843 take your time, save very often and name your saves. Try to have a party with 2 to 3 strong melee types and the rest ranged even slings are very effective, but you need at least 2 tanks that you can use to pull heat from incoming enemies with to keep the weak classes safe and then the weaker classes can wreak havoc upon the enemies trying to hurt your tanks with bows and slings and spells. Save before every battle, because often losing is the result of an invisible roll of 0 or enemy roll of 20. Hope this helps 😊 also the lower your "THACO" stat in your character sheet the more likely you will hit the enemy so the better armor you wear the lower that number will go its counter intuitive to the norm but it is what is is lol
whiff Spiggins Thankyou for the advice. I was thinking about using elf ranger archer for my main character. I like ranged. Does this sound ok?
@@simbobcrafts4843 thats a great idea 😄
whiff Spiggins Also, would an archer need wisdom?
I’m 14 yrs old in 2021 and I love this. Other games that most modern kids enjoy don’t interest me but older games like baldur’s gate and diablo are just fantastic. They were made in a time where games were made with passion and seen as an art instead of an attempt to seize somebody’s wallet. Truly an amazing experience, so immersive.
Try Neverwinter Nights and Titan Quest, Star Wars KotOR 1&2, they're ported onto Android.
There's still a lot of games being made today by people who clearly care about gaming as an art, both high budget and those made in a basement somewhere. Supergiant Games continues to produce experiences that feel like emotional nuclear blasts, for example. I don't think it's fair to discount modern gaming just because EA sucks.
EA does suck though. I do agree that it's pretty obvious when a company just wants your money in exchange for a product, and not to show you a piece of art.
Old good new bad
I've watched basically all of your videos and left comments here and there but I always forget to just say that I fucking love sitting down to a comprehensive, intelligent, well structured review, and your voice is never grating or annoying like so many others. Thanks for making these videos. I hope you continue, 81k subs is criminally low for the quality of your videos but hopefully you'll find a wider appreciative audience soon.
actually I was just nice to Viconia as well the entire time as well. After I slept with her she did get cold with me (I saw it as her being scared of her feelings toward me because that's not the kind of relationship they have in the underdark) but after a while she apologizes for being cold and the romance continues.
"You're suppose to be already thinking 'Oh-no, not these @$$holes'".
I cracked up at that.
I'm fairly certain the Enhanced Edition is significantly more popular on GoG than it is on Steam. Which would account for the low numbers for those low achievment numbers.
One minor mistake. You said the higher your THAC0 the better. No, the lower your THAC0 the better. Level 1 characters start off with a 20 THAC0 and then that number slowly comes down with character levels and additional pluses to hit.
But yeah, even though i'm a long time 2e D&D player, I didn't like how THAC0 was handled in Baldur's Gate. It almost felt like Black Isle screwed with the table and stacked it against the player. In BG1 it's easy to say "well you're still low level, so it's understandable you'd miss a lot". However in BG2, your fighters are of a high enough level they should be hitting things consistantly. ESPEICALLY in the first dungeon where a large portion of your early enemies are goblins. They shouldn't have an AC higher than 5. With your characters starting off at about 8th leve, your fighters would have a 13 THAC0. Meaning you have to roll an 8 or better to hit, but when you figure in strength bonuses and proficiency bonuses, that 8 turns into a 3. You need to roll a 3 or better to hit, and it's really frustrating to see how often you roll a 2. Several times in a row you will roll that 2. That never felt natural to me.
From what I understood, the backlash stemmed from a joke that came at the expense of Gamergate. Maybe it was also about the trans character. This issue then turned into, it became impossible to criticize this game without someone automatically assuming it was just about the trans character or that one joke. Which as you put it, "is a frustrating bit of blind idiocy".
The problem with Safana IS the fact they rounded out her character and gave it more depth. The expansion comes in the middle of the story, so when you go back to the base story, so does her character. For someone that has either never paid attention to her character before, or someone who is playing the games for the first time, this comes off as really bad story writing. It makes Black Isle look bad in comparison.
Whereas, adding depth to Khalid and Jaheira's marriage works extremely well and, I agree adds weight to the beginning of BG2. So more examples of the expansion being a bit of an unbalanced mess.
Boo is a mini giant space hamster.
I attribute the quality of this game 100% to Black Isle and little to nothing to Bioware. While KOTOR, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect 1 were all good games, they all lacked that little something in the storywriting that is found in Baldur's Gate. There are 3 phases of Bioware. Black Isle is phase 1. This is where they learned everything they know about RPGs from Black Isle. Post Black Isle/Pre EA is the second phase. This is where they've done their best work as a solo development company. The final phase is post-EA. This is after EA bought them and nearly everyone that was responsible for taking everything they learned from Black Isle and turned the company into the powerhouse it became, left.
Good video man. It makes me want to finally get around to buying the Enhanced Editions of these games despite owning the core games already.
Not to mention beamdog sells it directly; and that's the "recomended" version to use their multiplayer servers
It's hard sometimes to justify my brief free time to sit and watch such a lengthy video vs. so many shorter ones, but I find it's always worth it with these Thorough Looks. As always, looking forward to the next one.
BG2 was my introduction to D&D, and its byzantine rules were a huge part of the intrigue for me. The Forgotten Realms is rich with lore, but its coupling with the AD&D system made it feel like this whole new world I could get lost in. That it was at times punishingly difficult didn't feel like much of an issue when you had quick saves bound to Q by default; I thought "savescumming" was an intended method of play. I've started a play-through recently, well over a decade and a half later, and I'm "savescumming" my way through again. I guess it's my version of "story mode". But yeah, if a party member dies, I load. Maybe if I played through the game again, I'd rely on quick saves less - just another reason this series has near-endless replay value.
I mean, just like in FE, it's fine if you reload whenever a npc dies.
This was an amazing video friend, I'm 25 now, and I started Baldur's gate 1, when I was 8...It truly like the taint of Bhaal in the the protagonist left its mark on me growing up.
Please do a thorough look at Star Wars KOTOR
If you haven't watched the Kreia video yet, that's an amazing background.
Still waiting for this to happen
So sayeth the Slöth
He's done it.
This video was (is) AMAZINGLY good! You sir, deserve a salute for playing through the whole series, summarizing the plot, it's flaws and cherries, and then telling us what your opinions are in this video. I've watched it from start to finish, now downloading BG1 as a result - since I'll TRY to play through the whole series as a whole. I thank you, for your time and effort!
Awesome retrospective. I'm one of the players not running story-mode, but I can totally understand why you played it. I think it's also worth mentioning that BG has a huge modding scene with some really good quality mod like the one which adds the same amount of character development as in BG2 to BG1. In fact without this modding community Beamdog would not have been possible.
I started playing D&D in 1976. 0 Edition (Chainmail rules) I had almost forgotten how much Baldur's Gate captured the spirit of D&D from the earlier days. So, I have purchased BG1, Dragonspear and BG2 on my tablet, and starting them tonight. (Why not...Not like there is much else to do with the Beer Bug locking us all down) Thank you for one of the most enjoyable videos I have watched in quite a while. At the ending of the video, watching the stories of the companions, I felt a bit sad. Lots of memories tied up in 44 years of tabletop D&D, and the electronic versions of it. Old friends (some gone on to the Outer Planes) Games in the damnedest places (We played D&D in the desert in 1990. One photocopied DMG, a dog eared PHB and rocks, vehicle parts and wires for figures. A beetle wandered onto our "table" and immediately all party members rolled initiative and attacked!) and some truly amazing conversations. I still play online via Discord and Roll20, but I do miss the old days sitting around a table. Anyway, thanks again. i look forward to 120 hours + of gameplay ahead of me.
Check out Knights of the Chalice afterwards if you are interested. I'm sure you will love it.
I'm not sure whether anyone brought it up already, but you can avoid being turned to stone with lvl-1 mage spell Protection from Petrification.
Also, you can avoid it with Korax, the friendly ghoul who proposes to join you in this location. He is immune to petrification, though it requires patience to move him before the party because he is positioned at the back of the party, so you need to manage him manually, plus he doesn't reveal the fog of war, which also makes things more difficult.
So as you can see, you're not required to use story mode to successfully complete this area. It's not as obvious, as the game doesn't say you to do this to complete this area. Yes, Baldur's Gate does not offer solutions as clear as other modern games and RPGs, but it is common with older games, you just need to investigate the issue by yourself and find a solution using your own creativity.
My first encounter hearing the Hooded Man's voice actor playing through SoD was possibly the most jaw-dropping, bone-chilling, nostalgic feeling I've ever had playing any RPG in the history of RPGs.
The people raging about a trans character in SoDS obviously forgot about the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity. Transitioning is entirely part of the lore. You can transition characters between gender in BG and BG2.
Not really, no. In fact, when she was first brought up, that I recall on the BD forums, most people were asking how you give her the Belt, since, well, they used a voiced line for her. that tends to be something important, given Voices aren't used often in even SoD. Then it turns out, nah, she's some authors agenda piece, and she was ignored afterwards...then the same author started to tell people any problems they had with the game were really about the politics she inserted into it, rather than the story being genuinely bad, and the game being bug riddled and crash prone.
Dude every single video I have seen you have had an amazing song I've never heard before, I wish you made a song playlist. Been binging on your vids so glad I found you.
Anyone here to revisit his thoughts before playing BG3?
I nearly forgot about the brutal permanence of death in this game. I remember the first time one of my party members got turned to stone by a basilisk and thinking "didn't I see a scroll for sale somewhere that could reverse that?". Or how I learned that by shattering an enemy after freezing them with an ice wand prevented me from getting one of the more useful items in the game: the boots of speed.
I also loved that even uber-powerful characters actually carried items on their person. Such as Drizzt, who, after I learned how to kill by disbanding my party members in strategic positions around him which prevented him from moving (and then proceeding to sloooooowly kill him from afar with a bow), was duel wielding two very interesting swords, Twinkle and Icingdeath, which I "acquired" from him on my second playthrough of the game years ago.
And, yes, the game was agonizingly long. But at the time I played it in 1999, along with the TotSC expansion, I thought nothing of spending an hour or two doing things like sneaking around Beregost in the middle of the night with Imoen ("Heya! It's Me, Imoen!") stealing the citizens blind (and I was ostensibly one of the "good" guys!). It was essentially the first real open world game I ever played and the care and attention to providing things to do for those types of players was astounding.
Thank you for providing yet another compelling look at a classic game series that I will always fondly remember. :)
Noah, please don't do this to me when I'm about to go to sleep.
"thaco is wacko" I need that on a shirt
I am one of those weird math geeks who saw absolutely nothing wrong with thac0… but I would still love to have this shirt as well.
I'm the same. thac0 and ac might be a bit counter-intuitive because smaller is better, but look into it, and it perfectly understandable.
The thing often forgotten about Thac0 is that at the time, it was a logical streamlining of the rules. I do understand that the video only use them to illustrate the point about the ADnD ruleset being very esoteric for new players, but I still think that harping on about Thac0 being the worst thing ever is a tad misguided. Though I guess this is a point for "a though look at Dungeons and Dragons". Whatever madman would undertake that task.
Compared to Dual Class and how the exp caps work, Thac0 isn't remarkably awkward.
Im a Wacko? Damn. I kinda allready knew this however, Then again Putting me on your shirt? Br0 We need to talk about dinner first.
Is it too much to hope that Gervais revisits the series with the release of Baldur's Gate 3?
I keep coming back to this video in anticipation for bg3. Still a masterpiece of a video.
I stumbled across this after watching your Fallout retrospective and thought it was fascinating. That said, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't interested in seeing an addendum involving Baldur's Gate 3.
I just started the video, and I just wanted to say that Beamdog didn't add Steam Achievements until 2016, which would likely account for not many people having them yet.
30% left Irenicus dungeon now.
Call the men in white coats if you must, but I found the combat in this series to be fun. To me the swinging and missing was more an elaborate, deadly and nerve-wracking dance of combat. A system far more engrossing and believable than systems like World of Warcraft where every attack hits and everyone is simply a living damage sponge.
Also some of the swinging is only visual, from what I remember. Many characters in bg1 only attack once per six seconds. The only way to attack more than this is under the haste spell, oil of speed, or if you have two stars in proficiency with a kind of weapon. And then it's only 1.5 attacks per six seconds.
It would be really boring to have six seconds in between swings. It would involve people spending a lot of time standing and doing nothing. So false swing animations were added to the game to make it look like the characters are doing stuff more often. But. It's not a real attack. This leads you to think you're only hitting once every like fifteen weapon swings or something when that isn't actually the case.
Thank you so much for these videos. I had only heard about Baldur's Gate in passing before. I'll probably never play it, but you talking about its legacy in your signature style really was a treat.
I never played (A)D&D, yet I went into the games with relish around the early and mid 2000s, and as year by year I got older and better at English through my early teens, I figured out more and more and eventually learned the ruleset of the game right from within the Baldur's Gates - right down to the spells, potions, scrolls and items you could find and use to actually deal with those harsh rules. It holds a special place indeed, and even now some 10+ years since last I played any of them, those little epilogue texts got me tearing up. Your final points here also highlight why I'm not particularly excited for the Baldur's Gate 3 that has now been announced and started going through early access - what could they possibly hope to do that merits resurrecting the name of a story that's not only been long finished and wrapped up, but which relies upon world lore of the Forgotten Realms that was on the verge of being distant past edition lore even as BG2 was released?
Lovely video anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed this "little" 2 hour journey through such a big part of my gaming past.
I just recently finished the whole saga. Still got a nostalgia trip from this masterpiece of a video. Bravo 👏
I have the immense luck of having this game as one of my firsts. So many memories, I want to replay it again...
Just at a glance I don't see any other comments saying this, so.
Around 58:00 when you mention that you were definitely the one that did it and how alignment or choices typically affect the plot but not in this case, that's actually wrong.
If, at the trial, you're seen as a hero and convince Belt you didn't do the deed, the cutscene in the cell will show Irenicus having stabbed Skie. Otherwise, if you're seen as a villain, you truly did kill Skie while Irenicus was urging you to give in.
A bit of that was added later, when people found ways of disabling the target rather than killing them, and the cutscene would still say you killed her regardless of her being alive, so Beamdog made it so now there are ways not to kill her, but the Trial proceeds regardless, and you're made a scapegoat for the city's problems instead, especially as Bereaved father figure wants someone's head for it, and it might as well be your's. The result is the same, you out of the city, in a perfect position to be grabbed by the big bad.
Hey Noah, I noticed you're reading some of these comments as of two weeks ago.
Keep up the good work, love all your stuff. Hope to see you make a video on BG3 as this is one of my favorites of yours :)
Kind regards
I too, am interested on a Baldur's Gate 3 video. I've played a lot of it on early access, and I am hyped to see how it continues.
I've watched this several times, which for a nearly two hour review hopefully shows how much I think of it (and you, as reviewer).
And I think that the highlighting of the genius of the transferring AD&D from TTRPG into a computer game in a way not really seen before or after is done excellently. Also, hardly anyone has talked about Durlag's Tower, which was great. Finally, who ever made the choice about being a 'child of Bhaal' deserves 1000 XP bonus because it meta-games the game into standstill. Brilliant!
Jon was like my favorite bad guy it the face of 40 years of gaming.
41:30 my issue was that Forgotten Realms is a setting with literal gender change magic . Elminster spends half of his first novel turned into a woman named Elmira.
Even in Baldur’s gate you can get a belt that does this. I don’t know gender disphoria feels like it wouldn’t be a big problem in Forgotten Realms
Baldur´s Gate, Arcanum and Fallout, I could spend a eternity playing them.
The hours I must have invested into this game.... Grew up playing this religiously in the early 2000s as a young boy and still play Enhanced Edition today. Still remains my favorite game saga.
Great look back at BG. I wasn't always trying to kill everyone as a DM as so much trying to give them an immersive experience. I used to create even what fish were in the local lakes and all the drow foods on the table in the dungeon. Described them to see if they would piece it together what they were up against.
Dear Noah,
I would like to see "A Thorough Look at Baldur's Gate (Revised)", to be produced at your earliest convenience.
Thank you in advance.
I stumbled on this somehow by looking for Wasteland 2 videos. Specifically on how to beat the Tinker boss in the game. And I must say this video is pretty freaking awesome.
I have more than one friend that realized they were trans because of DnD and playing a character of a different gender than they thought they were.
Is this satire plz say this is a bad joke lmfao
@@Luckyluke870 No it's not a joke at all, one friend specifically, she played a girl character in a role-playing game and felt like she was getting really into it, much more than any other character, and she started learning makeup to do makeup like her character for "help with role play" and started exploring more and more femininity until she reached a point of realization that this is who she was.
Lol I rethinking my idea to get into tabletop rpg lol
Man i have watched most of your videos more than once. Still come back, they are just so good
Ok, so i discovered Baldur's Gate by watching my father play it when i was 5 years old in 2000.
It became one of my fantasy home. Your video is an hommage and a true observation of what these games were. Thank you.
Noah, you make the absolute best gaming content on TH-cam. I just wanted you to know that.
Very thorough and introspective.....
Damn, I just stumbled upon this from a link in an extra creditz video about the dungeon design of Durlag's Tower, now I couldn't stop watching it until the end. It's an amazing summary of my feelings for Baldurs Gate and whenever I now get into a debate about someone who doesn't understand why a new game X is not as good as Baldurs gate, I can link them with this video and rest assured that my point is made clear.
However, I feel that Noah missed one ... or rather two important points about what made Baldurs Gate special:
The 2D graphics in an age where everyone was making the change to 3D graphics made it stand the test of time so well - and second: the soundtrack being one of the most iconic suites of music in gaming culture even today.
Zwiebel4
Yep, music is a classic, like Jeremy Soules Total Annihilation score.....
I agree u need to never give up and continue to improve ur videos visually and audio so u get more viewers! the content and voice are perfect its just the visual needs a little upgrade
This video was great except for the part where he talked about how Beamdog created a new campaign and let his voice carry a positive tone while speaking those words. Siege of Dragonspear is not and will never be canon in the BG series. It is an abomination that is absolutely untrue to the source material as admitted openly by the person who wrote the script and dialogue. Characters had their personalities changed on purpose because the author did not like them.
It would be like somebody doing a new Duke Nukem game and saying, "You know, I think Duke is to rude, brash, and disrespectful in this certain way that I personally don't like. I'll change that." Sorry, but whatever in the fuck that shitty game would turn out to be would absolutely not, under any circumstances, be remotely related Duke Nukem. How about Mortal Kombat without any blood? Why not make Mario tall and Luigi short and fat? Beamdog will go out of business in a few short years for letting a person who shouldn't have ever been anywhere near the writer's chair make core personality changes to core characters.
South Park has little kids swearing in it. The Simpsons features a dysfunctional family with a fat, beer-guzzling father. Duke Nukem is rude and doesn't have time to care about anything but kicking ass. And the characters in Baldur's Gate were not, are not, and will never be meant to fulfill some one-sided vision of the political ramblings of a bigot who can't possibly accept any message being sent out through a video game unless it conforms to their own personal biases. Some of the characters you will think are wrong, some you will think are right, and some you won't know what to think of them. The incredibly stupid writer that worked on BG:SoD has no understanding of this at all and should have never been hired in the first place. Good riddance!
I never got into it when it first released, I tried but never really got much further than the first area, i always just gave up after creating a party and getting killed by a random enemy. Recently I´ve been playing it on switch and i finally get it, it´s a very charming game and I plan to finish all of it. Playing Pillars of Eternity opened my eyes to the genre.
You describe Viconia as mean, arrogant and sexually aggressive but this is hardly unique to her. That's ALL Drow females XD
She is really great if you get to know her too.
Viconia is by far my favorite NPC.
He's being incredibly biased towards her, while dismissing the others, like for example Aerie, as someone you just need to be nice with. Apparently he never went too far with her, since if you just go with the flow, be nice and all that, she ends up leaving. You basically need to heal her "wounded heart" not only by being nice, but being stern with her and even stopping her advances when you see her doing it out of desperation.
I honestly liked all of the romance options to some extent, they are leagues better than anything neo-Bioware has come up with.
Oh yeah, maybe that's why I never really cared for that chick much...
And to think many young women want to be more like her... Great... Just great. 👏👏👏
@@KazeVongola What, you're not a fan of tired faces?
As a guy who played AD&D IRL for hours and hours during the time that BG was out, I love the ruleset, understand it and dont have much trouble going back to it after all these years.
20 years on and vanilla BG1+TotSC remains my favourite game of all times. I've played [insert very long list of game titles], BG1 is still at the top.