The Baldur's Gate Saga (Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast, Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal)
Ah, Bioware. Known for its formulaic, yet effective, plots, dialogue trees, and romantic side quests.
Back in the early days of Bioware, they developed the Baldur's Gate series with publisher Black Isle Studios.
Its a story gamers will see for years to come: A protagonist coming from a normal background with an abnormal gift, thrown bodily into adventure, aided by a Cheerful Companion, a Dumb but Hilarious Ensemble Darkhorse companion, and a plethora of other (exceedingly) uniquely characterized personalities - to save the city/kingdom/world/multiverse.
Before we had Mass Effect's dialogue wheel, Baldur's Gate had a dialogue tree that made Type-Moon games looks like nickel comic books. Baldur's Gate was HUGE in lore, backstory, immersive plot, and dialogue options, with plenty of shout outs to the rest of the D&D and Forgotten Realms canon.
Even in its earliest stages, the BG series had enough side quests of varying types to never seem like you had to always go on a Fetch Quest or kill a hundred bears to get Twenty Bear Asses.
The escalating scale of its plot through each sequel makes it a truly awesome (as in, awe-inspiring) saga of mythical proportions as you slaughter your way to high-level gameplay and progressively become the most powerful mortal on the planet, a feat that makes even the strongest personalities of the Forgotten Realms think twice about challenging you.
But for all its epic and sprawling plot, its the characters - as always - that make BG and future Bioware games a treat. While BG 1 has the criticism that some of the NPCs were strictly there to give you meat shields (as BG1 had a notoriously high death rate compared to future games), BG2 onward definitely made you love to see the NPCs interact with you and - more hilariously - with each other. Taking the cake are the meme-tastic Minsc, Jan Jansen, and Boo.
For many gamers in the 1990s, the addition of romantic side quests was the western gaming community's first exposure to the phenomenon of intimately caring for a fictional woman or man. Of course, those of us who know about Visual Novels can readily say, "I've seen enough hentai to know where this is going...."
Finally, the BG series was HARD.
First-time playthroughs will invariably lead to wanton carnage, death, and destruction...and about half the time its your party getting trashed. In BG1, right in the opening hour or so, you can easily can turned into a paste by a mere bear. In BG2, there are plenty of secret bosses, dragons, and major bosses that can lead to a Total Party Kill if you don't know what you're doing. After a couple of playthroughs or just some judicious reading of various spell effects, you can easily learn to exploit the game's many glitches and computer AI flaws, but yeah - if you go into this game thinking you can just spam fireball all day, you will likely get obliterated.
I absolutely loved that.
Paradoxically, by the time you get to the last game, Throne of Bhaal, you're so damn powerful that most fights are a cake walk. But after four games and nearly 30+ levels of killing things, it felt liberating to walk up to a bunch of giant dragons and gods and trash them effortlessly.
Anyone remember these games? Give a shout out!
