Baldur's Gate

What is it?: A classic RPG featuring pre-rendered backgrounds and thus taking up 5 CDs, 1998, Windows and a later Macintosh port.
What computer or emulator will it run on?: A Pentium 120, better 166; any PowerMac.
Similar Games: Planescape: Torment, Siege of Avalon, Neverwinter Nights.

After the Fallout games, Interplay returned to classic fantasy RPGs with Baldur's Gate (developed by Bioware). At the same time, they introduced the Infinity Engine, which used pre-rendered instead of tiled backgrounds. As a result, Baldur's Gate came on no less than five CDs!

Interplay's design decisions are sometimes strange. In Fallout, there was turn-based combat, yet players had no control over the actions of their NPC followers. This resulted in reduced variations and boring battles; as soon as there was a higher number of combatants, you got to watch most of the time.

Now, they introduced real time combat together with full control over NPCs. No wonder many players despaired over this, even with the pause option it was just too much to handle. Nevertheless the Infinity Engine would continue to be used in Planescape: Torment.

Reviews

One of the most enjoyable games he has played for quite some time, Adrian Carmody says on Quandaryland:
Do you remember the sadness you felt when you read the last word in that book that simply enthralled you? That's just how I feel having just completed Baldur's Gate. It's been a long haul, more than two months of solid game-play, but I have been absolutely engrossed by every minute! Very few games earn such an accolade from this reviewer.
Every once in a while, a game comes along that becomes a blockbuster, Drizzt muses:
One such game is Baldur's Gate, which many refer to as a "rebirth" for role-playing-games, as the genre was stagnant for a long time in the 90's, until this came along. There were other games too, yes, such as Diablo, but even if they might have been fun, they were nothing more than action-games with some RPG-elements. When Baldur's Gate was released in 1998, though, it was just what was needed for the genre to make a huge leap, and suddenly we were surrounded by RPG's, of varying quality, many of them clones of each other.
My gaming blood thirsts for something fresh, Goliath confesses:
I love this game. I haven't been a fan of RPGs since I used to play text-based MUDs. […] The mix of nostalgia, solid gameplay, incredible graphics, and a shweet storyline give Baldur's Gate a 9.8 out of 10. The game loses two tenths of a point for being too short if you run through it without taking many of the side-quests. The fact that you can play it endlessly online makes the game a winner.

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