Baldur's Gate - In Depth Analysis

On our forums Lilura mentioned her/his blog is now covering the first two parts of the (expected) 10 part analysis of Baldur's Gate. The length of these two parts are already individually longer than an average review, so it is more than that. It is in any case an interesting read, if you are up to it.

Welcome to my Baldur's Gate review thing-a-mee! The following comments, criticisms and pro-tips pertain to BioWare's first RPG - Baldur's Gate (1998) & Tales of the Sword Coast (1999), patched to 5512; so, what follows is based on the original release and expansion only. While fixes, tweaks and various ambitious mods have long-existed that fix glitches, bugs and change the game-play, my concern is just with Baldur's Gate (& TotSC) as BioWare released it, "warts n all". Much of what I write here is from a somewhat fuzzy memory, so if I get something blatantly wrong please don't hesitate to jump down my throat, so that I can correct it before I mislead too many... ok, let's get on with this!...

...BioWare eschewed a traditional, tactical turn-based combat system in favor of real-time with pause (RTwP) or "pause n play"; and while I personally would have preferred the former - as seen previously in Goldbox and Fallout (and subsequently in ToEE) - apart from the niggling imprecisions related to pathfinding and spacebar tapping (ie, pause), combat is free-flowing and still fairly tactical and satisfying. The player controls up to six combat units (i.e, a party of adventurers) in "point n click" fashion, assigning them tasks singularly or as marquee-selectable groups. The basic combat flow is: "pause the game when enemy sighted, assign commands to your units (move, attack, cast spell, backstab etc.), unpause and observe what unfolds, pause again to make adjustments and assign more commands, rinse n repeat until enemy is dead". I'll write in-depth on melee, ranged and spell-casting combat in the follow-up to this post.