During the late ’90s, the world of role-playing games (RPGs) was controlled by games that seemed to reflect the norms of their pen-and-paper antecedents. The most popular games of the time all offered a choice of characters with unique abilities who would depart on a quest to vanquish evil and save the world. Most also afforded the player an opportunity to take part in a rich narrative that, though it told a predetermined tale, often allowed for some surprises along the way. Then, in 1998, came Baldur’s Gate. When BioWare and Interplay released Baldur’s Gate the industry was already heralding it as a major event. And it was. Baldur’s Gate and its sequel, Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, fast became two of the most beloved and enduring entries in the annals of computer RPG history.
Baldur’s Gate wasn’t just a game I played as a kid. It was a game I really, really cared about. It felt like something magical was happening within the drawn world that was then new to me, magical and macabre both, but also filled with wonders, too. I think I loaded up the game and just revelled in that first set of cinematics, uncomplainingly untilled many hours (basking in their portraits of pure, utter ugliness) more than a few times before I actually got to playing it.
Baldur’s Gate had a considerable influence on RPGs, and the main reason for this seems to be that the game managed to create the illusion of a world that was alive. Bioware’s 1998 game was filled with a multitude of non-player characters who each had his, her, or its own life, personality, and business to take care of. Gazing for a moment at the forest’s edge of the game world allows the player to watch as the leaves on the trees rustle in the wind. The game world’s prime wilderness, where a battalion of dangerous monsters roams, bristles with more danger and seems to hold its breath.
Exploring the very city of Baldur’s Gate was an experience in itself and one well worth savoring. This was a big, bustling place, and developers crammed it with dozens of interesting nooks and crannies. In the dark alleys of the town where assassins hung out, in the dockside where pirates plotted, and in the grand, sunlit plazas where spellcasters kept their duels thrilling and lightning-fast, everywhere one turned, there was so much potential for both discovery and sinister business. You were rubbing elbows with a very diverse element, and everywhere you went, next-level NPCs offered conversational life and intrigue.
I’ll never forget the excitement of exploring the game’s many unique, hand-drawn outdoor areas when I was a lad and the feeling of stepping into someplace truly dangerous, like the shady Cloakwood Forest or the downright sinister Nashkel Mines. Every place crafted with that same intricate love, mom-and-pop attention to detail that makes the worlds of the hold-your-hand era stand out. But back then, they felt way more than simply stages for good fights their wall-to-wall presence really pushed the overall narrative and created a massive space of pure imagination, assailable only by the player’s pixelated avatar.
The day-night cycle of the game combined with the weather effects go further to unpack a very profound sense of place. They make those places intensely memorable on any number of levels, and they give the feeling of experiencing a certain heightened atmosphere that one can reliably return to effect. One can and usually will feel a range of atmospheres in any place traversed…
Another outstanding feature of the Baldur’s Gate series was the interactivity of the game world. One could engage, divert, or toy with not just the usual hostile or friendly NPCs but with all facets of the game world. And it was a world that demonstrated meaningful design, and not just random construction. One could pick locks and disarm traps or fail to do so and suffer the consequences. One could read a book. One could examine an object and potentially find a clue to some quest. So if you consider a richly interactive, role-playing world to be next generation, then perhaps we were already dealing in that space in 1998.
Baldur’s Gate was a seminal release in how it pioneered an approach to character development and storytelling. It presented a world with a slew of memorable and part-reality-based characters, which created the sort of emotional miasma that games hadn’t been able to. The player learned about the backstory of each character, gained an appreciation for their individual motivation, and even got to see those characters evolve. The friendship system was robust and dynamic and managed to be so without cutting into the role-playing element of the game, which was just as robust.
For its time, Baldur’s Gate was innovative in the way it developed the RPG genre through its dialogue system. A novel way of having players interact with NPCs and party members was its use of conversations, in what you might look back now and call intuitive wheels of decision-making.
Players could have their story come intuitively out of the decisions they made onsite, while still having a progression that didn’t feel forced. And if you don’t nail something that both amounts to on-the-spot decisions and forward-moving progression at the same time—while still having things feel like they’re part of the story and the sum of your interactions—your accomplishment as an RPG developer can feel mighty next to the ground-breaking narrative moments in a game like Baldur’s Gate that boasts of not just size, but a sense of friendly-yet-bantering intimacy between the player and their party.
One character I adored was Minsc, the slightly deranged but very loyal ranger who had a “miniature giant space hamster” for a pet. Minsc was nutty in the most light-hearted of ways—this was a character who, by all accounts, shouldn’t have been as endearing as he was, but somehow he and his memorable quotes made the tall ranger a fan favorite. And when you ask me, or many others, what we remember most about the game, often our answer is something to do with Minsc and his layer of levity.
The innovative aspect of Baldur’s Gate was the tricky moral situations that it constantly put the player in. This was a game from 1998, and already, in a rather primitive form, it was defying that niche experience quintessential to the “gaming” of the era, even console and arcade to an extent, and trying to simulate what is laudable here “facut,” something the player would only experience in a tabletop game with- hence the idea.
The alignment setup found in games, seen mostly in RPGs, is not really about “good” and “evil.” It’s about choices and consequences. BioWare co-founder Ray Muzyka told GameSpot prior to the release of Mass Effect that BioWare’s games are “fundamentally about creating a narrative that’s very powerful, that has a lot of choices for the player. And those choices are meaningful.”
“The player has a very real sense of authorship,” he emphasized. The richness of character interactions and dilemmas of choice we witnessed in “Baldur’s Gate” set a fresh standard for what was possible in a video game RPG, a standard that pretty much every subsequent RPG has sought to recapture. In video game storytelling, the 1998 game represented a new narrative peak. Characterization and agency, more than just the look of the game world, were gaining in importance. We had characters who seemed more human than many found in novels. Would we let them live or die? Make them our friends or enemies? All the while, the stories that were unfolding were comparable in richness to what one gets when reading a good book.
Multiple facets of Baldur’s Gate had deep and far-reaching effects on the world of role-playing games. Chief among these was its approach to combat. The game mixed real-time action with a pause-and-plan system, making it an incredibly fun and deep part of any RPG of its era. And you could see, up on the screen, what was happening. That screen lent a serious realism to the fights, and the game lent a serious weight to the combat in the world of the fight, and the world of Baldur’s Gate in general.
Baldur’s Gate combat is deeply entrenched in the AD&D rule system, which endows characters with abilities, spells, and a robust set of mechanics. The game rules make it unclear whether characters should pay attention to the ways their avatars attack and then traverse through the five combat phases with an initiative system. But it’s more important to consider what happens when you are attacked, countering that, and whether the right things happen. It also matters what sort of orders you give as you command your party because the characters follow them very closely.
Baldur’s Gate combat is memorable especially because of the sheer number of spells and abilities on offer to the player. The PC version of the game has over 130 spells and special abilities across a wide canvas of cure-lit RPG gaming. And combat always felt strategically open-ended. Whereas most pen-and-paper RPGs are built around managing a character’s resources as well as tabletop tactics, Baldur’s Gate came to life on the digital flatscreen when you had to consider both elements and your party had myriad maneuvers in the art of war to pull off.
Another element that added depth to Oblivion was its system of battle. Fighting in the Elder Scrolls series has come a long way since its humble, rough beginnings in Daggerfall. It was by no means a straight shot to here from then, with 2002’s The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind serving as something of a bridge. In that game, fights felt more meaningful than in the prior installments. You had to use more of a head-and-not-ankles attack (magic, long-range weapons, and even stealth played in the background, offering various angles to approach a fight), which was a good sign; and even though it was all real-time, and the equipment you used was of crucial importance, there was still a sense that if you were better than the other guy, you could probably see yourself through to victory.
Another quality that really set Baldur’s Gate apart was the very well-done aspect of party selection. The player really had to consider not just what classes of characters to include in the core group that would travel and fight together throughout the game, but also what the mix of those classes would do in terms of creating or not creating a “synergy effect.” And finally, the player had to think a little in terms of the overall group dynamic and interpersonal relationships narrative: not just who was good to whom, but also who was not so good to whom. That, too, was very “real.” After all, power doesn’t just neatly arrange itself.
Baldur’s Gate really had something going for it when it came to gameplay. It took what other RPGs did and injected even more player decision-making and character building into the mix in a way that let it do real-time and a system incredibly like tabletop D&D work together, in unison. The reason people remember this game, I think, and the reason that it holds up so well over time, is that it and its first sequel, Shadows of Amn, offered an incredibly diverse range of quests that could be solved in an equally wide array of solutions.
The Baldur’s Gate series has left an ineradicable mark on the RPG genre. The games that followed a series of Dungeons & Dragons based titles each released about a year apart between the late 1990s and early 2000s were nearly as significant. They took BioWare’s emphasis on world-building, storytelling, and character development and ran with them, largely dispensing with the old left-to-right or top-to-bottom linear progression in favor of a more open-world format, where the player’s actions could have a wide variety of game-altering consequences.
Baldur’s Gate was influential in showing what was possible in terms of storytelling in video games. And indeed, the narrative of the game is lauded for being very well-written, and for being way ahead of its time. It could stand up, minus the art and gameplay, as a novel of sorts, a good novel that could not only get the player to care about the world of Faerûn and the characters therein but also create “a story with sufficient gravity to make the outcome of the player-controlled decisions seem meaningful and inevitable.”
The CD Projekt Red team, who gave us the brilliant The Witcher series, definitely looked to Baldur’s Gate as a strong influence. They love, as do the developers at Larian (Divinity) and Obsidian (Pathfinder: Kingmaker), telling good stories with lots of richly developed characters — which makes complete sense, because those are exactly the kinds of things that BioWare used to do with its Infinity Engine (1998-2002) games.
Baldur’s Gate was a triumph, and its success showed that there was an audience for what had become a very niche genre. The critics loved Baldur’s Gate. Gamers loved Baldur’s Gate. And what they loved, they told their friends about. Even at the end of the decade, in PC Data’s annual roundup of the software industry’s winners and losers in the year, Baldur’s Gate and its sequel figured among the best-selling games. CRPGs stood triumphant. CRPGs, represented.
The RPG genre is not the only one to feel the game’s effects. A large number of games from several other genres have also substantially felt the game’s pull, specifically its heavy influence on narrative structure and character building. These qualities are seen across a vast sea of games of very different genres, from as different as apples are to oranges in titles like Horizon Zero Dawn or The Last of Us.
For those of us who “lived” the Baldur’s Gate season, the games live on in our hearts and minds. We’ve become attached to a lot of the characters and areas. The Sword Coast is almost real and certainly beloved. Yes, it’s kinda chubby in the way a game becomes after you’ve put in a few too many sleepless nights. But to us, that’s all part of its charm. Baldur’s Gate will never be just a game. To the generation that experienced it first years ago, it was an epic, life-altering experience. Do you have any in particular?
In sum, Baldur’s Gate had a substantial effect on the RPG genre, setting new standards for world-building, character development, storytelling, and combat. The game’s innovations have had an impact on a number of titles, and have been especially important in creating the subgenre that we now call the narrative-driven RPG. RPGs that take their storytelling and character development as seriously as they do their game mechanics are Baldur’s Gate’s direct legacy. Valor’s Gate continues to be a nostalgic favorite of older gamers, but it’s also celebrated by their children and even their grandchildren, who have themselves become gamers. And for the past two decades, it’s been held up as a model of how RPGs should be done.
