Baldur's Gate 1 Enhanced Edition: Review After 100%

[Music] what's going on everybody mortum here this time bringing you a review after 100 for baldur's gate 1 enhanced edition now a few things to get out of the way right off the bat i like to 100 games for reviews because a sets me apart from everyone else on youtube basically as well as just adding some credibility to what i do sometimes i get questions about what 100 means because as is often the case the achievement list is not necessarily the most all-encompassing thing in the world so to clarify 100 definitely does mean achievements however it also means things like the story endings side quests all content all dlcs basically anything relevant in any way now in terms of balder's gate one it actually does have a pretty all-encompassing achievement list including beating it on the new legacy of ball difficulty which i had a lot of fun with now couple other things to get out of the way there's going to be a story series on this in the future as well as a new player guide so if you just want to hear about the story that series will be up before too long and then because of that i'm not going to cover it much here just going to give a plot set up so this will be free of major spoilers and then if i talk about anything you don't fully understand i'll have a new player guide up soon as well and just to mention it at the start of the video if you like those kinds of things and you want to support the channel and see it grow consider joining the channel as a member buying some merchandise that's actually a great way to support the channel but with that stuff out of the way let's actually dive into this baldur's gate 1 is set in of course the forgotten realm setting specifically the sword coast of dungeons and dragons fame which is where most people are probably familiar with as that is like the main area of dnd now while there are other settings of course that's kind of the most popular one these days and is where baldur's gate is set now this game was originally developed by bioware using the second edition d d rule set otherwise known as advanced dungeons and dragons or add now the enhanced edition was put out by beamdog they introduced a ton of quality of life changes for the base game and eventually they added some new companions specifically four of them to the base game those are neera rasad dorn and bailoth i'll get into those during the companion section of the video but just pointing it out here now in addition to the companions they did actually add some class kits which are the equivalent of sub classes basically to the character creation as well but it's a single player game so i don't think people were too worried about balance anyway now it's important to mention that bioware did the tales of the sword coast dlc that actually released after baldur's gate released and you know it put out dlc like any other game typically tends to do however the other two dlc if you want to call them that are black pits as well as the siege of dragon now we'll get into those during the dlc section however i just want to clarify that one of those was made by bioware and the other two were made by beamdog so with that out of the way let's start this off by talking about difficulty because the enhanced edition added two difficulties for starters they added story mode i think at this point it's pretty obvious that some people want to play through baldur's gate 1 just specifically for the story so story mode lets you do that without having to learn the mechanics or deal with much of that in any way because on story mode you cannot die in combat the only way you can die is during certain scripted events where you failed something and your character is killed as a result that happens here and there throughout the game and it's the only way your character can die now the opposite end of that spectrum they added legacy of ball difficulty this is like an uber difficulty to go even farther than the game's original insane difficulty now thankfully this isn't an iron man mode but on that difficulty most enemies have i think it's it's tripled or quadrupled health it's a lot like rats have like 90 hp and for some clarification most characters start with around 10 and rats are a level one enemy now for the most part everything in between is standard crpg stuff these days all of these affect your saving throws or your attack roles in this particular game that's called taco versus ac that kind of thing again i'll go into a new player guide that explains all of that but just keep in mind we have all the difficulty from literally can't be killed to a pretty grueling slog so that brings us to character creation now again we are using the second edition d so the things i want to mention here are that classes are race locked which means certain classes can only be used by certain races now humans get the widest variety however they can't multi-class all of the other races get to multi-class humans get to dual class multi-class allows a class or your character to level up two classes at the same time now what this enables you to do is use features from both of those classes however they are still subject to the same limitations so for instance if you go fight or mage you still can't cast your wizard spells if you have your armor on you have to take it off to do that but you can do that now the other side of this is dual classing dual classing can be very good i will never argue that with anyone however it's a bit more advanced than multi-classing and i highly recommend you stay away from it unless you know precisely what you want to do with it because dual classing is leveling up two classes but at separate times so this is where say you started as a fighter and then later on you wanted to pick up another class then you become that class and you don't get your fighter abilities back until you surpass that old classes level which can be a bit of a pain and again is why just generally speaking i don't recommend using it unless you have a very solid idea of what you want to do and a solid working of the mechanics so with that out of the way we get thrown into the world now you can choose to create a custom party i just want to mention that real quick as well technically this was possible when the original was released though the formal introduction of it was an enhanced edition change so in the original technically it was possible if you hit multiplayer you could create a full party and then just cancel it out and then go to single player which would allow you to do it and i think that's honestly why beamdog just added it to single player anyway so you can start with a full party like you can in iceland dale if you choose to let's talk story setup so you're greeted with a bit of a story set up from the game itself where a narrator explains to you that you were a ward of a man named garaian who raised you in a place called candle keep which is a giant library repository studying knowledge type of place not unlike a university now you were raised there and recently grind's been acting strangely and then he comes to you says you need to gather your things get prepared and then in and then you guys just need to bail doesn't explain why refuses to explain why and immediately upon leaving candle keep gorian is murdered in front of you by a band of strangers and you're just kind of dumped into the world now gorian left you instructions to find two people named jahira and khalid at a friendly arm in which is beyond that all the instruction you're given and you're just dumped into the world that's the setup i'm gonna talk about some general themes while trying to avoid spoilers the best i can i enjoy the story it's honestly the best part about this game however the pacing is a little weird and i don't think people always describe it very well so when people talk about the story of baldur's gate 1 they often talk about how you're just an adventurer off doing these things and i simply do not agree this is very much so a chosen one style story it's not a power fantasy by any means but your character is definitely a chosen one type in fact i think my main complaint about the story is a couple of pacing issues here and there and the fact that they're trying to tell you that there's some reason you should know that your character is the chosen one you know to use that language is usually what causes it actually so as you're out exploring like any time you go to an inn and a couple other places your character will just randomly be attacked by assassins who are you know like tell you they're there to kill you and then your character's like well that was strange better get back to what i was doing and like there's no way to like follow up on why these assassins are attacking you and it's very clear that someone wanted you dead which is why you had to leave candle keep that's why they killed gorian but like your character and the story just doesn't seem interested in explaining it and yeah of course it gets there but the main thing your character is actually doing is investigating an iron shortage because once you go talk to jihir and khalid they tell you they're headed to nash kill because there's you know stuff going on there with the iron mine and they're wanting to look into it so that's kind of where the game kicks off that's like the first big chapter and then it kind of goes on from there now on one hand i enjoy the fact that it's not some big power fantasy it is just you an adventurer and a group of adventurers really out exploring the world helping with crises if you will i like that a lot it actually lends very well to the game the environment what d and d is but people who say this isn't a chosen one story that's just not true because it is it's just that the game doesn't tell you that until almost the very end of the game but that's really all i wanted to say about story again there will be a story series in the future where we will discuss that in much more depth for now let's move on to the world building it's really good especially for 1998 when this game released so for starters we have our world map each area on the world map is its own like little map you can explore once you actually zone into it the city of baldur's gate is several of these maps strung together i think it's like 9 or 10 if my memory serves now in order to travel between these you have to account for travel time as well as resting taking you time actually days are passing now that said only some of the side quests are timed the main story is not so some side quests specifically most of the companion ones actually have a timer on them usually it's in the ballpark of 10 to 15 days and they will remind you if you're not going to do the thing that hey they want you to go do that thing or they're going to leave and they will leave if you don't go do the thing but the main story itself is not timed now as you're resting and going about exploring the world there is no limit on rest besides occasionally being attacked while trying to rest and being attacked on the road while you're traveling now you can't rest in special areas and towns but these are few and far between in town there's always an inn you can just go there it costs literally one gold to rest which is unbelievably cheap and then there are occasionally special areas where resting just isn't allowed but again those are very few and far between all these little locations on the map the main story only requires you to go through a few of them and what's more a lot of the story relevant ones are actually locked until you get to the point in the story that you need to go there for instance there's an area called the cloak wood that you cannot go into until the story tells you it's time to go to the cloak wood but beyond that there's a ton of optional ones and even the ones that are related to the story usually have a ton of extra stuff going on in terms of side quests and fights and things like that so there's a ton of optional places to explore there's some good loot the problem is that what they tend to do here is put the cool stuff in like one portion of the map and then the rest of that map is almost entirely empty besides an occasional roaming monster and i wouldn't say it's a problem because it is generally fun to explore it's just that once you do so many of these you realize that like there's the big area where the stuff is happening and there's the rest of the map in each of these individual places now i do want to mention while we're talking about it and before we move on where you exit the map at matters so in order to exit the map you just walk to the edge of the map click on it you'll see the little uh like i think it's like a ship boat sales thing almost but you click that once it pops up and then you can exit the map and the north south east or west that you actually leave the map from matters at least the first time through that area because which way you leave the map from will unlock the next adjacent place on the world map so at the start of the game when you need to get to the friendly arm in or from the friendly arm in down to baragost or nashkel you have to keep exiting the maps you're going through south to unlock the next portion of the map so i do actually kind of like that i thought that was a cool touch and beyond that i want to say that there's a ton of npcs there's a ton of side quests so they do a good job of making the world feel alive at least like in towns and things and even in some of these map areas there's still like npcs and stuff that'll come up and talk to you ask you to do things for them so the game world does feel a decent amount alive especially when we start talking reputation and charisma so your party while exploring will earn a reputation this can be affected by taking on some of the companions doing good deeds doing bad deeds that kind of thing i will say it does not pay to be a bad guy having a really low reputation it's a number of 1 through 20 i believe anything below like a 4 is considered despised guards will attack you on site if you attack those guards the settlement turns hostile and they all try to kill you which is very difficult to complete the game that way now if it gets that way and you insist on not just reloading you can go to a temple make a donation and it should help you out the character ability score charisma actually also affects this a great deal so having high charisma on at least the character doing the talking is actually pretty important because the game won't show you charisma checks or anything but they are happening behind the scenes for instance there's this little side quest where a little girl wants you to find her lost cat now very sadly the cat is dead so you can bring it back to her and she kind of makes a tongue-in-cheek joke which is like the writers having a laugh that like she's just gonna go have her dad bring the thing back to life because this is d d and rez spells everything in fact your own characters get resurrected at temples it's an in-universe joke to kind of a sad outcome for a quest that kind of worked out however if you do this on a low charisma character when you bring your cat back to the little girl she'll blame you for killing it even though your character is not responsible for this however if you bring it back on a high charisma character she'll thank you for finding its body so she can have it resurrected and then give you a reward none of that involved a visual charisma check but checks like that are happening behind the scenes so having a high charisma character doing the talking which by the way on the top right whatever character is at the top which doesn't have to be your main character you can rearrange those portraits but the one at the top is the one doing the talking beyond all of those specific to the game things it's very much so dungeons and dragons you know it's balder's gate obviously you're going around solving little group of adventurer type quests you go and save the minds of course because there's an iron shortage going on you investigate what's going on there as part of the main story and then there's all sorts of little quests where it's like some necromancer is causing trouble you gotta go take this guy out like classic d d type stuff and honestly even if you're not super familiar with dungeons and dragons or the setting that part still comes across well it's just a group of adventurers going out solving problems or causing more of them even now that brings us to the companions for the base game there was no romances for the original game however there are romances for the four added characters that i mentioned at the start of the video nira rasad dorn and bailoth truthfully i don't care much about romances and games but they are here those four characters being added to the game later they are much more fleshed out than all of the other companions because in the original game there was about 25-ish i think companions and then the new ones brought it up to close to 30. now you might be thinking to yourself that's a lot of companions and it is however almost all of them have like one timed quest and that is it a couple of them have dialogue for specific events as you travel around but that's few and far between just because of the sheer volume of companions now the reason there are so many is that generally the game expects you to put a party together of generally similar alignment characters this helps with the reputation system a little bit it's not required by any means but it'll help you out so basically all of these companions are here to kind of give you a broad assortment of good or evil aligned characters neutral etc but for the most part they don't get fleshed out at all there's no romances they're basically there to serve a role in the party and the alignment like i mentioned now that brings us to combat combat is real time with paws and it uses second edition dnd like i mentioned combat varies wildly depending on what difficulty you have it on legacy of ball is very very difficult even today it's not so bad if you know what you're doing for instance summons on that difficulty get the same bonuses as monsters which makes them invaluable probably the most important part of combat and understanding it for this game is second dnd's thako and ac system ac being armor class fako meaning to hit armor class zero so your thakko score is whatever your character needs to roll on a d20 to hit another character with an armor class of zero so the lower your thakko the better because that's the lower role that you will then need to hit someone with an armor class of zero however ac is also required to be as low as possible in this addition because what a c is really is a modifier to another character's thako so if you say a character with a thako of 10 were to attack a character with an ac05 5 is obviously more than zero and you only need ten to hit someone's armor class of zero so if they have an armored class of five you actually only need to roll a five to hit them now overall this is a simple enough concept once you get used to it however it does not play well people generally don't like it and that's why it went away in almost every edition of every tabletop game going forward and it's been abandoned by these rule sets now truthfully it's not that much different than the current system or later editions of the system i should say and if it ended right there i don't think it would be too bad however problem is is when you pick up items and stuff they'll still say like plus one or two to your sako or your armor class however putting those items on lowers those things because ideally you want them as low as possible because that's what helps you but it causes a lot of confusion especially among new players who don't have this stuff explained to them now in terms of combat and things the enhanced edition added a tutorial to the game that will kind of walk you through the basics there's also tutors and candle keep where you start the game that will explain every single one of these concepts if you stop to talk to them however at the end of the day combat is based on an aging system that generally speaking people these days do not enjoy now the combat itself and being good at it comes down to crowd control in the action economy level one spells and things are actually pretty high value in this game because a lot of level one spells or spells like blindness or charm person i think even is actually a level 1 spell and blindness is incredible in this game and it's a level 1 wizard spell because when something is blind it can only hit characters in melee range and even then it's going to do a poor job at doing so now later on you get spells like web web will crowd control basically everything in an area and all of the characters in there will have to make a saving throw basically every round to not be held and it's very hard to get out of so spells like that actually have more utility oftentimes especially on the higher difficulties than high damage value spells do moving on a little bit if that's where the difficulty of combat stopped in terms of the actual game it would be fine honestly i think most people would be okay the problem is the game is awful at conveying information to the player in terms of what you are fighting and what you are doing's effects on that enemy what i mean by this is that if you're attacking an enemy say is immune to your damage types you might see the chat there scroll up that hey this thing's not doing any damage because this creature is immune to it it doesn't tell you why it's immune to it it doesn't tell you what about that weapon specifically it is immune to and just generally gives you zero information but for instance the boss at the end of one of the tales of the sword coast little adventures a wolf wear has tremendous resistances and can really only be affected by a couple of weapons however when you hit him it just has its immune gives you zero information on why to that same tune if you hit a mustard jelly which is actually also immune to basically most physical damage or a battle horror which is immune to all missile damage which would be like bows and things the game is just going to tell you the same thing that hey this thing's immune to your attacks but it's not going to tell you why so when it comes to combat knowledge of what is going on that isn't always found in the game is usually the best probably no example of this is more defined than the basilisk so there are basilisks in about three places in this game there's one section of the maps that they are all over there's one part of the main story where you have to go buy two of them and then there's three on top of durlag's tower which we'll get into later basilisks come in two forms lesser and greater both of them however have a petrify attack petrify is basically an instant kill provided you fail your save which is most of the time you walk up to this thing you're petrified which as far as the game concerned is character death if that character gets hit with petrify a second time their statue shatters and you're unable to be resurrected period because that character is now permanently dead which makes basilisks incredibly deadly to a player that doesn't know what they're doing because the solution to killing basilisks is actually incredibly simple and it's literally a level 1 spell called protection from petrification which will make you immune to petrify just flat out then all you got to do is use the character that's protected to walk up in front of your group draw the threat or aggro or whatever you want to call it of the basilisks and then your entire party can just kill the thing however just finding that information without looking it up or just knowing it is honestly kind of difficult and that's you know why you don't see things like this in later games so still talking about combat a bit here the ui of this game is also not amazing like the enhanced edition is like upresident and stuff so it scales up to like 4k res and stuff but the problem is is that like none of it's explained very well and you get used to it after playing the game for a little while so i won't like belabor that point but my point is it feels very clunky and again it doesn't give you a lot of information that you might like and for the most part you kind of just got to figure out what all the buttons do yourself especially if you're new to the game but the kind of clunky old ui and the combat that uses this older edition of dnd rule set i think honestly is what puts most people off from playing this game because this game and the second the second is actually worse for this the achievement for leaving the starter area has less than 50 percent like people who have actually achieved it that own the game that's steam statistics by the way but i think people want to get started on it kind of see this interface and stuff and it's just a lot of information coming at them and then they immediately go no thanks the second game is just as bad for that it's actually much worse in terms of steam statistics but i'll cover that when we cover that game but my point is is that there is data that backs my point up here and that these two things combined are probably where this game shows its age the most but beyond that moving on to the dlc first up let's talk tales of the sword coast this one was made by bioware again this adds a town hub area that can be accessed basically from the start of the game called olgoth's beard it's at the very top up near baldur's gate now there are a couple little side quests that happen in town but the bulk of the dlc revolves around three little stories that are told from this area you can meet a mage that teleports you to a little dungeon like a one floor dungeon where you have to get his cloak back there's a bunch of interesting encounters kind of in there overall it's pretty short you get the guy's cloak back you get teleported back you talk to him he disappears then there is the island of werewolves and wolf wares so you're asked to retrieve an artifact of balduran the guy who founded baldur's gate from an island that was recently discovered by this guy so you set off on a trip to go to this island where you wind up shipwrecked and have to deal with the situation there and you very quickly find out that what's happening on the island is that werewolves and wolf wares you could take on a humanoid shape or this kind of you know hybrid werewolf that you would typically see now the main difference is wolf wares are genetically that way they can't pass this on whereas where wolves is caused by a curse that's like the main difference in the game we kind of have to resolve that situation in one of a few ways and you know get off the island and then it concludes in kind of a fun way i don't want to spoil so i'm not going to mention it and then the hands down best part of tales of the sword coast is derlagh's tower this is technically just a dungeon crawl in a lot of ways but it is fantastic it is a four level dungeon if you count just the dungeon part the tower itself actually has some mini levels that you can get loot and some context off of but you are sent to find a specific dagger actually in der lag's tower but while you explore the tower you learn that it was made by a guy named durlag troll killer who was this dwarf and as you explore the tower which is full of traps and things you just don't see anywhere else in game like all of these unique ways and combat encounters to get past objectives and you have to really think and kind of plan out what you're doing and it's just genuinely a great experience going through this but while you're doing that you learn that durlag himself built this tower because he was trying to give his clan and his family and everything like this place where they could be safe but slowly over time the desire to do that as well as the threat of invaders caused him slowly to go mad on top of the fact that his family was actually killed and replaced by doppelgangers which are an enemy type in this particular world and he's slowly driven insane and this actually opens up the entire tower to demonic corruption and you kind of just see all that play out on top of the fact that the levels themselves are incredibly challenging to get through there's a lot of unique mechanics again you don't see anywhere else in the game and it's just a very very well done story as well as a bit of dlc and gameplay now our next bit of dlc is the black pits this is just an arena thing that was added it's like 15 combat encounters you're a party of adventurers that was teleported and forced to fight in this arena against your will largely it's you know fight or die it's got a tiny little story to it but nothing crazy it's mostly just about these combat encounters as you go through them you'll be given gold and experience and stuff as you go through the encounters to level up your party and stuff pretty straightforward takes maybe a couple hours tops and then that brings us to the big one siege of dragon spear so people have a mixed opinion about this one i have a mixed opinion about this one so if you're unaware siege of dragonspear was basically an expansion done by beamdog it was released in 2016. now you might imagine it is unusual to release an expansion to a game that has sequels and also 18 years after its initial release but siege of dragonspear's purpose is to fill the gap between the first and second game because you end the first game the hero of baldur's gate and you begin the second game in prison so obviously there's some questions or at least a jail cell prisons uh not exactly correct but you get my point there's gaps that need filling and baldr's gate 2 never really bothered to explain it well not in a great depth anyway and siege of dragonspear was supposed to now by itself it is a linear story about a woman named kayla argent she is an asamar which means she has divine blood in her background that is manifested in her taylor argent is leading a crusade to castle dragonspear at the start of this dlc she sends people to kill you you would like to know why as well as defend the city of baldur's gate because while she's leading this crusade to dragonspear she's going through she's displacing tons of refugees who are now flooding baldur's gate and it's causing a real problem so you're sent to stop her what she's doing is interesting i actually liked it they tied it in with ice windale actually a little bit which i thought was cool in addition this actually adds even more new companions specifically for this little dlc if you will there's new romances new monsters you actually get to fight a dragon it's pretty cool the problem with dragon spear is that it's mostly pointless so it's supposed to be this bridge between one and two but literally only the ending deals with that at all like this story here could have been literally anything because the ending that happens that gets you kind of captured like it could have happened regardless like you could have literally just told me that little ending part and that would have been it the entire rest of this expansion is just a story and that's that's cool i like it it's a decent story i actually enjoyed it quite a bit but while you're playing it i can't help but ask myself what purpose does this serve because the only part of this that mattered was like five minutes of the ending so if you bother to wade into it online at all there's often back and forth about you know is siege of dragon's beer good some people like it some people are fans i don't have a problem with it honestly i don't take issue with the writing anything like that i simply take issue with the fact that the only part of this little dlc expansion that actually does the thing it was designed or made supposedly to do is the last five minutes as a standalone story i think it's fine i enjoyed it actually i had a good time playing it it's just one of those things that really irks me as a person because they were like oh it's the bridge between the two games no it isn't like the last five minutes of it is the rest of it you could have literally done anything with but i don't know it just it bothered me honestly but with that out of the way let's talk positives negatives and come to a conclusion so positives the story is very good i like the main story a lot again there's some pacing issues here and there but overall i actually enjoy the main story quite a bit if you're a big fan of dungeons and dragons you know there's a lot of that type of stuff here durlag's tower was amazing honestly i love that tower that is well done dlc truthfully the other part of the positive of this is that this game is super cheap i think the enhanced edition is 15 20 bucks something like that i don't remember exactly but that comes with tons of content all this dlc personally it took me about 75 hours roughly to 100 this and that's with prior knowledge mind you and the other positive is simply that it's a classic game it in a lot of ways reinvigorated pc gaming truth be told so it kind of has this place in video game history and that's hard to ignore negatives this game is aging poorly the ui even updated with the enhanced edition it's old it's clunky the old rule set is clunky and hard to understand it does not give you a lot of information visually that you you can get through the game and yeah they added the tutorial and things to help i'm not saying you can't figure it out i'm saying it's hunky and it feels weird and that's why less than half the people make it out of candle keep that actually start the game on top of that uh like i mentioned with the maps there's a ton of just empty space you might feel one way or the other about that personally i don't find going through areas where there's like one random wolf and that's it like why is this part of the map here it just seems unnecessary now some people enjoy that kind of thing kudos to you if you do personally didn't care for it and probably the biggest negative if i'm being honest is the fact that the companions are basically just mercenaries these could have been any of them the fan favorites if you will the ones that had a tiny bit more than the rest wound up reoccurring in the second game but most of these guys just don't matter so with that let's come to a conclusion this is a great classic of a game especially for the price if you can overlook the aging mechanics that aren't getting any younger now at the end of the day regardless of my opinion regardless of anyone else's opinion this game has cemented itself in gaming history it has a very important role in literally the history of video games that is undeniably true and you need no further proofs than that than simply the fact that here we are 20 plus years later still talking about it so with that out of the way guys there you go there's my review of baldur's gate 1 after 100 specifically the enhanced edition but you get to just so truly thank you so much for watching especially if you watch this all the way to the end if you did you're a legend keep an eye out for the story series and the new players guide coming in the future remember to like comment subscribe all that youtube jazz but regardless of any of that truly just thank you so much for watching may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing day [Music]

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 224,779

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, Baldurs Gate, Baldurs Gate 1, Baldur's Gate, Review, Gameplay, Story, Guide, achievements, Bhaal, Legacy of Bhaal

Id: nSrwn81Fm24

Length: 32min 49sec (1969 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021