Baldur's Gate II: A Retrospective Review

not all of us have been wandering faroon like witless cattle like you and so many others of ball's blood some of us have far greater aspirations the time of olando's prophecy has come great things are afoot and your contribution will be your death [Music] [Music] [Music] boulder's gate 2 shadows of arm is a real time with paw's computer role-playing game developed by bioware and published in september 2000 by black isle studios like the first game baldur's gate 2 is an adaptation of the advanced dungeons and dragons tabletop rules and takes place in the forgotten realms campaign setting players return to faerun and reprise their role as the bastard child of the long-dead god of murder having saved the city of baldur's gate in the first game the child of ball journeys south to the prosperous republic of arm players will find just as many opportunities for adventure in athcatler as they did in boulder's gate for everyone from devious criminal to corrupt aristocrat is in need of a strong sword arm gold flows freely in arm and blood freeer still beard at the hands of expert killers savage monsters or much much worse to battle these new threats players are able to improve their party up to around level 20 unlocking many new abilities and over 130 new spells newly created characters can also choose from a new race the half awk plus numerous class kits which are specialized variants of the core a d and d classes but they'll be facing a powerful new foe who wants to use the bolsporn's divine birthright in his own insane schemes where this madman's plans lead only he can know so you'll need to gather to your side companions old and new and set out to foil him but in the city of coin anything can be bought and sold including your allies you'll need to forge closer ties to your companions and ensure they have a reason to stay by your side be it for honor opportunity friendship or perhaps something more for baldur's gate 2 bioware made numerous improvements to the infinity engine that had powered the original game such as adding higher resolutions enabling support for 3d acceleration and making a whole host of quality of life changes the developer also completely overhauled the way the engine handled scripting allowing them to design longer and more intricate quest lines improve the ai and enable more sophisticated interaction between the player their party and npcs bioware promised that baldur's gate 2 would thus immerse players in a world of intrigue romance and fierce combat and would be the most stunning advanced dungeons and dragons game to date and shadowsvan was indeed a phenomenal success with both critics and consumers the game sold hundreds of thousands of copies upon release and earned perfect or near-perfect scores from most gaming magazines computer gaming world declared it lord of the rpgs praising its tactical thought-provoking combat and inter-party interaction and posited that it was the best role-playing game you can buy today pc power play called baldur's gate 2 a stunning sequel that would blow you away saying bioware had matured into a world-class storyteller pc gamer uk argued the game was a stunningly vast polished detailed addictive and compelling drama that constituted truly epic role playing of the best vintage pc gamer us concurred but with slightly less enthusiasm saying it was simply a bigger prettier and just plain better version of baldur's gate where criticisms of the game arose they usually revolved around the tedium of looting and inventory management bad pathfinding weak multiplayer options and disappointment in the game's failure to break new ground even pc gamers adulation was coloured by the warning that shadows of arm was still very much a scion of traditional crpgs and not a new dawn for the genre and whilst pc zone awarded baldur's gate to their seal of excellence award the magazine cautioned that it was not as deeply absorbing as black isles planescape torment or ion storms deus ex which they cited as having set a new benchmark for computer role-playing games still in the aftermath of its release baldur's gate 2 was showered with awards like rpg of the year rpg of the decade and even greatest rpg of all time the game would go on to sell over 1.5 million copies and in june 2001 bioware released the throne of ball expansion pack marketed as the final installment of the borders gate trilogy and the conclusion to the bold spawn saga these final chapters along with the optional mega dungeon of watchers keep included approximately 30 hours of new content and introduced fearsome foes on like anything players had encountered before accordingly bioware raised the maximum level cap to 40 and implemented new high-level abilities from epic spells to legendary fighting techniques the expansion also added the wild mage class and made some further improvements to the infinity engine once again throne of ball met with very strong sales and highly positive reviews although most scores were slightly lower than those of shadows of arm computer gaming world summed up the general consensus in saying that whilst some players would be disappointed by the expansion's linearity and heavier combat focus it was still an epic and fitting end to the baldur's gate series and it was also the last time bioware would be involved in the franchise the developer was now focused on finishing development of the ambitious neverwinter knights as well as moving into full production on a player rpg set in the star wars universe publisher interplay would retain the rights to the baldur's gate name for several years publishing spin-off titles like dark alliance by snowblind and funding development of baldur's gate 3 at black isle studios but the publisher was in serious financial straits and in 2003 it cancelled baldur's gate 3 and laid off most of black isle unsurprisingly several further attempts were made at resurrecting the baldur's gate series over the years including an aborted production by black isle successor obsidian entertainment in 2008. it wasn't until 2012 that the franchise came back into the spotlight with beam dogs boulder's gate enhanced edition a remaster of the first game this was soon followed up with enhanced editions of borders gate 2 and other infinity engine titles more recently larian studios announced baldur's gate 3 a turn-based game utilizing the add 5th edition rule set that's scheduled for release in 2023 whether the title will prove to be a worthy successor to the series rather than a continuation of larian's original sin franchise is as yet unclear today many consider baldur's gate 2 the pinnacle of computer role-playing games the title regularly appears near the top of rpg codex's top 101 rpgs of all time and is frequently spotted in similar lists by the likes of game informer ign zhu video g4 gamespot and many more tony mott included the game in his book 1001 video games you must play before you die and matt barton author of the history of computer role-playing games has stated that he considers baldur's gate 2 the finest crpg ever designed in today's video we'll have a look at the history behind the game how it changed things up from baldur's gate some of the mods available and why not everyone is so enamored with it due to changes made by the enhanced edition of the game we'll be sticking with the original version of baldur's gate 2 in this video as you can probably tell from the timestamps it's a long road but hopefully one that both laymen and veterans of the game will find informative and interesting so let's venture forth shall we [Music] i always like the joke that was the biggest mistake we ever made was not actually making thrown a ball balder's gate 3 because it actually was it was a conclusion it was a 45 hour 50 hour expansion pack that you look back and go oh what were you thinking the idea of the bowl spawn saga as a trilogy is strange to many people a trilogy usually means three games so why is the baldur's gate trilogy two games and a quarter to get an idea of why things turned out this way it's best to look at the context in which this trilogy was being made the relationship between bioware and their publisher was a slightly complicated one though baldur's gate was developed by bioware interplay entertainment also had their own internal rpg division fergus urquhart's black isle studios as part of the arrangement between bioware and interplay some black isle staff worked as producers and support staff for bioware on the first game's development prior to baldur's gates release black isle were by far the better known of the two developers and partly due to how the game was marketed the gaming press sometimes misidentified black isle or interplay as the game's developer with bioware characterized as being in a support role things became even muddier due to interplay then making use of bioware's proprietary infinity engine which was what powered baldur's gate this meant that the black isle division were now developing interplay titles using the moniker a baldur's gate engine adventure and bioware sets certain limitations on how interplay could use their infinity engine when developing icewind dale for example black isle were contractually prohibited from launching the game with support for higher resolutions and various other upgrades as this might have taken the wind out of future bioware titles using the same engine but all of these games were of course utilizing the a d and d property which was owned by tsr then wizards of the coast and later hasbro and was being licensed out specifically to interplay at that time the fate of the bolsporn saga was thus intertwined with the relationship between bioware interplay black isle and the owners of the ad and d license and any plans made regarding future entries required all parties to be on the same page and at first this seemed to be the case the future of the boulder's gate franchise was being planned well before the release of the original game bioware has claimed that baldur's gate was always intended as a trilogy before baldur's gate was even called baldur's gate they stated their intention to extend the story via a series of so-called mission packs smaller bite-sized adventures that would plug into the main campaign in 1998 a few months before the release of the first game black isles fergus ercart stated that these mission packs would tide players over until the release of two full sequels both of which he claimed had already been greenlit by interplay of course only one of the mission packs tales of the sword coast would actually make it to release with bioware later explaining that making any more would have diverted staff from more important projects initially bioware were fairly open about some of their plans for the sequels in several different interviews bioware founder ray muzeika indicated that the second game in the series would take players from levels 7 to 12 whilst the third game would carry them through levels 12 to 18. this might not sound like much but in the tabletop game this progression meant a substantial increase in power levels for an adventuring party this would bring them into conflict with some of the most dangerous enemies that existed in the setting from despots to dragons and provide more than enough fodder for two games worth of epic adventures on the interplay message boards bioware also discussed a number of possible features that could be incorporated into the sequels and actively courted suggestions from fans but there were a few factors muddying the waters one was that bioware had to be careful with their messaging especially when comments made on the message boards were picked up by larger gaming sites and characterized as some sort of formal feature list so bioware employees sometimes had to step back and clarify earlier comments or defer to official announcements made by interplay second according to baldur's gate director james olin in 1998 bioware didn't actually have many concrete ideas about what they wanted to do with the second game at most he says they knew they wanted to follow up on the highlander-inspired premise of the bolsporn prophecy but almost everything else about the game was still up in the air the other big factor confusing things was the neverwinter knights project the bioware were working on an online ad title a sort of spiritual successor to the original 1991 game had been something of an open secret for a long time bioware's neverwinter nights had in fact entered pre-production sometime in 1996 but rumors about that project often dovetailed with rumors about the baldur's gate series and its future a common mistake made in previews of baldur's gate was to conflate its multiplayer features with those of the at that time on named online game in fairness some of the confusion was bioware's fault in a 1997 interview with game center for example muzika was quoted as promising that regarding the two sequels to baldur's gate one sequel would take place to the south of the city whilst the other sequel would be set much further north and indeed in the game the appropriately named lord foreshadows specifically mentioned the cities of athcatler neverwinter and waterdeep so it was probably inevitable that in april 1999 ign claimed to have confirmed that the official sequel to baldur's gate was in development its name neverwinter nights immediately after the news broke biowest scrambled to assure fans that if hypothetically speaking a sequel to baldur's gate were already in development it was not called neverwinter knights but that it would also not be called the baldur's gate 2. the reason bioware seemed so confident of the latter was because the rumors were partially correct their online game was to be set in the north in neverwinter whilst the actual sequel to baldur's gate was set to the south in athcatla in both cases the team were completely finished with the eponymous city of the first game and saw no reason to retain the name of course as bioware would later find out baldur's gate was now itself a distinct ip to which interplay owned publishing rights and understandably enough they had no intention of dropping the title in any case by 1999 it was pretty well known that bioware were working on a second baldur's gate game and fans merely waited for an official announcement from interplay one fan cite opined that bioware were in an interesting situation with the sequel when making baldur's gate 1 they were inspired by classic titles from the gold and silver ages of crpgs but in developing a follow-up to baldur's gate bioware were now their own muse it's a nice quote but not entirely accurate bioware and just as importantly interplay were not quite so myopic that they thought baldur's gate had become the sole benchmark for computer role-playing games one title in particular that had ruffled feathers at interplay was square's final fantasy vii which had been ported to pc quite poorly in 1998. even after the release of baldur's gate for some final fantasy vii symbolized the triumph of cinematic story-heavy character-driven adventures over the stade stat heavy pen and paper-inspired western crpg final fantasy vii had already worked its influence on black isle's planescape torment and interplay encouraged bioware to take some cues from japan too for that reason final fantasy's character interaction was one of several bullet points that appeared on bioware's internal feature list for baldur's gate 2. the list was jointly composed by bioware and interplay as a guide to the most important features that had to be incorporated into the game some of these were based on feedback from fans like the ability to dual-wield weapons others as a response to common complaints that appeared in reviews of the first game like character movement speed there were also more detailed design guidelines for individual departments such as one set for level design another for the lead writers and so forth some of these guidelines were fairly broad others curiously specific when writing dialogue for example lines spoken by the player had to be limited to a single line and npcs were not supposed to exceed two lines per dialogue node in a later interview with computer gaming world it was implied that this could be a response to criticisms of the quote daunting blocks of text favored in planescape torment but though these guidelines were developed at a very high level in consultation with both interplay and wizards of the coast they were by no means solely dictated by the whims of those at the top wizards of the coast had recently launched the third edition of the advanced dungeons and dragons tabletop game and unsurprisingly expected bioware to upgrade the rule set used in baldur's gate 2 to bring it in line with the new system but bioware bulked at the request the publicly stated reason for this was that the third edition had only really been soft launched at that point and it would therefore be premature for bioware to redesign borders gate 2 whilst the rules were still in flux in reality though the reason for this was technical though this was only bioware's second outing with the infinity engine it was already being stretched to its limits and bioware simply didn't think the engine was capable of supporting the third edition mechanics bioware programmer mark dara says that internally wizard's request to use the third edition rules was considered the height of lunacy of course it wasn't just wizards of the coast who assumed bioware would be changing the rule set many fans expected at least some of the new features of 3rd edition would be incorporated into baldur's gate 2. as a compromise bioware kept the modified 2nd edition rules but added the sorcerer monk and barbarian as new classes and also introduced unique class kits like the cavalier or kensai but an upgrade to the rule set wasn't the only priority feature that was undone by practical considerations one of the major criticisms leveled against baldur's gate by some reviews was its multiplayer mode which allowed the player to replace npc companions with their friends critics of the multiplayer essentially fell into two camps one was the pen and paper demographic who hoped bioware would give them the tools to play baldur's gate too more like her traditional tabletop experience with a proper dungeon master the ability for players to wander off and do their own thing and so forth this was difficult to implement in a single player protagonist driven game like baldur's gate in development diaries bioware said they determined that whilst the upcoming neverwinter knights would be a multiplayer game that could also be played in single-player baldur's gate was the inverse a single player game that could be played in multiplayer thus though bioware made some small quality of life improvements for pen and paper fans like non-pausing dialogue in multiplayer there was no point investing too much effort in trying to cater to them when neverwinter knights was on the horizon but the second camp clamoring for an improved multiplayer mode were the death match crowd it might sound silly today the idea that baldur's gate needed more competitive multiplayer options but it was quite a common request made of developers back then these voices were loud and persuasive enough that one of the 15 core features in baldur's gate 2's original design dock was a death match mode with unique maps for player versus player combat in his post mortem reimu zeiker said that trying to implement deathmatch was enormously difficult and though bioware eventually gave up on the feature it was an unnecessary drain on resources that should have been cut much earlier in the development process even what had seemed like a less demanding feature the non-pausing dialogue turned out to cause serious problems and was only partially implemented into shadows of arm bioware have said that listing each and every little feature that was at some point intended but never implemented into baldur's gate 2 would make for thousands of entries in early discussions on the forums for example bioware said it was possible playable psionic characters might make it into the game but this would depend on how much time it took to implement the class kits bioware weren't simply promising every single thing suggested by fans but there were obviously a lot of examples of features that were briefly considered and then dropped early on in the development process one such example was rideable horses and mounted combat you'd assume that this is something that was dismissed out of hand but according to multiple sources bioware did actually sit down and have a serious discussion about the feasibility of this feature one possible reason it remained on the cards for so long was that acquiring a mount was actually one of the boons granted to higher level paladins in the tabletop game and class specific enhancements were another major feature bioware were pushing for strongholds and unique quest lines for classes being a legacy of this but inevitably rideable horses joined many other wild ideas on the cutting room floor the core of the ballers gate team were for the most part the same group that had worked on the original game including lead designer james olin writer lucas christiansen art director marcia topher artists mike sass and john gallagher and so on still a few had been moved to other projects and the baldur's gate 2 team had to be expanded due to the increased scope of the game among the new employees was david gaider a former hotel manager brent knowles a recent programming graduate and many other names that would go on to become key figures in bioware as with the first game there were also a number of senior producers from black isle studios overseeing the project on behalf of interplay despite bioware's expansion the working atmosphere at the developer was apparently still very casual brent knowles said founder greg zeschuk would wander around the office barefoot whilst david gaider later alleged that some employees refused to wear pants and one of the artists would routinely watch hardcore pornography during office hours this is borne out by the team's public interactions where both bioware and black isle staff made crude jokes at each other's expense jokes that they wouldn't dare make in today's environment but a common thread with the new hires was that like the old guard most were experienced tabletop gamers knowles for example was both an experienced pen and paper player and a dragon magazine contributor and once again a significant amount of the content that went into baldur's gate 2 would be coloured by the stories and characters staff had played around with in their dnd days james olin has said that though baldur's gate 2 was by no means a relaxed project it was not as stressful and demanding as the first game had been and brent knowles has said he has fonder memories of the experience than when he worked on neverwinter nights david gaider however has painted a slightly more negative picture and admitted we were terrible at scope control we just kept adding content the central problem with baldur's gate 2's development as romuzaika saw it was that the game was not only much larger than baldur's gate but the content itself was significantly more feature-rich and required a lot of time for qa testing the quest lines in baldur's gate 2 were longer and more complex the character interactions substantially wordier many quest lines and special events in borders gate 2 were now affected by two different internal timers one timer would measure how much time had passed in game whilst another tracked how much time had passed in the real world these would often overlap and become entangled with other quest lines and scripted events magnifying the risk of critical bugs bioware used an external tool called dottie that let them take dialogue trees out of the game and visualize them for the benefit of designers the tool would show all the different branching points and where they connected to other conversations and quest lines lucas christiansen noted that some of these were so complicated they couldn't even fit onto one screen designers had to zoom out so far all they could see was a beautiful crystalline network of dialogue nodes one of the major quest lines the thieves guild was reportedly so dizzyingly obtuse that it came close to crashing the whole tool but one of the biggest threats to the tool's stability came from an unexpected source romances the romanceable party members were not something that had initially been part of the core feature list for baldur's gate 2. they grew naturally out of the idea of giving party members distinct character arcs and were appended to the list after the characters themselves had already been sketched out this led to some head scratching on the part of the writers the character of anna men for example had originally been written as quote an yet was now supposed to be a compelling romantic partner the original plan for the romances was that there would be six potential love interests in total three for male protagonists and three for the ladies initially gaiter was responsible for the annamen valagar and herdalis romances whilst lucas christiansen was meant to write those for jahira airy and viconia but jahira's romance soon ballooned into an unwieldy beast that sucked up all of christiansen's time as it turned out christiansen wasn't even aware he was supposed to be working on the other two characters gaydar was therefore pulled off the herdalis and valigar romances to help finish viconia and aries content but shahira's romantic subplot would continue to spiral out of control this reached the point that james olin stuck a note to his office door stating that if he received just one more bug report regarding the jahira romance the entire thing would be cut the solution to this was that the team simply stopped submitting bug reports on their favorite content gada has said that designers usually had a lot of freedom both in how they interpreted what was handed down to them by olin and also in filling areas with their own content the result of this was that they were very passionate about what they were creating but this of course led to them becoming over-invested in the characters and quests they were working on giving them too much dialogue or making side quests too long and complicated it wasn't until much later in development that the leads put their foot down producer fergus ercart was particularly concerned about the state of the project and spearheaded the decision to present the writers with an ultimatum if their quests weren't working before his deadline they were getting cut but since staff were so invested in content that was for them very personal they became extremely protective of what they'd made refusing to go home and grabbing quick naps on the office sofa to ensure none of their work was cut gada has described the experience as like having the sword of damocles hanging over the designers heads with staff terrified that their favorite character or quest line was facing the chop but these attempts to rain the project in came far too late inevitably significant amounts of work were lost with gada saying that from the perspective of insiders it looked like there were giant gaping holes in the game where entire plots had been unceremoniously scooped out but though the cuts were painful for staff it was also clear that they were necessary and it wasn't only subordinate designers who had to swallow their pride and make sacrifices to get the game out the door one of the game's optional quests involved the planar sphere a giant interdimensional craft that served as both a dungeon and an important part of several smaller side quests but lead james olin had a much more ambitious plan for the sphere intending it to be the centerpiece of a chapter of the main quest in this cut chapter the antagonist of the first game would have commandeered the sphere and used it to create an alternate reality in which he had conquered the whole of the sword coast players were supposed to fight their way back to the planar sphere and restore the original timeline it seems unbelievable that olin thought he could fit this into baldur's gate 2's already overstuffed campaign but ray muzeiker has said it was a symptom of losing sight of the scope of the game and failing to set definitive deadlines early enough musica noted that olan like those under him was a creative type and always used extra time to add new quests or try and experiment with novel ideas instead of properly testing existing content brent knowles has said that he for example was almost brought to tears trying to implement david gaider's underdark plot gaider himself has said that at this point baldur's gate 2 looked like a disaster the game's scope had gone insanely out of control only for large chunks of both side content and the main quest to be hacked away in a bid to get the project under control as baldur's gate 2 neared completion the view inside bioware was that it was as gada put it complete crap gator claims that the prevailing attitude among the team was that they simply wanted to get it done and never think about it again of course from the outside there was no sign of these problems interplay announced borders gate 2 shadows of arm in november 1999 with a formal launch party and ramped up the marketing with numerous interviews special developer diaries and press tours over the next few months as always bioware and black isle were very active on the baldur's gate message boards answering queries about the title and explaining the rationale behind some of their decisions contests were held that let fans design their own characters with the winners being incorporated into the final game as minor npcs and spirits were high within the community some promotional tie-in material was also produced by both interplay and their partners as with the first game a novelization was announced to be penned by author philip athens unfortunately as with the first novelization athens had no contact whatsoever with bioware and was instead provided incomplete and outdated scripts by interplay resulting in a rushed and messy story that athens would later disavow wizards for their part published volo's guide to baldur's gate 2 essentially an elaborate primer on the background lore and locations visited in the game that was written by forgotten realms creator ed greenwood in the context of the wider advertising push the words being hammered home by interplay's marketing were size scope and storytelling baldur's gate 2 would be more epic more engaging more exciting and fix all the complaints reviewers had about the first game or so they promised aside from the usual talking points of bigger maps more quests higher levels and all that particular focus was put on the party members companions being better developed and having their own agendas was something that was brought up several times plus the possibility that a companion could fall in love with the player or even betray them if treated poorly bioware realized that when life gives you lemons make lemonade cleverly refashioning internal development problems into positive talking points taking the jahira situation for example bioware crowed that one character in baldur's gate 2 had more unique content than all the party members of the original game put together of course they omitted to mention that this had come at the expense of party members not named jahira another theme that was played up was how much darker and more mature the game's tone would be and that it would go places the original game hadn't dared and forced the player to confront tough questions about who they wanted to be overall the pre-release coverage of baldur's gate 2 was very positive with no indication of the problems going on behind the scenes some previews gently pointed out that the game didn't seem to be a harbinger of innovation that it was just balder's gate but better and the press struggled to find a way of hyping up the visuals although they were obviously trying to be positive noting the higher resolutions spell effects and interface improvements baldur's gate 2 was definitely a little behind the times at least from a purely technological standpoint quite apart from the recent system shock 2 or the upcoming deus ex early footage of games like revenant the polls of radiance reboot and ultima 9 showed that even crpgs were entering the polygonal era ign noted that those hoping bioware had hopped on the 3d train were out of luck and the lack of dynamic lighting something of a buzzword at that time was brought up as well interplay heavily promoted the fact that the engine was now able to support much larger creature sprites the problem as one magazine pointed out was that they'd already used the same talking point in icewind dale's marketing whilst images of some large enemies were released these weren't as impressive as the colossal beasts of black isles game bioware did have an even more impressive monster to show off but were holding back in game shots to avoid spoiling the surprise putting baldur's gate 2 at a disadvantage compared to icewinddale the fact was that 3d graphics were advancing at breakneck speeds during this period and there was enormous pressure for studios to keep up in a later interview artist mike sask says that bioware's art and technical departments went through brutal turnover rates as it entered the 2000s as veteran jack of all trade artists were quickly replaced with entry-level college graduates who are much more proficient in specific areas of 3d graphics at the same time more rpg oriented communities voiced disappointment that features from the pen and paper game like thieves climbing ability or war horses for paladins would be missing and there were always posters upset that a particular class or race combination was not going to be added but these were mostly nitpicks and all signs were pointing to borders gate 2 being a success daily radar was already confident that shadows of arm would solidify bioware's status as the hottest developer in the rpg world interplay seem to agree as towards the end of development they were willing to send out both a demo and preview copies to gaming magazines and authorized fan sites the response was overwhelmingly positive with sorcerer's place for example asserting that based on their time with it baldur's gate 2 is simply a game that you cannot afford to miss the question of the crpg of the year has been resolved but the announcement of the throne of ball expansion pack in early 2001 brought with it another question one that to this day has not been fully resolved that question being what happened to bioware's baldur's gate 3 computer gaming world met the announcement of throne of bald with good humor thundering that with the additional 50 hours of content they'd be on medicare before they finished baldur's gate 2. there were similar reactions from other publications excitement but also a sense of bafflement at the decision to bloat an already legendarily lengthy campaign with a massive expansion pack three talking points were repeated over and over again in both press releases and previews that the baldur's gate series was always intended as a trilogy that throne of ball was an expansion pack but one so large it was almost a full game and that this would indeed be the final chapter in the ballspawn saga the promised third game in the series was it seems damnatio memoriae in the decades following release there have been numerous retrospectives interviews with former bioware and black isle staff and of course a resurgence of behind the scenes titbits to accompany events like bioware's 25th anniversary and trentosta's baldur's gate enhanced editions but none of these give an in-depth unambiguous account of exactly how or why baldur's gate 3 was replaced by throne of ball when throne of ball was announced in early 2001 there had obviously been a set of carefully prepared talking points handed down to those interacting with fans and the press it's not that nobody asked the question at the time some sites did query what happened to the promised trilogy and we're told to paraphrase well it kinda sorta is a trilogy in a way that made it clear a more in-depth response was not forthcoming later retrospectives even those involving extensive correspondence with former team members seem to curiously skip over this part of the series history ignoring what was being said prior to baldur's gate 2's release and simply stating matter of factly that the throne of ball well exists but what we also have are some established facts regarding the developers intentions and throwaway comments made by bioware staff over the years i spoke by email to several people who worked on both shadows of arm and throne of ball and they agreed that at least to their knowledge baldur's gate 3 was still on the cards when baldur's gate 2 entered development brent knowles who joined in 1999 says that this was certainly his understanding and throne of bold producer alan miranda confirmed that he had heard the original plan was for a trilogy of games but none of the group i spoke to were able to say for sure insisting that they genuinely don't know why baldur's gate 3 ended up as an expansion pack but we can speculate based on publicly available information we know at least according to mizeika that the second boulder's gate game was only supposed to cover a handful of extra character levels and that the third game would bring parties up to around level 18 or so but baldur's gate 2 ended up blowing right past that with some classes hitting the low 20s already making them some of the most powerful mortal characters in the setting musica and zestchuck also revealed in a gdc event that after baldur's gate 2 had ballooned into a 100 hour monstrosity interplay proposed simply splitting the game in two using the second half of the game as the basis for creating a third title but since baldur's gate 2 had been designed from the ground up as a single game it would have been impossible to simply slice it in half without breaking pretty much everything we should also recall that bioware had already pushed the infinity engine to the limit of what they felt it was capable of despite extensive improvements made by the team mark dara has stated that the engine in shadows of arm was in the ballpark of 95 percent identical to the one used in baldur's gate describing the engine as held together by gum after throne of ball's release david gaider talked quite openly about the fact that bioware struggled with designing interesting new content in the expansion pack often haunted by a sense of deja vu scared they were unwittingly recycling encounters from previous games in the series granted black isle were able to partially implement add third edition into ice windall ii but this was in the face of extreme resistance from fergus urquhart and others who were convinced that it would result in disaster and that project had its own fair share of problems thanks to the engine some comments made by bioware staff over the years have been difficult to interpret zestrick and muzika have been quoted as saying that they have no regrets about not making baldur's gate 3 but have also been quoted as saying they do wish they'd been able to continue using the characters and at their gdc talk said that their biggest mistake was not making throne of bowl into baldur's gate 3. the most likely explanation for what happened is the most straightforward one the baldur's gate 2 cannibalized baldur's gate 3. bioware simply didn't want to try and make an entirely new game using an ageing engine that had already been completely exhausted of all potential assuming for the sake of argument bioware had made baldur's gate 3 it would have been saddled with impossibly high expectations and even if it launched as early as 2002 it would have had to compete with heavyweights like dungeon siege and elder scrolls 3 plus smaller rivals like gothic or divine divinity on the dnd front it probably would have brushed aside something like ice windall 2 but it would have seemed very dated in comparison to neverwinter knights in fact by the time throne of bold launched bioware had already started production on knights of the old republic begging the question of how a third game would have affected bioware's other projects several team members said that even after baldur's gate 2 bioware was still a relatively small developer and couldn't afford to take on too many projects at once brent knowles confirmed that neverwinter knights the unnamed star wars rpg and what would become jade empire were their priorities around that time partly because there was significant pressure to move on to newer fully 3d engines even so it's still not clear precisely when the decision was made to finish the ball-spawn saga with an expansion pack instead of a full game alan miranda said that when he joined bioware in october 2000 the plan for throne of ball had already been finalized so we can speculate that the decision to drop baldur's gate 3 had been made many months prior to that some outside bioware have pointed out that black isle began working on baldur's gate 3 the black hound around the same time it's reasonable to assume that once the decision to put black isle to work on the black hound was made the relationship between the two companies was coming to an end an interplay thus knew for certain that bioware would not be continuing the series on the other hand project jefferson began life as a fantasy game not a baldur's gate game the name wasn't slapped on until sometime later in development so it doesn't really help clarify the timeline of course this is all still speculation considering some of the things admitted by bioware staff over the years you'd think that if it was something as simple as creative concerns or a lack of confidence in the infinity engine that would have been revealed by now but let's not forget that developing a computer game isn't all sex drugs and role-playing there are also legal and financial concerns i've read third parties speculate that baldur's gate 2 was too expensive to develop and wasn't the hit interplay hoped it would be causing them to pull funding for bioware's baldur's gate 3 but this goes against pretty much everything else i've read it's true shadows of arm wasn't the financial hit the diablo 2 was something magazines at the time pointed out and it's also true that the hefty royalties payments involved meant that interplay didn't make as much from the game as they could have into plays brian fargo has said as much but by all reputable accounts and fergus urquhart baldur's gate 2 was a massive financial success for both interplay and bioware in that case why wouldn't both parties want to continue surely a slightly creaky old engine wouldn't dissuade them it certainly didn't stop icewinddale2 being funded well there were other factors to consider interplay were in a tricky situation regarding the state of the dungeons and dragons license at that time first losing the license to make dungeons and dragons games except those using the baldur's gator icewind dale title and later losing the rights to those as well it's well known that bioware were already in talks with arthur grahams and hasbro regarding neverwinter knights at that time in fact bioware were in talks with many publishers at the time according to mark dara valve software had attempted to negotiate a partnership with bioware involving their upcoming digital distribution platform it's also known that bioware sued interplay for breach of contract shortly after throne of ball's release meaning the relationship must have been extremely contentious for months prior to that although zestrakan musaika have in public been unwaveringly positive when discussing bioware's relationship with interplay this has been brought into doubt by comments made by others in 2018 former black isle producer chris avalone said the following the reason baldur's gate 2 didn't get a sequel wasn't due to sales but because bioware was sick of dealing with interplay and black isle by his account relations between bioware and their publisher had been strained for a long time at least as far back as the original negotiations for baldur's gate 2. avalon claims that black island interplay wanted to work on a third game with bioware but bioware no longer wished to work with them according to avalon the perception at the time was that bioware no longer needed interplay or the dnd license and wanted to go off and create their own ips going by avalon's account it certainly makes sense that bioware would prefer to make an expansion pack rather than an entirely new game this would have allowed bioware to finish the trilogy on their own terms without taking on the risk of negotiating a new contract with a hostile publisher whose own financial standing was at best shaky but in the end there's only two things we can say for sure that baldur's gate 3 was being planned right up to some unknown point in time during shadows of arms development secondly that for whatever reason it didn't end up happening it's important to avoid giving the impression that bioware considered throne of ball a mistake muzakar and zestruck may have said some conflicting things about borders gate 3 but one thing they've been consistent about is that they feel enormously fortunate they had the chance to finish the series at all as they pointed out at gdc many great franchises never had that opportunity in the review of throne of ball computergamingworld asked when was the last time a saga ended so fittingly certainly not the train wreck that ended the ultima series throne of baal is the resounding ending that the baldur's gate dynasty and its fans deserve anecdotally comments made by bioware staff in the 20 years since throne of bol do not give the impression of developers seething or bitter over having their legacy unfulfilled as far as i can tell those involved including those i spoke to directly by email seem pretty satisfied with how the series ended they had made a great game and were excited to move on to new projects and fans agreed well most fans many people loved baldur's gate too but not everyone to some it represented stagnation at a time when there were other developers taking role-playing games in radical new directions to others it was departure from the classic crpgs of the past and even to some of those who enjoyed the first game it represented bioware's first step on the road to decline in some cases bioware were intentionally taking shadows of arm in these directions in others these changes were a byproduct of the development problems we just discussed but there are also cases in which bioware probably had absolutely no idea how their decisions would change audience expectations of computer role-playing games to understand a little of this we need to look at what you do in baldur's gate 2 how it differed from the first game and how people responded to it [Music] [Music] anyone who's played an infinity engine game before will feel right at home in baldur's gate 2. you start by either importing your character from the first game which will carry over any extra experience and potentially one or two of the items you are carrying with you or you create a totally new character the core races and classes are the same as the original boulder's gate men elves dwarves and such plus the new half orc who can be stronger and hardier than humans but at the cost of slightly lower intelligence and some class restrictions the available classes include those of the original various types of fighters mages thieves and priests but with some new choices added by both vanilla baldur's gate 2 and the throne of ball expansion the new classes include the sorcerer similar to the mage but chooses spells upon levelling up rather than learning them in the field the barbarian who cannot wear as heavy armor as the regular fighter but gets some health speed and attack boosts and the monk who focuses on unarmed combat and special abilities most of the regular classes now also have kits which are basically subclasses that provide new gameplay and role-playing opportunities so thieves might specialize as trained killers rather than burglars fighters might issue armor and accessories to devote themselves to the art of swordplay rangers might attune themselves more closely to nature as beast masters and so on if you imported the character from borders gate there are a few adjustments that need to be made most notably in the area of weapon proficiencies in borders gate these categories were fairly broad a character who intended to use swords for example would put points into either large swords or small swords in baldur's gate 2 many of these categories have been divided up into more specific weapon classes instead of picking a large sword a fighter can choose to master one of several different types of sword they might be skilled with a long sword but not with a scimitar for example this encourages a bit more customization of a melee focused character since they're no longer quite the jack of all trades they were in baldur's gate 1. but regardless of whether you've imported a character or made a new one everyone will begin the game at around level 7. this means spellcasters will already have a wide variety of spells to choose from some of the more exotic classes will have a few of their class specific skills and even regular old fighters will have a handful of innate abilities from the original game players will begin shadows of arm in a tutorial dungeon will be introduced to their captor and the game's main antagonist after a short introduction the protagonist is freed from their cell by their childhood friend emilyn who then joins the player as their first companion the only real objective for now is to begin searching for a way out in the process of which you'll pick up some extra party members and learn about the basics of gameplay as with all infinity engine games borders gate 2 occurs in real time but combat spells and status effects revolve around the a d and d round system this means the amount of attacks that a player can make within a certain amount of time how long it takes to cast a spell how long that spell will last how long characters have to wait between performing special actions and so on it's calculated according to pen and paper rules one round equals six seconds in real time and one turn equals ten rounds so if a character has two attacks per round that means contrary to appearances that they are attacking twice every 6 seconds whilst spell that lasts 1 turn will remain active for 60 seconds to keep players from getting overwhelmed the game can be paused at any time and the party can be given orders for when the action resumes like the other games the party's goal is to wander around the environment slaying monsters looting chests for money and gear solving simple puzzles and picking up side quests like helping a genie escape from magical confinement or retrieving an item for some npcs the tutorial dungeon will also teach the player the value of having a balanced party of frontline fighters for dishing out and taking physical damage mages and priests for magic support and thieves for locating traps and picking locks the party will be constantly rewarded with a steady stream of experience points and once they earn enough experience to level up they'll gain a stat boost and access to new spells or abilities by this point anyone who's played the first baldur's gate will probably have noticed some small differences in how the general mechanics of the game operate the most obvious is that all the characters in the game move much faster than they did in baldur's gate have slightly better pathfinding and are able to nudge each other out of the way when not in combat making navigation in tight spaces a little less annoying there are also some changes made to spells that existed in the first game they may have been rebalanced usually nerfed by shortening their duration lowering the maximum amount that can be active at one time or in the case of defensive buffs changed from full immunity to a mere chance of avoiding damage one or two are gone entirely the dimension door basically a teleport spell was removed from shadows of arm due to breaking some of the scripts used in cut scenes but the most significant change is the way the game's new difficulty levels work in baldur's gate the default or normal difficulty was core rules which basically meant both the players party and npcs all followed the same a d and d guidelines for combat and character progression at least on paper in baldur's gate 2 the standard default difficulty is now the so-called normal difficulty which despite the name grants a number of boons to the player to make life easier the first is that all enemies now have a 15 damage reduction applied to attacks made against the player and their companions so the party are now noticeably hardier the player's party will now also automatically roll the maximum on certain checks like when calculating hit point gains on leveling up or when wizards try to learn a spell the last big difference is that all party members with the exception of the protagonist are now immune to annihilation or perma death this means that no matter how they died so long as a party member was not removed from the party they can still be revived with a raised dead spell via an ally or temple healer other changes made to the game's mechanics are mostly quality of life things like increasing the amount of ammunition and items that can be stacked in one inventory spot or the addition of magical holding bags for extra space so for players coming in from the original game baldur's gate 2 will at first feel pretty much the same just a little more convenient and less punishing once the party makes it out of the tutorial dungeon they'll be reintroduced to the game's main antagonist only for the city's authorities to intervene and spirit away both your enemy and a rather distressed immigrant the party discover that they are now in the city of athcatler capital of the republic of arm at this stage the party only have access to joaquin's promenade one of several districts of the city here they'll find plenty of shops to sell loot taverns and inns to rest in and npcs to dispense side quests one such quest is slap bang in the middle of the district solving the mystery of why a circus act has turned into a bloodbath this will help the player practice their skills earn some more gold looting experience and pick up a new party member once the party is finished with or has become bored of the promenade they can progress to the slums district and this is where the game really begins the party will be assigned the objective of earning enough money to ally with one of arm's major criminal organizations who will help them discover the location of the prison where emon and their mysterious foe now reside as of now the player is free to visit virtually anywhere in armed athcaddler alone consists of eight districts stuffed with npcs side quests and explorable interior locations some of these districts also host their own dungeon-like sub-regions beneath the slums and temporal districts runs the winding sewers and deeper still lie hideaways for criminals and killers abandoned tunnels and ancient ruins looming over the slums is a giant interdimensional spacecraft and under the graveyard district there's an undead infested tomb network as the player wanders around the city they'll find that the quests may come to them of their own accord a messenger might approach the party with a new adventure a previously completed quest drags the party into further trouble or the player's companions might request their raid in personal business at some point the player will likely wander out into the amish countryside visiting further quest hubs like the haunted umar hills the besieged town of trade meet or the ill-governed lands of lord firecrack eventually the player will also be given the opportunity to take command of a class stronghold a fighter will get the chance to govern a noble family's keep a paladin could rise through the ranks of a holy order a thief could run their own guild and so on this will mean further benefits and responsibilities for the player the castellan of the keep for example can earn money through taxes but also has to resolve disputes and be wary of attempts by a rival family to seize the keep for their own after a few hours of playtime veteran baldur's gate fans will likely notice that general quest design is a bit more sophisticated than in the original game most questing the original borders gate were relatively straightforward go pick up an item talk to an npc kill something then come back to the quest giver there might be multiple steps to these quests but they're usually developed in a fairly linear manner thanks to the upgraded engine and scripting language quests in baldur's gate 2 can potentially involve a few more moving parts we'll take one of the companion quests as an example the quest starts when one of your party members is cursed by an old enemy and his allies now the end point of the quest is to simply find where the villain is hiding kill him and lift the curse but a lot of stuff can happen in between since you don't know where the villain fled to you'll need to follow some clues your companion points out that an ally of theirs might know how to help visiting them will give you a couple of leads including the knowledge that a mutual friend was found dead in a nearby derelict house suggesting where the villain could be found other members of the party might chime in and point out that some of the villains allies were mages and since magic is tightly regulated in arm it might be worth asking the authorities for information and if the player follows up on these clues one of the villains allies will take note and offer to abandon or turn on the villain in exchange for payment making the final confrontation much easier but the companion themselves will become progressively weaker as the curse works its magic meaning they'll soon be virtually useless as an ally cold-blooded players will probably just dump them from the party whilst those who decide to help their companion are now in a race against time to save the companion's life depending on what the party did over the course of the quest the finale is either a pitched battle with a villain and their allies a battle with a villain by themselves an automatic execution of the villain or a negotiated surrender which ends with your companion killing the villain anyway and what you did during the quest will have repercussions for future quests involving that companion this excursion is more or less representative of the average side quest in baldur's gate 2. there are certainly shorter and more straightforward quests as well as substantially longer and more complicated ones but a good number of them at least have the potential to develop in slightly different ways of course most of your time in baldur's gate 2 is spent looting treasure chests and killing stuff and itemization and encounter design is also deeper and more sophisticated than the first game in the original boulder's gate most weapons were unenchanted quite appropriately classed as normal weapons in add rules and getting your first enchanted weapon was a major highlight of early game progression as a general rule any weapon with an enchantment higher than plus one was extremely rare the main benefit of magical weapons in the original game was that they were unbreakable and of course carried an attack bonus or even a special trait like causing a tiny bit of elemental damage or making the wearer immune to a specific status effect the vast majority of enemies encountered in the original game were native to the mundane material plane of existence and thus affected by the same rules as the rest of us hit it with an unenchanted hammer and it'll crack slash it with an unenchanted sword and it'll bleed there were a small number of foes with special immunities like elemental slime creatures and at the higher levels you would start to encroach upon the realm of more outlandish beasts like flesh golems helmed horrors or werewolves who were totally invulnerable to certain types of damage spellcasters could also protect themselves with incantations like mirror image or protection from normal missiles but these could be bypassed easily enough things are very different in baldur's gate too as you'll need to have to get to grips with not only all the different damage types but also multiple tiers of weapon enchantments defensive spells and debuffs you won't have to wait long before you run into enemies who can only be damaged or killed with elemental effects the dyani's keep for example is infested with trolls who will regenerate all their hit points if the killing blow was not struck with fire or acid similarly there are legions of shadow creatures in athcatla and the umar hills who are immune to normal weapons and soon enough the party will run into demonic and outer planar travelers who have even higher levels of immunity requiring magical weapons with an enchantment of at least plus two plus three or beyond finally due to the higher spell levels wizards and clerics can encase themselves in layer upon layer of magical protections on top of returning lower level spells like mirror image and protection from missiles the typical spellslinger you encounter will now cast spells that grant immunity to normal weapons spells that grant immunity to enchanted weapons spells that grant immunity to spells up to a particular spell level spells that grant immunity to spells of specific spell skulls spells that grant immunity to being targeted by spells spells that reflect spells back at the caster spells that inflict damage on the attacker spells that cause other spells to automatically trigger when certain conditions are met and spells that restore previously cast spells when the caster is struck by a hostile spell and then to counter these you have spells that dispel low level spells spells that dispel mid-level spells spells that randomly dispel spells of any level spells that dispel specific other spells spells that reverse spells that made targets on targetable spells that lower spell resistance and it goes on and these different mechanics will often intersect a lich for example is by their very nature already immune to unenchanted weapons and low level spells and upon entering combat will trigger defensive spells like spell trap invisibility protection from magical weapons and simulacrum creating a clone of themselves to cast further defensive spells lucas christiansen said that the magic system was purposefully designed this way so that it would be more tactical that it wasn't just unloading the heavy stuff immediately and seeing who's left standing now from the player's perspective it means you're incentivized to level up your spellcasters to access new spell levels and to loot the richest treasure hordes for the highest tier weapons and armor in baldur's gate 2 there's plenty of gear that doesn't just add flat bonuses to attack roles or armor class but also grants improved magic resistance or saving throws curses the target with debuffs like silence confusion or paralysis protects against numerous status effects randomly dispels defensive incantations and so on to give the party an extra boost baldur's gate 2 also introduces a crafting npc cromwell the dwarf resides in the docs districts and has a couple of useful functions first you can make handy items like an infinite quiver of arrows and second can nose around the player's inventory to see if they're carrying any artifact components if they are cromwell will offer to craft these items into some of the best weapons or armor in the game or at least give you a clue regarding what other components are needed to complete the artifact so although baldur's gate 2 isn't too noticeably affected by level scaling there's still a bit of an arms race going on between the party and their enemies a party with good gear will breeze through low level encounters a bit faster than usual and will accelerate their chances of running head first into a foe that's well above their capabilities these more powerful enemies will then encourage the party to go searching for adventures of an intermediate challenge so they can level up and claim some gear that'll help them when they inevitably return to their nemesis and exact some payback obviously this means that the campaign needs to provide a constant feed of new quests and locations roughly appropriate to the party's current level luckily baldur's gate 2's fame as one of the largest rpgs ever made is well earned and chapter 2 alone offers somewhere between 50 and 100 hours of unique content so it'll be a very long time before the player starts running out of things to do but at some point players will finally decide they want to advance the main story and upon paying off a benefactor they'll start chapter 3 of baldur's gate 2. chapter 3 is essentially just a re-branding of chapter 2. you have access to pretty much all the same content as the previous chapter but are now drawn into a relatively short quest line in which you decide the outcome of the war for athcatla's underworld at the end of this quest line players can depart for the isle of bryn lore a pirate nest that has sprung up around the fearful magical prison of spell hold this signals a significant change in the game's pacing from now all the way through until chapter 6. all the areas of chapters 2 and 3 become temporarily inaccessible the timers on the majority of the side quests and class strongholds will freeze and the player will progress in a much more linear fashion through a sequence of small and mid-sized locations upon breaching spell hold and progressing the main narrative the party can choose to either board a ship or step through a portal taking the portal will teleport them directly to chapter 5 and the underdark a subterranean world ruled by dark elves beholders mind flayers and slightly less dangerous races taking the ship involves a short aquatic diversion but will eventually deposit them in the underdark anyway the underdark is a little less linear than chapter four roughly analogous to two self-contained districts of athcatler in size and linked to several small dungeons but it is still a fraction of the size of chapter two upon finishing their business in the underdark the player can conclude chapter 5 and finally return to arm where they'll be able to resume exploring the game's side content how much there is to do in chapter 6 depends on how much the player did in chapters 2 and 3. if they didn't take the completionist route before this is their opportunity to experience everything the game has to offer if they did take advantage of earlier chapters then there's a brief dalian sanath cattler and a couple of tiny new outdoor locations once the player has decided that they've seen all they wanted of the city of coin they can pursue their nemesis to the elven capital of sudanesa and from there to the finale of shadows of arm upon defeating the final boss and assuming the throne of ball expansion is installed the party will then be teleported to chapter eight the first of three epilogue chapters that relocate the player to the kingdom of tethyr and bring the ball spawn saga to a close throne of ball's epilogue campaign is basically in the style of chapters 4 to 5 from shadows of arm the player only has access to one or two medium-sized quest hubs with a handful of short side quests at any one time the justification for this being either that they're trapped in that location or that they have no reason to visit any other locations into thea until told to do so the player does gain the ability to teleport to a small pocket plane of their own where they can obtain a new companion forge even more powerful artifacts and learn more of their heritage but for the most part they're led by the nose through to the end of the story with the only notable bit of optional extra content being watchers keep the keep is a sixth floor mega dungeon and is filled with extremely high level monsters and loot it can actually be accessed from the original shadows of arm map but the deeper levels are really balanced around throne of bold parties see by the time players get to throw in a bowl they should be starting to reach almost god-like levels of power and the new epic level abilities will reflect this ranging from superhuman toughness to fighters to magic users being able to summon divine assistance the items and abilities available to the party will also be appropriate to their power and experience and that they'll probably have multiple magic bags of holding several infinite quivers for their ranged weapons and likely more spells than they know what to do with enemies will of course be of an appropriate level to counter this in shadows of arm the player could face anything from street thugs to dragons but in throne of ball there will be entire armies of giants demon lords and demigods standing in your way and a guess throne of bald would probably clock in at roughly 30 hours of adventuring so the sum total of the baldur's gate 2 experience is potentially somewhere between 100 to 200 hours of unique content whilst a huge chunk of that content is optional you should at least make some use of it to improve your party because once you enter the final battle of the saga you'll be competing with fallen angels princes of the elemental plains and an enemy with the stolen essence of a thousand godspawn running through their veins bioware's mark dara says that he considers baldur's gate 2 to be the epitome of the true sequel model meaning a sequel that didn't radically deviate from the original game just iterated on its success dara went so far as to suggest it might have been the last time bioware actually made a sequel of this nature and pc gamer us summarizing bg2 as a bigger and better version of the original is hardly a controversial take if you look at both contemporary and retrospective perspectives of the borders gate trilogy baldur's gate 2 is pretty widely considered essentially the same type of game as borders gate but still the superior title overall so why did people enjoy it so much more than the first game minor improvements like pathfinding and ease-of-use adjustments might have massaged things a little but plenty of critical reviewers were still complaining about party members wandering off in the wrong direction or that they were spending too much time messing about in the inventory and whilst story and role playing were big selling points for shadows of arm i don't think you can attribute its success solely to those so the reason for baldur's gate 2's better reception must be down to differences in the core design in basic game play in character progression and in world and quest design this video isn't meant to be a simple pain to the success of baldur's gate 2 because as i'm sure you know it's hardly a game lacking in advocates i thought it would be more interesting to take a somewhat more critical look at the game and examine a few of the reasons some people didn't take to it so well both at the time of release and putting the title in its historical context there are people who love crpgs but despise the baldur's gate series there are people who love black isle's input but can't stand bioware's infinity engine games and there are even people who liked baldur's gate but were disappointed with baldur's gate too but how can this be it's just baldur's gate but better right well there are many things about baldur's gate 2 that are obvious improvements on the original that live up to the creed of bigger and better as pc gamer put it but there are also things about baldur's gate 2 that were a departure from the design principles of baldur's gate and its progenitors things that seemed inconsequential or were viewed as improvements at the time but that were in retrospect signs that bioware were losing touch with their own tabletop role-playing routes now it's important to keep in mind that despite being considered old-school today and beardy or conservative by mainstream reviewers at the time the baldur's gate series was seen by some role-playing and classic crpg fans as an unforgivable dilution of rpg mechanics there was a semi-famous series of articles from 1998 entitled why baldur's gate isn't a d and d that caused a bit of a stir in the community this is nothing new classic rpgs that might be seen as impenetrable to modern audiences like the ultima or might and magic series for example were subject to similar criticisms at the time of release so when thinking critically about baldur's gate 2 i'm not looking at the question of whether it was a betrayal of true tabletop rpgs or anything like that but it is interesting to see when and why it clung to the residue of older crpgs where it chose not to do so and why to some extent more forward-thinking titles of the day were actually more faithful to baldur's gate's roots than baldur's gate 2 was but before we get to that let's start with what most people liked about baldur's gate 2. i think one of the biggest factors that improved many people's impressions of the game over the original was simply what it was a mid to high level a d and d adventure before any of the other factors come into play starting the game with a 7th or 8th level party makes an enormous difference to the baldur's gate experience a common complaint about baldur's gate 1 was due to the fact that the first dozen or so hours were spent at levels one to four mali and ranged combatants had few or no special abilities and even clerics and mages had a very limited pool of spells to draw from per encounter and due to the extremely low health pools the party's survival was often at the mercy of a single coin toss weaker party members could die to a single hit and even front line fighters with heavy armor could expire within seconds if the dice didn't go their way if someone got off a single sleep or confusion spell that was pretty much it it really wasn't until frontline and support classes started to beef up their hit points and majors got some good defensive incantations that combat became a bit more manageable the game could be enormously rewarding with a balanced party but only with a balanced party as a general rule the enjoyment you derived from baldur's gates combat was proportional to how many options were available to the party and how many opportunities there were to try different tactical approaches neither total party wipes nor stomping trash mobs or experiences that played to the system's strengths baldur's gate 2 is able to ditch this problem right out of the gate purely due to the fact that parties start at a higher level assuming for the sake of argument that most players don't tell the tutorial companions to take a hike right from the start we have a party furnished with a plethora of spells and special abilities jahira has multiple tiers of buffs debuffs crowd control magical weapons monster summons and the innate ability to shapeshift into different animals imawen has stealth and traps from her thief class and a good number of mage spells minsk is obviously less interesting being a ranger but does have some stealth capabilities if you want to play him that way plus the changes made to the weapon proficiencies mean that there's some scope for customizing his combat role if the player starts off as a priest or wizard type class they have a huge range of options and even if they're a boring old fighter there's at least a few ball spawn abilities to play with the tutorial dungeon often gets dinged by fans for being one of the least interesting parts of the game and that's entirely fair it's far too easy and you're railroaded into using the same party combination every time there's a good reason the dungeon be gone mod is one of the most popular downloads for bg2 but i think that for new players it does a fantastic job of teaching them that there's always another way a veteran player can scoff at the otiego the duergar smiths but somebody coming into the series blind could easily get stomped at the start of baldur's gate there's a good chance your first game will be over to a random arrow or a lucky wolf bite there's not much you can do about these except reload and either avoid them or try the same strategy and hope for better luck but in baldur's gate 2 you can open your spell book and look at all the different things you could do to make life easier or note what spells the enemy wizard is casting and think about how you could use them and when things start to take a bad turn it's not like baldur's gate 1 where you've probably already lost a party member and have to open the save menu you can see one of your party members retreating or note that ominous red tint start to fill up someone's portrait you can still pause and think okay how can i salvage this and what's changed since the start of the fight maybe one of your companions is wandering around in a daze but two of the enemy are down so who do we need to prioritize next and that experience something you really didn't get until a fair way into the original game is right there from the start of shadows of arm remaining constant more or less all the way through until the conclusion of throne of ball all the way through baldur's gate 2 the party will run into tough fights that force them to stop think and revise their tactics but it also just about clings to that fine line between determinism and rng in some tactically oriented crpgs it can go too far in one direction if health pools are too bloated and combat 2 ponderous you get situations where random good or bad roles are crushed under the weight of predestination which isn't much fun to watch aside from the satisfaction of knowing everything went to plan similarly when one or two catastrophically unlucky roles will render all your planning irrelevant players can just bank on say getting some perfect crits at the start of the battle and spend the rest of the fight cleaning up most of baldur's gate 2 is right in the middle rewarding good planning and tactics but also leaving opportunities for every battle to take an unexpected turn when a system encourages situations where what seems like a sure thing suddenly goes south or a lucky role offers a glimmer of hope in the dark it makes combat more fun and dynamic challenging players to do some thinking on the fly there's such a thing as over balancing a system to the point that it ceases providing unexpected surprises and by extension ceases to be fun infinity engine games like the vast majority of traditional crpgs cannot be fun in the way an action rpg might be in the sense that merely swinging your weapon about or blowing things up can be psychologically rewarding so the player needs to derive some other kind of enjoyment from combat in bg2 that comes from both mechanical complexity and the type of dynamism that makes players reach for the pause button rather than the quick load key but here we come to the first problem because i do wonder if the flip side of that is that baldur's gate 2 is a little too forgiving one of the reasons you're less likely to reload in bg2 than the original game is that setbacks are just not as significant as they once were in boulder's gate a lot of the game was spent in the wilderness far from civilization if a character was struck by a permanent status effect like a curse or well death the party would have to go all the way back to the nearest town to find a healer that could be a significant trip depending on where you were and in the case of death someone would have to carry the victim's belongings and any loot they'd accumulated up to that point in borders gate 2 the player's party are a high enough level that they can deal with these problems themselves druids and clerics already have access to basic healing spells like cure poison or disease and the like and very early into the game they'll also gain the ability to raise the dead and cast lesser restoration spells to negate virtually any status effect in the game if you make it through an especially gnarly battle it really doesn't matter at all so long as at least one healer is left alive because they can just cast raised dead rest cast another raised dead rest and repeat until the whole party is back to full strength adding to this we have the fact that on like baldur's gate 1 party members are now immune to perma-death unless you drag the difficulty back up to core rules so the threat of catastrophic loss is gone entirely now on balance i will say i prefer how things work in baldur's gate 2 to the first game as in boulder's gate 1 i'd often just reload the entire game rather than deal with the trouble of messing around with dead party members and in bg2 there are other factors to consider involving death and status effects that i'll come back to later but it's undeniable that there is something lost from baldur's gate 1 here that being the sense that the party was not a fully self-sufficient traveling carnival who could exist independently from civilization in the first game you did perceive the untamed wilderness of the sword coast as a vast sea of danger and uncertainty there was at least a certain level of planning involved when venturing out from behind the walls of beregost or the friendly armin a degree of risk that affected how far you traveled and when you decided to return to town that aspect of the first game is neutered in baldur's gate 2 since a typical party already have all the tools they need to get by this is compounded by some of the quality of life tweaks like doubling the amount of ammunition that could be stacked in your inventory making it possible to carry an almost infinite number of potions and magic scrolls and setting aside random boxes full of arrows in the middle of dungeons it's not that there's no incentive to return to town in baldur's gate 2. after all you still need to cash in your completed quest sell your stuff and all that but the danger and uncertainty in setting out on a quest is almost completely gone in baldur's gate too it could be argued that this is just a byproduct of having much of the game set in athcatla but the problem exists even in places like the umar hills and trade meet you definitely feel more secure wandering around the dungeons in arm than you did in those around borders gate at worst the world map is only a short walk away and the distance to the nearest town is usually shorter and less dangerous than in boulder's gate that's assuming you even need to head back in the vast majority of cases if you're struggling you just need to check your spell book rearrange things as necessary take a nap and have another crack at it the resting system has always fit slightly awkwardly into the infinity engine games starting with baldur's gate you had to regain lost spells and depending on how long you slept for it was also a free health refill baldur's gate 2 uses the same system and simplified things even further by automatically making the party sleep for as long as it took to fully restore their hit points so the question is why would you not sleep at every opportunity well no infinity engine game ever really works that one out balder's gate tried to de-incentivize resting in dungeons or the wilderness by having a chance for enemies to spawn whilst you slept of course most people would just save spam and keep trying to rest until they were successful the fact was if you needed to rest you'd do it but the minor inconvenience of having to save spam to do it out in the wilds at least discouraged the player from doing it reflexively there were also a few areas where resting was forbidden but this was pretty rare and could be solved by just walking back to the entrance again not a major barrier just a matter of convenience baldur's gate 2 hasn't substantially changed in this area but it seems much easier to rest without being interrupted by monsters and there seem to be even fewer areas in which resting is forbidden so again it seems to go easier on the player than in the first game again i don't want to exaggerate the differences here baldur's gate 1 was by the standards of many classic titles extremely forgiving to amateur adventurers there was a time where heading into the wilderness was not something to be taken lightly some crpgs for example expected you to make sure you had enough food and general supplies to make the trip there and back and you couldn't necessarily just spam the rest button to heal all the party's injuries especially if there were time limits involved even fallout which was hardly a hardcore crpg made wandering into the wasteland an extremely dicey proposition so the first game was hardly a model of hardcore dungeon crawling or anything like that but another point to consider is a lot of people just don't like that side of role playing games the idea of spending half an hour in a shop figuring out how many crossbow bolts you need to take with you is to some a rather uninteresting diversion from the real fun of dungeon delving and dragon slaying the fact of the matter is that the little changes bioware made to make life easier in baldur's gate 2 were unanimously praised by mainstream reviewers at the time nobody was complaining that going on a quest wasn't inconvenient enough this isn't a problem unique to crpgs obviously there's always pressure to change mechanics that aren't immediately fun or rewarding it's just really tough to say what the right balance is if orders gate 2 made you run back to a temple every time a fighter cut his finger and got a staph infection it would probably be a very tedious game but every time a mechanic is diluted or made less consequential it only makes it stick out more as some sort of unnecessary vestigial remnant of the past if carrying 20 arrows is annoying why not make it 40. oh still running out in a dungeon let's make it 60 or 80 or well why even have ammunition in the first place what's so fun about making players mess around with inventory limits does having to sleep every time you cast a spell really make the game better you can see where this is going and it doesn't end well now does baldur's gate too seriously dilute this side of baldur's gate 1 no i don't think so but you can see the direction they were heading in all that said i shouldn't pretend i missed a hardcore crpg player here there are things about baldur's gate 2's mechanics that i find irritating too i mentioned earlier that just because party members can't permanently die on normal difficulty doesn't mean there aren't reasons to avoid it one of the reasons is that if a party member is a spellcaster it's bloody annoying to deal with the aftermath in accordance with making the party feel more powerful in baldur's gate 2 bioware added a lot of extra items that grant bonus spell slots a typical spellcaster in baldur's gate 2 will quickly amass a very useful collection of jewelry with this trait to the point that almost every page of their spell book will have at least a couple of extra spell slots tacked on when that party member dies the items are unequipped which means the slots are lost which means in turn when you return them to life and give them back their gear they've forgotten which spells were memorized in those extra slots and more than likely so have you odds are you'll be fighting a battle a few minutes later go to cast the spell you wanted and realize you forgot to add it back i've been playing baldur's gate 2 for long enough that i reflexively check for this after every death but even then i can't quite remember exactly which spells i'd added to the extra slots you might counter well a death should be inconvenient especially now the threat of permadeath is removed but this doesn't just happen upon death there is something even worse in baldur's gate too there's something more terrifying than any dark and malign enemy in the first game and that something is called level drain there are a lot of enemies great and small who can inflict level drain the name is self-explanatory it lowers the character's level removing any bonuses or skills they've received as part of leveling up ranging from hit points to extra abilities to spell levels and again as with death even after the character is cured of their ailment the lost spells and abilities are not recovered that means that the player has to recall every single affected spell that the character had memorized for use which means multiple spell slots on multiple pages of their spell book it's almost like restarting the game and having to choose all your starting spells again this also applies to epic level abilities in throne of ball which have to be picked from the level up screen all over again it's bad enough that in most cases a character being struck by a level drain is worse than that character actually dying at least from the perspective of post-battle busy work should that be changed i think so i personally think not retaining the memorized spells upon being cured is a blatant technical limitation not a design choice but there are no doubt people who would disagree a level drain is a negative status effect one so annoying that it can drive you to devote spell slots to protective buffs or change how you engage with enemies that have the capability to inflict it so it's tough to say which elements of baldur's gate 2 are too casualized and which aren't i mean i doubt there's anyone out there that claims the infinity engine games should have worse path finding so as to test your leadership skills but you never know on a related note the topic of whether baldur's gate 2 is sufficiently hardcore or not does come into play in another area in which it differs from the first game assuming you're playing the regular single player mode a crucial part of the ballers gate games is the companion system the original borders gate had 25 permanent companions most of them easily accessible from the start of the game and a few gated behind story progression the most common reasons you needed to replace a companion were the permadeath system which killed party members off for good a conflict with the alignment system interpersonal conflicts or practical reasons like preferring a certain combination of classes swapping party members out was obviously not ideal since you might have to level new ones up a bit to perhaps fit them with new gear or whatever but overall it wasn't too serious a problem now as with a lot of previous mechanics i mentioned this didn't really come into play to the extent it should have if the player lost a valued party member most likely they just reload the game not waste time searching for a hypothetical replacement that may or may not exist in the game world but again it was something that sort of worked in the first game for new players who didn't realize they'd lost their companion for good or for veteran players who were trying to role play or iron man the game and again it's a semi-functional element of the game that baldur's gate 2 undermines albeit unintentionally baldur's gate 2 shrunk the companion pool to 16 with two companions swapped out halfway through the game and thrown a ball adding a 17th companion for the expansion content this in itself meant that even if like me you prefer playing on the core rules difficulty there's very little incentive to carry on after a companion dies as it's a bigger hit to your party's effectiveness and it's substantially harder to find a replacement later on adding to this is that with the higher levels involving considerably more spells items and abilities to juggle most people will have developed very complicated strategies for their party that rely on everyone playing a very specific role one spellcaster would always be casting those protective buffs one spellcaster would always be casting crowd control or offensive spells this particular character will use their berserk ability and so on so it can be really problematic to then have to revise your entire party to fit a new character in there they might be of a specific spell school and be unable to cast what the previous character had cast or might not have the same abilities and weapon proficiencies as the previous frontline fighter at least in boulder's gate as long as it was you were only building your party around a single game in baldur's gate 2 you're creating a party that is already more complicated than the one you managed in the first game except you're now building them up over the course of a game that's twice as long and probably planning to take that party onwards into the throne of ball campaign i've done a couple of runs of ballers gate 2 where a critical companion died late in the shadows of arm campaign and training up a replacement was definitely not fun not to mention put me at a severe disadvantage for the rest of the game and its expansion the other reason not to let companions die is obviously that in baldur's gate 2 companions are almost content in themselves with at least one side quest and a fair bit of dialogue and interaction with the player and the rest of the party especially if they're part of a romance path we'll talk about the writing and all that later in the video but it does contribute to making the player reload after a perma death instead of dealing with the aftermath overall i think you get the idea in baldur's gate 2 it's basically just too hard to live with the loss of a party member compared to baldur's gate 1. it's another example of something that was a semi-functional element in baldur's gate 1 but is almost irrelevant in baldur's gate 2. you can see why over the course of future bioware titles the companion pool would wax and weigh in depending on the resources available and how much story related content those companions were involved in it became standard practice to leave the player with a handful of options and make these companions immortal until some special scripted event after all they put a lot of work into the writing quest design and voice acting for these companions and the player is damn well going to see all that work but with all this talk of diluting or streamlining things from borders gate 1 i don't want to give the impression baldur's gate 2 isn't a challenging game just because you have a lot more tools at your disposal doesn't mean you won't still be doing a lot of reloading and it doesn't mean that new players won't sometimes stumble into a random room and get annihilated before they can so much as scratch the enemy like the original game baldur's gate 2 can have a very uneven difficulty curve one minute you're chopping through kobolds the next you're being decimated by a team of seasoned killers there are several encounters in shadows of arm that are figuratively speaking meant as a sudden kick in the balls high level encounters that come out of nowhere either to warn the party not to get complacent or as if to say stop go away and don't come back until you know what the hell you're doing normally i dislike this kind of design without making it reasonably easy for the player to cut their losses and retreat but thanks to the incredible range of options available to you in baldur's gate 2 there's something inherently satisfying about dying reloading and trying out a totally different approach if things are too difficult it can be demoralizing but even with the massive gap between say an encounter designed for a starting party and an encounter designed for an end game one it's rare that you'll run into this situation the few times this does happen or it seems like the game is really trying to tell you that you're wasting your time there's usually a good reason for this we mentioned earlier that chapters two and three of shadows of arm include a lot of content enough that you can actually go from a starting level party to an almost end game level party before even stepping foot outside the city of athcatler of course as we saw earlier since the game doesn't feature much noticeable level scaling it needs to provide encounters balanced for both weaker and significantly stronger characters all within those one or two chapters in athcatla for example you might fight a gang of cup purses out on the street then wander into an inn open a secret door and find a lich waiting for you one of the reasons the game is designed like this is that lest we forget the game does have a few more chapters after chapters 2 and 3. there are numerous encounters in athcatla that are clearly meant to be tackled later in the game after returning from the underdark the most obvious of these are the liches twisted rune headquarters and a random high level compound in the temple district the latter two illustrate the designers intentions perfectly basically there's one random house in the temple district that for no discernible reason whatsoever features some of the hardest enemies and best loot in naf katla people were so perplexed by this that conspiracy theories sprung up around it with everyone assuming it was some kind of cut end game quest related to slavers the bridge murders the twisted rune the illithid conspiracy pretty much every single side quest in the city one of the most well-known patches for shadows of arm the balderdash patch actually inserted an item into the game cementing this theory confusing the matter further but based on comments from bioware designers the purpose of these encounters was always that they simply be random highly challenging battles that were off the beaten path there were encounters you were meant to stumble across get smacked down and come back to later in the game basically like the liches they're in terms of encounter design are katla's version of dragons dragons were incredibly hyped up during the development of shadows of arm and bioware clearly wanted to make them as fearsome and challenging as possible for players in terms of base stats dragons have extremely high hit points armor class dexterity attacks per round the resistances and all the rest there are also high level spell casters who can complement the basic immunities with protection from enchanted weapons stone skin and so on all dragons are also able to use innate abilities like wing buffet which automatically throws your party across the room dragon fear which is basically a unique high-level horror spell and whatever special attacks are appropriate to their sub-species in short they're enemies that will destroy the party the first time they're encountered and the game is designed around this prior to shadows of arm's end game none of the dragons you encounter in the game are mandatory battles just doing the two major side quests in chapter two there's a good chance you'll run into two separate dragons over the course of your adventures and both of these encounters are explicitly characterized as optional one encounter is meant to be avoided via a quest related stealth item the other laughs at you and tells you to buzz off the game really couldn't be clearer on the point that these are aspirational fights fights that you need to go off and level up for you're encouraged to eventually come back and deal with these enemies but not for a long time it's obvious that the intent with these high-level encounters whether in athcatler or beyond was that players would hit a brick wall and return to the main story path then with more experience under their belts they could come back with a vengeance in chapter six knocking out the liches and dragons and suiting up for shadows of arms final battle at least that's the idea you see there are a few problems with the way baldur's gate 2 does the difficulty curve or difficulty roller coaster we might say and it's difficult to untangle the pros from the cons the first issue is the game's pacing feels very uneven some players prefer the feeling that regular content should be reasonably challenging but not press you too much and that this should be interrupted with a sort of crescendo up to a set-piece battle that really tests the party to its absolute limit baldur's gate 2 isn't a good example of that because of the non-linear world design you could run into a very high level enemy whilst on a seemingly inconsequential quest or get struck by an instant death trap in a low level questing area you might go for a long time with the same gear or you might find multiple items of end game equipment one after the other well that's assuming you didn't just cheat and stroll straight to the collector's edition vendor an early preview of video game pre-order bonuses some would say bg2's pacing can be frustrating or less satisfying than a more carefully choreographed difficulty curve it's a fair argument but personally i think the lack of nannying is a good way of making the world feel more organic rather than player centric and there's always ways to overcome these sudden difficulty spikes directly or otherwise i think it's also indicative of what in my opinion is one of baldur's gate 2's greatest strengths which is that the player will unintentionally choose their own difficulty curve we mentioned the problems of the resting system and how questing areas were not entirely balanced to specific level ranges but these systems end up sort of solving each other a party that's progressing through a dungeon or quest very quickly and is feeling confident is less likely to bother resting between fights their parties start to take wounds they begin running low on healing spells and they've used up their more powerful abilities they're not desperate enough to rest and risk a monster spawn or waste time trekking back to the previous area but they do adjust their tactics maybe making use of lower level spells that would usually be considered redundant by this point in the game and then out of nowhere they encounter a harder enemy and face a real challenge due to being unprepared this way baldur's gate 2 makes it possible to have interesting fights with both demons and dragons when the party is at full strength and packs of robbers when the party is heavily wounded and stumbling towards the nearest inn it's something bioware pretty much gave up on in future titles instead basing most fights around the assumption that every party would always be going into a fight at full strength this gave the designers working on combat encounters a lot more freedom but it can also destroy any sense of pacing if all the encounters other than the boss are designed for the exact same challenge level i distinctly remember being really bothered by the first time i played dragon age origins where it felt like almost every fight in a single dungeon was aimed at the exact same party at the exact same level and that's before level scaling comes into it on the other hand obviously this is all based on the assumption that a player is not going to hit the rest button after every single encounter which is the most efficient way to play baldur's gate 2. it's definitely not a perfect system as evidenced by ice windall 2 basically saying screw it and designing almost every fight on the assumption the party were chronic daytime nappers but for baldur's gate 2 i think there are enough situations in which the average player will be caught off guard that make it worthwhile but again the same systems that make baldur's gate 2's and encounter design so great can also cause serious problems the game's excellent combat and breadth of content actually work against it to some extent we mentioned earlier that super high level encounters were meant to be a sort of soft gating system nudging players to get on with the main quest before exhausting all the content in chapters 2 and 3. but it doesn't work take the centerpiece of the optional high level encounters the dragon battles dragons are hard sure but not impossible at lower levels even if a party eschews cheesy tactics the amount of possible options available to even a low or mid-level party is enough that there's still a chance to deal with dragons at these levels let's say a new player bangs their head against the wall by trying to take out dragon say 9 or 10 times and then gives up there's a good chance that out of all of these attempts at least one or two of them gave the player a glimmer of hope like getting the dragon down to injured or finding a specific tactic that the dragon's ai had difficulty countering what the player will probably decide is that whilst they're not going to win this time they were close enough that going off and doing just a few more quests will be enough to pull them through on the next attempt so they'll leave do a few more side quests and come back to the dragons before taking the ship to chapter 4 and beyond and thus we come back to the most commonly cited complaint regarding baldur's gate 2. the problem that musica and the team cited as their number one failure that after starting the game the player does the vast majority of the content in chapters 2 and 3 and then has nothing left to do when they return in chapter 6. why is this such a problem the way i see it if baldur's gate 2 were just chapters 2 and 3 it would still be one of the greatest crpgs of all time but chapters 4 to 7 are almost like a prototype of bioware's later titles and for that reason are by far the least interesting and most painfully dated portions of the game on a macro level chapters 2 and 3 are great for several reasons they feature a lot of content that content is very densely packed is often interconnected and is constantly being fed to the player as they naturally explore the world at their own pace a player might decide to wander into one district of athcatler of their own accord where they'll be accosted by some quests and uncover others through deciding to check out the different buildings or npcs they'll very quickly get a sense that the world is developing with them as a messenger reaches them with news of a related quest or a companion chimes in about some point of interest now there are obviously a lot of ways in which the designers try to nudge the players in one direction or another and it does take a little too long to take the training pedals off as useful as the tutorial dungeon is it seems somewhat unnecessary when the player is then still restricted to joaquin's promenade until they go to the slums district and start chapter two the circus of illusions might as well have been redesigned to serve a similar tutorial role but in general the world feels huge can be explored at the player's own pace and desires seems alive and reactive to what the player did and there's almost always something new to do but the chapters immediately following this are very different the quest hub of brindle if you can call it that is tiny with only a handful of optional side quests what's worse is you spend very little time there before progressing to spell hold and spell hold is where you really get a sense of bioware's later approach to storytelling and exploration spell hold down the dream world is effectively one very very long interactive cut scene you can forgive the designers for being over enthusiastic here ignoring the storytelling side just from a technical point of view i'm sure they were really excited to see how far they could push the engine's scripting limitations nowhere in boulder's gate is there anything as complex as what was going on with the scripting and in-game timers in spell hold but it's not fun to actually play especially after your first run of the game walking down corridors and clicking through useless dialogue just doesn't play to the strengths of a party-based crpg things perk up slightly in the asylum dungeons which are fairly typical representation of baldur's gate 2's area design but we'll come back to that later but once you get out of spell hold you're either back to the tiny quest hub and ferried along to a rather undeveloped pseudo-dungeon or dumped straight into chapter 5. the underdark is at first glance a reprieve from the linearity of chapter 4. from a top-down perspective you could see it as a distinct quest hub with the drow city of us natha being a secondary quest hub but this isn't entirely true first the underdark is actually not non-linear there are no alternate paths to the different locations in the underdark indeed several quests are designed around the fact that you have to take the same route each time similarly what you first assume are optional side quests are actually part of the main quest you just get to do them in a slightly different order if you discover these areas before being directed towards them i would say at a rough guess something like 60 to 70 percent of the ant dark is effectively mandatory if you're following the main quest i remember playing baldur's gate 2 the first time and being really disappointed here when i realized that that cool dungeon i thought i'd stumbled across of my own accord was actually somewhere i was always intended to visit us natha is in a similar situation it does have a few side quests or rather side rooms but this conflicts with the addition of a timer to create a sense of danger and urgency to your time in the drow city on the first playthrough you can't really know for sure when your companions are going to give you a longer or shorter time limit or how long the mandatory tasks they give you are going to take so you're disincentivized from pursuing side content that isn't forced upon you in the streets i don't want to overstate the negatives of the underdark section it's still great fun when they let you off the leash and you're just exploring dungeons and stuff but it definitely feels more akin to a quest hub from a later bioware game smaller more scripted less side content and a lot of disguised linearity a further problem that dogs chapters 4 and 5 is that almost all the side quest timers from chapters 2 and 3 are now frozen so you don't get updates on new developments in an old quest a messenger calling you back to your duties in the class stronghold or a companion asking if they can visit somewhere maybe some people like this maybe they found the flood of new content annoying or difficult to prioritize but to me it makes the world feel smaller less eventful less real overall theoretically speaking chapter 6 is supposed to make up for all this you emerge into the harsh sunlight and the world opens up to you again but as we mentioned earlier and as bioware acknowledged many people had already done a lot of this content so the only new site content available to them was the forest of tathia and the pass most players forget these areas even exist and for good reason there's basically nothing of worth in these locations just some wandering monsters in a single high-level enemy party encounter they feel like content that was completely unfinished but left in the game anyway so there's a good chance that soon enough the player will just head straight on to the finale of shadows of arm which is like earlier chapters combat heavy very linear and lacking inside content if we take a step back and look at the general flow of the game then there's a pretty good chance that upon stepping onto the boat in chapter 4 the player goes through hours of linear content goes to the underdark and goes through many more hours of linearity leaves the underdark and goes straight into the finale which is much of the same so you have half the game being open world and content rich with the player being free to pretty much head off and do whatever they want at any time and then the other half of the game potentially being one long uninterrupted slog from bryn lore to spell holds to the underwater city to the underdark to the final chapter and that's just vanilla shadows of arm that's not adding the throne of bold campaign which as we'll see later doubled down on a lot of the problems shadows of arm had now i don't want to be too harsh on the second half of shadows of arm or imply it's effectively a different game to chapters 2 and 3. aside from general pacing exploration and side quests there isn't a substantial difference in the actual content even if we just focus on chapters 2 and 3 of shadows of arm compared to baldur's gate 1 we can already see how area design for one has become much more let's say focused to put it charitably the first game was famous maybe notorious for its wide open outdoor maps if you watched my bg1 video you'll know these weren't made that way entirely by design but the end result is that there were lots and lots of wilderness and forest maps that felt like wilderness or forests the maps were not really designed around a specific path you just explored them sometimes finding random monsters sometimes in nbc or side quests on rare occasions a cave or two and sometimes finding nothing at all baldur's gate wasn't all wilderness of course it had boulder's gate but even the city was built in a similar manner there were innumerable little homes temples shops taverns and warehouses to nose around in without the feeling you were being channeled anywhere in particular there were mixed reactions to this at the time with some reviewers saying it helped make the world feel huge in a natural extension of the background setting and that exploring miles upon miles of country was what adventure was all about a good number had the opposite reaction criticizing the world as empty and tedious forcing the player to go looking for fun rather than delivering it over the years i've seen several different bioware staff say something to the effect of bioware's design philosophy is a seesaw basically they mean bioware had a tendency to overreact to problems that they or reviewers perceived in one title and then swinging too far in the opposite direction in the next you could argue that shadows of arm is evidence of this instead of massive sprawling outdoor maps you have bits and pieces of outdoor maps appended to towns or dungeon entrances or outdoor maps that are so blatant in their attempts to funnel the player in a particular direction that they may as well be dungeons if you take the druid grove for example it's packed with content but this content is condensed into a single area and comes across as very fake or video gamey nothing like the feeling of exploration you got from baldur's gate one's maps i think athcatla isn't as badly affected by this change it makes sense that things are close together and though it does suffer a bit from having too many points of interest and too few random homes overall it feels reasonably close to wandering around the city at least earlier in the game when you tend to get more surprise side quests and such again it's departed somewhat from the original game but we're still a million miles from something like dragon age where cities are more a visual backdrop than a functional settlement when it comes to the game's actual dungeons biowas stated that they used their work on the first game's mission pack as their model derlak's tower the marquee mega dungeon of tales of the sword coast was the model for the crypts and catacombs of am precisely how many dungeons exist in shadows of arm depends on how you define a dungeon areas like the tutorial the graveyard crypts the shadow temple firecracks the main spell holds undercellar and all that are unquestionably dungeons in the classic d and d sense the beholder caves lost city courtuar tunnels and several other areas are debatable they're underground are fairly linear and involve a lot of fighting and looting treasure but they're light on or completely missing things like puzzles and traps some of them are basically just gauntlets where you stroll from one set-piece encounter to the next there are also a few areas that could conceivably be characterized as dungeons out of push like the diani's keep but in any case the general area designed for most of these locations is clearly a step up from the optional dungeons in baldur's gate 1 which were mostly just labyrinthian tunnels and very narrow ones at that most obvious improvements made are the addition of more complicated puzzles and scripted events to gain access to different rooms affect something in another room halfway across the dungeon awaken new monsters or claim some hidden loot some of these are really fun and inventive even the simple ones from the player's point of view make the areas more memorable than those of baldur's gate 1 at least if we're comparing them to fire wine bridge or the old caster ruins they definitely capture a small spark of the classic pen and paper dungeons of yesteryear on the more negative side whilst they're designed around similar principles as derlac's tower the work that went into them had to be spread very thinly so whilst the dungeons in shadows of armor are step up from those in boulder's gate they're also relatively small compared to not only derlagh's tower but a typical dungeon from the crpgs that preceded baldur's gate although baldur's gate 2's production pipeline was more refined and efficient than that of the first game it's still a lot of work to design a dungeon for baldur's gate 2. designing it to be not only more complex than those of the first game but of course visually distinct too it's not like many classic crpgs where level designers could literally plonk down miles of room templates and then go to work on the interesting stuff the dungeons in baldur's gate 2 had to be unique and distinct and the drawback of all the work that went into making them that way is that they're considerably less intimidating in size and scope than the multi-floor multi-faceted and multitudinous crpg mausoleums of the 80s and early 90s the graveyard district crypts for example are technically speaking just a few individual rooms on the surface a small spider pit and then a handful of corridors or this to represent the sprawling ancient burial complex beneath afkatla the dungeons can also sacrifice non-linearity for the sake of their puzzles and complex scripting like in the shadow temple which can make you feel less like you're really exploring an area and more like you're just clearing a sequence of challenge rooms for some the extra puzzles and scripted sequences might be a mildly amusing distraction but hardly worthy of sacrificing hours of classic tomb raiding for where once the prospect of dungeon delving might have been a daunting prospect in baldur's gate 2 it could be dismissed as akin to a school trip curated for the tastes and temperament of inquisitive children rather than hardcore dungeon rats you can definitely see how fans of older crpgs might have viewed baldur's gate 2's dungeons as a disappointment in both their failure to live up to their antecedence and their failure to innovate enough to justify this shortcoming which i think brings us to what was arguably baldur's gate 2's biggest failure in the eyes of some the thing that makes it unworthy of its plinth in the hall of historic crpgs it's interesting to go back and look at reviews of the original baldur's gate and compare them to those of the second game in the majority of cases mainstream publications scoring the first game made few references to other rpgs other than those released around the same time like fallout or final fantasy vii a couple of grey beards did look a bit further back with australia's pc power play complaining that baldur's gate lacked the in-depth minute interaction of ultimus 7 was too focused on combat and was held back by its adherence to the shallow unrealistic and inflexible ad d skill system as they put it these were all somewhat fair criticisms of the first game it was to some degree at its core a hack and slash game and the player's level of interaction with the world was governed by a very clear set of boundaries when the player was given the goal of let's say getting an item from an npc's home their options were either to go there and kill the npc go there and pickpocket the nbc or go there and talk to the npc at which point there might be a dialogue option or two involving persuasion or bargaining what the player couldn't do was approach the problem analytically they couldn't go to a guard and manipulate them into raiding the npc's home they couldn't go to a craftsman and have them make a forgery of the item they couldn't stack chairs up against the npc's home and get in through the window they couldn't set a fire outside the npc's home to distract them or anything like that except in an extremely limited number of scenarios when the quest designers took the time to add such options to a specific quest in which case the player would be explicitly told that one of these was an option we mentioned earlier that shadows of arms quests were longer and more sophisticated than those of the original but were they at a fundamental level an improvement on the aforementioned system the answer is unequivocally no the player's interaction with the world is still clearly delineated into in 99 percent of cases killing sometimes stealing and occasionally talking to npcs in the rare instances other options are available these are spoon fed to the player and not the product of their own ingenuity you go where the game tells you to go you do what the game tells you you are allowed to do and no more a few quests get a little bit more depth in one particular area than usual like dedicated theft quests or dialogue heavy quests but these were also present in baldur's gate 1. in reviews of shadows of arm reviewers seemed to have forgotten names like ultima entirely but a few were talking about other titles namely the fallout series and deus ex both franchises had like baldur's gates been credited as contributing to the late 90s or early 2000s renaissance in western crpgs and from a gameplay perspective this was due to how these titles changed how the player engaged with the world presented to them although they took differing approaches both encouraged a more open and less concrete path to fulfilling quest objectives the players options for interacting with the world were far broader and not so clearly delineated letting them use their own intuition to explore possible solutions putting aside story or choices and consequences in role-playing for now it's important to acknowledge the mechanical reactivity of these games rather than confined by the dictates of the designer players were enticed by the illusion that they asserted control over the world and that the world acknowledged and reacted to their attempts to influence it there's a concept in psychology called learned helplessness which is based on the very straightforward premise that when a creature learns they can control their environment in some way they become more active but when they believe they lack any such options their passivity becomes chronic and difficult to break out of the vast majority of games promote this sickness of passivity teaching players that their intuition is worthless that their decision making capability is limited to choosing whatever options the game explicitly presents to them a few games rattled this cage by maximizing the amount of options available and rewarding free thinking instilling players that rarest and most precious feeling in games that they were inhabitants of fully realized digital worlds and not that they were merely obedient lab rats pushing the same big fat buttons over and over again so it's not implausible that for some players who had experienced fallout or deus ex who'd gotten a taste of this freedom baldur's gate 2 was like being grabbed by the shirt and thrown into a tiny cell that reeked of maple syrup and that failure if you see it as such is one of many that was epitomized in throne of ball the expansion pack the final entry of this so-called trilogy refined many of the elements found in shadows of arm unfortunately some of these elements were bg2's worst failings bioware knew that after 100 hours of the original game players interest would be starting to wane they had to pull out all the stops and make throne of ball as unflaggingly epic as possible that meant big numbers big monsters and big set pieces and it starts in shadows of arm the level cap in bg2 was high but certainly reachable by well before the end of the game by completionists one of throne of ball's innovations was the addition of epic level spells spells appropriate to the demigods and divine avatars of faerun summon comets wield interdimensional energy blades and make the messengers of the gods into mere henchmen the problem is that due to engine limitations these spells don't have unique slots they replace regular high-level spell memorization slots which meant that soon after gaining access to the highest level priest and mage spells these became almost redundant since none of them are as useful as being able to summon a fallen angel or an elemental prince even regular old fighters gain the ability to halve incoming damage or gain a sudden massive boost to their attack this leads to the end game of shadows of arm which was not rebalanced to accommodate these changes a bit of a joke and once you enter throne of bold all the subtlety or hardship of adventuring is shrugged off to accommodate a loud and eventful rush to the conclusion where shadows of arm arguably overstepped in conveniencing the player throne of bull tears across this line in a frenzy of streamlining and casualization the party will be festooned with bags of infinite ammo and all manner of spells and items that render status effects or resource management virtually irrelevant travel times and tension lose all meaning as the player can teleport back to their private pocket dimension anytime they wish trash mobs drop heavily enchanted equipment like candy and the corpses of named enemies will discourage absurdly powerful gear there's very little sense of pacing quest hubs are small and pathetically light on site content and the quests themselves are usually shallow and lacking in alternative options even before the game's formal release one magazine warns that throne of ball felt more like a diablo clone a straightforward hack and slash dungeon crawler than it did a true crpg and as horrible as it sounds it was probably the right approach it works it works because in an almost obscene way it's no longer about playing a crpg it's about blazing your way to the end of the story as soon as possible and getting it over with instead of making a futile attempt to balance a party of demigods with a hundred hours worth of epic gear throne of bold shrugs and cuts away everything from shadows of arm except its core which was the combat you go from one epic fight to the next pausing only for exposition or companion interaction and you go as fast as you can until you reach the final battle bioware said they designed several fights in throne of bol for no other purpose than to illustrate how insanely powerful the party was by this point cathartic massacres of orcish tribes and armies of mortal menadams these encounters laugh in the face of the spirit of adventure that animated the baldur's gates series up to this point the entire expansion is like a madman finally abandoning all restraints just wildly exalting in their own insanity and again it works it says to the player that they shouldn't even care anymore just indulge in their most ridiculous power fantasies and be rewarded with the epic conclusion to the journey they began in 1998. that's the add-on part of throne of ball anyway one bioware called the add in part of the expansion was the watchers keep dungeon the keep is a slight change of pace from the rest of throne of ball somewhat closer to content in shadows of arm like the vanilla dungeons watches keep was designed to be much more complex and inventive than the dungeons of baldur's gate 1. here it delivers in spades with many interesting puzzles to solve riddles to ponder a little bit of actual exploration and some rather creative mechanics to each level like an entire floor of elemental portals that must be turned on each other or a magical labyrinth with some nooks and crannies off the beaten path that contain worthwhile rewards but despite its impressive size and scope the dungeon does share the problems of both shadows of arm and throne of ball despite its imposing exterior watchers keep is no descent into the infinite blackness of the underworld each floor is designed for maximum convenience to the party accessible via portals that will unlock as they progress deeper into its bowels so the party can easily teleport out go do something else and then just pop back in via one of the side entrances at the keep's base one of the reasons the keep was designed like this was because it was intended to be tackled in bite-sized chunks assuming players would do a floor or two in shadows of arm then come back in throwing a ball and progress a little farther then return before the finale and finish things off but it contributes to the sense of keep being a sort of dungeon themed amusement park with a player sampling different attractions at their leisure and the sense that there's little consistency between each floor of the keep like every floor was designed by a completely different designer with a completely different gimmick now just to be clear there is a lot to like about the gameplay in throne of ball even as a more hack and slash-oriented experience it features some fantastic set-piece battles i would probably class the sendai fight for example as my favorite in the entire boulder's gate trilogy and the expansion represents bioware pushing the infinity engine to its limits even though the locations are smaller and usually shorter than equivalent content in shadows of arm the designers certainly weren't lazy they still try to experiment with some little scripted tricks but trying isn't always good enough no matter how valiant the effort in their shadows of arm review pc zone grumbled that bioware's next outing really needed to make the switch to 3d before anyone leaps to the attack and bemoans the catastrophic effects of graphics whoring on crpgs i should clarify that they weren't just talking about visual upgrades but rather how technology was limiting bioware's ambition and this is something david gaider james olin and others have said themselves that by the time bioware reached throne of bowl they were struggling to do something fresh within the confines of the engine in some cases innovations if you can call them that are simply refined versions of unimplemented sequences from baldur's gate 2. david gaider mentioned that in one of shadows of arms dungeons bioware had originally meant to have an antagonist taunt the player as they made their way deeper and deeper into the complex but that they couldn't get this gimmick working properly bioware figured out how to implement this in throne of ball so your journey through sendai's lair is interspersed with cut scenes showing her increasing panic at the party's progress but that kind of in-engine level swapping cut-scene-driven design is very limiting sendai's lair doesn't really qualify as a dungeon but a linear sequence of arenas it's just contorting the infinity engine into a shape it was never meant to hold on the same note in abasigal's lair there's a part where the party can swim through flooded caverns to explore new areas but the party aren't doing anything of the sort really they're teleported from one area to another via clicking on a hot spring you're not actually navigating these watery tunnels in real time nor is the game automatically calculating the party's skill at underwater exploration based on their stats class or racial background it's a slight of hand a gimmick akin to those ridiculous mini-games blizzard kept piling into world of warcraft's engine year after year to distract from the game's fundamental limitations whether it's 2d or 3d or whatever the infinity engine wasn't designed to do much more than what it was capable of in the original boulder's gate we can certainly criticize things about throne of ball's core design could it have been bigger longer and less linear absolutely and i wish this were the case i used to replay the entire balder's gate trilogy every year without fail and whilst i don't stick to that as religiously as i once did it's still something i look forward to every few years throne of baal is always the part of that replay i look forward to the least it's not quite a chore but it is the least interesting entry in the saga overall as we saw earlier in the video bioware and interplay both mused over the possibility of splitting baldur's gate 2 into two separate games and i think regardless of the practical considerations that would have delivered a more satisfying final chapter to the trilogy move about half of baldur's gate 2's content are thrown of ball clean up shadows of arms campaign a little and redesign thrown a ball around the new content this would solve the current problem of getting to shadows of arm's fourth chapter then having to hack and slash without the reprieve of an open world all the way through to throne of balls credits but even that wouldn't touch the fundamental problem of the baldur's gate series being big in everything but innovation in gameplay terms baldur's gate didn't really innovate in any way except in combining real-time strategy with turn-based crpg combat but this was not the innovation that drove future bioware titles nor crpgs in general as we'll see later baldur's gate 2's most enduring legacy for good or ill was in its writing but it's somewhat unfair to complain that baldur's gate 2 didn't revolutionize the genre in a way it was never really intended to in marketing the original baldur's gate bioware would shamelessly name pretty much every single classic crpg in existence at the time as a supposed inspiration for their design philosophy but we know for a fact that certain elements in particular the tactical combat of the gold box series the fast-paced action of real-time strategy titles and the massive handcrafted content-rich worlds of the ultimate games directly influenced baldur's gate baldur's gate 2 did refine those things that people loved about baldur's gate and the result is a vast engaging challenging and just plain fun experience and that makes it worth anyone's time [Music] the lands you traversed in the original baldur's gates consisted of quiet woodlands windswept plains rustic hamlets and a city designed with in bioware's words a realistic grubby medieval english aesthetic for the second game bioware moved further south to the rich and cosmopolitan city of athcatzler in previews for shadows of arm bioware described athcatna as byzantine or venetian and the city obviously has a more mediterranean even oriental vibe than the comparative backwater of baldur's gate there are plenty of poorer areas in the slums or bridge district that wouldn't look out of place in the original game but then you have the cyclopean edifice of joaquin's promenade or the kalimshite palaces of the rich merchant lords to display the city's wealth and diverse cultural influences tunneling into the city's depths there's even hints of ancient egypt i think this is meant to represent the ancient mulherandi empire but i'm not sure and then there's the lost city which i don't think is really modeled on anything specific outside of athcatler environments temporize between baldur's gates western european look and afkatla's renaissance influences brynlor is typically piratical whilst spell holds vaults are canonically speaking a deliberate mishmash of visual influences sometimes minoan sometimes wacky and sometimes just plain nightmarish the rest of the environments are as you'd expect of the setting the elegantly spiteful drow city looks pretty faithful to the established design seen in official forgotten realms art of the day and the leafy opulence of elven tree cities could be seen in any old high fantasy game the locations in throne of bowl are visually quite similar to those in shadows of arm probably because in the background lore tethyr shares more or less the same culture being further south and thus a bit closer to the heart of the old kalimsham empire you do notice more north african and middle eastern elements but i doubt this would register unless you were specifically looking for it you don't get the feeling that you're in fantasy arabia or anything like that there are some outliers like the fortress of the fire giants or the monastery of amcethrin but the main difference is that most of these locations are on average smaller and sometimes a bit more detailed than those in shadows of arm sarah dush for example has a lot of battle damage and debris as part of the ongoing siege although it's also noticeably more compact than athcatler almost sigil-esque in the way some of the buildings are packed together too closely whether saradosh is supposed to look like this in the law or it's just a result of rushed development i couldn't say a more obvious case of limited resources is how often throne of ball reuses environments from the base game sometimes this is relatively subtle but other times it's a straightforward cut and paste job i guess you shouldn't be too hard on throwing a bowl reusing assets since shadows of arm did it too and it was after all priced as an expansion pack and it certainly has a lot of impressive new environments alongside the old ones speaking of the old and the new it almost looks to me like some of the throne of baal areas were made differently to those in shadows of arm not just in terms of art style but somehow related to the technology behind them maybe there was a different environmental artist or they were just using newer techniques or something could just be my imagination i suppose one thing i'm not imagining is that parts of throne of baal are very orange brown and orange to be precise to the extent some of these locations feel like they belong in a completely different game it's a bit harsh and kind of unpleasant to look at i much prefer the environments in saradesh to a lot of the later ones of course you'll also spend quite a bit of your time in the pocket playing in throne of ball whilst overall this is a fairly bland hellscape bioware do use some clever tricks to depict the environment being transformed by your decisions basically the game fades out and fades back in with a new background they experimented with this in shadows of arm but it seems to be used more liberally here a neat touch but obviously not very impressive compared to 3d games of the day that animated these changes in real time as with the first game all the environments in baldur's gate 2 are made with 3d modelling software and then rendered out as colossal two-dimensional scenes according to art director marcia topher bioware had significantly upgraded their hardware since baldur's gate 1 but an individual city scene would still take an average of 24 hours to be rendered for in-game use as not only were the scenes in baldur's gate 2 more detailed they also made heavier use of lighting effects particularly in outdoor scenes bg-1's locations weren't ugly but you'll notice a lot of improvements in bg2 like pre-rendered reflective surfaces and a lot of animated props from the player's perspective another upgrade or side grade depending on one's perspective was shifting the infinity engine from directx to an opengl renderer with added 3d acceleration support in contrast to baldur's gate's fixed 640x480 resolution baldur's gate 2 officially supported resolutions of both 640x480 and 800x600 with unofficial support for higher resolutions when i was younger i always used to play with the highest possible resolution but the game and its environments were specifically designed for 800x600 i sometimes try dropping it back down to bg-1's resolution because it feels more intimate but the scale does look a little off playing at the highest resolutions meanwhile means many backgrounds are actually too small for the screen and make it seem like you're playing a crpg for ants one nice innovation over the first game is the drop off interface which lets players hide the ui for a bit more screen real estate but this makes the game a bit harder to control and personally i like having the ui cradling the in-game action another difference from the first game is that many if not most of the spells were remade as 3d accelerated effects though maybe not as sophisticated as those in the ice wind dale series they're still quite impressive especially the new flame strike sadly a byproduct of this was some of the old effects were cut entirely and didn't get a satisfactory replacement most notably the flaming swords from the first game which are replaced with a simple glowing blade also some effects are a bit too aggressive when attached to enchanted gear by the time you each throw in a ball there's a good chance one or two of your party members will look like a walking magic show aside from the spell effects also remade were all the models for the various playable races bioi said there were few reasons for replacing those of the first game one being that the original models had no animations for dual wielding the other that they wanted to double the amount of animation frames to make the movements look smoother some of the new sprites look almost identical to the first game others have fallen victim to bioware's insidious pro tunic agenda for the sake of novelty value alone having all the models wear different clothes and more ornate armor is a nice nod to the fact that culture and fashions are a bit different in arm but i for one will never forgive bioware for depriving the crpg community of the human female fighters sexy giraffe legs another of bioware's crimes which i'd never noticed before but someone in the comments on one of my other videos pointed out was using sprite mirroring to save memory the effect of this is that if you pay close attention you'll see weapons switching hands depending on which angle is being resented to the camera not a big deal if you're not looking for it i guess there were a few complaints at the time about bioware reusing some assets from earlier infinity engine games in pre-release materials bioware said they specifically did not want to include staple d d enemies like orcs and goblins saying they were trying to emphasize the exoticism of the new setting and higher level encounters but in the end they did incorporate a lot of the creatures black isle created for ice wind dale and planescape torment i think this is perfectly fine they produced plenty of new content with shadows of arm so why not fill it out a bit with older art as long as it fits the aesthetic i will say i think black isles artists did a better job with certain enemies like the umber hulks and gollums but you could argue it's just a different art style overall i'd say bioware achieved an impressive feat in ensuring all the art from baldur's gate ice windale and shadows of arm look consistent side by side though i have a few small complaints the first game was a very grounded and dare i say it veristic picture of a european fantasy world cobalts might not be historically authentic but you could believe they were shadows of harm in pushing the cosmopolitanism and exoticism of the setting has difficulty maintaining the same illusion maybe it's just me but things start to fall apart when you have medieval peasants standing a few feet away from 18th century seamen and cutlass waving pirates if baldur's gate was ye old renaissance fair baldur's gate 2 is a little more comic book cosplay convention it's a minor point though i mean in the context of later forgotten realms titles shadows of arm is still pretty down to earth the wildest specimens strolling around the streets of athcapta are your own party the most exotic of these being a drow and a tiefling who use the same models as regular npcs despite grumbling about baldur's gate 2 remaining an isometric 2d game when the world was moving to 3d the game's visuals don't seem to have significantly affected review scores it was one of the best looking 2d games on the market thanks to its pre-rendered environments and the improved spell effects helped keep it looking reasonably fresh one area that didn't noticeably improve was its fmv cutscenes in the first game these were a mix of environmental flybys and slightly more active scenes with multiple characters interacting with each other although the environments are somewhat more detailed and the resolution higher in bg2 the scenes themselves don't look much better in fact bg2 actually has a lot less footage with animated models vg1 had the opening cut scene the nash kill introduction the beragost introduction the city introduction the duke or palace introduction and a few more but bg2's cutscenes are overwhelmingly environmental flybys only the ending cutscene goes for broke and features a lot of characters in motion this was improved upon in throne of ball with the most memorable and technically impressive scene probably being the siege of sarah douche but it was still quite far behind what its contemporaries were doing with cut scenes in the late 90s and early 2000s at least at a similar budget level perhaps it was felt they could achieve what they wanted within engine cut scenes though i think these are of mixed quality a few people can forget the battle in joaquin's promenade but there are a lot of very janky scenes where the scripts character animations pathfinding and voice dialogue were simply not well synchronized i distinctly remember that these looked pretty bad even at the time and they're even more embarrassing to sit through 20 years later but maybe bioware or black isle or whoever decided that resources that went into fmv cut scenes were better used elsewhere on the projects and that's fair enough we did at least get some very nice artwork for the chapter transitions whereas baldur's gate simply used a still image from in-game footage shadows of arm has a unique piece of art for each chapter that i suppose is meant to mimic a fresco or mosaic from the house of some amnion noble also returning from the first game are of course the lovely character portraits in addition to the 32 portraits from baldur's gate 1 artist mike sass created 20 new portraits for player characters and companions there were also a few special portraits used exclusively for some plot critical npcs i'm not sure who made them as they're taken from official marketing posters and i'm not sure whether the artist was sass gallagher marcia topher or a completely different person according to rey musaika all the portraits in bg2 were again based on real photographs of bioware staff or their families which is interesting because i wasn't aware penthouse model zedenka podcapova ever worked at edmonton you might recall bioware got into hot water for relying too heavily on stock headshots and celebrity photos for neverwinter knights portraits although they seem to have dodged that bullet here maybe miss podcapova was a big boulder's gate fan there's definitely a subtle difference between the old and new portraits the bg1 headshots look almost like they're going for photo realism whereas the bg2 art seems more stylized i personally prefer the bg2 art the art in bg1 is a bit too might and magic six for my liking but from the player's perspective there's actually a strong incentive to pick the bg-1 portraits as the overwhelming majority of the bg2 portraits are already taken by companions i do wish there were more player exclusive portraits in the bg2 style but bioware probably assumed a lot of players would just download portrait packs from fan sites back in the day i'm pretty sure half my party were anime girls with massive breasts another little factoid mentioned in the bioware anniversary artbook was that bioware developed closer ties to local theatre groups in edmonton and that many of these actors such as mark mia whose first speaking role was in a cut scene at the end of shadows of arm would find work in both baldur's gate and later bioware games however this is really only half the story and undercuts the role played by black isle and interplay in providing assets for the baldur's gate games whilst bioware did do some internal audio work a significant amount of the sound design and voice acting in baldur's gate 2 was handled by black island interplay go through the credits for both games and you'll find the overwhelming majority of audio work is credited to either black isle or interplay not bioware in fact development diaries written by black isle's chris parker give the impression bioware only really played a secondary role here so whilst some canadian talent was used for voice acting most of the actors seem to have been subcontracted through californian talent agencies a good number of these thespians returned from the first game such as jim cummings despair not i will inspired you by charging blindly on gym yes master what should i fetch now created loyal i find this a most satisfactory arrangement and oh wait that would be a spoiler but returning talent usually had a lot more to work with in baldur's gate too thanks to the massive increase in the amount of voice dialogue particularly for companions even better this wasn't just random war cries or small talk but part of character arcs and full-on three-way arguments within the party everyone did a brilliant job here and really proved the worth of having experienced voice talent in games oh squirrelsbu i know i saw them quick throw nuts could you please maintain a little grace while in nature's presence sometimes i simply do not know how you came by your title of ranger off the top of my head the only companion character that bothered me was the obnoxious little rat john johnson i think that this video was the first time i'd ever actually played all the way through bg2 with john as a party member and it took about five hours of play before i wanted to shut him up permanently but this is entirely the fault of bioware's writers and not the voice actor so we'll come back to that issue later in the video of course there were a few fresh faces during the cast such as the indomitable david warner whose performance was so strong that one fan sighters accused him of carrying the entire story on his shoulders it is important to keep in mind that some people weren't quite so keen on the expanded role of voiced dialogue this was certainly part of the wider trend of increasing production values in the industry but using a lot of va work puts a particular strain on especially wordy games with branching dialogue choices chris parker's development diary revealed how arranging recording sessions was a very time consuming process and that dialogue sometimes ended up being rewritten when it returned to bioware due to errors or experiments by those involved and that this was just for the english language side of things before involving localization teams and such obsidian entertainment's josh sawyer the project lead on pillars of eternity has said that they received a lot of negative feedback regarding inconsistent voice acting in poe with some characters having a handful of voiced lines then having none then voicing entire conversations and so on this combined with the release of larian's original sin 2 which had fully voiced dialogue unfortunately led to a greater focus on voice dialogue later in pillars of eternity 2's development which limited the writing team's options considerably and drew them away from other tasks baldur's gate 2 arguably falls foul of poe's problem which is that there can be entire conversations performed in silence then a completely mundane paragraph of text fully voiced for no discernable reason or conversations where the first few lines are unvoiced then halfway through the conversation a single line is voiced which is a little jarring sometimes it also affects how the player engages with the script if the game sets a baseline of important dialogue being voiced and less important dialogue being silent they're probably more likely to skim read or skip through silent dialogue or perceive silent conversations with companions to be less emotionally engaging it can also be extremely boring to wait for a voice actor to finish speaking a line you've already read even so i think baldur's gate 2 struck a reasonable balance between voiced and unvoiced dialogue it got some of the benefits of text text-heavy branching dialogue and some of the benefits of having good voice acting ideally sure i'd prefer if 99 of games had fully voiced dialogue but it's always a trade-off in big complicated games like crpgs there is one area in which the audio department at bioware or black isle or whoever was responsible made a big misstep in general sound design in baldur's gate 2 is quite close to the original but if you listen carefully it does fall short in some respects in baldur's gate 1 you could hear the clinking of mail as your fighters moved around or the harsh rasp of leather as thieves idly stretched their muscles there was also a lot more variety to the combat sounds depending on the different weapons and armor types being employed much of this is gone in baldur's gate 2. i recall a comment somewhere saying the reason for this is that the boulder's gate 2 iteration of the infinity engine handles sound and animations in a way that precludes what was done in bg-1 although i've never looked into the details of this whatever happened the final result is simply that it doesn't sound as good battles look good they feel good but they don't quite resonate in the way boulder's gates did in terms of ambiance i think baldur's gate 2 has a bit more variety to background noise in cities although it's kind of difficult because the game's audio sliders don't accurately represent what they actually affect random shouts or background chatter is sometimes classed as sound effects sometimes ambient noise sometimes voices and in one or two cases are actually part of the music another thing to keep in mind is that most players at the time of release were able to take advantage of the eax effects which added things like reverb to make dungeons and caverns appropriately the echoey i suppose you can probably get it to work on modern systems if you have the right software but this also depends on your sound card or motherboard shadows of arm's soundtrack saw the return of michael hernig though again this must have been done through interplay because in previews bioware seemed to be unsure who was actually handling the music it probably also happened quite late in development as most of the previews for bg2 used music from the first game i'm not sure the average listener would immediately cotton on to the fact that bg1 and 2 had the same composer hernig's bg2 tracks are definitely quite different to his work on the boulder's gate one the main theme at least is much more inspiring promising grand adventure and to my ears the gentle hint of romance though i'm not exactly sure what kind of direction hernig was given whether it came from bioware or interplay or whoever one or two of the combat tracks could potentially get a little repetitive to some players although considering how many thousands of hours people like myself have put into the game over the years my opinion is probably a bit tainted i really like the romance tracks especially how they differ depending on the specific party member ares music for example sounds sweet and almost fragile the perfect accompaniment to the actress's hesitant delivery depending on which version of the soundtrack you get your hands on there are several tracks labeled as unreleased some of these are misleading they're just tracks that were in the game but that were not included on the official soundtrack cd from 2000. though there are a handful that never actually play in game mostly related to in-engine cutscenes most of them sound out of place and were probably just placeholders or abandoned experiments most sources credit hernig for every single track in shadows of arm including the unreleased music although the credits note the involvement of howard drosson as one of the music's editors drossin and his friend inon zur took over from hernig for throne of ball's soundtrack according to interviews neither had any correspondence with hernig regarding the music and simply worked off what hernick had made for shadows of arm zur has erroneously been credited as the sole composer for throne of baal in many sources but work was actually divided between zur and drossin with zer doing the main theme for example andros in doing the ball spawn battles quite a few fans have said that they prefer the throne of balls soundtrack to that of shadows of arm although in fairness sir and drossin were able to cheat a bit since they knew this was the finale to the saga and they could pull out all the stops personally i would cite the bolsporn battle as one of my favorite combat tracks of all time there's this one section where the music seems to capture both heroism and desperation so well [Music] not everything is evocative of fighting through fire and brimstone but even slightly more reserved tracks like the dream music are thick with portentous rumblings this can go a bit far at times the only tracks i would honestly say i dislike are the themes for some of the ball spawn strongholds these are a bit too movie-like a bit too conan in the case of the fire giant fortress to the point that they sound pompous and wildly out of place in baldur's gate even for the final chapter it's only the beautiful melesans theme which is also very effectively used in the epilogue that takes things down a notch and brings some peace and restraint back to proceedings but inevitably we come to the question of how to play baldur's gate 2 today unlike the first game where you had the original the enhanced edition the mod sporting it to the bg2 engine the fan remake for neverwinter knights 2 and the unreleased playstation port your options are rather more limited for bg2 as of making this video there's only really two choices i did actually consider splitting this video in two one four retail shadows of armed pre-expansion and one for throne of bold but the amount of people playing on patched shadows of arm these days is unlikely to number very high so you have either baldur's gate 2 complete which is the digital copy of bg2 with throne of ball installed or you have beamdog's baldur's gate 2 enhanced edition which replaced the complete edition on stores a few years ago i think a lot of people already have bg2 complete having boarded in a sale years ago but those who purchased the enhanced edition should also be able to download the complete edition by following a few simple steps at least if you bought it on gog i've read conflicting information on whether enhanced edition owners can acquire the originals from steam so i'll avoid commenting on the topic i've been fairly critical of the fact that the enhanced editions are sold at a much higher price than the originals but sales that bring them down to around 5 or so are fairly frequent so it's not such a big issue now i suppose the original complete edition of baldur's gate 2 should run fine without any extra tinkering due to using opengl rendering it has less issues with modern versions of windows the only exception to this rule to my knowledge is people running certain laptops with integrated graphics which might require extra software to scale the image to full screen properly in terms of unofficial patches well for many years i played bg2 with nothing but the official fixes but it is a very large and very long game so there are more than a few bugs i'm not 100 certain of whether the gog release has any fan patches already built into it or not as far as i know most people will at least install the jibbering 3 baldur's gate 2 fix pack on top of the official patches built into the fix pack is also the bg2 tweak pack which is getting more into the realm of modding or customization but there are some really useful tweaks in there like removing some of the annoying visual effects for enchanted gear for the average player i think the base complete edition of bg2 with the fix pack is the best way to play the original game if you want the traditional experience my one major complaint about this version is the lack of widescreen there is a wide screen mod but it's not perfect still this is a retro game channel so i wouldn't get very far if pillar boxing bothered me that much now if you've seen my bg1 video you'll know i don't recommend the enhanced editions of the infinity engine games especially the version for the original boulder's gate however baldur's gate 2 enhanced edition is nowhere near as controversial as the version for bg-1 the main complaints regarding the bg-1 enhanced edition were that it completely changed the rule set and mechanics to bring it closer to bg2 that it was visually a major departure from the base game and that the new companions were completely out of place bg2's enhanced edition does not have a lot of these issues the rule setter mechanics are fairly close to the original game it uses most of the same art assets and the bg2 companions are already a lot more vocal and interactive than in bg-1 so the new companions aren't quite so jarring but i still can't wholeheartedly recommend the enhanced edition over the original first the fact that the two versions are so similar kind of undercuts the point of the enhanced edition there are already a lot of quality of life convenience and difficulty level adjustments in bg2 that make it pretty welcoming to new players secondly the enhanced edition has its own unique set of bugs most notably characters getting stuck on things which still hasn't been fixed as of 2022 thirdly i still don't like the art style in bg2 enhanced edition there's no easy answer to upgrading the graphics of an old isometric 2d game especially when all the original 3d assets have been destroyed but that doesn't make the changes in the enhanced edition any more palatable yes you get access to true widescreen mode most of the time but at the cost of a camera that doesn't fit the scenes if you leave it at the default and exposes beamdog's use of filters and harsh outlines to soften the low resolution sprites if you zoom into the level of the original games if i were a conspiratorial person i'd also point out the latter change conceals or tries to conceal the pretty blatant aesthetic differences between the original pre-rendered environments and the new ones created by beamdog plus though bg2's companions are chirpier and play a more important role than in the first game they still don't get entire maps built around them like beam dogs do suggesting to players that beam dog's companions are more important than those in the original am i being old and cranky look i don't deny there are benefits to the enhanced editions particularly for the purposes of modding and trying to tie the trilogy together as a coherent whole something i'll probably talk about if i ever do a dedicated take on beamdog's enhanced editions and it's unfortunate the siege of dragonspear controversy has led to misinformation regarding beamdog changing content in bg1 and 2. though that's partly beamdog's own fault but i still don't like the enhanced edition and though i'm not warning you off it my personal recommendation is still the original complete edition of bg2 at least for your first playthrough the only reason i'd really recommend the enhanced edition is if you absolutely don't want to do any messing about with patches or fix packs whatsoever or you need the special story mode difficulty to maybe help a child or someone with a disability get into the game which i guess is fair enough so these really are the only two versions of baldur's gate you can actually play today but since i got into the subject in my bg1 video it's worth noting that there were attempts to create alternate versions of bg2 an alpha version of icewind gate which ported shadows of arm to the icewinddale 2 engine and the third edition rules had a lot of work put into it but the differences between the two engines and the way they used scripting and such led to it being abandoned many years ago with no indication it'll be resurrected another perhaps more famous attempt at recreating baldur's gate 2 was the baldur's gate 2 redux mod for dragon age origins this project actually made a lot of progress in its early stages teasing fans with both gameplay footage and a really well-made cinematic hearkening max the iconic mage battle in shadows of arms opening unfortunately work on bg2 redux was dropped a long time ago partly due to the amount of content in the original game obviously but also due to how difficult it was to work in the dragon age origins tool set thanks to enthusiastic fans bits and pieces of baldur's gate 2 did find their way into other games the talking sword lilacore for example or the lovely viconia but the most notable project currently in development is baldur's gate 2 reloaded which recreates baldur's gate 2 in the neverwinter knights 2 engine you might dismiss this as just another pipe dream but the team have already completed a similar module for the original baldur's gate campaign which i'll probably make a video on some day as of 2022 baldur's gate 2 reloaded is still in development with a suggestion that the first public release will come at the end of the year whilst i have my misgivings about neverwinter nights 2 baldur's gate 2 reloaded is certainly a fascinating and very ambitious mod that's worth keeping an eye on after all whilst i've spent quite a bit of time explaining the gameplay and audio visual appeal of baldur's gate 2 the game is remembered by many today not only for those but for its story its role playing and for the relationships the player would forge with their companions these are things that aren't necessarily tied to the infinity engine if bioware carried anything from baldur's gate 2 into future titles and if crpgs in general took anything from bioware it's those elements so i guess we should talk about those next [Music] south of boulder's gate lying just beyond the cloud peak mountains lie the empires of the sands arm tethyr and khalisham have played many different roles in their respective histories at times the crown jewels of great empires that stretched across the continent at other times a glittering sea of wealthy but contentious independent city-states the northernmost of these three empires is arm sometimes known as the merchant kingdom unlike baldur's gate arm has always been a focal point of trade and civilized culture its lands blessed with an abundance of natural resources and positioned perfectly to take advantage of the great caravan route known as the trade way this has made arm both an important market in its own right and a crossroads for goods from all over faerun arm's value is such that even when a tributary to more southernly empires it was always treated with a light touch and given a measure of freedom the ruling classes of arm have traditionally been the merchant lords and their families noble houses who command the most coin for an arm coin is synonymous with power respect and even morality in arm every child is familiar with the proverb that poverty is the greatest sin for amnion society values the accumulation of material wealth beyond all else arm has no respect for men of learning or culture except for those who employ their skills to get fabulously rich a great artist who refuses to sell out is viewed with disgust whereas a bad artist who eschews self-respect for the sake of gold is considered a wonderful role model in amnion society in arm it's said that he who has the gold makes the rules and no thought is spared for frivolities like principles if they do not further one's financial position it's no surprise that the worship of joaquin goddess of trade is prominent but the preposterously vain and ostentatious worshipers of soon goddess of beauty also find armed very much to their tastes still any religion is welcome in arms so long as it brings wealth and equally importantly does not threaten the power of the council of six the council of the official ruling body of arm based in the capital city of athcatler officially their identities are a state secret and revealing such information is a crime punishable by death but it's widely known that whoever sits on the council always represents the interests of arm's most powerful merchant houses the other two major factions are the cowled wizards and the shadow thieves the cows as they're known in athcatla are a secret society of powerful mages who operate outside arm's strict regulation of magic users despite attempts by the council to wipe them out the cowled wizards have remained a major player in arm not least due to the fact that one of the council of six is in fact a cowled wizard themselves a fact that would undoubtedly trigger a civil war in arm where it exposed at the time of the bolsporn saga the cowled wizards seem to have been temporarily co-opted by the authorities and converted into a semi-autonomous enforcement agency the cows at this time are ironically now themselves the overseers of arm's magical regulation laws the cowled wizards now handle both approving licenses for legal magic use and the disposal of unlicensed mages sending the most dangerous spellcasters to rot in the magical asylum of spell hold the other power player in arm is the criminal syndicate known as the shadow thieves this group were once a rising power in water deep but the city of splendors would brook no threat to its authority and drove the shadow thieves out the group fled south to arm where they came to dominate the smaller thieves guilds operating out of afkatla the council of six came to not only tolerate the shadow thieves but actively rely on them to regulate criminality in at kapla's underworld the shadow thieves now have an unofficial agreement with the city's rulers ensuring that independent criminals revolutionary groups and foreign insurrectionists do not threaten arm's stability in return for being left alone by the authorities the city of coin thus gained a measure of normality at least on the surface afghatla's merchants continue to get rich the cowled wizards keep a lid on sorcery the noble houses maintain their power and authority and the shadow thieves ply their trade in peace awaiting the day they return to water deep and exact revenge on the city's rulers the boss born finds themselves deposited on this stage through no fault of their own having saved the city of baldur's gate gurayan's ward should by all rights have earned the opportunity to put their past behind them and settle down they are by this point a famous and accomplished mercenary and adventurer not to mention one of the heroes credited with saving baldur's gate from a war that would have ruined the city and fueled a dark apotheosis but the bold spawn's tainted heritage ensures that life will never be quiet or easy they depart baldur's gate in a haze of dark rumors with only a handful of trusted companions at their side but the party is ambushed by figures cowled in shadow and wrapped in mist who swiftly overpower the bolsporn and their companions grind's ward awakens in a dingy cell where they're subjected to sorcerous torture by a masked man every waking moment promises agony to which there seems no purpose for the wizard asks no questions and his cold pitiless eyes offer no hint to his emotions he neither threatens nor cajoles and indeed seems almost frustrated by the bolsporn's ignorance as to the point of these endless torments the boss born is saved by the intervention of a third party who launch an all-out assault on the dungeon in which the party is held imawen the boss-born's childhood companion escapes her own cell and frees the protagonist the two of them gathering the surviving members of their erstwhile adventuring party and fighting their way towards the exit along the way the companions discover other prisoners some of them driven insane by captivity in the wizards experiments but one the character bounty hunter yoshimo joins them in their flight a name is unveiled irenicus as well as some fractured contradictory hints of the villain's character and motivations amongst the ruins of the dungeon there's plenty of evidence that speaks to the man's evil nature yet the party also stumble across the wizard's magically preserved friends and servants who have lost all sense of time and place these sad creatures ultimately speak of iranicus as a man of loyalty and compassion in one breath and of insane cruelty in the next though much of the dungeon is taken up by guard rooms laboratories and workshops for crafting instruments of pain one room is a picture of perfectly preserved beauty and grace a tribute to some unnamed lady with whom the villain is apparently obsessed beyond all reason when the party emerge into the sunlight they find themselves amidst a pitched battle between irenicus and an army of rogues blasting his foes to pieces without a second thought irenicus turns on the party demanding they return to their cells and submit to further experiments immewen rattled by her experiences lashes out at tyrenicus with her magic to little avail suddenly a pack of cowled mages appear demanding all involved in the incident throw down their arms and surrender aranicus refuses and obliterates the first wave of mages but relents as more and more grey-robed wizards teleport in allowing the mages to seize both he and imoen for the crime of unlicensed spellcasting with the battle concluded a crowd gathers around the scene of the crime and the party are informed that they are in athcatla the city of coin asking around the bolsporn and his friends discover that irenicus and immoen have been taken by the cowled wizards and the only way to reach them is with the help of one of arm's major criminal organizations one option is the shadow thieves who have eyes and ears at every level of athcatla's governance and are willing to help the party in exchange for the princely sum of twenty thousand gold but the party is approached by a pale mysterious woman named valen who informs them that her mistress has a more enticing offer bodhi meets the party in the graveyard district and offers to help the party for a mere 15 000 gold so long as they have no qualms about making an enemy of the shadow thieves it seems that bodhi has built her own underworld empire and is attempting to supplant the shadow thieves causing a full-scale war between the two factions moonlit athcatler has witnessed power struggles many times before as the shadow thieves often take punitive actions against upstart guilds or rival organizations attempting to muscle in on their trade the night knives of waterdeep are one such interloper being currently engaged in a scheme to take control of the athcatland docks but the war between bodie and the shadow thieves is unusually brutal and desperate and the night is filled with a clash of steel and screams of inhuman fury though the amnion aristocracy remained cloistered from harm athcatla's underclass is frequently awake to the sight of streets filled with dead footpads their throats torn out or bodies drained of every last drop of blood regardless of which faction the bolsporn chooses to side with they'll need to generate a sizable amount of coin before they can pursue iranicus and save immigrant thankfully there's no shortage of work to be had in athcatler alone there are dark cults to be cleansed bounties to be claimed conspiracies to be unravelled and much more venture outside the city and there are many other communities calling for aid and willing to pay very well for the privilege the dyani's keep is besieged by an army of monsters the umar hills are haunted by shadows the prosperous town of trade meters assaulted by wild beasts and lord giadan firecrack begs for adventurers to drive the orcs from his lands but as the bolsporn explores arm they're subjected to surreal and disturbing dreams instead of the cryptic visions that dog them in borders gate now their dreams seem to be the stage upon which imoen and irenicus play out their own bizarre performance imoen is hopelessly adrift in fragmented memories while irenicus taunts and teases telling gorion's ward to overcome their inhibitions and take command of the power within them to follow the mage to spell hold and accept the gifts offered by their heritage little does the bolsport know that spellhold is but the first stage of irenicus grand plans the wizard will lead the bolsporn on a chase through the depths of the asylum the shadows of the underdark and all the way back to arm here the party must foil the wizard's scheme to finish an obscene ritual a ritual that will elevate tyrenicus and fulfill his vengeance against those who wronged him so very long ago at the end of their adventures in arm the bolsporn yet again finds themselves a very powerful and very wealthy individual fated across the sword coast as a hero and yet again their dark blood drives them from safety and contentment and back into the bloodshed of battle the bolsporn is advised to seek the counsel of the stones of prophecy the stones reveal that the prophecy of alondo is nearing its destined resolution just as the god of murder seated the world with his progeny those progeny have sown chaos in their wake and the strongest of these have gathered for a final confrontation perhaps to resurrect their father or perhaps to claim his power themselves gorion's ward is attacked by illasera who reveals herself to be another bolsporn she attempts to kill gorion's ward and claim their power for herself but is cut down as she dies gorion's ward and their companions are transported to a pocket dimension here they meet an old enemy who offers to pass along what they know of the bolsporn and olando's prophecies in exchange for being returned to life as a mortal left with no other choice gorion's ward accepts the offer and is informed that their objectives are two-fold to confront a series of challenges within ball's pocket dimension and to deal with the other ball spawn the party leaves the pocket dimension and finds themselves in the kingdom of tethyr just south of arm violence is not unusual in tethyr which saw a succession of bloody civil wars that climaxed in the ten black days in which the entire ruling dynasty and anyone suspected of royal blood was put to the sword still the kingdom had gained some small semblance of peace stability and justice under the reign of queen zarande star that piece has been shattered by the bolsporn the five most powerful living descendants of ball have carved out their own petty kingdoms within tathia's borders though once united the five are now at each other's throats rallying armies of monsters mercenaries men at arms and even lesser bolts born to their side and making war upon each other as armies march and cities burn those balls born who have no involvement with the conflict have become feared and hated by the rest of faerun most of them banished executed by the authorities or torn apart by mobs in saradesh garayan's ward meets melisan a flame-haired wizard who has tried to save the children of murder from their fate bringing them to the city in the hopes it would be a safe haven instead sarah douche has become a cage with one of the five gromnir seizing control of the city and locking himself and his allies within the palace another of the five the fire giant jagashura has sarah douche under siege intending to storm the city and kill all the ball spawn within gorion's ward must first deal with a mad gromnir and then escape the city and find a means of defeating the invulnerable yagashura but with the prophecy of alondo rapidly approaching its conclusion quraian's ward must also contend with the other three surviving members of the five with the deaths of so many bolsporn much of the dead god's divine essence has finally returned to its rightful place and whoever can finally claim that essence has the power to restore ball to life or claim the mantle of god of murder for themselves older viewers might remember that when bioware was advertising baldur's gate 2 the operative word was dark shadows of arm was darker it was more mature its sense of morality more equivocal that sort of marketing was usually as tired predictable and manifestly untrue then as it is now but bioware did have some justification for making the claim when making the original baldur's gate bioware were constrained by tsr's code of ethics a series of extremely strict guidelines drawn up in response to the satanic panic of the 1980s in short the code limited how far bioware could take its depiction of violent or morally objectionable behavior in boulder's gate for example it mandated that the game could not be seen as encouraging the player to commit evil acts as bioware put it that meant that evil characters could only be roleplayed as greedy bad tempered or coldly indifferent that they could not be seen to profit too much from their behavior and that in a nutshell they still had to be performing good acts albeit out of self-interest or by accident at bioware's 1999 event announcing baldur's gate 2 they told the press that this would not be true of shadows of arm although a code of conduct of sorts still existed by this point activists had mostly lost interest in dungeons and dragons according to bioware the code was now significantly less restrictive and bioware would have considerably more freedom in both the type of content they depicted in baldur's gate 2 and how players were able to interact with that content out of the gate the game certainly does its best to hammer players over the head with almost comical edginess there are lengthy descriptions of knives cutting into flesh of deformed mutants and half-grown artificial woman floating in amniotic tanks of mutilated and defiled corpses your own companions talk about watching their friends being butchered in front of them a mad clone screams about being driven mad by the disgusting touch of her captor i've even read people claiming there's dialogue that suggests immoen was being sexually assaulted though i'm pretty sure people are just misinterpreting some of the language but after leaving the dungeon the game does lighten up a fair bit and never really goes back to this level of unrelenting unpleasantness it's certainly a little more explicit than baldur's gate with more overt depictions of slavery butchering innocence and all that but fairly typical fantasy stuff by today's standards well except the slavery i guess it even let the player have sex with a few characters and employ the services of prostitutes compare that to baldur's gate where the game literally killed you for letting a strange woman give you a kiss and even bethesda games don't let you get someone pregnant you know without mods i'm not that kind of girl mister go find a brahma or something of course it's a far cry from the adult rated content of the fallout games particularly fallout 2 and this was pointed out at the time whether the world of shadows of arm is a mature one is obviously a fuzzy question what do you count as mature does it tackle hard questions or offer a nuanced depiction of the characters and factions that exist in the setting burn it burn the drow well not especially most npcs are caricatures of the groups they represent like the spluttering screaming mob that tried to lynch viconia or the moustache-twirling slavers and corrupt government officials the nobility in particular come across as very silly with a relationship between arms merchant houses and afkatlas great unwashed rather anachronistically portrayed as a fairly straightforward class system that doesn't mean there isn't room for some interesting characters nalia one of your party members is depicted as a sort of spoiled rich girl slumming it with the masses she has the luxury of advocating charity towards the less fortunate but becomes defensive when the system as a whole is threatened she's a liberally minded reformer but at her core accepts the basic tenets of noblesse oblige and is critical of those who get ideas above their station unfortunately that tension is only communicated in throwaway dialogue and isn't really explored in her side quest i can understand bioware going for this trope of snobbish blue bloods sneering at the underclasses and telling you not to track your dirty feet in their villas as they were probably just trying to recreate amnesh culture as it's described in the source books but it does miss a lot of the more unique elements of amnesh culture described in empires of sand like the various mercantile idioms peculiar to athcatler or the nobilities frequent and stunningly extravagant displays of charity to reinforce their social status you could argue that the former is partly due to one of the guidelines in the original design document that npcs are not supposed to speak with strong accents or strange dialects but it seems like the writers frequently ignored these guidelines when it suited them so probably not without distinctly amnion features athcatla's sociocultural environment is very generic and really not that different to how society was portrayed in the original baldur's gate in fact the first game actually went into a bit more detail regarding how bold iranian society operates despite not even reaching the city until something like half or three quarters of the way through the game this is mainly because the first game made baldur's gate's economic political and military framework a central part of the main narrative we learned about the relationship between the grand dukes and the flaming fist militia how ducal elections work the role of the banks and merchant houses the importance of the iron mines and all the rest shadows of arm is missing or that or at least hides most of the details in throwaway dialogue the in-universe explanation for not dabbling in politics is that athcatla's council of six and key figures are all away dealing with some kind of successionist movement and an invasion of monstrous creatures so the city is just chugging along as usual at the time of the bolsporn's visit the real reason is probably the bioware took to heart criticisms of the first game story that the iron crisis was too mundane for an epic fantasy tale and they wanted to pivot to something more exciting in bg2 like kicking dragon arse i wouldn't say this decision completely wrecks the world building in shadows of arm or anything like that but it does make arm a little less unique than baldur's gate you could transplant 90 of shadows of arm to some other civilized region of faerun and it wouldn't change all that much feel free to lodge a complaint to the proper authority that would be me i understand a good number of people aren't particularly interested in say whether sudanelasar has a flat tax rate or whether the council of six subsidized athcatl's dye industry but i think having a lot of little details especially cultural quirks can make a setting more compelling and believable you can detect scraps of this in bg2 like the relationship between the shadow thieves and the city authorities or the semi-legal status of slavery but it's not enough to make kath katler as memorable as say morrowind still there are also people who felt bg2 went too far in trying to make the world overly exotic i talked about that a bit earlier in the video but i didn't get into the problem of how bg2 tackles the in-universe issue of power creep baldur's gate 1 very consciously focused on fairly mundane affairs bandits kobolds cranky old wizards and the like conversely vampires demons and outer planar tourists weren't particularly interested in that stretch of the sword coast by baldur's gate 2 the party is canonically at a power level in add 2nd edition that's nudging into the upper echelons of the setting even at the start of the game individual party members are at the same level as some of the settings lesser faction leaders for example they're not quite drizzed to urden but they are at the same stage players in the tabletop game would consider retiring the characters so they can settle down to a well-deserved rest from adventuring or advancing the characters to a more active leading role like dukes or generals this is a major reason for the stronghold side quests in shadows of arm the kind of foes characters of these levels tackle have to be something special both in terms of power levels and in terms of how unusual they are in the setting that means mind flayers that means beholders that means hordes of vampires dark elves secure again and other exotic fare and though the game definitely tries to introduce these enemies with some degree of tact and reserve appropriate to how remarkable they are in the universe it inevitably devolves into throwing armies of fire giants at the players it becomes increasingly difficult to retain any sense of plausibility to the point that throne of ball has multiple dragon battles in one location as if the dragons just sat around playing cards in the guard room waiting for the protagonist there is an upside to this problem at least in throne of ball when the queen of tethyr is literally sending armies to stop you you really get a sense of how far the ball spawn has come since the days of running away from zvarts but things had started to break down pretty early in shadows of arms so this excuse only goes so far it really upset some forgotten realms fans one fan site raged against the use of liches as mere sideshow enemies in shadows of arm quite fairly pointing out that there should never be such a thing as a generic lich fight they cited the example of icewind dale's lich as a better handling of such foes but personally i don't agree the phylactery mechanic came across as a cheap gimmick rather than a quest in its own right lich battles in shadows of armor in my opinion much more fun than the lich battle in icewind dale but i think the fan site was correct in that they certainly cheapened them as in universe enemies ideally shadows of arm could have built an entire major quest line around defeating a single lich now admittedly there's always going to be a section of the audience for whom none of this really matters because they can't take bg2's fantasy setting seriously in the first place they just don't care about the details in a fantasy setting it's already fantasy so it's not worth trying to make it plausible i think there are really two factions within this group one is just people who come to bg2 already sick to death of generic high fantasy settings it was pointed out in some contemporary reviews of both boulder's gate and baldur's gate 2 that though crpgs had been on the decline there certainly wasn't a paucity of high fantasy games available people in this group would probably be much more positively disposed to titles like morrowind or planescape which were much more novel spins on fantasy and thus had worlds that were worth exploring in detail but the other faction is people who just hate fantasy settings in general believe it or not there are people who love rpgs but become intensely nauseous when they read words like dragon or phylactery again contemporary reviews did mention that people who were allergic to elf queens and undead had other choices available to them with reviews of baldur's gate 1 invariably mentioning fallout and reviews of baldur's gate 2 referencing deus ex there's a fair number of people who probably just don't care about the specifics or sorry verisimilitude of baldur's gate 2's setting but do care about how good the main plot and leading characters are the original design dock for shadows of arm put a lot of emphasis on making the protagonist feel they were at the center of the plot that they were constantly reminded of how the villain's plans were progressing and that there was at least one major twist in the story to make them re-evaluate what was going on the first point was an obvious change from the original game where the player was peripheral to the iron crisis conspiracy and the big revelation of their heritage was actually incidental to the villain's plans in the case of shadows of arm the main plot does rely very heavily on irenicus getting his hands on the protagonist still i've seen criticisms of bg2's main plot not as a self-contained story but in the context of the bolsporn saga the argument is that it feels like a filler episode in which the bolsporn prophecy is merely one small part the shadows of arm's story is really about irenicus and his revenge i'm not 100 on board with this criticism as i think the internal character development that occurs when the ball spawn loses their soul is relevant to the developing saga but there's definitely a feeling that the story sort of rubber bands when you reach throne of ball as if shadows of armor a break from the saga of balls progeny and now suddenly everything is coming back with a vengeance this is even indirectly referenced by the other bolsporn and there is definitely a sense in shadows of arm that this is as much irenicus tale as it is yours the first game was criticized for introducing the main antagonist early on and then pretty much forgetting about him for the rest of the game there are things you can do with this approach but in bg-1's case most people don't consider the antagonist to have been used very effectively even if he is a pretty intimidating figure in his own right so in baldur's gate 2 there was the requirement that the player has access to much more information on the wizard's character and motivations hence the tutorial dungeon and irenicus leaving his diary pages conveniently strewn around spell hold but there was also the requirement that the player is frequently updated on the mage's progress how do you do this unskippable cutscenes of course i'm sure you can already see the difficulties taking form both in how the storytelling was handled and how it's integrated into an open world adventure when you ask people about the worst parts of baldur's gate 2 two commonly cited sections are chateau irenicus aka the tutorial dungeon and spell hold one reason is as we mentioned before the story heavy sections of these are quite boring from a gameplay perspective the tutorial dungeon doesn't really have any interesting fights and gameplay is often interrupted by companions there's a lot of walking into a room triggering a conversation walking into another room triggering another conversation and so on and then spell hold also has bits where you just walk around and talk to people without any actual gameplay but they're also quite bad for replays and from a role-playing perspective because there really aren't any worthwhile choices to make during these long sections the player's dialogue options here and their overall interactions with the antagonist are mostly false choices in the vast majority of cases they boil down to a polite okay a humorous okay a very rude okay or an alternative option like attempting to bargain or change the outcome of a conversation that always turns out to be a waste of breath so once you've experienced the main plot once every subsequent playthrough is just going through the motions secondly there's the matter of timing once the player leaves the tutorial dungeon and starts chapter two a script is triggered that forces the player to see what moen and irenicus is up to when the party takes a nap okay a little boring on subsequent playthroughs but it keeps things in perspective but there's a very good chance you'll exhaust all these cutscenes within a few hours of real-time gameplay and you won't trigger a new set of cutscenes until starting chapter 3 or 4. so in the period following the start of chapter 2 the player sees a couple of cutscenes of irenicus and immoen a couple of balls born dreams and then nothing for hours dozens of hours maybe a hundred hours erenicus has absolutely no involvement in any of the other events going on in arm and is barely mentioned at all and that's only when the player themselves mistakes unrelated foes as allies of the wizard so within a few hours of starting chapter 2 probably the core of the game for players who like to explore and do side quests the umbilical cord is cut and the main plot loses any relevance to the rest of the game but this problem then spawns an even more serious problem the frustrated developers having their intricately planned and painstakingly paced main narrative upended by ignorant players now feel compelled to curtail the player's freedom making the game more linear for the sake of telling a more effective story and to me that's far worse than the main plot being sidelined and an issue with focusing on the antagonist is well maybe the antagonist is not all that interesting for some people i mentioned earlier some critics have argued that irenicus is a memorable villain primarily because he was fortunate enough to be voiced by david warner it's difficult to imagine irenicus as anyone other than warner as far as i know bioware have never released the placeholder audio for bg2 when bioware staff were used as stand-in voice actors we can speculate that irenicus would have been a lot less effective without warner but it's hard to say how much weaker the character would be overall i think the information we're given about irenicus at least at the start of the game makes him an interesting figure but i'm not sure how well that holds up over the rest of the campaign even if we removed everything from the game except the events directly pertaining to irenicus and his plans his character doesn't really go anywhere and personally i don't think what we learn about him past the tutorial is all that compelling some people will dislike irenicus because he's not a very good example of what the game's marketing claimed would be a morally ambiguous story irenicus from chapter 2 onwards is hardly shrouded in shades of grey he's a bad man doing bad things for bad reasons that in itself doesn't bother me a good villain doesn't have to have noble intentions if you go too far in making the player sympathize with the villains you get a situation like icewinddale2 where the villains are so close to being in the right that the writers seem to have snapped back and then made them hilariously evil to compensate for this besides the forgotten realms are or were at the time a setting with congenitally evil races and a pantheon of gods that could represent an objective definition of evil but we'll come back to that a villain can be compelling as a tragic moral fable or because we can empathize with their motivations even if we don't sympathize with them people can identify with anger insecurity humiliation and all the rest even if it was well deserved as a moral fable irenicus passes well enough we see his arrogance his pride his inability to take responsibility for his crimes and redeem himself he'd make a good subject for a play but really we learned all this in the first few hours of the game it's just communicated a bit better later on in interactions with his former lover as an aside shadow of am has quite a few cases of tainted love affairs i particularly liked the one between cylophane and fair in us natha though this isn't really resolved in a satisfying way the problem with iranicus even as a straight straightforward villain is that nothing that's revealed about him later in the game is really worth learning it feels like the game was trying to use irenica's background story the unspeakable crime he committed and the unspeakable thing that was done to him in return as a big twist or revelation but it's not it's hard to really understand why what irenicus did or his punishment are such serious topics firstly they're not issues that a regular person can process on an emotional level and secondly the game doesn't drive home how awful they are for irenicus or his victims it just says they're bad but to the player they have no bite whatsoever i wouldn't say irenicus is a bad villain he's just not really a standout part of shadows of arm's story at least in my opinion of course irenicus technically isn't the only major villain in shadows of arm his sister or i think she's his sister the game goes back and forth on this also plays an important role this is a bit of a bigger spoiler but it's quite difficult to discuss the topic obliquely so stop the video and skip ahead to here if you don't really want to know still here okay so bodie is honestly quite underdeveloped as a character considering how much dialogue she has at least if you sided with her for chapter three if you joined the shadow thieves in chapter three then bodhi is a bit of an oddball addition almost extraneous as the sister of the antagonist and allegedly a major cause of irenicus being such a bad boy in the first place she doesn't get much screen time or character development in shadows of harm in fact she may as well have been a random vampire queen or something with no connection to iranicus assuming you did side with her in chapter 3 she gets a significant amount of exposition much of it voiced but it doesn't really help fill out her character the established facts regarding bodhi are that she was always a wild card and a bad influence on irenicus that she drove him to commit the crime they were both punished for and that by the time you meet her in shadows of arms she is cruel impulsive reckless and untrustworthy though she hides some of these traits well if you side with her guild there's really nothing more to her character than that and her relationship with irenicus is neither interesting in itself nor the cause of any further drama there are some indications that bioware intended bodhi to be a more active predatory antagonist in shadows of arm i believe she was originally meant to hunt the player through spell holds vaults unless i'm misinterpreting what gader said sabab's body and irenicus were meant to represent two villainous archetypes that would complement each other bodhi is the more active and aggressive antagonist who would clash with the player on multiple occasions and iranicus as more of the dark overlord type in that case i suppose she didn't need much depth or character development she was just a very visible threat to the player but it's disappointing that siding with bodhi in chapter 3 doesn't give us more insight into her character or affect the plot in any way interestingly in philip athens much maligned novelization of shadows of arm the roles of bodhi and irenicus are almost flipped ironicus doesn't actually have anything very interesting to say and the book doesn't really dwell on his motivations or character bodhi on the other hand is given numerous introspective chapters where she questions her own motivations and how much agency she has in her own fate it also implied that bodhi being a bad influence on iranicus is merely the heavily biased perspective of other characters and she and the protagonist actually tumble into an ill omens love affair now i'm not saying bodhi should have been a love interest or anything though i'm not saying she shouldn't rather that she is her own woman so to speak and something could have been done with her in chapter 3 at the very least maybe the player could have learned enough about her to help drive home another moral fable to complement that of irenicus or maybe the player could have influenced her in some way to drive a wedge between her and iranicus as it stands bodhi barely acknowledges the fact that the player even worked with her in chapter 3 and on subsequent playthroughs there's really no reason to take her aside when you know you're going to be punished for it unfortunately throne of baal's villain is far worse than irenicus or his sister or if not actively bad then at best forgettable although in this case the identity of the villain is itself a twist of a kind throne of balls sort of builds up the rival boss born as the antagonists but also sort of builds up balls potential rebirth though it wobbles back and forth on the latter point the final villain when exposed probably elicits less of a whoa and more of a oh yeah i remember you to be fair bioware had written themselves into a corner when making baldur's gate 1. there is absolutely no way that back in the mid 90s anyone at bioware had thought so far ahead as to have an overarching villain in mind for the trilogy this meant a lot of rabbits being pulled from hats in baldur's gate 2 including some pretty blatant retcons of details that had been established in the first game retcons that bioware try rather unconvincingly to address in-game still the final boss is a functional antagonist and it could have been much worse i can't say i have any bright ideas regarding how bioware could have addressed this problem based on how they dealt with the retcons i'm very glad they didn't pretend to have been building up to the villain since the first game like portraying biff the understudy is the puppet master behind it all i guess there's still baldur's gate 3 for that though at a push maybe they could have made the villain's background irrelevant and played up some introspective elements like having the villain be a nemesis character representing the opposite of the player's choices or maybe using the villain to explore the sad futility of the war for ball's throne so they're not a very memorable or effective villain but they don't particularly detract from throne of ball either so we can't be too harsh of course there is another potential villain in baldur's gate too the player you are a wonder of destruction child of ball go then and defeat the creature that lies in the cavern crush it beneath your heel and claim another victory bioware insistent that shadows of arm would substantially improve on baldur's gate shortcomings when it came to role playing and the d d alignment system we can divide complaints about role playing and alignment into two camps those who object to the role-playing options themselves and those who object to the alignment system in general regarding the second we won't rehash arguments from the baldur's gate 1 video the simple fact is many people will never be happy with dnd's alignment system at the time of baldur's gate 2's release games like fallout and deus ex led to increased scrutiny of the whole good and evil lawful and chaotic dichotomy of d and d and ballers gate 2 did nothing to solve those baldur's gate 2's alignment system is just as abstract and arbitrary as the first games and critics of the system definitely won't be pleased with it there was an argument between david gaider and several unnamed posters back in 2001 where bioware are criticized for not taking a cue from planescape and letting players define their alignment through their actions gaydar quite fairly countered that whereas planescape let you define your character through his actions the baldur's gate series was more about traditional d and d role playing in that you defined your character first and then had them act according to that pre-existing alignment it's tough to say which would have worked better in baldur's gate too my personal sense is that the majority of people who play rpgs at least today tend to role-play a character reasonably close to their own identity and beliefs on their first playthrough and then roleplay as someone other than themselves on subsequent playthroughs i don't really have any hard data to support this i just think it's common for people to self-insert in games where they have the option to do so especially when they're expected to get emotionally engaged in a game but regardless of whether you're role-playing an evil character or are in fact an evil bastard in real life i think baldur's gate 2 expanded the role-playing options quite a bit over baldur's gate one whilst gameplay-wise the player's options for tackling most quests aren't especially varied most quests do try to offer at least a couple of different choices when it comes to one's moral compass some are pretty straightforward good or evil options some a bit muddier and more reflective of the player's interpretation of what is just or fair let's take the paladin keldorn's sidequest as an example after dealing with a local cult keldorn returns home to visit his wife and daughters only to be greeted with the shocking news that his wife is cuckolding him keldon's wife is completely unrepentant accusing keldorn of abandoning his responsibilities as a husband and father in favour of his duties to the order of the radiant heart depending on the player's actions the quest can conclude either with keldorn forgiving his wife and returning to his family or with the lawful good outcome the deed is done my lady maria rots in some dungeons depths and sir william of thorpe swings at the end of a well-tied rope though the quest is very short there are various bits of information that the player can uncover that might influence their advice to keldorn there isn't necessarily a clear-cut practical benefit to either outcome keldorn can still be persuaded to continue adventuring with you either way so the player's decision will probably be based on either their personal opinion or how they think their character would view the situation what an evil character would choose to do here isn't easy to predict would an evil character feel murderous rage at the idea of being cuckolded regardless of context would they be a cold-hearted pragmatist and just tell keldorn to get it all over with no matter the cost would they think keldorn got his just desserts being too weak to keep his wife in line or would they feel a kinship with lady firecam being selfish and impulsive and putting their own emotional satisfaction above all else there are evil gods in the forgotten realms whose portfolios would cover all of the aforementioned perspectives even according to the definition of evil set forth in the dnd system evil can take many forms and baldur's gate 2 definitely does better than the first game in providing options for evil characters the central problem in bg-1 was that loosely speaking evil never wins being evil was harder and less advantageous for the party than being a model citizen evil options in bg2 usually fall into one of three categories greed anger or selfishness unlike bg-1 there are some great moments of magnificent bastardry for evil players to revel in like poisoning the druids grove or triple crossing adelon and the drow in the underdark and there are sometimes more straightforward approaches to certain quests like threatening or flat-out murdering npcs instead of running around on errands unfortunately it's still not quite enough the real standout villainous moments in shadows of arm are few and far between and the central problem from baldur's gate 1 remains it's not in your interest to play an evil character if you define evil as self-serving there are still severe disadvantages to taking the overtly evil options in bg2 you could split your party in two bring down the wrath of the authorities lose access to useful gear or most consistently receive lower experience rewards the good path for quests in shadows of arm might be longer or require forgoing immediate financial rewards but in the long run these are usually better for the party even though players aren't going to sit down and calculate the exact pros and cons of the good and evil roots players naturally gravitate towards the good or just options and nothing in the game encourages them to do otherwise even if you define evil as simply being cowardly there's no particular reason not to go out of your way to help people and put your party in harm's way in baldur's gate too the worst that can happen is a reload and the potential rewards are at the very least some experience some gold and a bunch of loot so the game's credit the final chapter of shadows of arm involves a series of tests that gorge the ball spawns sense of morality a similar technique is used in throne of ball the problem with these tests is that first of all they're restricted to a very short sequence at the end of the game and secondly they are again of dubious value to an ostensibly evil character some of them don't have clear-cut long-term benefits to an evil character particularly a lawful evil one conscious of the consequences or one that simply values their allies i often played lawful evil characters in bg2 and almost without fail by the time i reached throne of ball their alignment had changed to lawful neutral because of the decisions made in these selfless sections from one who willingly shoulders the burden of destiny and its effect upon others your companion is returned to you child of ball the one major almost unambiguously positive addition i think shadows of arm made in this area was the slayer transformation the slayer turns the protagonist into a powerful and extremely effective fighter not only due to their basic combat stats but due to their natural weapons and immunities which both bypass and protect against many of the nastiest or most irritating buffs and debuffs that fly around during high level battles this is a huge improvement over baldur's gate 1 where the dark heritage the player was supposed to be afraid of was actually pretty toothless and unappealing evil characters got a couple of crappy innate powers that depending on your play style were much worse than those good players received the slayer transformation makes the call of evil a much more seductive one somewhat living up to the theme of giving in to your dark impulses something bg-1 completely failed at now it's not perfect there's still limited incentive for a good aligned protagonist to swallow the reputation loss and risk of going berserk but playing with an under-leveled evil party especially one in which the bolsporn is not a conventional front-line fighter class the slayer transformation definitely has its merits but where baldur's gate 2 really blew the first game out of the water was in fleshing out the game's companions and that's both a good thing and a bad thing we've already been over how slashing the total number of companions affected the gameplay was the sacrifice worth it conventional wisdom would certainly suggest so to this day baldur's gate 2's companions are far and away its most historically significant innovation and their faces are etched into the collective memory of the fan base at a basic level what was so different about baldur's gate 1 and baldur's gate 2's companions this is bad the short and simple answer is quantity and quality baldur's gate 2's companions talk more than baldur's gate ones a lot more they semi-frequently interjecting conversations with npcs chat with each other more than in boulder's gate 1 and are usually directly involved in at least two side quests typically one to recruit or meet up with them and one that triggers after they've been wandering around with the party for a while we already mentioned jahira at the start of the video who has three separate side quests there are two regular companion side quests one of which is a continuation of another side quest and a very lengthy romance side quest the rest of the cast aren't quite as content heavy as jahira but all of them have substantially more dialogue than any party member in bg-1 they have distinct personalities that left an impression on players that made it feel like you were traveling with people rather than robotic servators silence you fool chauvinist pig the problem here is that quality begets higher expectations in bg-1 companion interjections outside of random one-liners were so rare that you were acclimated to the fact that your party were the laconic type but in baldur's gate 2 you start to expect companions to chime in and when they don't you notice that you'll notice that certain party members have a lot to say whilst wandering around athcatla others have very little outside a very specific situations similarly party members tend to shut their traps during dungeon crawls even when their comments could be helpful when they do chime in in these areas it's often unwelcome but we'll come back to that the clearest example of this is the period between boarding the ship in spell hold and returning to arm as mentioned earlier most of the side quest timers are frozen during these chapters as is a lot of the companion banter on top of this your companions have very little unique dialogue pertaining to brynlor and the underdark especially voice dialogue this depends a bit on your party composition viconia obviously has a few comments on her homeland for example but overall the party doesn't have much to say for this lengthy sequence a problem that persists in the game's final chapters in baldur's gate 1 you wouldn't notice this at all because your party almost never speak anyway but in baldur's gate 2 the player will notice when companions go for long periods without any unique dialogue throne of ball is not quite as bad as the latter half of shadows of arm in this respect since it's much shorter you're more likely to remember the last time a companion had something to say but overall it is quite wanting the lack of companion side quests is very noticeable especially if you're playing the enhanced edition where the beam dog companions get star treatment it's definitely one of the times you wonder what they could have done here if throne of ball had been a full game some characters should have a lot to say about tathir particularly jahira regarding her personal and familial connection to the harpers the regicide and the ten black days then again jahira is hardly in a position to complain about lacking enough content many companions didn't even get enough content in shadows of arm let alone thrown of ball i'm not going to go through an exhaustive list of all the cut companion content that has either been uncovered in the game's internal data or revealed by bioware staff over the years suffice to say there's quite a lot aries sidequest in particular was a very unfortunate loss in my opinion involving her inability to come to terms with the loss of her wings this quest had several potential outcomes all of which were arguably appropriate to her character and all of which were somewhat bittersweet and rather touching but at least baldur's gate two's companions got to join in on the fun in the first place one of the difficulties in positioning the baldur's gate series as a trilogy is that only parts two and three shadows of arm and throne of ball are actually contiguous baldur's gate 1 is a completely separate entry not just in the sense of being a totally different game but in the sense that your companions are not carried over into shadows of arm bioware are famous for trilogies boulder's gate mass effect and dragon age but only the last two entries of the baldur's gate series are truly interconnected though they did come close with the mass effect games despite their loud and repeated insistence in the late 90s that baldur's gate would become a trilogy bioware hadn't really planned ahead with regards to how they would actually tie everything together the unfortunate result of this is that most of the colorful characters you shared blood sweat and tears with through 100 hours of baldur's gate are dispensed with in shadows of arm this by itself was unavoidable bioware probably could have carried all the bg1 companions over but that would have meant sacrificing the deeper companion interactions they pioneered in bg2 but what i don't think was necessary was the way these old friends were treated in shadows of arm aside from some stats and equipment nothing of your bg1 save is carried over into bg2's campaign that means the game can't tell what your interactions were with returning characters you'll run into several ex-party members in shadows of arm who either don't acknowledge your previous relationship or have throwaway one-liners like don't you recognize me or i thought you were dead which the npc then hand waves but what's worse is that several of your former comrades are randomly killed off or made antagonists in shadows of arm did you become attached to a certain companion over the course of the first game well too bad they don't acknowledge your shared experience and randomly get killed in front of you or force you to cut them down in bg2 it's a very cheap and disrespectful way to treat the player's memories of baldur's gate mass effect 3 is obviously no model of storytelling but it does deserve credit for either bringing back all the companions from previous titles as party members or at least trying to give them a decent send-off but this is really an example of the conflict between bioware's writers and bioware's players david gaider has said it's ironic that bg2 is held up as a model of player agency by fans as even if it was it was entirely accidental and not something that bioware were actually all that concerned with at the time gader says that it wasn't until knights of the old republic that bioware really started thinking about honoring player choice bg2 illustrates that in how many characters are killed off or have their personalities completely rewritten based on the whims of the writers rather than the player's actions this isn't just the case in how bg1's companions were treated in bg2 but how bg2's companions were treated in throne of ball particularly some of the epilogues it's a tension that would continue to dog bioware throughout its history gader himself was involved in some notorious flame wars in the bioware forums over how dragon age 2 reflected or rather did not reflect decisions made by players in dragon age origins i've always been kind of baffled by the fact that drew carpischen's novelization of throne of ball was better received than philip athens earlier adaptations the throne of ball novel has the exact same problems in my opinion aside from breaking with in-game events it gleefully murders companions and characterizes the ball spawn in a way that many players would object to i don't really understand the point of making a canonical version of the ball spawn saga from the player's perspective everything outside their experience is fan fiction if you care about baldur's gate there's no reason to read the novelizations and you sure as hell don't want to know how wizards of the coast handled the question of canon but that doesn't change the fact that no matter what you think happened in baldur's gate 1 shadows of arm decided the question for you whether you like it or not nobody is in the right or wrong here obviously as a player i want the game to reflect my choices and pamper my favorite companions but bioware's writers wanted the freedom to tell their own stories there are certainly plenty of sagas ruined by writers being forced to cater to the rabid fan base of a star character i won't risk my neck by naming any but i'm sure you can think of a few on your own and let's not forget that in some cases the characters in the boulder's gate saga were quite literally bioware's characters maybe not in a legal sense but in terms of artistic ownership you might remember from the bg1 video that heroes and villains like minsk edwin ceravock and zan were all characters from bioware's pen and paper adventures the same is true of shadows of arm irenicus and bodhi for example were originally characters called john icarus and body in bioware's pen and paper games irenicas even had a brief canonically dubious shout out in the first game the opening of bg2 in fact may have been a reference to a long-running joke about james olin constantly throwing his pnp players into jail cells and newer employees continued the trend the famous skinner plot line that begins in the bridge district and ends in trade meet was adapted from brent knoll's own short story the skin dancer there are quite a few characters and scenes in shadows of arm that caused a bit of confusion among players with many assuming they were part of cut side quests or clever little hints towards grand conspiracies but most turned out to be nothing more than nods to bioware's pnp games or personal lives none of these are noticeable enough to break the fourth wall with the notable exception of that dungeons and dragons cartoon reference and the horribly mature scene with the low level adventuring party in throne of ball but they are an important reminder that the player was not the ultimate authority in borders gate 2 that they were to some extent unwilling victims of bioware's writers and i think this brings us back to the other issue with companions introduced in bg2 putting companions front and center is a risky move hell is other people as they say and though baldur's gate 2 by itself isn't proof of this it's set bioware and many other crpgs on a dangerous path on paper some of baldur's gate 1's companions are pretty terrible paper thin d and d archetypes clownish one-dimensional joke characters and the like but beyond the in-game voice acting and their alignment the player doesn't really need to pay attention to them their personalities aren't forced on the player with baldur's gate 2 party members start to become a distinct presence on the periphery of the player's consciousness it's harder to ignore the peculiarities of individual personalities more restrained characters like keldorn or valigar aren't affected too much but outlandish personalities become a double-edged sword some players will find them delightfully zany or a ray of sunshine in an otherwise dour story and enjoy adventuring throughout cattle with a ragtag band of misfits but some players will find them obnoxious tiresome or perhaps even downright creepy you don't often hear fans complain about the companions in baldur's gate 1 at worst they might turn off their voice packs but aerys whining animen's pomposity yawn's oh so adorable wackiness and similar offenses all grated on the nerves of some players it's tough to predict what will set a player off personally i found aerys personality quite endearing and always feel very guilty about not taking her with me but i have absolutely no intention of subjecting myself to yawn or hair dallas on future playthroughs again i don't think this is a serious problem in baldur's gate 2 but it was very clearly the start of a trend party sizes contracted the pool of available companions shrank and there was an increased emphasis on the character and personality of the remaining party members bioware games began to limit the number of possible companions and forced the player to interact with those party members and their idiosyncrasies much more frequently some digital scholars dubbed the late 2000s as the giggle squee era of bioware writing a reference to the fact party members seem to be increasingly written as cute or relatable or at least what bioware's writing staff considered as such there was also an increasing sense at least in the dragon age games that the player was being conscripted as an unrenumerated mental health consultant to the party again this has two sides some players consider being taken into a companion's confidence and being told of their experience with magic gay conversion therapy to be a very powerful moment others will be less impressed as with the general production values the more bioware focused on storytelling and companion content the higher the expectations from fans and the more glaring their shortcomings when they don't hit the mark with the player you can easily ignore the foibles of a character like teax or czar in bg-1 but overly off-kilter characters in bg2 may well creep ever so slightly into the danger zone i think minsk for example is bearable enough in bg2 bioware wisely or perhaps coincidentally left some of his more rambling asides unvoiced but flicking through some of the tie-in material featuring minsk produced many years later he does seem like he would be rather grating to put up in a modern more cinematic rpg if you transplanted minsk with the same personality into dragon age pathfinder or original sin replete with hours of cut scenes and forced humor a lot of players would probably find him extremely off-putting so it's a gamble going all in on companions can make them more memorable but it could also make them memorable for the wrong reasons and nowhere is this gamble as risky as the minefield of romances you might recall from earlier in the video that in bg2 one romance jahiras was written by lucas gristiansson and after it spiraled out of control two of the three male romances had to be cut so after finishing off annamen david gayder was tasked with doing aerie and viconia's love quests gada looked at the jahira romance and decided to base the other two romances off distinct romantic archetypes if jahira's love was that of the mature and experienced woman aerys would be that of the trembling virgin and viconias of the seductive but scarred femme fatale this gave players a fair range of options to match their tastes female players of course were stuck with sir anna men though there was some divergence in how the romance played out depending on how they handled his sidequest from these humble origins came a feature that seems almost mandatory in rpgs nowadays if an rpg or anything resembling an rpg features npc companions you can guarantee one of the first questions will be can they be romanced gada has said that the positive response to baldur's gate 2's romances encouraged bioware to lean into this feature in the dragon age games gator also said that the mass effect teams weren't so concerned with romances but i don't think that's true romances are still a standard feature of the mass effect titles just perhaps not as dialogue heavy as those in the fantasy series so what's the problem with romances well some people just think romance is stupid in the first place they want to fight dragons not canoodle with the cleric shut up jahira you think you'll be somehow impressed because because you're so mean you'd do nothing but boss people around no wonder that khalid was the only man who would marry you did those girls seriously choose now of all times to have a cat fight over the ball spawn okay the latter isn't so much people taking issue with romances but more how romances were implemented bioware were well aware of criticisms of bg2's romance timers which had a tendency to trigger at inappropriate times and places like right before a boss fight or whilst mourning a disintegrated party member i wasn't that bothered by the issue myself and i actually disliked bioware's response to this which was limiting love talks to specific story points and camp scenes in dragon age origins this made the romance feel less natural and spontaneous but that's all quibbling over details not really pertinent to the core appeal or downside to romances a bigger issue is that romances are really a supercharged version of the companion writing bringing greater benefits but also greater risks because again the greater the focus on a character's personality the more likely players will find something unbearably objectionable about that character attraction and romantic relationships are an especially sensitive topic to most people in writing a romance there are far more potential pitfalls than in writing a likable or compelling companion and writers should probably know their limitations as romances became a standard feature of bioware games there was also increased pressure for the writers to outdo themselves or avoid repeating tired romantic tropes but i personally don't feel the writers were up to the task from around the dragon age period onwards bioware obviously worried about being accused of writing lazy sex fantasies or juvenile fan fiction that didn't reflect the nuance of a real relationship but there's a good reason media often resorts to such wish fulfillment writing a compelling and realistic relationship is bloody hard and beyond the scope of most people if you take a character like viconia for example she's a bad girl with baggage but in the end is still a pretty standard male fantasy you can definitely see shades of her in later bioware romances but in these cases there's a definite feeling that the writers wanted to avoid making these characters too appealing so they tried to inject some i suppose in the writers minds they would say realistic elements but this sort of deliberate subversion of romantic fantasies can easily lead to making the characters unlikable i mean having a girlfriend with magical stds who tries to publicly cuck you is not really most men's number one romantic fantasy outside of twitter and a related problem is that the more romances become standard or expected of the rpg experience the greater the cause for them to cater to different tastes even in the early 2000s there was some noise made over the lack of options for homosexual players in bg2 in a post on the baldur's gate forums david gaider said that hypothetically speaking bioware had no problem with the idea of gay romances but there were other factors to consider like whether it would affect the age rating some posters cited fallout 2's slapstick gay marriage scene in response but gada quite fairly pointed out it was an unfair comparison since fallout was an adult's only rated series but what's really important is that in later interviews gaiden talked about how there was also a practical cost benefit analysis at play when deciding what kind of romances made the cut in their games bioware were acutely aware of who constituted the majority of their target demographic but fast forward 20 years and we have david gaider talking about representation of asexual romances transgender romances polyamorous romances and so forth now every game has a particular target demo obviously real time with pause fans turn-based fans fantasy fans and so on but romances by necessity segregate audiences to a far greater degree it's one thing to expect a fan of real time with pause games to try or at least endure a turn-based game but people are vastly more sensitive to content that touches on their sexuality or romantic inclinations in introducing romances to baldur's gate 2 bioware had to make a decision about who they thought their games catered to and it was fairly obvious the answer was men the importance of this wasn't quite so obvious back at the time because i think it's fair to say that at the time their audience were mostly men so expecting female players to put up with anna men or nothing wasn't such a big deal from bioware's perspective but as demographics at bioware changed both in terms of who worked at bioware and who constituted their target demographic romances were now a double-edged sword ever since balder's gate 2 romances have been expected of bioware games and they're a fairly significant chunk of the game's content in terms of how much work goes into them that means bioware's player base tend to feel entitled to romances and naturally they expect at least one romance that caters to their tastes or sexuality it's easy to mock gay as quotes about catering to this or that specific sexual identity or whatever but this march towards catering to as many tastes as possible is just the natural evolution of crpg romances once they became standard once fans felt entitled to them as a basic feature it became more difficult to ignore the expectation that every player had some options for romance this is obviously dependent on other factors like who you think your audience are i'm sure it's not a coincidence that the mass effect series had a significantly higher proportion of romances aimed at straight men than the dragon age series but regardless of who the target demo are it can be a big drain on resources with a potentially narrow appeal david gaider gave a vague ballpark figure of something like 20 percent of baldur's gate 2's player base having experienced john johnson's companion side quest that seems rather high to me but let's take it as fact if only 20 of players saw a companion side quest it's reasonable to assume that a similar number missed out on at least two or three of the romance subplots that's a fair bit of work for something only a minority of players will actually see and that's time and resources that are taken off other content the writing quest design voice acting and qa resources that went into a romance subplot that could have been spent on a regular side quest that more players would have seen that was certainly a concern during the development of obsidian's pillars of eternity which chose to forego romances in favor of general companion banter but you know what for me it was worth it in baldur's gate too i loved the romances they made me really care about that character in our journey together i played baldur's gate 2 in my early teens which was probably the sweet spot for sappy romantic subplots and i was so invested in one of the romances that i was shattered by the way it ended in throne of bald i actually replayed the entire game with a different love interest just to avoid that ending but that was just one game a game that specifically identified people like me as the target demo and catered specifically to my tastes looking at modern bioware style crpgs and seeing the romantic options i'm put off and that's a problem for two reasons first of all because the characters seem unpleasant in the first place but on top of that i know they're probably going to constitute a not insignificant portion of the game's content and will either be difficult to ignore or will have at least drained resources from other parts of the game i mean there's something surreal about watching footage of larian's baldur's gate 3 and seeing how much work goes into writing and reducing sex scenes and related content is that really the best use of resources but i see it as karma really i always hand waved criticisms of baldur's gate 2's romances because i liked baldur's gate 2's romances but it feels like modern bioware romances for example are aimed at a different audience for people who write harry potter slash fix for example which is a big turn off for me and that's the problem with romances they're like porn they're good if they're aimed at you and cater specifically to your individual tastes but they can be repellent when they're aimed at someone else's they can intensify the appeal of crpgs to a specific niche but in turn become more exclusionary to other demographics and unfortunately i think romances have been proven to be baldur's gate 2's most enduring legacy a feature that became central not only to bioware's writers but to a new fan base who value this feature possibly above anything else in crpgs and i think you can see the stirrings of that fan base in the baldur's gate 2 modding scene one of the most laudable things about the baldur's gate 2 engine is how much can be fiddled with without installing a single mod by simply enabling the game's console in a text file players have access to a remarkable number of variables the original baldur's gate also let you enable this console but without the same level of control over the game's scripts whilst there aren't quite as many console commands as say the later elder scrolls games you can still do a lot of tweaking bypassing or resetting quest variables for example which was enormously helpful back in the day letting players essentially fix many of baldur's gate 2's bugs without having to wait for an official patch the game's built in cheat mode also let you do cool things like force npcs to join your party and just don't click the level up button unless you want to crash a fan made save game editor called shadowkeeper was released soon after baldur's gate 2's launch which made a lot of these options more accessible and over time was built up to essentially become a modding tool in its own right i'm sure a few veteran fans watching this video remember spending hours playing around with this once again bioware also made it very easy to insert custom character portraits and voice packs into baldur's gate 2. you can either make these yourself or pick from the dizzying number of portrait bundles available from fan sites be they classic d d art cartoon characters celebrities or fan art created specifically to replace the original party member portraits in terms of the general mod ability of baldur's gate 2. as with the first game it wasn't built from the ground up to accommodate modding but there's still a great deal that can be done in the engine wesley weimar's waidu was a huge boon to the community making it substantially easier to install and manage multiple mods across a single installation but there were a lot of other unsung heroes who produced infinity engine editing tools the purpose of this section isn't to try and make an exhaustive review of all the mods available for baldur's gate too that would be another four hour video but i thought it'd be worth giving a quick overview for new players and mentioning a few mods that long time fans might have missed the main hubs for mods are as of this video the spell hold studios forum the jibberlings 3 forum and the beamdog forum for the enhanced editions so check those to get yourself started we've already mentioned the unofficial patches and tweak packs now even for new players doing a first time run i would recommend skimming the readme of the tweaks section as there's quite a lot of minor changes that are worth applying like disabling certain obnoxious audio visual effects speaking of which if you're interested in changing more of the visual side of baldur's gate 2 you should also have a look at the infinity animations mod technically this isn't part mod and part modding framework for other mods but even by itself it gives you a lot of customization options like restoring some of the art from boulder's gate 1 adding art from later infinity engine titles or just overhauling the spell effects i believe that some of these features are actually implemented in the enhanced editions another popular mod that makes seemingly minor but consequential changes under the hood is sword coast stratagems there are quite a few difficulty rebalancing or encounter design mods for baldur's gate 2 a testament in my opinion to how good the basic combat mechanics are but sword coast stratagems is worth noting for a couple of reasons first because it tries to focus primarily on the enemy's artificial intelligence rather than completely changing all their stats and abilities despite bioware's promises enemy ai is still extremely dumb in baldur's gate too partly because making them prioritize targets with the same ruthlessness as the player makes the game considerably harder and partly because handcrafting the ai scripts requires a level of insane commitment that only unpaid modders are capable of the second positive to sword case stratagems is that it's highly customizable you can select specific components to install and then in game it has a special option that lets you tailor the specifics i'm not sure i'd recommend it for a first playthrough because it does assume the player has a very high level of familiarity with the d and d rules and how bg2 implements them but it should definitely be something you consider for replays as it can make the fights much more challenging and tactically interesting without making you fight fallen angels in the tutorial or something ridiculous like that moving on to mods that change or introduce new content probably the best known is the ascension mod which is basically david gaider's personal vision of how the ball spawn saga should have ended the changes made by this mod mostly effect throne of ball especially the final sections of the expansion gaider has stressed that this mod should not be considered bioware's semi-official vision of the true throne-of-ball experience or anything like that it makes changes that conflict with official canon and makes a number of the fights significantly harder probably too hard for most players it also wasn't worked on solely by gada members of the modding community produced some of the content but it is a very interesting and story-wise perhaps more satisfying take on the final chapter than what was present in the original game one to consider for your second playthrough be aware there's also an enhanced version of this mod called redemption which gaider wasn't involved with but is favored over the original version by many players an equally well-known cherry vanilla mod is the unfinished business project this mod is an attempt to restore content that was cut from both shadows of arm and throne of ball some of it already partially implemented in the game and some of it confirmed by bioware to have been intended but cut sometime during the development process this mod places a very high value on keeping content as faithful to the base game and bioware's original intentions as possible being fan made content it obviously had to check its ambitions it doesn't try to recreate james olin's original vision for the planar sphere or anything huge like that but it does restore several small companion side quests extend or modify quests in the base game that had to be streamlined late in development re-enable some dialogue and items and so on it doesn't 100 fit with the base game it's noticeable when a side quest has no voice dialogue for example and the extra portraits are clearly placeholders or fan made but it did its best under the circumstances and i can certainly recommend it to those who want an enhanced experience that doesn't change anything too radically there's actually a third party extension to the unfinished business mod called almateria's restoration project which started out as an attempt to restore broken sound files but turned into a general cut content mod this goes further than unfinished business and even attempted to tackle entire areas that were cut from the base game but it was abandoned in 2018 and honestly i'm not sure how stable the mod is it's included in some recommended mod lists but not others so i thought it was worth mentioning though i haven't tried it myself ironically another very popular mod for balder's gate 2 is not one that restores content rather it removes it the dungeon be gone mod basically lets you skip the chateau irenica's tutorial area from chapter 1. this is a convenient way to jump into a second playthrough of the game without going through one of the more tedious sections but do double check whether it's compatible with any other mods you have installed now based on my masterful segue at the end of the last section you probably assume i'm going to talk about the companion and romance mods that constitute a massive chunk of the bg2 modding community but i won't now that's not because i'm being snobbish or holier than thou i've played some of these mods and i've really enjoyed some of these mods but like i said before content that focuses very heavily on romances or new companions is very much subject to the tastes of the individual player there are mods i liked that you would find repellent and i'm sure there are mods you would enjoy that i would report to the authorities and the romance mods in particular have a tendency to make their subject matter the centerpiece of the experience some of these basically retool the entire game around your relationship with the new characters they introduce it's definitely not a good idea to install multiple mods of this type as you will likely run into more than a few conflicts and get frustrated by the constant in-game interruptions so rather than make specific recommendations i would just say browse these yourself and see if there's anything that catches your eye the npc banter packs are fairly popular for example though not everyone likes the tone of these i've also avoided talking about mods related to the bg2 baldur's gate trilogy big world big picture or ice wind dale to baldur's gate 2 projects that kind of stuff is just too big for me to cover here there are more moderately sized mods like the assassinations mod or the expanded thieves guild mod but these tend to be aimed at specific play styles that's not to say there aren't more general mods like the baldur's gate 2 quest pack but having already done a few playthroughs of baldur's gate 2 for this review i was a bit burned out on cherry vanilla content by this point also some of these are really poorly documented and don't mention prerequisite mods like the world map mod or even how to actually access the new content so i did actually start a playthrough of some of these but then got annoyed and abandoned them still of the moderately sized and bigger mods i will mention a few first i was hoping to do a review of shadows over subbar for this video aside from the boulder's gate one points sos is probably the best known mega mod for baldur's gate 2. such was its scope that when it first released it was even covered in major gaming magazines like pc zone or pc power play sos featured a number of new quests in and around athcatla but its focus was an adventure that draws the player out of arm and into the region known as the fields of the dead there a bandit king and his armies have seized control of an abandoned keep and are attacking neighbouring lands so it's down to the ball spawn and his companions to stop them sos apparently added a hundred new areas 30 side quests and four unique companions and i have absolutely no idea what they're like because i couldn't for the life of me get the bloody thing working properly i kept getting broken scripts soft locked cut scenes and eventually a straightforward crash to desktop once i actually arrived in subar from what i've read it seems like one of the more recent updates broke a lot of stuff and at the time of writing this script they're still being fixed i could probably have tried installing an older version of the mod or maybe the newer versions work better with baldur's gate 2 enhanced edition but i was kind of out of patience at that point there are plenty of reviews of sos available elsewhere anecdotally it seemed to me that impressions of sos are very similar to those of the darkest day mod a lot of people praised it for size scope and ambition but i saw a lot of criticisms of it as being amateurish unbalanced or poorly paced like i said i didn't really play it myself and some people actually warned me off covering it in this video so i'll just leave it up to you the next mod i wanted to mention isn't actually a single standalone mod but a collection of mods dubbed the colours of infinity project i hadn't even heard of this mod until earlier this year when i was asking for mod suggestions for the video colours of infinity constitutes six parts the yvette romance the foundling companion and four separate quest mods i skipped the first two mods and played three of the four quest mods i forgot to install the fourth one and couldn't be bothered to restart the game once i realized my mistake sorry the author describes the colours of infinity series as taking an unconventional approach to quest mods there's less emphasis on hack and slash and looting and a bit more on puzzles or dialogue and they tend to have a more contemplative tone than you'd expect from a conventional fantasy quest the deep gardens involves the party running into a mad wizard who offers them a prize in exchange for trekking across athcatler to solve his riddles if they're successful the party are then teleported to a strange on iric realm known as the gardens the inhabitants of the gardens perceive the world through the lens of what they call colours with each of these colours roughly analogous to certain emotional states or philosophical concepts to escape the area the party need to gather ten colours and bring them to the elder of the community who will then bring them to the master of the dream the mod puts a heavy emphasis on critical thinking though it does feature some combat several of these battles involve using unusual tactics to win it's about an hour or two long and by the end you may have picked up some new spells items and even special abilities for your party the next quest mod is inner shade where the party finds a map that brings them to a troubled village between the trees inner shade is a quiet isolated community haunted by a malign force people have been disappearing from the nearby mines and the local healer asks the party to investigate this mod is again quite short probably an hour or two at most and is more about talking to the locals and listening to their stories rather than the usual adventuring fair the quest does culminate in a series of potentially quite tough fights after which the player has to judge what punishment if any the antagonist deserves for their crimes once again the party can earn some new items and abilities depending on the decisions they made during quest the last quest i played was the white queen which the mod author made in response to complaints about the lack of excitement in their earlier mods the white queen is a more straightforward hack and slash adventure starting with the party's visit to the bookkeeper in joaquin's promenade from here they journey to the monster-infested lonely swamp and fight their way towards a ruined town the inhabitants of this town have all been slaughtered or turned to stone by the magic of the white queen who rules from her palace under the protection of a mysterious necromancer the last survivor of the town begs the party to fight their way into the palace and put an end to the white queen's cruel reign but they soon discover that the truth of the matter is not so straightforward this quest is more like a typical hack and slash than the other two but depending on the party's level it can be quite challenging so it's probably another hour or two of content depending on how much trouble you have with the battles altogether the three quest mods i played only really add about four hours of content but they do have some interesting ideas including a few companion interjections and feature some unique music that was composed specifically for the new areas not everyone will love these quests the mod author was pretty upfront about the deep gardens in particular not being for more casual players if you get the riddle wrong at the start of the quest for example you miss out on the entire mod apparently i'm one of those players because i had to keep reloading and choosing a different answer you might also be put off by the amateur voice acting in this mod or feel like it's one of those mods where the author isn't quite as smart as they think they are maybe i just liked it because it was one of the last things i played for this video so i appreciated the change in pace at the very least i would recommend the white queen quest as the fights are reasonably challenging without being too insane and i personally loved the whole dark fairy tale vibe i don't think there's a specific order you're supposed to do the colours of infinity series in but i assume the ideal experience is to play through all four of them with the yvette and foundling companions by your side the third project i thought worth mentioning was epic endeavors if only for novelty value this total conversion basically swaps out the shadows of arm campaign in favor of an x-com style sequence of scripted missions the player works for some sort of secret intelligence organization and controls a squad of special operatives this squad operates out of a hidden fortress filled with training rooms and various vendors and from here they can teleport to one of 13 unique scenarios of various levels of difficulty each scenario offers a different type of challenge one mission might have you infiltrating a temple to assassinate a mage another has you rescue a dragon from a coliseum and another involves leading an army across a bridge full of snipers and artillery barrages as you progress through these missions you'll level up your team get better gear and spells craft artifacts and even pick up some hidden missions along the way the mod then culminates in a huge battle that reportedly crashed a lot of people's pcs back at release i expected to hate this mod when i first read about it as i thought it's strange you'd want to completely remove the role playing and exploration of the original game to focus on a bunch of gimmick scenarios but i actually ended up quite enjoying some of these missions as most of them can be quite challenging and several of them involve some pretty varied and inventive mechanics i do question why epic endeavors needed to be a total conversion mod as it could easily have been inserted alongside the main game as several other arena style mods have been i suppose the author wanted to be able to balance the missions around a very specific level and gear bracket so fair enough i suppose i'm not recommending the mod i mean the point of it is to throw out much of what actually appeals to people about baldur's gate too but if you wanted to jump into some interesting challenges beyond those of a regular arena mode then you can give it a go finally the last big mod i wanted to mention is the classic adventures mod which was started in 2005 but ceased development sometime around 2012. now there are lots of abandoned baldur's gate 2 mods so you might wonder why i'm bothering to cover this particular one but all will become clear the goal of classic adventures was to take a number of famous old ad and d modules and fashion them into a single coherent campaign in the infinity engine i think this mod was inspired by a similar project called the realms that was created for the forgotten realms ultimate adventures engine though i'm not certain of that classic adventures focuses on two particular module sets the so-called u-series where an adventuring party investigated threats to the coastal town of saltmarsh and the a-series which pit the party against a coven of powerful slaverlords orbiting around these two series were several shorter adventures which either served as side content to the main quests or were incorporated into the central plot line to help tie things together the ca project is a total conversion of bg2 with a totally different story and several changes to the underlying rule set so you have to start a completely new game with a fresh level 1 character the campaign is structured in a way that's in some ways similar to borders gate 1 and in some ways similar to the icewind dale series as there are numerous quest hubs and side areas independent of the central plot line but you can only unlock a few of these at a time by progressing through the main quest the campaign begins in the town of oakhurst where you can recruit a couple of party members buy some gear and pick up a few side quests at this point you can choose between two adventures either head north to investigate an ancient ruin known as the sun the citadel or head west and explore the time-trapped palace of the silver princess after returning from one of these quests you'll then be directed towards the town of saltmarsh this is a major hub for further adventures such as investigating case of missing boys trudging through a swamp or being caught up in a security invasion depending on your choices here the party may also end up traveling to other locations like the troubled town of mistmore where a gruesome family drama is being played out by ghostly apparitions eventually the party will arrive at selgorn while they'll take a ship to westgate and come into conflict with the slaver lords pursuing their quarry all the way to a volcanic island and the hidden town of sudaram after defeating the slavers the city of selgorn opens up you can wander around the partially completed districts of selgorn or use the console to teleport to other half-finished areas such as castle amber but this is effectively where the mod ends originally the ca team had intended to continue the adventures using the gdq series which would have brought the party into conflict with giants and drow but only portions of this were finished due to the campaign starting at level 1 this is definitely a mod for people that enjoyed baldur's gate 1 or icewind dale's combat rather than those that liked the complexity of baldur's gate too the mod also tries to fix the rest spam issue of baldur's gate by making it virtually impossible for the party to sleep in hostile areas forcing them to go back to a safe zone or find an npc who can watch over them whilst i applaud the effort i don't think it works very well for a couple of reasons first there are just too many enemies in some of the dungeons and rest spots are too far apart meaning you spend way too much time trekking back and forth between fights second because the party is so low level there isn't really any element of rationing spells like in baldur's gate 2 where you might use low level spells on trash mobs and conserve more powerful ones for tougher fights so it's a nice idea but ultimately just slows things down without adding any level of strategic decision making another issue is that the journal is underutilized sometimes information is stored in the quest tab sometimes in the regular journal and often just not recorded at all making it easy to miss important clues and have trouble figuring out what the heck you're supposed to be doing my other major complaint with the mod is that there are two separate occasions on the main story path where the party have all their gear and gold stolen now i appreciate the fact that this is part of the original pen and paper modules lawrence schick one of the designers on the original modules said the idea was to make the party act like real people people with skills and brains not just lists of equipment the problem with this in classic adventures is that there isn't really much brain power or non-combat solutions involved here it's mostly just the usual hack and slash experience but with a suddenly underpowered party plus this trick is pulled twice in the same campaign and seems to be bugged i never got any of my equipment back the first time it happened and only a handful of items the second time so the net effects was really frustrating and made me stop caring about loot or proper inventory management since i expected the game to steal all my stuff anyway but despite all these problems i did quite enjoy classic adventures or at least the parts before westgate the first half of the mod is fairly stable for an unfinished project as there are certainly bugs in the early sections and i had to abandon a couple of minor side quests but it's mostly fine it does start to fall apart when you reach westgate and begin the slaver series as whilst there's still a lot of content there's also a lot of half finished quests empty buildings and a sparsely populated city this is also where the bugs become more serious and i had to reload a few times to fix broken scripts like invulnerable enemies or critical cut scenes failing to trigger but i enjoyed classic adventures as a sort of 50 50 mix of baldur's gate 1 and icewind dale with quite a few little side quests in most of the hubs and some interesting non-combat parts like the missed moore manor although the latter are particularly prone to bugs appropriately enough the dungeons recycled from ice windale 2 are probably the weakest parts of the campaign as they're really densely populated with trash mobs and respawning monsters and even worse are lacking some of the puzzles and npcs from the original icewind ale2 versions players will have mixed reactions to the companions in classic adventures initially i thought they'd be closer to baldur's gate 1's companions mostly staying in the background but depending on who you pick up in salt marsh and beyond they can become much chirpier and in your face a few of the party are actually quite important to the main plot and though a lot of the writing in sudaram was obviously only half finished you could see these characters being taken in some pretty wild directions there are several party members who could potentially turn against you as well as antagonists who might join the party out of self-interest or even be redeemed some of the party can also be romanced by either the player character or another party member although i only saw brief snippets of this in my playthrough in total i got something like 15 hours of content out of classic adventures and i missed several side modules like the ghost tower of inverness the sentinel the gauntlet and the mythrana quests so overall there's probably at least 20 hours of adventuring here now i'm not formally recommending classic adventures it's unfinished unpolished sometimes on balanced or unfair and won't appeal to people who dislike low-level infinity engine combat but personally i still liked it and i wish it had been completed with a bit more fleshing out and polish the existing sections from oakhurst to sudaram could easily stand on their own as a separate baldur's gate engine adventure so i wanted to highlight this mod as it does seem to be one of the better mega mods despite being unfinished i suspect a major reason for it being relatively obscure is that it was never ported to beamdog's enhanced edition so only people who played it back at release or who religiously stick to the original game are aware of its existence but another big factor is simply the fact that it's a total conversion classic adventures is incompatible with pretty much any other mod for baldur's gate 2. it even replaces the original launch programs so you might as well just make a completely separate installation for it it seems some of the most popular mods for baldur's gate 2 are those that modify or expand on content from the original campaign people favor mods that fill out underdeveloped side quests build on companion interaction or add new companions to experience the adventure with rather than mods that create totally new dungeons for example i don't think this is a sign people dislike the basic gameplay in boulder's gate 2 but i do think it illustrates how important these shall we say peripheral elements were to the appeal of the baldur's gate saga particularly the second game in its expansion when you read a retrospective on the baldur's gate series and what people remember it for today it's almost always the story or the companions or the romances that are mentioned over anything else but the baldur's gate series still be as fondly remembered today without those elements perhaps not and i do wonder if that's a factor in why the infinity engine gameplay formula never achieved the historic status of certain other crpgs [Music] the period from 1997 to 2001 is often dubbed the bronze copper or platinum age of crpgs a time when the genre seemed to rise from the grave and gain a new lease on life you'd be hard-pressed to find a retrospective that doesn't put the borders gate series at the heart of that era but lest we forget it gains that moniker copper age or platinum age for good reason it was a brief faded echo of the successes of the past despite the promise of titles like fallout planescape baldur's gate deus ex and the like for the most part the genre did not go on to bigger and better things in its immediate aftermath there was no resurgence in the crpg market to match that of the 80s the only major enduring and unambiguous success to come out of the era was the action-oriented hack and slash sub-genre epitomized by games like diablo 2 or dungeon siege deus ex fallout and the infinity engine games certainly had some influence on the direction of crpgs but nothing like the effect of diablo and looking back at that specific period we can hold up titles like deus ex or fallout as truly unique in their approach to quest design and interactivity and bemoan the fact that these types of crpgs did not have the impact on the industry that we might have hoped but does baldur's gate 2 deserve to be held up alongside those titles what exactly was it that shadows of arm or throne of ball brought to the table that deserved to be mimicked by future crpgs romances strongholds quirky companions who never shut the hell up it's a fair question and one i as a fan of baldur's gate 2 can't really answer i will defend the game on one point there's been an almost deliberate effort to understate the influence tactical real-time with pause combat has had on crpgs some critics contend that certain crpgs of the last 10 years are more influenced by darklands or ultima than they were the infinity engine games that's just nonsensical it's like looking at age of empires 4 and pretending it wasn't influenced by other rts games outside the series that were released between 97 and 2021 you simply cannot look at modern crpgs and pretend they weren't influenced by baldur's gates gameplay regardless of which specific title individual games claim as spiritual progenitor but as we discussed in the baldur's gate 1 video tracing specific features or designed philosophies in modern crpgs back to shadows of arm is trickier again there's definitely strongholds romances and more vaguely a general preselection towards developing relationships with your companions but not much beyond that at least in terms of specific gameplay features so why is it a title computer gaming world once called lord of the rpgs is today something of a relic well i think we have to recall what bioware we're trying to do with the baldur's gate series in the first place we've talked about some of the very specific features bioware wanted to include in baldur's gate tactical combat real time with paws memorable companions and so on but the general overarching intent of baldur's gate was as rey muzeika said to bring tabletop role-playing to home computers that's a far broader goal than what bioware did with baldur's gate beyond simply translating statistics and spell lists to bits and bytes with baldur's gate we sparked a role-playing renaissance now a multiplayer revolution baldur's gate 2 was an ambitious project but it paled in comparison to what bioware were trying to do with never winter nights a title that as bioware saw it would truly fulfill the goal of translating the pen and paper experience to computers neverwinter knights was arguably therefore a much more important title than baldur's gate 2 and its failure to transform the industry is perhaps an even more tragic one for a long time even up to the final release of shadows of arm bioware had intended for players to be able to import their infinity engine characters into neverwinter nights and continue adventuring in many ways baldur's gate 2 was meant to be a stepping stone to future role-playing games from bioware not the end goal in itself and just as bioware were drawn away to more exciting and ambitious projects so were crpg fans deus ex for example offered a very different vision to baldur's gate 2 in terms of what it meant to be a role playing game and the same year throne of ball was released interplay refugees at troika developed arcanum a smaller but more complicated and innovative title than baldur's gate a few years later troika would follow this up with the even more daring bloodlines and of course in 2002 many fans would be seduced away from bioware by the siren song of todd howard in the elder scrolls series people wanted to do other things with crpgs take them in fresh and novel directions in retrospect of course that didn't happen whilst nobody is calling crpgs a dead genre today it's certainly not as lively and exciting as genre as it was in the late 90s and early 2000s fergus urquhart cited the moderate success of titles like larian's original sin as evidence of a new crpg renaissance but i don't agree with that western rpgs today seem to be either inferior copies of older titles action rpgs single-player mmos or just innovating areas i personally don't care about like multiplayer or co-op the bulk of the genre seems to be confined to the indie and low budget niche scene i can't name a single rpg that has generated the enthusiasm to match that of 15 to 20 years ago so to sum up baldur's gate 2's influence on crpgs was just not as strong as conventional wisdom would tell you and the only features it pioneered that remain with us today are of questionable value still whilst i've tried to play devil's advocate at points i certainly don't want to end the video of baldur's gate 2 on a sour note if you're watching this video i assume you're either a balder's gate fan already or just curious about a well-regarded title you've never experienced yourself to look at baldur's gate 2 on its own merits to look at it as a title you can pick up and play today i do think it deserves its reputation as one of the best crpgs ever made shadows of arm is a big beautiful journey packed with epic battles legendary loot and maybe even a songworthy romance or two to tug at your emotions boys boys don't fight over me please so i hope this video has convinced veteran players to return to arm and persuaded newcomers to try it out and that's all for today's video those of you following my channel will be pleased to know probably that this isn't quite the end of our journey through the infinity engine games we do of course still have planescape torment to cover at some point and i'd like to do a video on the baldur's gate and icewinddale mods for neverwinter nights 2 one day as for siege of dragonspear and the enhanced editions we'll see and now i don't have the shadow of the baldur's gate saga looming over my plans i can finally look at making videos on more obscure crpgs but i'll also continue covering other retro titles and i did promise a video on myth 2 soulblighter so i'll get to work on that after my next video if you enjoyed the behind the scenes part of this retrospective you might want to check out a channel called computer gaming yesterday who thoughtlessly made their own video on baldur's gate 2 before me but also do videos on topics i don't cover like classic mmorpgs i personally enjoy their videos so i thought i'd give them a shout out bioware fans might also want to check out mark dara's channel as he's done a lot of videos on his perspective working at bioware in particular on the dragon age series and the story behind interplay and black isle wouldn't be nearly as easy to research were it not for matt barton's channel who has done interviews with a number of retro gaming luminaries so give matt's videos a look if you haven't already thank you very much to those of you who somehow managed to make through this entire video i don't know how you did it but congratulations and i apologize to those of you who are hoping i'd cover other topics related to the game like the whole turn-based versus real-time issue how well it translated the ad and d rules to a computer and all the rest but i covered some of those in my boulder's gate 1 video and i wasn't trying to make the definitive video on baldur's gate 2 or anything like that feel free to make your own video on the subject in any case i think we all deserve a break now so i will sign off and bid you all a very good day see you next time [Music] so [Music] [Music] you

Channel: MrEdders123

Views: 83,509

Keywords: bg2, baldurs gate 2, bgII, baldur's gate 2, bg2 review, bg2 classic, Baldurs Gate 2, Baldurs Gate II, Baldur's Gate 2, balder's gate 2, balder's gate II

Id: qrnKXIH5Jp0

Length: 281min 9sec (16869 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 29 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/JonHap51]

Hello everyone, I posted my BG1 video here last year so I thought some people might enjoy this one. I made the video as one, longform review but you can skip around using the timestamps to avoid stuff like the gameplay/story basics, which are really for subscribers to my channel who haven't played it. Hope it brings back some memories or you learn something new :)

[u/sporeegg]

A 5 hour video essay about my favorite game that i have played so often i become bored after 2 hour runs? LETS DO IT

[u/kaidan1]

It's DETAILED folks. Very well done

[u/Datante]

Oh my god thank you, I needed that! Almost 5 hours also, such a treat.

[u/Longshanks_1]

Great stuff - thanks for sharing! Hope your channel keeps growing.

[u/KRKavak]

Only watched the behind-the-scenes bit at the start but it was very informative.

[u/WildBohemian]

I'll never understand this community's fascination with making every YouTube video about 40 times as long as any reasonable person would ever expect or desire them to be but I assure you that you are not the only one... For some reason.

[u/[deleted]]

That middle picture looks like something from the box art. Am I remembering that correctly? What is it supposed to be from the game? Brynnlaw/Spellhold?