Baldur's Gate 2 - a review from a 2017 perspective

I love Baldur’s Gate 2, and that’s not just the nostalgia speaking. It’s a game I still enjoy playing - the same can’t be said for the two Bioware Dungeons & Dragons games that came immediately before and after it.

I never finished the first Baldur’s Gate, I barely even started it. From the beginning, it lacked character and characters. Its opening was such a clichéd heroes journey, and it started off with no one to latch onto.

Baldur’s Gate 2 started strong, not just with the villain. It gave you a party of interesting characters in the very first room, really kickstarting the game. It didn’t care about your backstory, because it half-presumed that you spent the whole first game developing it. As someone who hadn’t, I really liked the lack of focus on me because I could imagine all kinds of things that led me here, filling in my own character sheet. I could design my own history and use that as the template for which to role play in the game.

The city of Amn felt alive in ways that Neverwinter just didn’t, even though they share many of the same features. One thing that separated them was the art style. Amn’s 2D hand-painted graphics were much better at representing a dirty city than shiny, clean 3D graphics were. And in Neverwinter you got quests in the center of the map and did them on the edges, where all the fights happened. It felt much more like a zoned play space than a random city. In Amn things happen everywhere; behind every door or entrance could be a friend or a fight, you just don’t know.

Combat was more interesting in Baldur’s Gate 2. Neverwinter was more balanced but had a max party size of two in singleplayer. In BG2 your party of six had access to so many more different spells and abilities. You could come up with different strategies and find combos. Each encounter felt like a puzzle to solve rather than an obvious victory. Many times you had fights you thought were just impossible, but taking a really deep dive into your spellbooks and backpacks earned you a hard-won victory. It rewarded and even required mastery of its systems.

But that’s also one of its negatives, especially if we take the nostalgia goggles off. It doesn’t introduce the massive amounts of rules, spells and items gradually, but hits you with walls of text and rule explanations right off the bat. You need to know this stuff before character creation, and heaven help you if you choose a mage first and have to pick all your spells. My advice for noobs is to start the game knowing that you’ll probably get 3-4 hours in, and having finally got the hang of it, you’ll feel like creating a new character and starting over again. That’s what I did even this time through, and I’d played it once before.

Combat in Neverwinter felt more grindy, like you were guaranteed the win and guaranteed some good loot. It feels almost like a Diablo game. In BG2, really decent loot is genuinely scarce and prohibitively expensive. I upgraded my protagonist’s main weapon only twice in the course of 60 hours through the game. It feels rare to get something good, and also more real. Enemies are not loot piñatas, they carry weapons appropriate for their role. That’s something I love, but most people probably find boring.

In many games sidequesting feels immersion breaking. The whole world is threatened, you’re the only one who can save it, but you take time off from that to go hunting for rare herbs to save one little girl. BG2 requires you to do sidequests to progress in the main story. At one point you need a vast amount of money to achieve your next goal. The only way to get it is to explore the various sidequests, to do things all over the city and countryside. Like the game Freelancer, this encourages you to get out there and explore, see the world. You’ll do the sidequests that suit you, and leave the rest. You feel like an adventurer and not the boring hero who does exactly what destiny has laid out for them.

There’s great moments further along the main quest too. You infiltrate a drow city undercover, magically transformed into drow yourselves. Through several small quests, one false step and you’ll blow that cover and have an entire city come crashing down on you. But it’s not a guaranteed failure. If you’re close enough to the end you can fight you way out and through. BG2 never gives up on the player, and it never forces your hand either. The plot of the main story – chasing an antagonist who has taken things from you – allows you to be lawful good, chaotic evil, or any of the other great D&D alignments. Unlike Neverwinter, you’re not forced into doing good deeds to progress the main plot.

So no, it’s not nostaligia that makes me love this game. Many of its dated aspects can turn new players off, but there’s a great, highly original game here for people who can get past that. It succeeds at things that most modern games don’t even attempt.