Sometimes I wonder if it’s me – perhaps I have just outgrown computer games, and what was amazing when I was 14 just wouldn’t be so engaging now. I think there IS an element of nostalgia to it, and plain old evolvution of tastes with age, but I think its still fair to say “they dont make em like they used to”. Reading the post above hammered that home.

Dragon age was generic. Obvious talent had gone into it, but it just wasnt built with the vision Baldurs Gate was. It’s like it was full of these beginnings of awesome, creative threads, that just never got developed into anything truly special.

I kept feeling like:

“ahh NOW we get to the cool stuff…
yeah.. any time now…
any.. time…
..hmm.”

The other problem with it was the whole premise. BGII was ingenius in its capacity to immerse you as the player in the role. The player’s legacy develops throughout the game, and teh mystery of the godlike mage who imprisoned you at the start, continually causing havoc and scuppering your journey, just pulls you along.

In Dragon Age it’s like “ok here’s the evil uprising, can you (this generic anybody) do something about it please”.

They’re just coming from entirely different creative headspaces. One seems born of passion for storytelling and immersion, the other seems like formulaic and forced, even if considerable talent and hard work was put into it.

Though I love RPGs, the great jewel of Baldur’s Gate, hadn’t come to my attention until somebody basically ordered me to play the second game, after listening patiently to my praises of Dragon Age. This happened two years ago.

To that point, before playing this incredibly imaginative and visionary, epic and so very deeply immersive game of Baldur’s Gate 2 + ToB, games like Gothic 2, Kotor, Mass Effect and Dragon Age had been the RPGs that were, to me, the most enjoyable among a vast number of games that I disliked in this genre.

I don’t really know why I failed to find Baldur’s Gate earlier, e.g. when it was released or close to that time.
But once I played and finished it I realized how very wrong I had been all these years.

The other games I mentioned are good games, and I enjoyed them very much, dont get me wrong,and good games with good stories are so very rare these days, but to me personally, nothing compares to Baldur’s Gate 2 + ToB in terms of story, gameplay and atmosphere except System Shock 1 and 2, which were equally enjoyable but not even remotly as complex or long and set, partially, in another genre.

The little and the big things make that game so incredibly awesome. Where so many other games, even good ones, have static and generic things and people in them, or tell a standard story in flashy cut scenes, Baldur’s Gate gives so many NPCs, fractions, monsters, goddesses, buildings, temples, areas, powers and motives a righful and masterfully crafted reason to be in the game.

Everything in that world just feels right. Those artists of Black Isle sat down with awe inspiringly gifted people that wrote and crafted a world so dense and compelling that I can only marvel at how far it stands above anything the mainstream mass production sells these days.

The story, dialogues, texts – from the voice that initiates each chapter to Irenicus, Imoen, Jaheira, Korgan, Anomen, Mellisan, Yaga Shura, Sendai and all the others – are overwhelmingly grand if compared to other games. All of that instilled a feeling of disappointment in me. Disappointment at how rare and unique the ideas and expertise behind that game are.

I was spellbound through the entire game of Baldur’s Gate 2 and the expansion. The story drove me on and it was impossible to stop playing. I love that story. It is alive and dark, brutal and full of love. Many fantasy books I have red were not as imaginative and well told as Baldur’s Gate’s story.

Gameplay and combat are so diverse that it almost scares me. There are so many ways to deal with foes, so many spells and group combinations that I spend hours and days shifting spells around in my spellbook or joinable NPCs in my group list. This is how it’s done. This is what games should be like.

And I hate it that most games are dumbed down nowdays. It has to be “accessible” and easy to handle for the dumbest people or the casual player who seems to be a caveman with an IQ of 69 if you look at how shallow most RPGs are.

If i was a very very rich man I would put together the entire Black Isle team and give them every resource they need and see it as a cultural investment. How could anybody split that dream team apart? Those people that could deliver such a product. It is a shame, if you ask me, a shame that money and money alone is the driving force of everything in our world. It’s nobody’s fault, really, but it’s just the way things are.

The heads behind Baldur’s Gate deserve many Oscars for what they have put together and should be the inspiration for other talented people.

The team is payed only on the condition that a petition of 50,000 customers are interested in such a game, and that 15,000 customers pre-order the game for twenty dollars, which will be deducted from the total game price once it is developed. Once this benchmark is reached, EA agrees to officially open the project fo development.

Obviously, those who pre-pay for the game will understand that their money may be held for twelve to eighteen months, as this is a grass-roots project.

I honestly don’t think the above numbers would be hard to hit given the number of fans out there, but maybe this is just one of those things we’ll have to let rest in peace.

If they did, one could only imagine the level of advertisement that would be saved by word of mouth, alone. The blogosphere would do all the work for EA. They’d hit a hundred million in less than a year.

There have been no games like Baldurs Gate and there probably won’t be for a while. Dragon does not even come close. A 7 out 10? Sure, but only when compared to other games. Compared to Baldurs Gate II, Dragon is a 5 out of 10 at best.

Remember how in Dragon Age you used to fight the “Blight” pretty much the whole game and you would get a few different other monsters here and there ( Golems, Trees, Dragons, Undead ). Now what did you fight in Baldurs Gate? Probably around 70 different kinds of monsters. How many types of Golems in DA? One. How many in BG2? About 4 types ( and maybe 10 different kinds with Mods installed ).

Very correct about corporations being money hungry. That’s the society we live in right now. Also not to forget the dumbing down of society in general each year passes by. Movies, Games, Music and Entertainment in general go down and only down.

A small or medium studio could only make a proper successor to the BG series if they would license a proper Game Engine. That means using a solid Engine that is relative easy to use and performs well. Right now I could think of the Unreal Engine 3 with the proper camera perspective would make a for good RPG.

A small studio will never be able to make it’s own Engine + Develop the game on it. Too much time and resources.

Then there is the other problem of licensing D&D, and the world of Baldurs Gate as a whole. But I think this could overcome one way or another.

The Diablo 3 Engine from Blizzard looks really nice, great graphics, design and animations. Imagine if Baldurs Gate 3 would run on something like that. We can only dream…

I want my six hours back. If the gameplay is going to be so stitched with non-choices, if I’m not really navigating my character, I’d rather just watch the A-Team. Yeah, it’s predictable, too, but at least I wouldn’t be watching “marionettes” build a home-made tank from scraps.

I think you’re probably expecting to see something like this from game companies:

“We’ve been working on a title for the past five years, which we expect to be received as both unimaginative and derivative to the highest level, with no interesting characters nor thrills, not to mention its clunky combat system, but we hope you players can bear with us on this one and, showing your everlasting support, buy it anyway. That would be great, thanks.”

One thing I find interesting is seeing the word “overrated”, peppered all over, everytime something comes up that everyone else seems to like except me – not in this article, not the word, at least.

The fact is: your opinions about anything are your own, not written in stone.

My opinion is, we can continue playing the same old games for the rest of our lives, or we can play a new title just for what it is, without making pointless comparisons. Both are all right, as long as we’re happy with it.

Bashing out a game, because it’s receiving more attention and praise than you think it’s due, it’s just “full of birds”, in my arrogant opinion. As I can see by articles like this that, by being arrogant, I might make a point true to others.

The truth is that when anything is corporatizes, its quality quickly plummets into the nether-regions of anti-art, or in this case, anti-games. The people that design these games have no desire to create fun, exciting games. They care exclusively about money, or in the case of the lower-level designer, doing just enough to avoid getting fired so they can get paid.

If another Baldur’s Gate is going to be developed, it will have to be developed through one or more small, independent presses by people who really love games. It’s up to us to make good RPGs now, because it’s sure as hell that no company these days is willing to put the kind of effort and dedication it takes to do it.