I had a lot of old drafts that I for various reasons never actually published. Some of them probably because they were shit. Some of them just cause I never got round to editing them. I’ve picked a few that I thought had some merit. They are hopelessly out-of-date but they still made chuckle/think. Enjoy.
Should have been published: 2021
A lot of people are familiar with – at least the concept of – rage quitting and uninstalling. But I suspect a fair few also know about disgust quitting and uninstalling. Not disgust with the game but with oneself.
A game has sunk it’s teeth into you and made you sideline all other aspects of life: friends, family, exercise, personal hygiene, changes of clothes. It’s all about the game. And then, at some point, you wake up and smell yourself, get up, shower, find the last cleanish pair of underwear and leave the game, never to look back.
There is nothing wrong with the game – it’s not (necessarily) an addictive game by design – but it’s tainted by association with how you played it and related to it. And so, you quit.
For me, the original Baldur’s Gate was that game. I don’t remember much about the week or two I spent locked in my apartment, but what I do recall is a very warm August, wearing nothing but underwear, eating junk food and being hunched over a hunky turn-of-the-century laptop with a struggling fan and a tiny screen. It wasn’t pretty.
So it was odd that, looking at my games library recently, all I wanted to play was the enhanced edition I picked up cheap at a recent sale. Part of it was nostalgia and part of it was a desire to lay the groundwork for Baldur’s Gate II, a game that I have often heard praised but never played. Mostly, though, it just felt like it would hit the spot and, surprisingly, it did.
Here’s three random observations about Baldur’s Gate (Enhanced Edition) that I want to hit you with.
1: The story starts out strong but devolves into a “Can I speak to your manager?” farce (contains some early to mid-game spoilers).
First, I want to profess my love for the ridiculous way the game sweeps you up into the game’s main narrative stream, a.k.a “Why has the iron gone bad and why are the roads crawling with bandits?”
If you don’t know the premise, here’s the short version:
You set out from your childhood home in the middle of the night because danger is afoot. From the backseat, you keep poking at your foster father and asking him why you’re fleeing and where you’re going, and he keeps saying “I will tell you when we get there”. Then he get’s killed in front of your eyes for reasons you don’t understand. You follow his earlier directions to seek out his old buddies at the Friendly Arm Inn.
Then you just tag along on their quest to investigate the bad iron at the mine in Nashkel because and I quote:
… perhaps investigating local concerns will shed some light on your own predicament.
Journal, chapter two
This nudge is reinforced in equally spurious ways, e.g. when talking to a barkeep:
Bently told us there has been some sort of trouble in the south. Perhaps we should go to Nashkel.
Journal, chapter one (Troubles in the Region: Rumours and Happenings)
Because that’s what you do when you’ve just been orphaned, right? Get involved in the current, political crisis. Because the two must be connected. I suspect a psychiatrist would have field day with Gorion’s ward, the game’s protagonist. The subject is clearly coping with their loss and trauma by seeing connections and finding meaning where none exists.
Anyway, for all it’s silliness, I think the iron crisis is superb political thriller material. The plot is decent, it digs into the solid lore foundations of the Forgotten Realms and it still hooks me just as much as it did 20 years ago.
Where it starts to lose me is in chapter three to four, after entering the Nashkel mines. Here’s the spoiler: Every time I find the big bad, it turns out he’s just taking orders from an even bigger bad! So I go see the next guy and… cleanse and repeat. None of them will talk to me and explain what’s going on. They spout beard-stroking evil villain tropes about how I’m in over my head and then I chop off theirs. On their person I inevitably find a letter from the higher-ups complaining about quotas and unmet goals.
So here’s how I see it: I’m working my way up the corporate ladder, going though middle management, hoping eventually to speak to the man at the top so I can complain about my foster father getting killed. Oh and also ask him to stop “poisoning” the iron, please, everyone’s really upset.
2: There’s a lot of empty space on the maps. I like that.
I watched a fair few videos á la “Should you play Baldur’s Gate in 2021?” before settling in. One of the common cons was “lots of empty space”. And it’s true, there is. You will enter a large map at one end and wander through lots and lots of forest, fighting the occasional spider or bears or hobgoblin, looking for that one or two quest related item or person on the map. But mostly just looking at trees in pretty, late summer, early autumn colours.
It does get somewhat tedious after a while but that’s okay. You need a bit of tedium because that’s what makes the drops of story and quest not only interesting but memorable.
It’s easy to demonstrate how this works by contrasting it with Larian’s approach in Divinity: Original Sin, the 1st. Empty space with copy-pasted trees is boring, they must have thought, so let’s put stuff everywhere. Every nook and cranny has named NPCs and treasure and traps. It’s too much. I played the darn thing through to the end only last year and I cannot recall even the outline of the story.
Less is more, Larian. It’s okay for the player to just travel and ponder the quest.
3: Get some rest. And in the game.
Unlike twenty years ago, I have a job now. And I care more about how I smell and appear and about getting my 7-8 hours of sleep every night. So I take breaks from playing.
More to the point, I installed a mod that makes it easier for my party to rest outside of towns and taverns.
This is important because only by resting – and resting without interruption – do you get refills on your spells. If resting is nigh on impossible, you have to work hard to conserve your spells and only use them when you absolutely need them. A familiar pattern in games with scarce weapon ressources: You end up saving the fun toys for some super enemy that never actually appears.
Baldur’s Gate has a lot of fun toys. You should absolutely use them and waste them on enemies that could be felled easily by lesser means. Not only is it the only way to learn how and when to use them properly, it’s also makes the game a lot more fun and less grindy. Therefore I really recommend getting a good night’s sleep in a creepy, crawly dungeon, so you can keep on doing it.
Doesn’t that remove the challenge? Somewhat probably. I try to make up for it in other ways. In my party I include Neera, a wild mage, whose every action comes with a chance of RNG that often spells disaster or chaos. No pun intended.
That’s it, those are three random observations on Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition. I suspect I will finish it this time round and have more thoughts by then. In the meantime: Is middle manager of evil a pleonasm?