Aryfa, the half-orc berserker has finally caught up with Trent the illusionist. She cleared out the Nashkel mines and defeated Tranzig. In the process, she soloed up to level 5, and recruited a party of level 6 companions. The weird thing is that the two save files took around the same time to play. This game is . . . not very well balanced.
I think Baldur's Gate represents both the best and the worst of old-school gaming. It very accurately models the AD&D ruleset, including a wide variety of spells, classes, monsters, and magic items. It's an ambitious design that creates an enormous potential for deep strategy and boundless replayability. Yet the flip side of this is that the video game elements of Baldur's Gate are unsophisticated and haphazardly implemented. In emulating a pen-and-paper ruleset, they incorporated a lot of legacy mechanics that simply do not work without a DM to vitiate their failure modes.
The aforementioned pacing issues are a prime example. It is positively perverse that you can recruit a six person party, play for 10 hours, and still be at level one, and also play a one person party for six hours, get to level five, and then recruit five level six party members. And it's doubly frustrating when it turns out that the solo character has fewer deaths and more combat power than an entire low level party, even at level one (this is due to a quirk of how AD&D's rules work - high physical stats can get you 2-3 levels worth of combat benefits).
Similarly, combat is, 90% of the time, a total whiff-fest. The random die rolls that power the system have a small chance to "hit" a competently built character. However, spells and other magical effects are difficult to resist, so you'd have things like a single ghoul (a low level monster) wiping out an entire party because it also has paralyzing claws, and once the front-line fighters are out of the picture, the various mages and rogues have no chance of connecting with attacks.
These are all things that, were I DM'ing Baldur's Gate as a D&D game, I would be able to work around, but the computer just throws them at me, and trusts that I'll be able to figure it out. And I have very mixed feelings about that. It's kind of exhilarating, having that kind of freedom to explore, to make my own destiny, and to potentially break the game by discovering broken combos. Yet it is also exhausting, having to constantly be working the angles, always on the lookout for the myriad ways in which the system can plain screw you over.
Honestly, what I really want to do is play Baldur's Gate II. My hope is that the makers learned a lesson from both the strengths and the weakness of the first game and delivered a more tightly tuned experience that could somehow offer the freedom of an open-ended AD&D-based rpg, while also somehow ditching (or at least minimizing) the awful arbitrariness of the pure rules-as-written.
It's something to look forward to, at least. For now, I'm going to try and finish Baldur's Gate. I'm no farther in the plot than I was at hour 10, but I am level 5, and optimistic about my chances going forward. I think I've passed the worst of AD&D's meat-grinder levels, and am now sturdy enough to start raking in some serious xp. Hopefully, that will give me enough momentum to get to the end of the main story.
Wish me luck!
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