It's 26 hours in, and I am finally at the titular Baldur's Gate. Honestly, the thought of exploring a new city exhausts me. Talking with npcs is so time consuming, and probably my third least favorite part of the game (behind the ultra-deadly low levels and the slow rate of xp advancement). It's not a genre thing, though. I loved exploring the worlds of Mass Effect or Fallout. I'm simply not very interested in what's going on.
It's hard to say exactly where to lay the blame. Full disclosure: I came into Baldur's Gate with an existing prejudice against the Forgotten Realms universe. Ever since my purchase of the 3rd edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, I've found this universe to be breathtakingly dull. Even so, it was only a minor dislike, so I'm not sure that can be the cause of my disinterest.
I think the real problem is that I've only the foggiest idea about what's actually going on. It seems like there is some evil faction, possibly called the Iron Throne, that is distributing a magical, iron-weakening potion to various bandits, mercenaries, and demihumans, who use it to contaminate various iron reserves and reduce the iron supply. Meanwhile, this group is also using its political connections to exacerbate border tensions between the city-state of Baldur's Gate and the nation of Amn, ostensibly to drive up the price of their own, uncorrupted iron, and thus make a shit-ton of money from selling weapons.
However, I suspect that their apparent motive is not their real one, and that the Iron Throne are in fact servants of a darker power who has some nefarious mystical goal that will threaten more than just the Baldur's Gate region. I also suspect that the main character is somehow pivotal to this scheme, and that the weird dreams with the impenetrable symbolism that she has after basically every chapter break are somehow indicative of a potent supernatural ancestry or legendary destiny that she has yet to discover.
That last speculation is really just based on general genre-savviness, though. There's something about the way Baldur's Gate presents its story that says to me "the main character is a secret Chosen One out to stop a Hidden Evil." But obvious hints aside (such as the mysterious clerical powers I get after my symbolic dreams, or the way Gorion and all of his friends seem to think I'm something special), the game doesn't really explore this much, and does virtually nothing to make the potential resolution of this mystery seem interesting.
So, I'm not sure I really care all that much about finishing the game. I've been cut loose in this big city with no real clue as to where to go next (the captain of the guard wants me to undertake a stealth mission - yeah right), and I'm absolutely positive that it will be another few hours before I raise in level. However, I also feel like I must be pretty close to the end, and it would be a shame to quit now.
The deciding factor will probably wind up being the difficulty of future fights. To get to Baldur's Gate, I had to kill Daveaorn, a powerful mage who repeatedly embarrassed my entire party. I got through it eventually (the solution involved kiting his assistant monsters, not engaging him until they were killed, and then sending in a hasted, berserking Arjyfa to take him out solo), but it was kind of an overwhelming fight. Future ones, in theory, should be even worse. If the difficulty curve keeps rising, I'm not at all confident in my party's ability to keep up (minus a bunch of tedious grinding that I'm not prepared to do).
The plan, then, is to keep going until I face my first serious obstacle and then give up if it takes more than, say, a half hour to overcome. It's a quitter's way, to be sure, but I've still got to play the sequel, and it would be a shame to become disgusted with the series before that can happen.
There's one not far ahead that's really tough - imo the hardest in the game - if the hostile spell-casters cast much magic. Two clerics and two mages (and two fighters) who can and will cause repeated party wipes. The bad news is even beating them doesn't let you know what is going on, but the goods news is that if you can - I suggest potions of explosions, oil of fiery burning, fireball and other AoE effects to interrupt casters, and employ poisoned weapons on the clerics while not attempting melee - you do find out what is going on very soon afterwards. And there isn't any other fight as hard as that one.
ReplyDeleteAre you talking about the fight at the top of the Iron Throne tower? That one was pretty tough, but I wound up loading my main character down with a bunch of potions. My casters got a few more buffs in before they were taken down, and the half-orc berserker did most of the work herself. Unfortunately, it's not something I could use at the very end of the game, because I had no way of raising dead in the field.
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