I’ve been replaying the first Baldur’s Gate lately. I haven’t played it since high school-ish and I wanted to do a thorough playthrough, so it’s in the backlog. I know in past conversations (not on the blog, I don’t think) I’ve called it the best RPG of all time as of its release, but that it hasn’t aged perfectly, and while I stand by that general sentiment, I double-checked the release dates and Fallout 1 came out first. Fallout 1 is such a perfectly tightly paced and plotted game that I can list off its small handful of flaws in a single blogpost, and that blogpost is exhaustive. Absolutely nothing else needs to change.
Baldur’s Gate 1 isn’t that good. If I were listing off every single one of its flaws, it would be a multi-part series and a lot of them would be very similar to each other, different manifestations of the same basic problem. Some of Fallout 1’s flaws were like that, with the broken iguana-on-a-stick quest and the broken Boneyard quests both falling under the same general header of “broken quests,” and while the bulk of that post was dedicated to broken timers, I covered every single timer in it.
The Baldur’s Gate equivalent would be combing over every one of the static wilderness encounters to figure out which of them can be cut in order to combine different wilderness maps together, and that’s a problem that comes up often enough that it’s better to talk about the general issue: Baldur’s Gate is mostly wilderness maps, and there are three kinds of encounters on those wilderness maps. The first are static unique encounters that have some kind of side quest or dialogue associated with them, the second are static generic encounters that just throw a bunch of gnolls at you, and the third are random encounters that sometimes spawn when you try to rest. The first are great, the second help pace them out a little so that the maps neither feel empty nor throw an exhaustingly unbroken series of dialogue-heavy unique encounters at you, and we’ll get into the third thing later, because right now I want to address the balance of the first two: There are about two or three times as many static generic encounters as there should be in many of the maps.
The maps would certainly feel very empty without those encounters, but also most of the wilderness maps are nothing but depositories of encounters. I like that there’s a large number of wilderness maps you can just wander around, bumping into little vignettes and side quests, but they clearly needed to cut several of them. Given the size of the maps, I think 3 is probably the minimum number of unique encounters each map needs, and I would feel better about 5. Many maps have just 1 or 2, and rarely reach 5. There are about two dozen wilderness maps in the game, and eighteen still would’ve been plenty enough that when the main plot sends you to track down some bandits, you wouldn’t feel like you’re being pointed directly at your goal because you know the bandits are in the wilderness and there’s only one wilderness map not already in use connecting towns together (only five maps are required to link Candlekeep, Baldur’s Gate, the Friendly Arms Inn, Beregost, and Nashkel). Cutting a few maps and moving the unique encounters of the remainder in with each other would really help the chapter where you scour the wilderness for bandits feel like less of a slog.
Similarly, and this is a bad habit that BioWare would take a long time to shake, increasing the length of your dungeons to match their importance in the plot is actually a bad idea. The Nashkel Mines are the first major plot point, where you find out that someone is intentionally sabotaging the iron supply of Baldur’s Gate and its sphere of influence, and it isn’t Amn as people suspect. Investigating the iron shortage is the immediate goal of Jaheira and Khalid, the adventurers who take you under their wing after your mentor tragically-yet-inevitably dies, and it puts you on the trail of the guy who killed him through a somewhat contrived coincidence (but only somewhat – the main villain is putting several plans into motion at once, one of them involves killing you (your mentor sacrificed himself to stop him), this iron thing is another one, it feels weird to suddenly jump track from “who is trying to kill me and why?” to investigating a seemingly unrelated crisis, but at least after you know what’s up it does make sense). It’s the first hint we get of a fairly convoluted scheme, and it’s the first step of the main plot, so I get the impulse to make the dungeon where that plot beat is delivered bigger than the wilderness locations that facilitate side quests.
The problem is that the actual dungeon’s concept is just a mineshaft full of kobolds. It’s not super clear how the kobolds are causing the quality of the ore to plunge, but whatever, it’s magic. The more important issue is that the Nashkel Mines are three floors of dungeon with one floor’s worth of content, bulked out purely to help signal that it’s more important than the ruined magic school at Ulcaster, a side quest dungeon. But while that does make it clear the Nashkel Mines are more important, it also makes them less fun to play.
This is especially the case because there’s very little increase even in raw difficulty when lengthening the dungeon, since there’s no penalty to backing out and resting in nearby Nashkel. This is a problem inherited from the game’s 2e D&D ruleset (a problem which persists through 5e), but BioWare was under no obligation to leave the 2e rules as unmodified as they were, so that’s no excuse. Like in D&D, some effort is made to make resting costly – early on in the game, your allies get angry at you if you take too long to reach Nashkel or complete a side quest, and if you rest in unsafe areas, you may be jumped by monsters. But these quest timers are rare, so for 90% of the game, including when you’re at Nashkel (assuming you aren’t on the timer for the side quest to rescue a wizard from some gnolls), you can rest at almost any time and your only potential penalty is that monsters might attack you – and even that isn’t really a problem, because Nashkel is so close and it’s perfectly safe to rest at an inn. Another of the proposed solutions to making rests actually cost something in D&D is to have dungeons restock encounters when you rest, but Baldur’s Gate doesn’t do this (and would almost certainly have had to tone down the length anyway if they did – unless you know exactly which wilderness areas to hit for levels before doing the Mines, you really need the rest).
Fallout 1 had this more figured out – while the timer for the last leg of the main plot didn’t actually work right (that’s one of its few flaws), the basic concept was fine, only the exact math needed to be altered. Baldur’s Gate toys with the idea, but abandons it by the time you reach chapter 3, which is exactly when it is most needed. Without any kind of timer hanging over your head, the days all blur together and plot points patiently wait for you to arrive, unchanging, so although the whole game feels like a crisis lasting about six weeks, canonically it’s more like 3-6 months, depending on how thorough you are. That would be fine if there were a timer hanging above the whole thing counting down to doom, with the situation getting progressively worse – the only reason why it seems like it can’t be much more than six weeks is because the iron situation and the escalating tension with Amn and the Zhentarim never actually escalates. The villain’s plan never actually advances, so it can’t have been that long, right?
A doom countdown like Fallout 1 nearly had would’ve greatly improved this – the iron shortage growing so catastrophic that prices on iron weapons and armor starts going up, and then they disappear altogether, leaving only magic weapons behind, murders of other Bhaalspawn grow more frequent and more daring in Beregost, Nashkel, and the Friendly Arm Inn, culminating in a massacre of over a dozen in one night in Baldur’s Gate, tensions with Amn grow more intense and Amn soldiers start patrolling the wilderness near Nashkel and become confrontational and then hostile. It’s very unlikely anyone will take more than 360 days to finish the game or more than 90 days to finish up chapter 2 (after which the hostility of Amn soldiers makes entering Nashkel more difficult, which is going to be a big problem for completing the Nashkel Mines), so this rough timeline should work:
Day 25: The next time the player enters Nashkel, they are approached by an Amn soldier who interrogates them about a murder in town. The soldier is suspicious the player may be involved because they’re a transient, but gives up the suspicion easily.
Day 45: Prices on weapons and armor rise significantly. The next time the player enters any of a couple different shops selling weapons, someone complains about the extortionate price on iron goods and the shopkeep tries to explain that iron is getting scarce thanks to the bandits.
Day 60: The next time the player enters Beregost, there’s a dead body lying in the street and some guards standing around. If the player approaches and asks what happened, the guards discuss the case with them and it’s suspiciously similar to the one in Nashkel.
Day 90: The next time the players are in Beregost, there’s a large Flaming Fist contingent there marching south to confront the Amnians. Flaming Fist vs. Amn standoff encounters start to spawn in the wilderness zone north of Amn.
Day 120: The next time the player is in Nashkel, they are confronted by Amn soldiers. If the dialogue goes poorly, they might be forbidden from the city for presumed loyalty to the increasingly hostile Baldur’s Gate.
Day 150: The next time the player is in the Friendly Arm Inn, a murder of another Bhaalspawn takes place right in front of them, in the courtyard of the inn.
Day 180: Non-magical iron weapons completely disappear from shop inventories. The next time a player enters a shop that sells weapons/armor, a soldier there complains that they’re skirmishing with Amn (or Baldur’s Gate, if it’s the Nahskel shop) and if they can’t get some decent weapons, it’s going to be a slaughter. The shopkeep points out that the iron shortage is hitting both sides, and the soldier complains they’ll end up killing each other with sticks and stones. As the conversation implies, standoff vignettes on the road to Amn become skirmish vignettes. Amn soldiers become hostile to the player no matter what conversation options they take.
Day 240: The Bhaalspawn massacre, an enormous number of dead Bhaalspawn appearing throughout the streets of the city. A prophetic dream (of the sort the player has been getting regularly during chapter breaks) heavily implies that only two Bhaalspawn remain: You and Sarevak.
Day 270: Baldur’s Gate and Amn explode into war. The road between Beregost and Amn is packed with fighting soldiers. Skirmishers move out into wilderness maps all across the southern section of the map.
Day 300: Amn forces break through and besiege Beregost. Any attempt to fast travel to the city triggers an encounter with besieging forces instead. Amn soldiers have the entire road from Nashkel to Beregost occupied and appear sporadically in the wilderness all throughout the wilderness, except for very remote areas like the bandit camp and the Cloakwood. A pinning force of Amn soldiers appears outside Candlekeep.
Day 360: Baldur’s Gate is stormed by soldiers of Amn after the gates are opened from within by agents of Sarevok. The Bhaal cultists begin a mass slaughter of the city’s inhabitants, supernaturally inciting the invading Amn forces to join in. A frenzied orgy of violence sees Sarevok soak in immense amounts of power and become a demi-god. The next time the player enters Baldur’s Gate (including necessary triggers for chapters 5 and 7), they are instead confronted by an invincible Sarevok amidst the bloodsoaked remains of the city, locked into an unwinnable battle.
Also, put the name of the wilderness areas on the world map so I don’t have to consult a guide to figure out which one is Red Wizard Forest and which one is Mutamin’s Garden.
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