Turn-based combat is a necessary abstraction in a tabletop game, but you can do without it in a computer game. Real-time is more immersive, but it’s tough to think quickly enough, especially when you’re controlling a half-dozen different characters. I always thought that BG’s real-time-but-with-orders-while-paused (which also shows up in a few other games of various genres) was the best of both worlds. That said, the lack of it isn’t a dealbreaker for me.
High-level play in Baldur’s Gate is annoying, but that’s not Baldur’s Gate’s fault. As others have said, it’s an artifact of the rules in pencil-and-paper D&D… where it’s also annoying.
And my biggest complaint with Siege of Dragonspear is that it’s way too railroaded: There’s nothing of the open world about it. You can’t even go back to areas you’ve already visited. And it’s annoying that you have to give up your old party, though I understand why they did that: Otherwise nobody would ever play any of the new characters they created. Other than that, I thought it was pretty good.
Because it’s a necessary abstraction in a tabletop game, that means it’s also an integral part of what **makes **it a tabletop game. So in the case of a long, long, long-awaited return to a D&D ruleset, I want a game that feels like playing Dungeons and Dragons.
I prefer turn-based, but only if there is an intelligent quick battle system for the thousand fights with worthless scrubs, I don’t wanna have to assign orders to kill 2 Kobalds a hundred times, but I also don’t want the computer blowing a fireball in my stead, to kill them.
I loved BG and BG2. To be honest, I’m not sure that I’ll still have the time, patience, and passion to dive in to BG3, but I’m glad that games like this are still being made.
I judge these games by how good they are as games, not by how closely they mimic a different game. They’re already by nature missing out on the most important aspects of D&D; why should I care that they’re also missing a trivial detail like turns?
I want a game that captures as much of the feeling of D&D as possible - and that’s not just the roleplaying, but also the system. I enjoy D&D’s combat system on its own terms, and have long wanted a game that allowed me to play with that system without having to co-ordinate with four or five other people first.
Also, just generally, I find turn-based combat systems to almost always be superior to real-time, and I find both to be superior over BG’s real-time-with-pause system, which lacks both the tactical depth of turn based, and the arcadey fun of real time.
I’m going to clarify why I think this feeling, while valid, isn’t necessarily correct. The reason is the Dungeon master (Game Master) or lack thereof.
On a tabletop, you don’t have to spell out every last detail and you can in fact dispense with turns entirely and toss in a different system if you like - I’ve created a dozen different initiative systems for D20 alone. The key to tabletop game, in combat or out, is that the DM is there to adjudicate and get creative. For example, in a tabletop game, the DM may or may not allow everyone to rush willy-nilly in combat without getting clocked in the head (depending on your DnD game, this could be handled by Attacks of Opportunity). Similarly, in early DnD spellcasters didn’t just get “a turn” and instantly unleashed their most powerful spells - it had to be planned and used based on timing.
Now, there are good reasons to use turns still, and turn-based games are not necessarily bad. But they have issues and there is a reason that video games, too, pushed away from turn-based battles early: You could do more complicated but also much cooler things.
They were ported to IOS. I played Baldur’s Gate a few months ago and had a blast, although the ending was enough of a slog that I never finished it–but that’s true for most long games for me these days.
Sure, there have been plenty of innovations in game design in the last twenty years, and in this respect it shows its age. But the core gameplay is excellent.
At the time, the Baldur’s Gate games were, by far, the best port ever of D&D to a computer game. Now, I haven’t played a lot of D&D computer games since then, so that might no longer be true… but I’ve never heard anyone claiming that title for any other game since then, either. At most, I’ve heard “Such-and-such is about as good as Baldur’s Gate”.
I’m having trouble thinking of anything using the D&D license since BG that wasn’t one of the Neverwinter’s Nights or a remake/port of the BG/Torment/Icewind games. I think after Wizards took over, most RPG makers just didn’t bother with trying to license it anymore.
Temple of Elemental Evil was, IIRC, the first game to use the 3rd Edition rules. It was pretty faithful to them, and sometimes clunky, and sometimes annoying, and pretty dang fun for old-schoolers like me who’d run friends through the original adventure back in the late eighties.
There were a few, but they were mostly terrible. Temple of Elemental Evil was eventually a decent game, but it took years of fan made patches to get it into a reasonable shape - out of the box, it was literally unplayable, it was so buggy. Ruins of Myth Drannor was similarly broken, including a bug where the uninstaller could sometimes delete your system files, bricking your whole PC. (It was also the first attempt at adapting 3rd edition rules, about two years before ToEE came out.) There were few others, mostly console exclusives that amped up the arcade factor and featured minimal role-play aspects - most notably the Dark Alliance games, which, despite having the Baldur’s Gate brand on them, played more like light-weight Diablo clones.
I’ll never forget the quote that the player character says when he can’t open a door:
“This door is locked tighter than a dwarf’s ale purse.”
The imp village in Beyond Divinity is well done and is the most memorable part of the game.
I haven’t played Original Sin or the Baldur’s Gate games, I don’t like the idea of having to control a party although Beyond Divinity was two characters.
I think I looked it up when I played Planescape. I even remember what it stands for, but not actually what that means or whether you want high or low. I was more in a “role not roll PG” mindset back then, and only gave up on Planescape because my computer was garbage.
I heard that someone used to more modern game interfaces might find the original BG a bit frustrating, but I didn’t receive details.
THAC0 was awful. You remember that it means “to hit AC zero.”
Armor class back then went from 10 (unarmored) to -10 (extremely well armored). Your character’s THAC0 was the number you had to roll to hit a character with an armor class of zero.
Of course, hardly anybody has an AC of 0. So if my THAC0 is 17 and your AC is 4, and I have a +2 strength bonus and a +1 sword, I have to roll, uh… hold. on. I had a chart back in the day…