An intriguing adventure set in a fantastic fantasy world – Dungeons & Dragons fans rejoice!

Story

You are an orphan with an unknown past. You have been living a peaceful life until one day, when suddenly strangers start attacking you without apparent reason. Later that day your caretaker and tutor, an elderly man who basically has taught you everything you know named Gorion gets involved in a life and death battle with a strange demon-like armored man. Gorion dies and you start to investigate what lies behind the recent incidents. From there, your life quickly becomes that of an outsider; a journey full of untold secrets, magic mysteries, new friendships and new rivals.

The Game

Tales of The Sword Coast is the official expansion pack to the masterpiece PC roleplaying game Baldur’s Gate. The expansion adds some new locations, new items and new monsters making an already epic adventure even bigger and better. Even if you already aren’t familiar with the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons and the biggest fantasy campaign produced Forgotten Realms, then this game will introduce you in the best possible way. Baldur’s Gate offers a never-before-seen nice and detailed look at some of the fabled and legendary locations in Forgotten Realms. I think it’s fair to say that it does great justice to the lore of the setting, even if it certainly isn’t all-encompassing (how could it be?).

The game is played from an isometric top-down view where you control up to six party members. You’ll walk around and explore various wonderous locations, talk to NPCs for clues and battle monsters and antagonists who come in your way. The game has a great pause feature where you can at any time pause the real-time action and issue orders to your party members in your own time. This allows you to make better strategic sense of complex combat encounters which can get quite chaotic otherwise. For example, queue up spells and position your allies so that they don’t get caught in the blast.

Content

You get to create a character of your own and there are multiple different classes you can play such as fighter, rogue, wizard and ranger, or a combination of two or even three of the available classes. As this is a fantasy game you can also choose to play different races such as dwarf, elf and halfling. The races all have their own pros and cons and you get to read all about it in the character creation screen. Chances are that you will find some pleasure in trying different combinations of race and class to find something to your liking.

When your adventure starts you are all on your own – but during your journey you will meet some potential party members along the way. Most every one who offers to join you in your quest also have their own agenda – these effectively become side quests that you should help them with in return. Depending on who you accept to your party disagreements might arise if the different personalities clash too much. It’s all very well done and you will be amazed to hear your group talk and among themselves – either in agreement or disagreement. If someone in your party feels too dissatisfied, he or she will complain about it for some time and then leave if you do not make changes accordingly.

For the most part you are free to travel wherever you want on the Sword Coast, but you will discover that some places simply are too dangerous for you to traverse and you would be wise to avoid those areas before you are more able – that is to say when you have leveled up your characters and perhaps gotten better equipment.
As this is a Dungeons & Dragons based game you will be rewarded with experience points when you complete a quest or defeat a monster or a hostile person. When you have accumulated enough experience points, you will level up, and your character’s stats become better – allowing you to take on harder challenges.

The story will give you clues on where you should go next and when you progress in the main story you will learn about new places you could visit. There are lots of locations you never have to visit to finish the game and that’s where much of the fun lies. To find the most rare treasures and gain the most experience points you should explore as much as possible. With the expansion pack installed there are literally hundreds of sub-quests to take on making for a truly unforgettable journey. The game also features dynamic day- and night cycles which further adds to the great atmosphere and mood of your journey.

Even if you should only follow the main story and rush your way through the game, you will visit many different locations such as a monster infested mine, numerous caves and caverns, deep forests, ruined castles, a huge spider nest, an underground complex, a fortress of war, towns, secret sewer tunnels, the capital city Baldur’s Gate, which is a story in itself, and more! You will also face about 40 different types of monsters and creatures, and face many deadly traps. The story will take about 40 hours to play through, and much more than that if you engage in its countless side quests and the optional adventuring locations.

There are some magic weapons and spells to find and utilize in the game. There certainly could have been more, because it will be quite rare to find better equipment than what you currently have in any given situation – but when it happens you will feel empowered indeed. Many of the more powerful items and weapons are hidden, so you will have to search carefully and solve quests in the most favorable way to get them. Most of the time though, you will only find various potions and magic wands which generally aren’t very interesting as they have limited uses.

Baldur’s Gate may seem like an overly advanced game, and it does have a complex engine running, given that it is based on the official Dungeons & Dragons rule set. But it is still easy to play, and you will learn to use the interface as you go. You have the option to enable AI support to your party members so that they will for example pick their own targets in combat – however they are still not strategically smart, so you will have to be the party leader issuing orders either way.

Each individual character has their own inventory and character status screen. You can freely move items from one character to another, and it should be mentioned that at least some small portion of your game time will be spent managing inventory space. This is something I typically hate doing in roleplaying games, but in Baldur’s Gate it never really becomes a problem, perhaps thanks to the generous inventory space of each character. You still have to keep an eye on healing potions, arrow counts and magic scrolls, however.

When installing the game, you get to choose what components to install, but if you want the full experience you need to install all of it as that is the only way you get to hear all the music and hear all the sounds, and see all the visual effects.

The negative sides of Baldur’s Gate are close to none. Exploring vast areas can be tedious if someone in your party acts up and gets stuck somewhere, or if your party gets split up and a random encounter takes you by surprise. There are numerous traps that can instantly kill one or more of your party members. When this happens you’ll want to load your last saved game, because dealing with death and resurrection is very expensive and sometimes not even possible! You can load and save whenever you want, which can quite easily be exploited, in a way taking away much of the challenge. This game is really challenging so I guess that extensive saving and loading is unavoidable.

If you dislike conversations and reading dialog sequences, then you may become tired of this game in a while. There’s a lot of text to go through here. Quite often will you have to gather clues and hear rumors through word of mouth, but you always have multiple choices in what you can respond. Depending on what you say, you will reach different conclusions, which could lead to you making new friends or new enemies. There is an impressing amount of recorded voice acting in this game and that just adds to the feel and presence of the game world.

Multiplayer

You can play Baldur’s Gate in multiplayer either via TCP/IP or LAN cooperatively with up to six people – in that case you all control one party member each, and one player is the party leader. The party leader will be the one who decides where to go and basically what to do. The multiplayer mode isn’t really suited to play with random people but on a LAN with friends it can be fun – especially combat is fun and exciting in multiplayer.
The party members will effectively become side kicks as they have no agency as to where to go. Also during dialogue sequences, every player has to stop what they are doing and read the text together with the one who initiated the dialogue. This can obviously become annoying, especially in large towns where there are numerous NPCs to talk to.

Graphics

There are lots of neat details in this game, and the graphics are just awesome overall – the game can’t be run on very high resolutions but still, the visuals are perfect for this game. The items have beautiful hand-drawn illustrations, the cut scenes look great and the architecture is inspiring. Old castles, deep forests, dark dungeons and mysterious caves – it all looks gorgeous and really invites you into the world to explore more.
The sprites may be a little grainy and the animations are indeed a bit stale. But that doesn’t deduct from the game at all.

Sound

This game really shines when it comes to creating atmosphere and different moods. The weather effects combined with the graphics, sound effects and the soundtrack really is enough to take anyone’s breath away – rarely have I seen a game build up ambiance and presence like this. It’s simply poetic and beautiful. The soundtrack alone is a masterpiece and it really fits the theme of the game like no other – it’s all there! When you enter a tavern you will hear people talk, walk, drink and the jolly music play. When you exit the tavern you will still hear the bustling activity from the inside.

Summary

If you are enticed by the idea of playing a Dungeons & Dragons adventure on a computer with a rag-tag band of adventurers you happen to meet during your quest, then you’ll love Baldur’s Gate and its expansion Tales of the Sword Coast! There is a lot to discover, many places to visit and many personalities to meet and eventually fight. You’ll experience some of the most elaborate digital renditions of Forgotten Realms and be swept away by the wonderful soundtrack. Once you have finished this epic quest, you’ll be able to transfer your characters to the sequel Baldur’s Gate II.

Developed By: BioWare
Published By: Black Isle Studios
Version Reviewed: Windows PC
Genre: Roleplaying
Players: 1-6
Also Available On: mac OS
Released: 1999-04-30