Baldur's Gate gets no free pass for being a game that was a formative experience in gaming for many people my age. Some of that stems from race and gender issues inherent in D&D, on which this is based, but that's no excuse.
As someone who really loved the games as I was growing up, I found it harder to take certain story events at face value. Problematic! Some of the things that happen in this game really don't hold up well 20 years later. Make at least 2 save files and save in them interchangeably (like save 1, then save 2, next time save 1, etc. Here's a very important trick that will save you infinite frustration: 1. This expansion was crashing once every couple of hours, which is not great. TOB: Again, same as BG2 but the save crash comes back.
I didn't have any save wipes, but it could happen. BG2: Primarily crashes when changing areas but will start to crash late game when a lot of special effects are firing at the same time. Siege: Same deal as BG1 but way more often. This starts to happen late game more often in my experience. BG1: Crashes when you save, wiping the whole save file. Why the 7/10? Bugs! Irritatingly, although BG1-2-TOB are all part of the same package that a single character can play through, the games all have different crashing bugs that activate at different times.
Beyond that, if you didn't want to mod the game, I feel strongly that this is the best version of it.
It's a nice bridging point, though the early introduction of a series baddie felt a little unnecessary. Some of the other series standard characters felt better developed than ever. There was only one trans character, and I felt the writing for her was pretty good.
This addition is a lot bigger than I expected and culminates in some great fights. Take it for what it is: some great quest building using the design of Baldur's Gate to its limits. Siege of Dragonspear-there's a lot of trolly reviews for this game that are directly related to this content and supposed SJW themes that happen here.
UI-all aspects of the UI feel like an improvement on base PC version. I cannot overstate how smooth this makes the gameplay-pathing issues stop mattering because all of your characters more or less follow your leader, even if they're hasted. You can still do that with a simple button toggle, but most travel happens by highlighting the whole party and just using the thumbstick to directionally travel. The main thing holding me back from buying this was concern over the point and click nature of the game. Before that, here's what really works about this game: Controls-Wow, I really have to hand it to Beamdog on redoing this for consoles. My review score reflects a couple of key things that haven't aged well: bugs and some problematic storytelling. I did not try the Black Pits or Black Pits 2 in my hundred + hour campaign, because those parts do stand alone. This review contains spoilers, click expand to view.įor reference, I played through the whole game series for the first time on this Switch release, but I've previously played every part of the Baldur's Gate series on PC except for Siege of Dragonspear and the BG1 expansion Tales of the Swordcoast.