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10-07-2007, 05:58 PM
|  | News ID | | Join Date: Nov 2002
Posts: 25,275
| |  Baldur's Gate Review
We take a walk down memory lane this evening with a review of BioWare's original Baldur's Gate by megascore.biz. Mostly, it appears to be an attempt to dig up the flaws that were ignored at the time. Still, Baldur’s Gate linearity is mostly present on the main plot, as the player is able to explore the entire gameworld as he sees fit. You can choose to go North or South, visiting this or that location in whatever order you want. The gameworld is divided in closed areas that you explore in real time, and to which you can travel to through the world map that you can access by going to the border of the area you’re in. Sadly, most of those areas are generally uninteresting, filled with random monsters and bandits with nothing else in mind other than to kill you. Cannon fodder… In those “general” areas, there are a few characters you meet, with whom you can talk. Some of them want to attack you, others may want to join you, there are also some cases where you meet someone who wants your help. When you meet these NPC’s (Non-Player Characters), you are normally given options as to how to deal with them. Sadly enough, though, these options usually consist of three attitudes: clearly benevolent, outright evil and lazily unconcerned (as in “I don’t want no part of it.”). This kind of good/evil dichotomy, quite common in BioWare’s titles, kills all sense of moral ambiguity and creates unrealistic social interactions. These options usually give different consequences, and, even though there certainly are some bright moments, these NPC’s feel more like easter eggs than properly gameworld characters. It usually feels like “meet/deal with/goodbye and never see again”.  |
10-07-2007, 10:31 PM
|  | Exalted Member | | Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: Frag Town
Posts: 4,905
| | | Why criticise the game now? Shouldn't they (the reviewers) have done it prior to this game's release? I really detest it when reviewers praise a game to high heaven when its first released only to bash it later on.
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"Every time I hear a person saying, 'PC games are dying,' or 'PC games are dead,' particularly if they're a competitor, I fully agree with them--and I encourage them to get out of the space as soon as possible, just so I don't have to compete with them," -Tim Holman, Senior Producer for Company of Heroes
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10-07-2007, 11:18 PM
|  | Moderator and Twisted Sister | | Join Date: Apr 2001 Location: The maelstrom where chaos merges with lucidity
Posts: 18,184
| | I read this review.. and I ended up scratching my head and wondering just what the point was exactly... 
Sure, they were perhaps more critical than reviews written at the time.. but the whole thing still struck me as a bit odd and lacking in purpose.
Have game reviewers started to run out of material, so that now they are going back to old titles or generating "Top X" lists?
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testingtest12Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
testingtest12.......All those moments ... will be lost ... in time ... like tears in rain. |
10-08-2007, 01:27 AM
|  | Super Moderator | | Join Date: Nov 2000 Location: Denmark
Posts: 13,376
| | | I get the strong impression that the reviewer is looking at the game in his modern day perspective, and not his 1998 perspective.
BG (series) was story driven, which accounts for the linearity. It was not a sandbox at all, and I doubt the developers intended it to be a sandbox. |
10-08-2007, 03:31 AM
| | Exalted Member | | Join Date: Mar 2006 Location: Frag Town
Posts: 4,905
| | Quote:
Originally Posted by dragon wench  Have game reviewers started to run out of material, so that now they are going back to old titles or generating "Top X" lists? | Not to sure about that. I have yet to see any mainstream gaming site doing re-reviews of previous titles.
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"Every time I hear a person saying, 'PC games are dying,' or 'PC games are dead,' particularly if they're a competitor, I fully agree with them--and I encourage them to get out of the space as soon as possible, just so I don't have to compete with them," -Tim Holman, Senior Producer for Company of Heroes
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10-08-2007, 04:10 AM
| | Member | | Join Date: Oct 2007
Posts: 1
| | | Just to make it clear, we are a small site and we don't make things for profit. I reviewed Baldur's Gate because I felt it would be nice (to review).
Anyway, thanks for your comments. Hopefully they will help me improve the way I review games.
@DesR85 megascore.biz is not mainstream at all :P Way too small to be anyway, but we are trying to grow, of course.
Last edited by Morbus; 10-08-2007 at 04:12 AM.
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