Originally published at: Baldur's Gate saved the Western computer RPG
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Baldur’s Gate 1 was three years of work from “roughly 15 people”. Baldur’s Gate 3 has roughly 3,000 people listed in its credits; it was in early access in 2020 and had a finished release in 2023.
I don’t think “once a decade” is likely to change for this series.
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I still have the first one I borrowed from a friend. Need to give it back. I remember I only got about half way through it!
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It is 2031. Baldur’s Gate 4 is out. The manual lists 645,901 contributors. The Guiness Book of Records holds a party for Chaz Mondrell of Ipswitch, who broke the world record for staying awake just to watch the end credits.
It is 2049. The development studio working on Baldur’s Gate 5 says the game will not be complete for some time, may require another 4 billion prompt engineers, and they’re not sure there’s enough space for them in Ghent.
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You must gather your party before venturing forth.
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I beat Ice Wind Dale twice, as well as one through Pillars of Eternity once (I think there was some DLC I missed). Does that make up for it?
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Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the eyes!
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I know Baldur’s Gate and the sequel even more so sold gangbusters, but I’d argue that the original Fallout was the true saviour of the Western CRPG.
It came out a year before, and the sequel a year later was made by the same branch of Interplay that published the first two Baldur’s Gate games.
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Sure as hell didn’t save Interplay though. Invested in their stock when this came out. That didn’t end well.
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I’d say the D&D video game franchise was in pretty rough shape by 1994-1995 but the idea that the western cRPG was “dead” at the time development on Baldur’s Gate started is a bit of an overstatement. Certainly Baldur’s Gate (and the other Infinity Engine titles) made D&D licensed computer games cool again compared to the flawed efforts that immediately proceeded it, but that franchise was hardly the entirety of the genre.
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Baldur’s Gate 2 was my entry to the franchise and its a masterwork. I tried playing the first one when they released the remaster and i didn’t love it, the gameplay was just too rough for me but perhaps i would’ve loved it if i had played it back in the day.
As far as “western RPGs” go for me my entry was Fallout 2, which remains as my all time favorite in the genre but Baldur’s Gate 2 and Icewind Dale are also outstanding titles.
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Sorry most of my mid 90’s were taken up by playing this.
The late 90’s and most of my time in college was taken up by the sounds of head crabs and crowbars.
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As Shar commands.
Let us also not forget the other Interplay published title that followed on BG’s heels in 1997.
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The lord of murder shall pe-rish!
As noted above, I think you’ll find Fallout actually came out before Baldur’s Gate.
Fallout 2 came out the same year as BG.
One thing that doesn’t get noted much when talking about these old Interplay games is how important they were to Mac gamers. I was one at the time, and Interplay were one of the only publishers releasing their games on both Windows and Mac concurrently.
I spent many happy hours with the Fallout demo on the Mac, and eagerly tore into the full game when it was released later the same year.
This also meant I got to play BG1 & 2 on Mac at release too.
The only other developer at the time who was treating Mac as an equal platform when it came to release schedules was Blizzard.
I’m not counting Bungie, as they were a Mac developer first and foremost at the time, with Windows versions of their games often being delayed, before they were acquired by Microsoft.
id eventually followed suit in 1999 with Quake 3.
Interplay, despite the clusterfuck of their eventual decline, were a great publisher in their time, at least to me and fellow Mac gamers.
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This article is a bizarre reinterpretation of history. The Western RPG was alive and well all through the '90s. It certainly didn’t need saving. Besides which, Diablo, which came out the year before, was far more influential. This seems like it was written by someone who worked on Balder’s Gate who wants to feel more important than he really was.
let’s not forget planescape torment. ( 1999 ) it was such a well put together game. great story and characters. and just downright weird.
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I wouldn’t really qualify Diablo as a Western RPG in 90s parlance to be honest, and even at the time, it birthed its own genre name of ARPG (Action RPG).
Western RPGs were very much their own thing and an attempt to define them as something different and separate to JRPGs, which exploded in popularity in the States in the 90s (less so in the UK.)
Western RPGs usually featured a top-down or isometric view, an overworld map, dense explorable location maps featuring lots of options on how to approach objectives and interactive NPCs, sharing a lot in common with Immersive Sims in that respect.
A lot of the developers of both Western RPGs and Immersive Sims as they came to be defined could trace their history back to Richard “Lord British” Garriott’s Origin Systems.
On the surface, that description doesn’t actually sound that different to the definition of JRPG, but in practice, they played VERY differently, with JRPGs often featuring more linear story telling with less character customisation options, and turn based combat that occurred outside of the world or location maps, instead taking place in separate battle screens, usually with no consideration for the geography of the location the encounter took place in.
Object interactivity was/is also incredibly limited in JRPGs, usually being limited to puzzles and switches.
Western RPGs, and the Fallouts in particular, were quite heavily invested in the philosophy of emergent gameplay design, where robust systems allowed for unpredictable yet logical player interactions, such as the now infamous reverse-pickpocket to place a live grenade in a character’s inventory.
Diablo, by contrast, was a stripped down, combat-heavy interpretation of Rogue, with very little opportunity for emergent gameplay.
Even today, I don’t think you’d find anyone who would place Diablo IV and Baldur’s Gate 3 in the same category, with the former still likely to be called an ARPG and the latter a CRPG.
CRPG is the new name for Western RPGs, and is a genre which itself has gone through a couple of definition iterations, starting as “Computer Role-Playing Game” to maintain a link to the genre’s tabletop roots while clearly defining it as taking place on a computer, before finally settling on “Classic Role-Playing Game.” Personally, I’m not fond of that definition, as it’s less descriptive than the former, but I must also admit that the former is probably too broad a definition.
I spend far too much time thinking about this stuff 8|
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It’s also weird to me to even make the Western/JRPG split. If you go back to the 1980s, it is pretty clear that the traditional “JRPG” gameplay of wandering around a landscape and having random encounters and having cities you can enter where you can have brief conversations with locals, heal in an inn, and purchase supplies in a shop, is simply taken from the early (Western) Ultima games. I think the “JRPG” trope came about after the Ultima series evolved when it left 8-bit platforms (and died in the late 1990s anyway) and so many younger people don’t realize where the “Japanese” tropes originally came from.
