Baldur’s Gate isn’t too old, it was released in November of 1998, but that’s still a bit dated now. The gaming industry isn’t friendly to the years, often working in what seems to be accelerated “dog years” in terms of technological advancements. It figured this was worth covering because it’s one of the best selling and considered a top tier single-player RPG by most accounts.
It was also developed by BioWare, who, at the time, only had one other game under their belt from two years before called Shattered Steel.
The story begins just after a devastating event in the Forgotten Realms D&D campaign called the “Time of Troubles.” This was a great twist in the standard D&D campaign, it caused all curative magic (clerics) to lose their ability to heal unless near their deity, magic didn’t function correctly (I believe this is where the Wild Mage came from) and was unpredictable and gods walked the earth as mortals which caused magic to, in effect, die while the gods were away. Since the storyline starts slightly after this event, the game contains healing and magic but the storyline is impacted by prior events of course, people have trust issues.
The game was made great because it held “mostly true” to the 2nd Edition D&D roots so the learning curve for D&D player’s wasn’t so rough; some things were adjusted to handle the real-time effect of a video game RPG. You could party with up to six Non-Player-Characters (NPC’s) whom would swap in and out of your active party over time as part of the storyline (something also implemented by the US release of Final Fantasy 2).
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This weeks gaming podcast, emotions run wild while we talk about our initial reactions to Diablo 3’s isometric engine, gaming graphics and overall Diablo experiences. Doug admits to owning two copies of Diablo 2, but doesn’t really know why.
Hey guys, I’ve listened to your podcast since episode 75, and I must say, it’s hard to believe your website isn’t as popular as most gaming podcast sites. I’ve wanted to ask you your thoughts on this holiday line up of games, and if it is enough to convince you to buy a console just for that one game. Thanks guys!
The main reason our site probably isn’t that popular yet is because it’s been in existence for about a month 🙂 TechDiversions.com wasn’t big enough to hold the community we want to build here so we recently expanded it to gamingpodcast.net.
In the coming weeks I’ll be setting up a forum for everyone to chat on, run contests for prizes and other community based things, so stay tuned for that!
To answer your holiday lineup question…well, that will be in the next episode 🙂