Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance

I picked up Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (BG:DA) for Playstation 2 after finishing Dungeons & Dragons: Heroes on the Xbox. I'm familiar with Bioware, who consistently makes games I really enjoy (including Neverwinter Nights and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic). Additionally, Baldur's Gate came first before D&D Heroes, so I knew there would be some improvements. Still, Maleficent and I enjoy blowing stuff up together, so we needed a new fix and Baldur's Gate fit the bill.

Unlike D&D Heroes, BG:DA pretends it has role-playing elements and in doing so, just highlights how non-role-playing the game is. Similar to Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights, there are conversation trees. When you speak to a character, you select a series of responses from a menu. There are maybe five characters you can talk to in total and your conversation doesn't really matter - we quickly discovered that clicking the top choice always meant we'd get to hear the whole story. But you can just skip the whole story too and get right to the matter at hand, which means the role-playing elements are just trappings to make it seem more like D&D.

Forget character customization too, at least at character creation. There are three character types, including an elven sorceress, dwarven (cleric? I didn't play him so not sure), and human arcane archer. Some warning flags should go off for folks who play the third edition of D&D - one cannot start out as an arcane archer, that's a prestige class. But that doesn't matter - the human, named Vahn, is whom you get to play. While he can hack things up in melee, Vahn's clearly optimized for ranged combat. The game gives subtle hints like dropping great heaps of arrows as the only equipment you find in treasure hoards.

BG:DA is obviously geared towards a particular breed of player - the young, [...], male kind. The first character you interact with is a blonde elf that is quite buxom and has a habit of leaning forward, gesturing towards her chest or thrusting her hips. Similarly, the elven sorceress is only elf-like in that she has pointed ears - the rest of her is quite human.

The artwork, especially for a PS2 game, is fantastic. The backgrounds and sound effects are impressively crafted and filled with a loving attention to detail. The characters themselves move smoothly and act like real people in their hand gestures and emotions - even the lizard man acts slightly inhuman in how he speaks and moves. The voice acting is well done, but that's something I've come to expect from Bioware.

There are some lazy shortcuts that were very irritating in their exclusion. One lizard man sends the heroes through an elemental plane of water, spends five minutes explaining how dangerous the journey will be and then we see a cut scene focusing on some random tower. POOF! That whole water/drowning thing? We never see it - we don't' even see animation explaining the journey. We have to trust on faith that it was a tough swim through the elemental plane of water. When everything else is narrated and explained in such painstaking detail, I expect to see animation explaining it.

There is, of course, all the good stuff that some people think equates with a role-playing game: you can buy equipment, switch out arms and armor, and train particular feats and spells as you advance. Little of these powers resemble third edition D&D - fire shield is considerably weaker than its tabletop counterpart. Strangely, my character was unharmed by Maleficent's burning hands (even when she was blasting right through him) but her fireballs hurt him. Go figure.

Some of the monsters are radically different from their tabletop equivalents in weird ways. In Neverwinter Nights, umber hulks are wusses with an irritating confusion gaze. In BG:DA they are terrifying juggernauts, sans gaze. Drow are still as sneaky as ever (it's clear Bioware has a soft spot for the dark-skinned elves), dragons are still a pain in the ass, and giants are suitably fearsome. Bulette burrow and are extremely difficult to kill, which is appropriate, although they waddle like fast moving turtles...not how I envisioned them (or how they move in D&D Heroes).

Perhaps the most unforgivable flaw in the game is that it crashed. That's right folks, just like a PC, the screen went white and the game crashed hard. Considering we were at a critical point in the game and a lot of objects were on the screen at the same time (magic missiles, multiple enemies, arrows, etc.) I imagine it overtaxed the PS2. But what the heck - if I wanted a game that would crash I would have played it on a PC!

As a game developer myself for RetroMUD, I was surprised to see that every corpse and item stays where it is. That means there's no object cleanup. This means that the system has to determine the location of every item, corpse, and monster at all times. Corpses stay right where they are, which is alternately cool and disturbing, especially in rooms of mass slaughter. This problem was resolved in D&D Heroes (the corpses disintegrate) but it's a big mistake for a game of this size and probably led to the aforementioned crash.

I also got stuck once in an area due to clipping errors. These are amateurish mistakes that I haven't since seen repeated (certainly, not in D&D Heroes) so I'm willing to forgive the developers. But it's their first foray onto console games and it shows. It's a good game, but there are better games now with less boring, click-so-they-shut-up "role-playing" elements.