Jerry Whorebach wrote:

The best part: creating an entire party of your own characters using the multiplayer trick, then setting off into the seemingly-endless wilderness in search of weird deep cut Monster Manual beasts to slay and individually-placed treasures to loot (how many different kinds of non-magical gemstones were there, each with handbook-accurate prices and descriptions?), uncovering every square inch of black fog from your automap along the way. I doubt I could tolerate the awful real-time combat anymore - especially now that I know how much better a more faithful adaptation of the AD&D ruleset could've been - but the first Baldur's Gate was pretty much everything fourteen-year-old me wanted out of a Fantasy Adventure Game. That first time I made it to the city itself, after taking days (a week?) to get there, exploring its map after map of houses and stores and pubs and guildhalls and mansions with hidden passages and dueling wizard's towers and a harbour with boardable ships and warehouses and SEWERS and eldritch ruins under the sewers and all of it deliberately crafted by human artists and designers, populated with unique NPCs and generously seeded with adventure hooks? Fucking magical.

The original Baldur's Gate is 99% of why I still read RPGnet. The other 1% is transsexual forum drama. O_O


[Random Baldur's Gate memory: the ersatz smurf village about three maps over from any location you might possibly have legitimate quest-related reasons to visit, populated by xvarts (you will never see a xvart in a game again, or probably even hear the word xvart in any other context) and their mystical protector, a cave bear. The xvarts were just minding their own business but they were still hostile like all monsters (monsters... I hate those guys!), so I slew them all and stole the magical +1 morning star from the back of the cave bear's cave. Papa smurf ran out and tried to lay a guilt trip on me for indiscriminately slaughtering his people but it wasn't terribly effective on account of he obviously had fewer hit points than a +1 morning star does in one swing.]