Ruminations on Dragon Age: Origins vs Baldur's Gate

This first section contains a few spoilers for the end of Dragon Age: Origins. Skip to the next section header, where I get into the comparisons, to avoid them.

Much belatedly (a year late, by my reckoning), I decided to go on and finish Dragon Age: Origins (I can't keep just calling it "Dragon Age" without the "Origins" anymore, since there's the expansion Awakening, and Dragon Age 2 coming out shortly).

I had left it just after the Landsmeet, with several unfinished side quests. I wasn't happy with the way the Landsmeet went, since I hadn't managed to "harden" Alistair. If I had, I would have been able to convince him to leave Logain alive. Now, I wanted to see that bastard dead just as well as he did, but I really liked the alternative Riorden presented, in making him a Grey Warden. That way, we'd have had someone to sacrifice against the Archdemon, if he even survived the joining ritual. Really, I couldn't understand why we weren't recruiting a whole army of Grey Wardens, since we were down to 3 in total, and we knew we had to have at least one left alive to kill the Archdemon. Those are not very good odds!

I also disagreed with the whole conceit of keeping the ritual secret for the reason of "Well, who would go through the ritual if they knew it might kill them, and it would shorten their lives?" Come on. Patriotism and honour alone would ensure people lining up around the block to go through the ritual.

Well, in any case, I think Riorden gave a slightly better excuse -- that they didn't have enough archdemon blood to recruit more Grey Wardens en masse, since either Howe or Logain had confiscated their supply, and perhaps destroyed it.

So, because he wasn't hardened, Alistair ignored my protests and chopped off Logain's head in front of his daughter. There went the marriage plans.

To harden Alistair, you have to go through his companion quest, which involves finding his sister in Denerim, and I hadn't been able to find her house, despite tediously running around the Market District many times. I don't know why, but it finally triggered when it was too late. A previous save made just before going to the Landsmeet allowed me to fulfil his quest, but unfortunately I still wasn't able to harden him, because you have to wait for him to strike up a followup conversation in camp afterwards, and if you've progressed to just before the Landsmeet, Alistair won't engage in normal conversation -- he'll just say something about the upcoming meeting without allowing you to say anything to him.

So, the thing that kept me from finishing the game all this time was that I wanted to try to get my preferred situation. So I went back even further to a much older save, all the way back to the brilliant side quest where you have to escape Fort Drakon (a refreshing and occasionally humourous quest, depending on who you select to handle it). After that, I succeeded in hardening Alistair, and thus I would be able to convince him to set aside his lust for revenge for the greater good with Logain.

I probably would have played it the rest of the way through like that, except shortly after I took care of Alistair, the game started crashing -- a lot. It crashed upon opening doors, passing by certain areas of the marketplace, or even opening my inventory. It became unplayable. I tried many things -- updating my graphics drivers, removing all mods, using low resolution settings, and even ultimately uninstalling and reinstalling, and only patching up to 1.02, instead of 1.04. But nothing worked.

The problem must have resided somewhere in that particular earlier save file, because the other one from after the Landsmeet worked fine. So, regrettably, I gave up my perfectionist plans and decided to just continue on without Alistair marrying Anora and with Logain dead. There were still some occasional crashes between then and the end, but those problematic segments of the game (such as the part where Riorden tells you to select the party you plan to take to fight the Archdemon) were able to get through when I lowered the graphics settings (returning them to normal after those glitchy points).

Luckily, even without Loghain, there was an option given to allow you to avoid any Grey Wardens having to sacrifice themselves to kill the Archdemon, and that was thanks to Morrigan's Sexy Ritual, which Alistair appeared to enjoy greatly.

Time played for my main character's save (not counting reloads and backtracking): 145 hours, 48 minutes.

The end game sequence was well done, I think. There were several places where all your companions file past you one at a time to deliver last-minute interactions, before the battle and before the end of the game, and it made for some much nicer resolutions than BG's "okay, you killed the bad guy -- the end!" approach. That's one place where I think DA:O was a clear improvement over Baldur's Gate 1.

Dragon Age: Origins as it compared to Baldur's Gate 1

These two games were made 11 years apart, but it is fair to compare the two, since DA:O was hyped by its creators as the "spiritual successor" to Baldur's Gate.

The biggest advantages DA:O has over the Infinity Engine games are its full 3D graphics (which, though they have their faults, are masterpieces compared to the 3D models in Planescape: Torment), and the fact that it has a developer-made modding toolset, whereas the Infinity Engine modding toolsets had to be made by fans reverse-engineering the formats.

The graphics come at a price, though, and that is in large size and slowness. The loading times are often terrible, perhaps worse the further you progress in the game. Combined with DA:O's tendency to often begin some important cutscene or plot-important dialogue setup directly after loading screens meant that I couldn't just get up to go do something else while it loaded, even though there was usually plenty of time to do so.

Moving around in the game is at a fixed speed, with no way to speed it up to eliminate the tedium of walking around as the Infinity games had. Even the simple act of pulling up the inventory screen has a noticeable delay, whereas with BG it was instantaneous. The graphics also may be to blame for the reduced number of NPCs in the game, to avoid overtaxing the CPU with too many NPCs walking around. Oh, it's better than Oblivion, which had ghost towns that they called "cities", but Baldur's Gate was brimming with NPCs walking around, giving little comments, and making the place feel alive. Taverns were packed with people walking around or sitting at tables, making drunken comments. By contrast, at the Gnawed Noble Tavern in DA:O, I counted a total of 3 occupied tables (and an overkill of 3 waitresses to serve them).

I'll try putting some of the pros and cons in bullet points.

Cons:

• Slower than BG (in gameplay and loading times)
• Bigger (in hard drive space/RAM terms, not scope of story)
• Obsessed with blood
• Humour is too...restrained. Most of the comedy seems more like gallows humour rather than comic relief. There are some exceptions.
• Fewer races to choose from (7 race options in BG, three in DA:O, and soon to be one in DA2!) I have a whole post in progress about the evils of "metrics" in "streamlining" games.
• Fewer spells
• Too much automation for rogues (automatic lockpicking, no careful selection of where to put skill points for rogue skills, etc.)
• Reduced dialogue options
• Lower population in towns
• Auto-resurrecting party members. This is a con because it takes away from a lot of gameplay and world richness. In BG, you would have to either be a powerful priest, or have a resurrection scroll, or go to a temple and pay a priest to resurrect your party member. It made fights much more intense and challenging than in DA:O, where if even just a single party member survives the fight, the rest will stand up again and just need to use an injury kit.
• Following from that, along with making health auto-refill, this made the temples pretty much useless window dressing, since this alleged Maker didn't seem to grant the priests any actual powers (I noticed this the first time I accepted a "blessing" from a Chantry priest, and nothing happened), and they didn't need to offer any healing services or resurrection services, nor even identification of magic items (all of which they did in BG), since there were no unknown magic items that needed identifying.
• The fact that there was only one organised religious group (those following the Maker and Andraste) further detracted from the richness of the world, where BG had dozens of distinct temples.

Other criticisms, such as the ugly hats and poor selection of clothing for mages, don't really belong in this list, because I'm only comparing it to BG here, and you can barely even see the gear on your characters in BG.

[As an aside, I hear that in Dragon Age 2, you're not even going to have a selection of gear for your companions. They say they want to make each one unique as a character. Never mind that usually, characters even in TV series (which may make use of the "limited wardrobe" trope), tend to indicate their progression and rising competence with a change in their personal appearance. (See Growing The Beard and Important Haircut.) I'm glad they're releasing a demo to try, because what I've heard about the changes sounds like they've removed almost everything that attracted me to DA:O in the first place, and which made DA:O my first ever preorder game.]

Pros:

• Full 3D, mostly good looking (and what is not good looking can be improved)
• Excellent expandable toolbars. Put whatever talents, abilities, spells, or consumables you want on the bar, in any order.
• Superior spell and talent system, with indicators letting you always know who's doing what, what's still in progress, and what the cooldowns are
• Preparing to use Area of Effect attacks (such as certain spells, or grenades) shows a circle indicating range of the blast, who will be affected, and whether you will have to move to hit that spot
• Many more active warrior actions (in BG, warriors basically just hit, hit, hit, or used the same kind of items anyone else could also use)
• More active thief/rogue actions, too
• The mana system with mana potions may be a pro or a con -- a con since it makes the game much easier than BG's Vancian magic system, and makes mages even more powerful and useful than in BG, but I'm calling it a "pro" just because it eliminates some of the tedium.

Overall, despite the darker overall colour scheme and the predominance of mud in Ferelden, as well as the more limited spell and playable race selections, Dragon Age: Origins seems to be the best modern game that I know of which can be modded to have more Baldur's Gate-style adventures. Modding can also take care of the lighting and colour schemes, and as we see from excellent quest mods such as Mengtzu's Classic Week, modding can also revive the feeling of fun and humour that were so prevalent in Baldur's Gate, but much muted in DA:O.

Personally, I find the pros and the cons to almost evenly weigh each other out, despite me finding more of one than another, and I'd like to think that some of the shortcomings will be remedied by modders. (All of the story, humour, and graphical critiques can be modified by modders, at the very least.) Additionally, based on what I've seen, DA2 may be sufficiently different that a large number of modders will stick with DA:O for modding, and continue the community projects that have been showing much promise (especially if DA2 does not include a toolset). In the meantime, there are still hundreds of hours of Infinity Engine games for me to enjoy: Baldur's Gate 2 and its expansion, The Icewind Dale series and its expansions (which I've been playing), and Planescape: Torment (which I've also been playing).

Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast

This post is a detailed review of, and contains spoilers for, the Baldur's Gate 1 expansion, Tales of the Sword Coast.

Right away, I'm delighted by the expansion. The little fishing village of Ulgoth's Beard is a nice little quest hub, with memorable characters and lively dialogue.

At the tavern I was greeted heartily by a smiling dwarf who hailed my party as a "merry band of heroes" and promised a glorious adventure to retrieve his grandfather's dagger "Soultaker" from Durlag's Tower. Maybe it's because it was late into the night when I was playing this, but this really appealed to me. Sign me up! And speak not a word of recompense, my good man -- whatever it is, I'll do it for free! At this point, I'm quite rich anyway, and the only rewards I'm really interested in anymore (aside from a fun story) are special items which are more likely to be found in challenging fights than as quest rewards. Plus, I'm almost at the end of the game, so rewards don't really even matter.

Then I learned the story of Durlag's Tower from a man who had been there on tour. All I had known of the tower up until this point was that it was added by the expansion and that it was full of traps, and not to touch it until I was high enough in level. I had assumed it was the home of some evil necromancer named Durlag who needed to be defeated, or something along those lines. But what he told me was instead a very sad and moving story about high hopes and grandfatherly intentions being dashed to bits and turned to grief. What happened to Durlag was similar to what I was afraid might have happened to the people of Candlekeep, but more tragic.

Then I met a poor mother who had lost her son due to the hucksters who were making profits selling tours and special keys to supposedly treasure-filled areas of the tower. These quests given by grieving family members always touch on my empathy.

The mood was lightened considerably with the interactions of the old sailor Calahan, "Scourge of fish in th' seven seas", who had some lighthearted and funny dialogue, and the disgruntled dwarf merchant Delsvirftanyon, with an interesting manner of speaking to match his unusual name. This merchant is selling off his stock, but he speaks as if he's in a shop, though he's standing far away from any buildings. There is a strange building on the other side of town that looks like a shop, but with no merchandise or NPCs, which I'm thinking may have been where this vendor was supposed to be. But the building also has a very strange basement, also empty, with nothing but false doors in it, and a large symbol on the floor. Maybe a purpose for it will show up later.

But first, there's a wizard named Shandalar who wants me to go to one of those islands.

Ice Island

Here's my review of this quest (the shortest one), An interesting premise, but the execution was rather unbelievable. The premise is that a remote location on a tiny frozen island acts as a "magnet" to capture powerful mages that are teleporting nearby. A handful of these mages are trapped there, living off of seabird eggs in an elaborate underground fortress that was allegedly built by some of the bored mages trapped there long ago. (Perhaps there's some kind of "carve chambers" spell I'm not aware of.)

The quest unfortunately just amounts to "everyone here is evil and attacks you", which is also unbelievable because if these mages are so hostile as to attack every newcomer that arrives, and also don't work together, they should have wiped themselves out by now.

No special encounters, no interesting characters, and if there was any special loot, it was forgettable. I'm guessing this quest was either the first one they wrote, and never went back to polish it, or it was simply one last quest thrown in as an afterthought, or to have more than two quest locations for this expansion.

Mendas and Balduran's shipwreck

This one was a much longer and more satisfying quest, with interesting locations, lots of NPC interactions, some interesting loot, and even a sort-of romance (the first I've experienced in this game, in fact). This quest plot had several twists and turns, and though the major one was pretty easy to guess, some things were unpredictable enough to keep me guessing. After killing the werewolf boss in the ship, and I found Balduran's diary, I suddenly had a sinking feeling that it would tell me that I had actually killed a cursed Balduran himself! Alas, this was not the case, but it would have been quite a twist!

For those who played this part, didn't anyone else feel bad about fighting the innocent villagers who are only attacking you because their two leaders basically betray their own people and whip them up into a frenzy? Especially if you kill one, and find the quest items you retrieved for their quests on their bodies. I avoided as many as I could. At least two of the villagers refused to fight my party because of the quests we'd done for them.

Back on the mainland afterward, there was one last twist, but it was to be expected after everything that you learn on the island. Makes the "hints" the NPCs drop feel a little heavy handed, much like the doppelgangers back in vanilla, who wouldn't have fooled anyone in reality with all their "slips of the tongue" and bizarre behaviour.

All in all, a good questline. The next bit is the main attraction, Durlag's Tower.

Durlag's Tower upper levels

This tower is the largest location in Tales of the Sword Coast, even though Balduran's island includes two exterior maps, several levels of ship, numerous buildings, and an underground cave system. It also has three different NPCs sending you there for one reason or another -- two quests and a guided tour. The tour is worth it for the chuckles and the background information.

As an aside, I've noticed that the expansion begins right away with several very expensive transactions (2 quests to settle bar tabs at 900 gold each, 500 gold to spend on a mystery grab bag of the merchant's stock, and instances of bribery to get people to talk. The tour isn't too expensive, but then the guide wants to sell you a 300 gold runestone on top of it). I guess this was supposed to be a gold sink, acknowledging that the player is probably filthy rich at this stage of the game. And I was, so why not spend it? I'm near the end of the game anyway, so what else am I going to spend it on? I bought some of the expensive magical items from the tavern owner, while I was at it.

I think I slightly broke the tour, though, since after the guide stopped talking the first time, I had Imoen check around the place for locked chests and traps, and she found a trap in the kitchen that apparently one of the other tourists was supposed to trigger, as later dialogue would indicate. When the guide called for a break, one of the tourists walked to where the now-disarmed trap had been, and the next time I talked to the guide, he warned us not to go wandering off like that tourist who we just saw get burned to death, though no such thing had happened. Ah well, I guess it was included to remind us, in case we'd forgotten, that Durlag had heavily trapped the tower before dying, as everyone had been saying.

Checking for the traps was tricky for the upper levels, since I couldn't do it while stealthed, and that meant facing possible monsters around every corner. It only occurs to me now that I should have had Edwin cast Improved Invisibility on her to do double duty in trap-disarming and monster-scouting.

So far, as of the upper tower, there has only been one fight that was a real challenge, and that was more of an irritation than a challenge. The succubus near the top. At Core Rules difficulty, it's a long, seemingly-impossible fight, with these four innate abilities she has. First, she keeps casting Dire Charm with no casting time, and even though she's a succubus, her charm works on the male and female members of the party (I had read that succubi could only charm males, regardless of whether or not the females are bisexual or lesbian). Then, she keeps teleporting around the place. Then, whenever she gets slightly injured, she turns ethereal and disappears, returning at full health. Even with my party under Haste, I can't hurt her enough to kill her, because she seems to be able to go ethereal at will, not even waiting 2 turns sometimes. And lastly, she's immune to every spell I cast at her, leaving my mages mostly useless. She isn't even affected by Skull Trap or Greater Malaison.

There's an evil solution that involves luring another adventurer to her clutches, but I'm not going to do that. I'd rather just avoid her and leave the quest alone. But before giving up, I tried it again at Normal difficulty. This time, she just stood there, never turning hostile, and didn't fight back at all as we killed her. Not a very satisfactory outcome. I didn't want auto-victory, I just wanted a fair fight. So I reloaded and tried again. This time she turned hostile as she should have, and she dire charmed Minsc just before she started running away with her circle yellow, indicating a morale failure. Her death came shortly thereafter.

So I don't know what to think here. At normal difficulty this is an easy fight, or at least it's easy when I'm all buffed up and prepared for as tough a fight as it was under core rules, where it becomes nigh impossible. Are succubi supposed to be this tough in the core rules?

By far, though, the toughest part of this tower is the pathfinding. Directing a character to stand in a strategic location often sends them running off in the opposite direction to go all the way around to the other side through a corridor. This is often a problem when an area hasn't been fully scouted out or cleared yet. Likewise, not being able to tell where the line-of-sight is on these curved corridors means sometimes my mages try to walk right into a crowd of monsters instead of throwing a fireball where it looks like it should be straight ahead.

Lower levels

Now things are getting really good! Once we got underground, the round rooms of the tower gave way to more extensive spaces, the first of which was an elaborate high class dwelling fit for a king, with all the amenities. They're very well-connected rooms with many logical exits, completely unlike the usual one-route-only corridor mazes seen elsewhere. This place would not be a fire hazard. It's still not a city/home for a whole clan, though, which is what the story says the tower was built to be. Maybe it'll look more like one as I go deeper.

This first underground level might be the first place I've seen in Baldur's Gate 1 that has special interactions with machines and tools, like what I saw in the first few rooms of BG2 when I tested it out. Places that you have to hunt for with your cursor, and find when the cursor turns into a circular shape. There are also a lot more of the things I had seen occasionally before -- the question mark cursor which gives you a textual description of the item, which in this case gives clues as to how they work and what you need to do.

This level has several puzzles to solve, which sets it apart from anything else I recall from the game. The first indication I got that there were going to be puzzles (aside from a fellow thief upstairs who mentioned puzzles) was when I found a gong mallet head, without its handle, and I knew I was going to have to find both its handle, and a gong to hit with it. Then I met some ward-keepers, who indicated that there were going to be four puzzles in total to solve in order to move on to the next level. The place is also, of course, heavily trapped and littered with bodies.

All in all, the puzzles were enjoyable, and I'm glad to have gotten such a nice change from the usual kind of questing. It's something that I didn't even really notice was absent until now.

Lower level 2 (with the doors)

This level of the tower was full of door-opening puzzles and special encounters. I thought the previous level was refreshing in its open layout, and how it specifically didn't include the kind of single pathway through the level that you usually see in games, mainly because they're usually illogically-floor-planned labyrinths of corridors. This level, at least, had a reasonable floor plan, and became an open layout once the doors were opened. The keys for this place were mainly wardstones instead of actual keys, though there was one real key in the bedroom. I have to say I'm not a fan of the "unpickable lock" game mechanic, in a game that includes lockpicking skills. But even though this was something of a key-hunt level, it did its best to keep it from being monotonous or routine.

The location design didn't seem very consistent. Separately, the set-pieces were very interesting and varied, but perhaps a little too varied. What was the room of three different bridges over lava for? Or the teleport room? Were they just for the traps? As an aside, I wonder if I missed out on some of the creativity here, since I was able to disarm almost all of the traps. One of the traps I missed was one that seemed to make a block of wall slam into the corridor to crush you.

The torture chamber was also quite unexpected. Nothing I had read about Durlag, the purpose of the tower, and nothing I'd seen of his ghost, indicated that he would have had need of a torture chamber. Perhaps it was just one of those things added entirely by the craftsmen he hired to devise the traps after the tragedy of his kin?

Lower level 3 (with the masks and four foes)

This level was also a strange mix of some rooms that looked like they were designed as part of a family home, and others that were just plain death traps. Who decided to put a pleasant hedge garden right next to a device that constantly explodes in fireballs? Actually, as we go deeper, it seems that more and more of the pretense of this being a home base is abandoned, or else the lower levels were most heavily redesigned by Durlag to revolve around challenges and death traps. This, of course, is fine with me. It made for some great gameplay and exploration.

This level included four themed challenges, with several giant speaking masks which offered clues and hints on strategies for the upcoming challenges, described fairly cryptically, which was nice and atmospheric.

One of the challenges, however, was a bit over-explained by Minsc (from vanilla game, or from NPC Project? Not sure), who explicitly said what to do against the slime, (use fire) even though the mask's clue made it clear enough.

Now, unlike the previous level, this level was completely open, with the entrance hall having three doors that could be explored in any order, which all eventually accessed the same areas. But also unlike the previous level, this one included a room that would have actually made more sense if you were restricted to approaching it from only one direction. There's a room with some rather tough enemies by one entrance, and some petrified adventurers by the other entrance. The statues are there to help you with the enemies, as was explained by an NPC on that side of the room. Unfortunately, I entered from the other entrance, and so I fought the enemies without help, and found the help too late. Too bad, because it was a pretty unique new thing for this game.

At the end of the four themed challenges, we got teleported to a life-sized chess board, for a very interesting and unique new encounter. My party was assigned chess roles depending on which square they were standing on, and the rules stated that if any of us stepped on an illegal-move square for our piece type, we would be punished with lightning. It didn't actually tell us which characters were which chess pieces (but they were lined up on specific squares), so you have to know the default arrangement of pieces on a real chessboard, and their moves, to know your restrictions.

Unfortunately, the enemies on the other side of the board didn't seem to have any restrictions, and they liked to cast spells like confusion or fear or something else that made some of my party members go running around on illegal squares, so it ended up as more of a free-for-all rather than a strategic challenge like I was expecting. Still an interesting idea, and I enjoyed it.

Lower level 4 (with the compasses)

This level was really good! It seems they decided to have each level have a different approach to gameplay, which really helped keep the whole thing fresh and interesting. This one again had three areas to explore in any order and "solve" in order to unlock the final challenge. I like this design. Somewhere in this level, I think, was also a bit of useful loot illustrating some halfling humour, to add to an earlier amusing Alora interaction.

Strangely, this was the only level that didn't allow you to just go back up the stairs to leave. Even with my bag of holding, I kept filling up with loot, and at this point I don't bother picking up any un-enchanted weapons or armour, sticking only to ammo (that I can use), jewelry, potions, wands, and scrolls. But I still had to trek back up to the surface several times to unload with the vendor at the map's entrance. I wish he were placed a little more conveniently, since it was annoying and monotonous walking up all the paths past the respawning doppelgangers to get back to him. I probably should have ignored the jewelry, too, considering how close to the end of the game I was.

Anyway, to get back to the surface from this level, you actually have to find and talk to an NPC down one of the corridors, and it was down the last one I picked to explore. Nevertheless, I still prefer that the place could be explored in any order.

The unique feature of this level was a set of three reading comprehension quizzes dealing with the backstory of the tragedy of the tower. Pretty daring to include that sort of thing, and very refreshing to have that kind of challenge for a change. I lament that we'll probably never see that kind of puzzle in a modern game. Dragon Age at least had a section of riddles in the Mage origin, but I still kept finding people asking for the answers to them. Were they that hard? They were multiple choice!

This is the last of the levels in the tower, and once you've accomplished everything here, the ghost of Durlag wants you to fight some demon knight that decided to move into the tower recently. It was another challenging boss fight that I had to attempt multiple times, but I did it without using the magic mirror that was talked about by an NPC outside the room and by the demon knight himself. I'm thinking maybe I should have used it, just to get more out of the special content they included for this fight. I could have a conventional fight any time, right? Maybe I'll go back later and try it with the mirror. That's why I keep plenty of save files.

Not quite over

To my surprise, there was still one last bit of content left in the expansion beyond going back to turn in the quests at Ulgoth's Beard.

Awaiting me back in town, as I returned with the dwarf's dagger Soultaker, was a band of cultists for some kind of demon, who wanted the dagger to use in a ritual to bring the demon to the earth (or whatever the name of the planet is in D&D). Apparently the dagger had taken a sufficient number of souls to use in this ritual.

Anyway, despite not giving it to them, and despite that they never had my party imprisoned or otherwise unable to stop them, they somehow took the dagger from me anyway.

So now I see the purpose of that conspicuously empty and ominous basement under the shop I mentioned before! That's where the cultists are having their ritual. I guess they had all gone out to eat when I was investigating the place the first time. Perhaps, in an earlier design of the expansion, this was the original reason the departing shopkeeper was selling off all his wares? It probably would have made more sense, but perhaps would have distracted the player from the tasks that needed to be completed first.

So I went to the shop and had to fight another small group of cultists who confirmed their nefarious intent, then got inside and fought another small group, this time with a mage or other kind of magic user. If I had any use for plate armour at this point, I could have outfitted every single recruitable NPC I've met with all the plate I picked up from these cultists.

So then I got into the basement, and found myself in a new boss battle, with the raised demon! This demon thoroughly thrashed me, worse than any other boss fight in the game (unless I count Sarevok and his helpers). Mainly it was because he kept silencing and paralysing everyone, making it impossible to do any real DPS or heal my wounded. In this encounter, you have to kill off all of the frozen cultists first (who thankfully never move or attack), because any time the demon dies, he just takes over the body of one of the cultists and comes back with full health. The cultists had a hell of a lot of hit points on their own, though, so this took a while.

A couple of times I was lucky enough to debilitate the demon with one of my spells (maybe Emotion), but I didn't survive those times. Another nasty thing this demon does is to infect random party members with its death gaze, which perma-kills the party member and turns him/her into a hostile ghoul. You have to dispel magic on the infected characters to prevent it, and several times I didn't notice when one was infected (it's a little icon that looks like either a ghost or a snake, or a Death Eater tattoo).

I fought this battle maybe a dozen times or more, and actually won a few times (including one of the first tries), but something was wrong. There was no spoken scene at the end as there should have been, I didn't receive XP for killing the demon, and in fact the demon died too early! As mentioned above, the demon is supposed to come back to life if you kill it before killing all the cultists -- and thanks to my use of AoE spells and potions, the demon happened to die a few times even though I wasn't aiming for him, and occasionally he would simply not reappear, despite not having killed all the cultists yet. Definitely a bug. The dwarf that gave me the quest acknowledged that the demon was dead, at least, but I was still cheated out of a proper ending.

This happened every time, in fact, in the 3 or 4 times I beat it successfully (some attempts of which included the use of Cloudkill, but not all). Once I found out what was supposed to happen and after I watched a video of the ending narrative I missed, I just went through it one last time after enabling the cheats (first and only time I used them) to see if it would complete properly if I killed all the cultists first, and then the demon (first enabling cheats, then using Ctrl-Y cheat to kill the cultists, then unpause/repause to be sure, and then Ctrl-Y on the demon). Still no proper ending and no XP for the demon, so I just considered it done, talked to the dwarf, and left Ulgoth's Beard.

All in all, buggy ending aside, I found this expansion to be extremely enjoyable and in some places it was much superior to the original game. At the very least, it added several more dimensions to the BG gameplay, and more than makes up for that horrible end-game maze back in vanilla.

With the final battle with Sarevok described in the previous post, this marks the end of my play of Baldur's Gate 1.

Baldur's Gate, part 7: end of the vanilla game

Return to Candlekeep

Returning to Candlekeep at this point in the game really felt like a homecoming to me, since it has in fact been almost a year since I first started the game. I didn't actually remember who some of the characters were until they spoke and made some reference to the quests I had completed back at the beginning of the game (such as the lady who lost her book).

The whole conceit of Candlekeep doesn't quite hold up to scrutiny in my eyes. You step outside the gates, and immediately you're not allowed back in unless you can donate a very rare book to their library? Even though you grew up there? It's hard to imagine how life would work there under those conditions.

Winthrop the innkeeper showed pretty clear signs of never having been out in the world, though, since his first words on my return was to call out to hidden assassins to fire crossbows at me -- as a joke. Considering the assassination attempts that happened within Candlekeep before I left, and the death of Gorion, and of course the fact that I was in a well-armed group, that probably wasn't wise. I might have fallen for it, too, if the NPC project hadn't inserted tearfully sentimental dialogue from Imoen between his words and my response choices.

My first indication that something was wrong came when I visited the priest's house where the first assassination attempt had taken place. The priest was surrounded by dead cats, and he was acting strangely, as if possessed. He left without revealing himself due to my answer, so I didn't find out exactly what was going on until I ran into another suspicious figure in the library. This time, I questioned him more strongly, and he revealed himself as a doppelganger and attacked. Shortly thereafter, I was approached by a suspicious cloaked figure who knew a little too much about the details of what had happened the night of Gorion's death, and who insisted I have a ring as a gift. I took it, but threw it away and didn't use it. Still don't know what it would have done, but I'm sure it was cursed.

After some intrigue and plot twists (and some amusing embarrassing stories about my character's childhood told by an elderly couple in the library), I ended up in a new dungeon under Candlekeep, and again, I was glad for it! It was a very interesting dungeon, which included some sinister and potentially chilling implications. In here, there were doppelgangers of just about every NPC I had met at the beginning of the game in Candlekeep. Were all of these characters now dead? Is it necessary for them to be dead for these doppelgangers to take their forms? Since the game never lets you go back to Candlekeep, I never got to find out, but it's possible they were not dead, since doppelgangers of Elminster and Gorion even showed up. Gorion died in a more conventional way, and there were no doppelgangers around at that time, and I strongly doubt they had actually killed Elminster, so perhaps these were all doppelgangers who were preparing to take over the real people in Candlekeep, and hadn't yet done it.

Alora disappearing during arrest

I happened across a post on the Bioware forums that warned me about this shortly before it happened to me -- some kind of bug that causes Alora to disappear if she's in your party. It happens when you confront Angelo of the Flaming Fist in Chapter 7. Just before you're thrown in prison, Alora will say "I'm too young to die! [Charname], we've got to do something!" and then the scene switches to jail, whereupon she's no longer in your party. I'm guessing something dialogue-related is supposed to happen between those two events, and it's not happening for some reason (perhaps an expected party member is not present.) I don't think this bug is being taken seriously, because people assume it's actually the intended occurence where Angelo will randomly select someone to be killed on the spot if you choose a hostile dialogue response to him. This is not the case here, because Alora disappears without notice regardless of which response you pick. Choosing the hostile answer shows a random party member being killed, with their belongings on the floor and a grey picture in the party portraits, and this happens in addition to Alora disappearing from the party entirely.

I'm guessing this might be mod-related or Tutu-related, and that, combined with not everyone having Alora in their party anyway, may lead to the bug's lack of exposure. The workaround I used was to remove Alora from my party just before confronting Angelo, and returning to pick her back up after getting out of jail.

Duchal Palace fight challenging, and buggy

I encountered another more game-stopping bug at the Duchal Palace battle. The first time I did it, everything went smoothly. I killed all the enemies with no party members lost and both dukes still standing. The trouble was, nothing happened after that. I went around and tried to talk to the dukes and Sarevok, and they had generic responses. I went upstairs and all around, and nothing was happening. So I reloaded, didn't do quite as well that time (one of the dukes died), and this time the surviving duke (Duke Belt) initiated a conversation that progressed the plot once the battle was done. Well, that wasn't very ideal.

I played that battle several more times, to varying degrees of success, but any time both dukes lived, the game would get stuck. Only when Duke Belt was the only survivor did things progress as they should. He informed me of the fleeing Sarevok's destination (the ruins of the older city of Baldur's Gate, on top of which the current city is built), and I declined his offer to teleport me there, since I wasn't done looting the palace yet.

I'm a sorcerer priest

From what I understand, evil characters (below a certain reputation level) receive destructive abilities at the beginning of each chapter, while good characters receive healing ones. Up until chapter 7, I had only gotten Heal Minor Wounds and Slow Poison, but now that I've gotten Call Upon Holy Might, the "holy" part finally made me realise that these were all priest spells. The question is, do all gods control the healing and holy type spells? Even the Lord of Murder? So in D&D, it doesn't matter which god you're a priest of; as long as you're a priest, you get to use healing spells and have all the other specialties and restrictions of priests. How very...egalitarian of these gods.

Thieves' Guild Maze

The traps in the maze were spread so far apart, you might be lulled into carelessness, but I steadfastly had Imoen find and disarm all the traps down these long corridors. There were markings on the walls that I noticed next to the first set of traps, and saw them again when I got to the next set, but they were so conspicuously placed that I didn't trust them to be anything more than a more subtle 2nd-level trap to beat those who didn't get careless from the long distances between trap placement. Did Sarevok reset these traps when he passed through? Or did he somehow evade them without setting them off?

Anyway, the skeleton warriors and doom guards were pretty tough here, even one at a time, and I had to rest frequently. The maze, alas, was featureless and tedious.

When I got to Winky Pennyrate lying on the floor deep in the maze, his dialogue indicated that I was heading into the final showdown, and it occurred to me to wonder if I was missing anything by plowing on ahead, so I checked with the Dudleyville guide, and it advised me to delay the final battle until after I'd gone through the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion content. It seemed pretty narrative-breaking to go off and visit other locations just like that, since Sarevok was on the run and all, but the Tales of the Sword Coast manual explains that beating Sarevok ends the game, and if you want to play the expansion content even though you've already beaten him (without just loading up a save from before you fought him), it resets the final battle so that it hasn't happened yet. So one way or another, I'm leaving him down there to stew in his own stink until I've finished my tour of the expansion.

Expansion content

Several days have passed now, and I have completed the game. For the purpose of chronology, since I hadn't yet posted this or my notes about Tales of the Sword Coast, I've decided to describe my experience with Sarevok here, and deal with the expansion content afterwards.

Final battle with Sarevok

This was a very tough, challenging battle on Core Rules difficulty. I've heard it's made tougher if you have the expansion installed (which I do), and it's also tougher with Tutu, because Tutu limits the number of monster and skeleton summons you can have.

I think I attempted this battle almost 10 times before finally succeeding. It was mainly due to Angelo's explosive arrows, and it had be be cheating how often he was able to shoot them. I just kept seeing these rapidfire explosions, boom, boom, BOOM and dying over and over. I can't shoot arrows that fast! Sarevok resisted every single attempt I threw at him to paralyse him, make him sleep, or capture him in a web or a Resilient Sphere, even with his saving throws lowered with Greater Malaison, and he just kept chopping through my summons (and then Minsc and my other party members) faster than I could summon more while everyone else was getting creamed with fireballs (and I didn't have any fire resistance potions on hand, and didn't want to go all the way through that maze twice more to get some down there).

So, after reading up on some suggested strategies on the old forum, I finally beat it with this approach. I snuck up there just out of view, and threw a Dispel Magic up there. It said it worked, with all the names of the enemies showing "Dispel effects", but it didn't actually seem to make any difference at all. Two of them still had their cylinder and sphere shields, and Sarevok still ran around like Sonic the Hedgehog until I dispelled them again during the battle with Alora's magic-dispelling arrows (slower, since I had to do them one at a time, and sometimes she missed, but it was worth it not to dispel the beneficial buffs on my party).

Anyway, they didn't react to the dispel, so I just snuck Imoen up there stealthed until Sarevok spoke. His henchmen teleported down to the rest of my party as usual, but Sarevok didn't move since he didn't see anyone, so I was free to focus on the three stooges Tazok, Semaj, and Angelo. I had skeletons and 7 summoned monsters down there waiting for them (wands of monster summoning seem to be exempt from the summon limits), which kept them all busy, along with Minsc acting as a decoy protected by Otiluke's Resilient Sphere (which he sometimes resists, to my annoyance -- apparently that's another one of the changes caused by Tutu) and allowed everyone else to stand out of the way and let Alora shoot the dispels at them and let me and Edwin DPS them down and refresh the summons as they kept blowing themselves up shooting those detonation arrows at Minsc and the monsters standing right next to them. Imoen was hit by one of their confusion spells, though, so she was standing within range of the blast. I managed to draw her down with Viconia as a side effect of going up there to heal her. Confused Imoen started trying to attack her, so I had her chase Viconia out of range of the explosions, threw a heal on her and got out of her way (she didn't follow further to continue attacking).

For once, I got those three killed without losing a party member. In previous attempts, I had tried to win even after losing members, since Viconia could raise the dead using scrolls I'd been collecting for the purpose, but healing potions just don't heal enough at this level, and it takes too long to drink as many as you need while there's a battle going on. I'd like to see more than one "strength" of healing potion in this game, like in other games. You know I had to be desperate to beat this battle when I still tried plowing ahead even though Imoen died a permanent death in one of those earlier attempts.

So anyway, with just Sarevok left to fight, I was actually able to rest to relearn my spells and rebuff everyone, since I'm using a mod that lets you rest in most interiors as long as you're not in battle and enemies aren't within the field of view. It's possible I may have been able to win without resting, since I had plenty of healing potions on hand, but I really wanted to finish this game before school started again.

First, I softened him up by sending Edwin up there to throw fireballs, Alora to toss a potion of explosions (and ready her arrows of dispel and detonation), and Minsc to throw an oil of fiery burning. I myself started by casting a web, hoping to catch him in it so I could have Edwin cast Cloudkill, but as I mentioned before, he just strode right through the web. So everyone ran back down to the bottom of the screen (always avoiding the big trapped circle area in the centre that can't be disarmed) where I had more monsters and skeletons waiting for him. This time, Minsc stood out of the way, since he had resisted Otiluke's Resilient Sphere this time, and I just had Alora shoot arrows of biting at him, Viconia cast Firestrike from scrolls and the Wand of the Heavens, and Edwin and I shot magic missiles at him and refreshed the summons as Sarevok kept mowing them down, and finally it was all over.

I was treated to a final movie and credits for both vanilla and expansion Baldur's Gate, and then the title screen. I thought I would get a spoken epilogue like in the chapter breaks, or maybe a screen of text congratulating me, but no such luck. The ending movie was fine, but I really think a little textual or spoken story ending should have been in there.

I went and found some videos of the end of the game in the original (non-Tutu) engine, and I see that it was supposed to tell me something like "Sarevok has fallen. The battle is won!" (which isn't really much better of an ending) and then tell me about the final save. It did not tell me this, in fact, nor did it award me the XP I saw it award the player in the video. Perhaps that's what was supposed to be happening when it kept auto-pausing and saying "target gone". Not sure if this happens with Tutu all the time, or if it's a bug. After the Duchal Palace bug, Alora disappearing, this, and the bug I'll describe later from the expansion content, I believe I have the global variable bug I've read about, though I thought I had installed all the patches.

Ah well. It's done, and Baldur's Gate 2 awaits!

Final thoughts

What an incredibly long game! I first mentioned plans to review BG at the beginning of May 2010, but my earliest screenshots are dated from early January 2010, and here we are in January of 2011. The game saves themselves attest that it's been 346 days since I started the game. Admittedly, I took my time getting into it, with all the other games that also occupied my time (as well as school and other non-leisure concerns), so as a rough estimate, I'd guess I spent about 4 months playing this game, if I exclude the time spent playing other games. And it was a very fun ride. I really enjoyed the challenge and difficulty in the fights that I had to attempt multiple times trying different strategies.

Baldur's Gate 1 and its expansion had a very clear major theme of doppelgangers, both in the merchant's league questline and in Candlekeep, and the expansion continued that theme. It is a horrific and tragic thing to happen, and it was used effectively here, but I hope it doesn't continue into BG2, because any more of it and it'll get old.

It's interesting how much my perspective has changed over these years in regard to these games. As much as I may complain about modern RPGs now, now that I recognise most them as sickly shadows of their ancestors, I do have to thank them for introducing me, with training wheels, to a genre that I had shunned until recently. Perhaps as little as 3 or 4 years ago, whenever I saw images or video of a game in isometric view, with little coloured circles under the feet of the characters, I immediately lost interest. Modern "streamlined" RPGs serve their purpose as a sort of child's "My First RPG" to people like me who never got into them when they were really good, and they eased me into the genre painlessly. It's much like going to see a movie before reading the book it was based on. If you watch the movie first, you'll be more likely to enjoy it than if you read the book first, because the book is always better.

I saw people lamenting the passing of Troika at the time, but I never understood what had been lost. Now I do, and all I can hope is that enough independent developers rise to the occasion, to fill the niche that is being ignored by the larger companies, before I run out of good games from the past that I haven't played yet.

Next post, I'll talk about my impressions of the expansion.