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Baldur's Gate by Interplay

Baldur's Gate takes place in the Forgotten Realms universe, where the city of Baldur's Gate is the largest and most powerful in the region. It has the city of Amn to it's south, the sparse region of High Moor to the north, the Wood of Sharp Teeth to the east, and the Sea of Swords to the west as it's neighbors. Because of it's size, Baldur's Gate has always been a city with ample resources, but recently the availability of iron has been growing scarce. Baldur's army is having trouble keeping itself well armed, villagers & peasants cannot buy plows or tools, bandits and mercenaries begin to raid merchants entering the city. Rumors start that the neighboring city of Amn is responsible and are planning to invade. More mines are dug manned with more workers, but the region is left with very poor quality iron which breaks after everyday use or no iron at all. You start off in the wilds of the Sword Coast to the west of Baldur's Gate where you hear of the current events and dire situation and your adventure begins...

In Baldur's Gate, you can choose from a wide variety of the classes, races, and alignments that are presently offered in TSR's AD&D Forgotten Realms universe. Eventually, up to five other characters may join you in your quest making you a six person party. Bioware & Interplay have gone to great lengths to make everything in Baldur's Gate adhere to the rules and environment already set up in AD&D universe. Things like initiative, distractions from enemies while casting, casting times and even the spells themselves are all taken into consideration. For all the complexity, though, Baldur's Gate runs in real time. In combat, a 3-second round replaces the standard 1-minute one and the computer calculates all the initiatives and things like that instantly. This makes for smooth-running real time action, but without sacrificing the genuine AD&D feel.

There are 7 chapters planned with around 100 sub-quests as well. More than 50 spells and 60 monsters are incorporated into the mix and, to add to the realism, the game runs in day / night cycles. Where you will start off adventuring in the morning, having it get brighter in the middle of the day, and then getting darker as the day passes into night. And, of course, encounters with monsters are more frequent when the sun goes down. Everything has received a healthy portion of detail, depth and well thought-out development. Even the characters themselves have their own personalities and attitudes towards others depending on their race and class. Interplay is planning on Baldur's Gate being a big success and will be putting together an add-on expansion pack for Baldur's shortly after the release of the full game and they have even began talking about a sequel to Baldur's if all goes well.

Baldur's Gate is going to require atleast a Pentium 166 with a 2MB (or more) SVGA graphics card. You'll also need atleast 16MB of RAM, a 4x or higher CD-ROM drive and about 300 MB of free hard drive space. And since Baldur's is a Windows95 only game, your going to need Win95 with DirectX 5.0 or later. And, just in case you want all the performance you can get, Baldur's Gate will support 24- and 32-bit graphics as well as the standard 16-bit. Support for MMX will also be available and a DVD-ROM version is also being planned for release shortly after the normal CD-ROM version. Bioware has stated that they do not want to release Baldur's Gate until they feel it is completely ready. Originally set for a Fall '98 release date, this has changed to a "When it's done" release date. Baldur's Gate is now currently available.

More Information on Baldur's Gate can be found at the following sites: BG Chronicles The Raging Boar Tavern The Official Baldur's Gate FAQ