Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Editions
DO THESE CLASSIC DUNGEON & DRAGONS RPGS STILL SCORE CRITICAL HITS? DARRAN JONES
PUBLISHER BEAMDOG / DEVELOPER BEAMDOG, BIOWARE, BLACK ISLE / RELEASE DATE OUT NOW / COST £41.74/$49.99
manage whatever tasks you wished,
from backstabbing an ogre that was
threatening to wipe out your team,
to using your mage to cast a killer
fireball that scorched your enemies.
That original point-and-click method
of control is still available if you want
an authentic experience, but we’d
recommend using the new Drive mode
that allows you to control your entire
team with the analogue stick. It works
exceptionally well, massively speeding
up progress through the Sword
Coast and making it feel more like a
conventional console RPG.Saving throw
This isn’t the only quality-of-life tweak
Beamdog has made to improve your
journey to Baldur’s Gate. Squeeze the
right trigger and you’ll bring up a neat
radial menu that will allow you access
to everything from resting your party to
checking your inventory, levelling
up your characters and managing
your spells. It feels extremely fluid
and dramatically cuts down a fiddly
aspect of the original game. AnotherIt’s safe to say that
Dungeons & Dragons
is more popular than
it has ever been- a fact which is
immensely gratifying
for someone who has enjoyed it
since the early Eighties. Most modern
videogames owe debts to the tabletop
game (it pretty much coined the
level-up system, for example) so
it’s pleasing to see that some of the
best D&D adventures of all time have
been dusted down and ported over to
Microsoft’s powerful black box. It’s
even more pleasing to see how well
they hold up in today’s climate.
The fact that both Baldur’s Gate
and Baldur’s Gate II still feel so
relevant today is largely down to both
the incredible work made by original
devs BioWare and Black Isle, and the
changes that Beamdog has made to
modernise them for today’s discerning
gamer. The original PC games were
mouse-driven affairs that enabled you
to effortlessly manage your band of
adventurers, easily setting them up to
radial option exists for managing
your party, allowing you to change
their position in your formation, set
up new groups and even switch their
AI on and off. Pressing the Y button
immediately brings up a map of the
area you’re currently exploring, while
holding down the A button shows off
any NPCs in the area that are worth
talking to (very handy when you start
investigating the more populated
areas of the game). Countless zones
of the game have been overhauled
to ensure that playing it with a
controller is as responsive as possible,
and we’d argue that it’s the best
setup the games could possibly
have. Pathfinding has been greatly
improved, and there are six new
characters available across the two
games, including a psychotic half-orc
and a potion-quaffing bear. However,
as much as Beamdog has done to
overhaul these classic games, there
are some aspects of both Baldur’s
Gate titles that are showing their age.
The combat was fine back in 1998
and 2000, but it is now starting toshort
cutWHAT IS IT?
A pair of classic
isometric adventures
rebooted for today’s
modern audience.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
The best comparisons
on Xbox are Divinity:
Original Sin II and
Torment: Tides Of
Numenera.
WHO’S IT FOR?
Anyone who has
loved playing
Dungeons & Dragons,
and those who want
to twat a Kobold with
a +1 sword.074 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE