Bio..who?
Chances are, if you're an RPG fan, or even if you're not, you've heard of Bioware. They have developed some of the most high profile games of recent years, such as the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series. However, the game that really put them on the map, so to speak, was one of their earliest; 1998's Baldur's Gate.
Baldur's Gate
Baldur's Gate is a game based in the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons and Dragons, so Bioware had quite a bit of source material to pull from, and it was from this rock solid foundation that they crafted an RPG that would completely change the playing field for the genre.
Baldur's Gate was one of the first RPGs to offer the player meaningful choices beyond how they decided to equip their character and manipulate their statistics. Although the story was still quite linear, the player could now dictate if they wanted different characters to travel with them, and in turn these characters would offer new quests, adventures, and conversation options; you couldn't possibly see everything in one play-through.
Talk, Talk, Talk
The mechanic that set Baldur's Gate apart from other RPGs at the time was the conversation system. When you click on a Non-Player Character (NPC) to initiate a conversation, instead of a linear back and forth taking place, you may be presented with several different choices of response. Each response could garner yet another unique response from the NPC, creating what is called a conversation tree, and at the end of some branches could lie a quest or a hint on how to move forward. Bioware is widely considered to be the first developer to really evolve this branching conversation system in a meaningful way. Of course Baldur's Gate was only the first iteration of this system. I will explore how they refined it later on!
Resources
Baldur's gate for pc reviews. (1998, November 30). Retrieved from http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/baldurs-gate
If I were to suggest a change it would have to be go more in depth on the conversation tree and what it has done for role playing games as a whole. The feature is still used today in games like Fallout, and it influenced the genre a great deal. In this post, it’s only a nub in comparison to Baulder’s Gate and BioWare. It’s good, don’t get me wrong, but if you wanted it to be better I would suggest cutting the introduction down an focusing on the conversation tree and its influence. All and all, love the blog.
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