Baldur's Gate

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Baldur's Gate is a series of fantasy role-playing video games, and one of its best-loved heroes takes advice from a hamster. Minsc, a berserker ranger from the human nation of Rashemen, travels with a hamster named Boo. He believes Boo is a "miniature giant space hamster" and consults the animal about what to do. The games are set in the Forgotten Realms, a campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons.

  The series raises several questions that this documentary will answer. How did a new way of handling battle change computer role-playing? Why did one branch of the series head to consoles while another stayed on personal computers? Which promising games never reached players? And how did a franchise fall quiet for years, then come back to win some of the industry's biggest awards?

  5654

• 2. Branches and Engine

  ›

  Two sub-series make up Baldur's Gate: the Bhaalspawn Saga and the Dark Alliance. Both take place mostly in the Western Heartlands, a region of the Forgotten Realms. The Bhaalspawn Saga also stretches into Amn and Tethyr.

  BioWare originally developed the Bhaalspawn Saga for personal computers. Critics acclaimed it for pausable real-time gameplay, which is credited with revitalizing the computer role-playing game genre, known as CRPG. The Dark Alliance games went to consoles and succeeded with both critics and buyers.

  Behind the PC games ran BioWare's Infinity Engine, which showed the world as a pre-rendered isometric view. The characters on screen were sprites. Baldur's Gate was the third computer game to use the Lua scripting language. Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale series later ran on the same engine.

  The earliest games rested on a real-time modification of the second edition of AD&D, short for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. A party could hold up to six members. Players either created them under the AD&D rules or recruited non-player characters, called NPCs, from the game world. Baldur's Gate 3 would later adopt Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition and limit the party to four characters.

  Numerous side quests and plot twists attach to particular NPCs and activate only when those characters travel in the party. Extensive, context-dependent dialogue fleshes out many characters, inside the party and outside it, and gives them added complexity. Those characters needed a plot to move through, and the first game sent players to a place called Candlekeep.

  56233031

• 3. Candlekeep to Amn

  ›

  Candlekeep is a fortified library-monastery, south of the city of Baldur's Gate and north of the kingdom of Amn. There the sage Gorion raises an orphan who becomes the player character of the first game. An urgent departure and a violent separation from Gorion send the protagonist in search of his allies.

  The search pulls the protagonist into the region's iron crisis, which mysteriously causes all metal to crumble. Along the way, increasingly powerful enemies are tasked with taking the protagonist's life. An expansion called Tales of the Sword Coast added nothing to the main storyline. It offered more areas along the Sword Coast, tougher enemies, more spells, better equipment and higher levels of experience. It also changed some general gameplay and altered the original game's final battle.

  Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn opens with the main character captured by Jon Irenicus. Escape leads into Athkatla, the capital of Amn. From there the protagonist works out the reason for the capture while journeying through Amn and the Underdark.

  The sequel brought further specialization of character classes, better graphics and higher power levels. It also allowed more interaction with joinable NPCs, including friendships, romances and exchanges among party members. Throne of Bhaal, an expansion for Shadows of Amn, added new areas to explore and concluded the Bhaalspawn story arc begun in the first game. In that finale the first game's chief villain, Sarevok Anchev, can even return, if the player chooses to restore him to life.

  5623263031

• 4. Companions and Villains

  ›

  Paul Dean of PC Gamer wrote that the series "has always been as much about who these characters were as what they could do." He called the characters the cornerstone of the series. He ranked some of them among the best RPG companions ever written.

  Imoen was never planned as a star. Late in development, BioWare added her to "fill a non-psychotic-thief gap in the early levels." The studio did not anticipate how popular she would become with fans. She is the player character's childhood friend, a fellow ward of Gorion raised in Candlekeep, and an expert thief. In Shadows of Amn she is tortured, then arrested by the Cowled Wizards, an organisation of magic-users, for unlicensed magic use.

  Jaheira and Khalid arrive as a pair. She is a half-elf warrior druid and he is a half-elf fighter, and both belong to the Harpers, a semi-secret organization that promotes good and balance between civilization and nature. Gorion leaves instructions for the player to meet them after he is killed. If one leaves the party, the other follows.

  Khalid is nervous and peace-loving, with a pronounced stutter. Irenicus murders him in Shadows of Amn, which leaves Jaheira widowed and carrying survivor's guilt. The writer David Gaider noted that her romantic subplot was lengthy but riddled with bugs. Jaheira remains one of the most popular and well-regarded characters in the series.

  Anomen Delryn is a warrior priest of Helm who covers deep insecurity, caused by his father's treatment of him, with vanity and boasting. He brags about battles he most likely never fought. Whether he succeeds in his knighthood quest in the Most Noble Order of the Radiant Heart changes his personality and in-game alignment. Gaider said Anomen's romance subplot was his first attempt as a writer employed by BioWare.

  Edwin Odesseiron, a haughty member of the Red Wizards of Thay, asks for the player's help in killing the witch Dynaheir. He joins the party if the player agrees. His side quest for the Nether Scrolls ends with him changing sex after he tries to invoke their power. The arc is played as pure comic relief with no connection to a real-world issue. Esther MacCallum-Stewart nevertheless noted it as an early example of an LGBT theme in a BioWare RPG.

  Dynaheir is the reason Minsc is in the story at all. Guarding the Rashemi witch is his rite of passage, and the two are inseparable once she is rescued. Irenicus murders her before Shadows of Amn begins, so Minsc outlives her.

  Other companions fill out the roster. Aerie is an avariel, a winged elven subspecies, who lost her wings as a child when slavers imprisoned her in a circus. A gnome named Quayle later rescued her and restored her to health. Viconia DeVir is a drow outcast and Cleric of Shar, the goddess of darkness, night and loss.

  Jan Jansen is a gnome, a race with an average lifespan of over 350 years. He is an eccentric inventor who rambles through lengthy stories that never reach a point. The gadgets he peddles in Amn turn out to be dangerous weapons. Korgan Bloodaxe is an evil-aligned dwarven berserker found at the Copper Coronet Inn. Players rate him highly for his combat skills and for his banter with good-aligned party members. Guests from elsewhere in the Forgotten Realms also appear, including Drizzt Do'Urden, Elminster and Volothamp Geddarm.

  The antagonists carry just as much history. Sarevok Anchev is a mortal spawn of Bhaal, the dead God of Murder, which makes him the half-brother of the player character. As a child he was the intended victim of a sacrificial ritual that Gorion and the Harpers stopped. Rieltar Anchev, a member of a mercantile organization called the Iron Throne, later adopted him.

  Sarevok's foster father is central to fomenting the iron crisis in Baldur's Gate and to the doppelganger infiltration of merchant rivals. The Iron Throne wanted power. Sarevok wanted to exploit the resulting chaos to kill his fellow Bhaalspawn and ascend into divinity himself.

  Jon Irenicus, the chief antagonist of Shadows of Amn, is a cold and calculating mage. The player first meets him as he tortures the player character with powerful magic, hoping to learn the mysteries of their divine ancestry. He was once an elf named Joneleth. Queen Ellesime exiled him from his home city of Suldanessellar because of his hubris in seeking godhood.

  Yoshimo, a bounty hunter rogue from Kara-Tur, looks like an ally. He meets the party in Irenicus' complex early in Shadows of Amn and offers to join them to improve their odds of escape. At Spellhold, where Irenicus and Imoen are held by the Cowled Wizards, Yoshimo reveals that he was under Irenicus' thrall all along. His purpose was to betray the player as part of the mage's contingency plan. He dies in battle with the party whatever the player chooses, and he is the only Shadows of Amn companion the player cannot recruit in Throne of Bhaal.

  5457585961

• 5. Dark Alliance on Consoles

  ›

  Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance reached the PlayStation 2 in 2001, with Xbox and GameCube versions following. Snowblind Studios and others developed it as an action role-playing game. It takes place in the city of Baldur's Gate and the area around it, and its ruleset derives from the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Its plot has nothing to do with the earlier PC games.

  The console version used an overhead third-person view and hack-and-slash dungeon crawl gameplay. Players chose from defined characters instead of building their own. Vahn, an Arcane Archer known for shooting arrows with unerring accuracy, is one of them. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time, he lands in the political and social upheaval of the city. He faces the Dark Alliance, led by Eldrith the Betrayer.

  A Game Boy Advance version arrived in 2004 with reduced graphics quality and a 2.5D isometric perspective. Every port was very well received, yet only the PlayStation 2 original gained universal acclaim.

  The sequel pushed the formula toward a full role-playing game. Players could craft weapons, armor and amulets and level up their class. Baldur's Gate became a hub city, with a world map and the ability to travel back to earlier areas, which made the game open world. Many more side quests were added. The same year, 2004, Sorrent published a Baldur's Gate mobile game for J2ME. In 2016 Interplay Entertainment put its entire catalogue of video game properties up for sale, Dark Alliance included.

  3334353637

• 6. The Unmade Games

  ›

  Jefferson and FR6 were the code names of Baldur's Gate III: The Black Hound, which Black Isle Studios mentioned in early 2001 as a new game using a 3D engine. It was announced in 2002 and was said to use the 3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons ruleset. The Jefferson Engine could cast dynamic shadows. The design also planned to borrow elements from the Dark Alliance series.

  The Black Hound was meant to step away from the high-powered epic of the Bhaalspawn saga toward a low-key plot. Protagonists would reach only around level four by the end of Black Isle's typically large campaign, with a hard cap at level eight. Quests mattered more than combat. The Baldur's Gate name was a matter of licensing and not of story, since the game would have no connection to the earlier series. It would have started a new Black Hound series and continued some aspects of the Icewind Dale II story.

  In an interview with Winterwind Productions, developer Damien Foletto described the opening. The player character rests at a campsite when a woman chasing a Black Hound crashes in and kills it. The hound dies on the player character's lap. Accusing the player character of being in league with the dog, she is about to kill them too, until the Riders of Archendale arrive and scare her off. The local magistrates then tell the player character not to wander far. The quest would uncover who the mad cleric was, and why a black spirit hound follows the player character around.

  Development on The Black Hound was cancelled in 2003. The third Dark Alliance game followed in 2004, when parent company Interplay Entertainment closed Black Isle Studios. The Black Hound was 75% finished. Interplay had lost the right to publish Baldur's Gate games on the PC while keeping the name for consoles, and that is also why Dark Alliance II exists. The Black Hound's engine was repurposed for Van Buren, the working title of the eventual Fallout 3, which proved similarly ill-fated.

  Atari said in a December 2008 press conference that the Baldur's Gate series, among others, would be revisited after 2009. Sawyer kept working on The Black Hound as a personal side project, shaping it for a time into a module for Neverwinter Nights 2. Years later, another studio began talking about a third game of its own.

  213151617

• 7. Return and Recognition

  ›

  In 2012 Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition ended an eight-year silence in the series. Overhaul Games and Beamdog remade the original game 14 years after its release. They used an enhanced Infinity Engine and packaged it with Tales of the Sword Coast. Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition followed in 2013, with new material and widescreen compatibility, still using the 2nd Edition rules. A brand-new expansion, Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, came in 2016. Beamdog also made enhanced versions of Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment and Neverwinter Nations, and the enhanced Baldur's Gate games reached Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2019.

  After finishing those editions, Overhaul Games called a Baldur's Gate 3 "a long-term goal," with funding possibly from Kickstarter. The studio said it would be a separate game from The Black Hound. Trent Oster suggested Thay and Waterdeep as possible settings. Beamdog began calling the project Baldur's Gate Next to set it apart from the Bhaalspawn Saga.

  Overhaul Games and Beamdog eventually lost the rights to make further Baldur's Gate games. The license went to Larian Studios, the Belgian developer behind the Divinity: Original Sin series. Larian unveiled Baldur's Gate 3 in 2019 and released it four years later, on the 3rd of August 2023, in partnership with Wizards of the Coast, which holds the Dungeons & Dragons license. It received universal acclaim. It won Game of the Year awards from the Golden Joystick Awards, the Game Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards, the Game Developers Choice Awards and the British Academy Games Awards.

  The older games had collected prizes of their own. In 1999 Baldur's Gate won the Origins Award for Best Role Playing Game Computer Game of 1998, and a year later Tales of the Sword Coast won the same category for 1999. The Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences gave the original game its PC Role-Playing Game of the Year award. Throne of Bhaal and Dark Alliance later won Interactive Achievement Awards for the 2001 release year, in the PC and console categories respectively. Dark Alliance II won GameFan's 2004 RPG of the Year Award and entered the GameFan Hall of Fame. By June 2001 the series had sold more than 3.5 million units worldwide.

  The series also spread into print. Philip Athans, editor of the Forgotten Realms novel line, wrote novelizations of the first two games. His novels drop several subplots and include only a few NPCs, and they name the Bhaalspawn hero Abdel Adrian. Drew Karpyshyn wrote the third, Throne of Bhaal. A novel titled Baldur's Gate 3: Astarion, by T. Kingfisher, was scheduled for September 2026.

  A comic titled Dungeons & Dragons: Legends of Baldur's Gate appeared in October 2014 as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of Dungeons & Dragons. Jim Zub wrote it and Max Dunbar pencilled it. It is set generations after Throne of Bhaal and stars Minsc. In February 2026, HBO and Hasbro Entertainment announced a television adaptation, with Craig Mazin set to showrun, write and executive produce. It is set after the events of Baldur's Gate 3. According to journalist Geoff Keighley, Larian Studios has no involvement in it.

  3941434453