Baldur's Gate Review

By 1998 the computer RPG was widely presumed dead, and Baldur's Gate is the game that dug it back up. A team of newcomers at BioWare built the Infinity Engine, painted the Sword Coast as gorgeous hand-rendered wilderness, and translated the full weight of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, THAC0, spell slots, saving throws, into something a mouse could play. Real-time-with-pause combat was the crucial invention, letting tactical spellcraft coexist with cinematic flow, and it became the house style for a decade of RPGs.

Just as important were the companions: Minsc and his space hamster, the bickering of Xzar and Montaron, party members who argued, quit, and occasionally attacked each other gave the genre a social life. The pacing drags through some wilderness maps and low-level AD&D means wands of paralysis and dead mages in one arrow, but the ambition, reactivity, and sense of a living world made every modern BioWare-descended RPG possible.