Baldur's Gate Walkthrough

Well life has certainly taken a few turns on me since I published my last post, as you no doubt can tell since it's been over a year.  But fear not, I have not abandoned this blog.  My Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest video got put on hold a long time ago, and as appropriate it might be to finish it during this Halloween season, it probably is going to remain so for the time being.

In the meantime I have been revisiting one of my favorite games of all time - Baldur's Gate.  I've had the itch lately for some old school, party-based, AD&D 2nd edition adventuring, and it really doesn't get any better than BG.  So today I start a new series of a full length walkthrough for the entire game plus the Tales of the Sword Coast expansion.  Note that this is the original game, not the Enhanced Edition that came out a few years ago (although I'd love to check that out one day).

I'm doing a single player game, but unlike normal I'll be using five characters created by me instead of just the usual protagonist.  I outline how to do this (which involves converting a multi player game to single player) in my gameplay guide, which, after all these years, is still not yet complete.  I do this because while the NPCs you meet in the game who will join your party do have amazing personalities, most of them rather suck as characters.  The thought of having to play through the game putting up with Khalid and Jaheira yet again was just a bit much for me, so I decided to create five characters of my own and then take Imoen, since she is one of the few awesome NPCs.  Doing this will also allow me to show off the power of dual-classing, as I don't start the game with either a mage or cleric, but instead two fighters who will later be dual-classing to those classes.

I'll be breaking up the walkthrough by doing more or less one video per game area.  I'll try to keep the tedium to a minimum by not including such things as leveling up or trips back to town.  I'm pretty sure no one wants to watch me try to roll maximum hit points for all my characters or meticulously reorganize my inventory.  Dealing with my compulsive need to eliminate all the black on each screen is probably enough as it is.

It will obviously take me quite some time to finish the entire game.  Once that's done I have a number of ideas for one-off videos I'd like to do as well, such as strategies for killing Drizzt, alternate Aec'letec strategies, etc.  Ultimately I want to do a solo run of the game with an evil character as well to show off some other strategies and the different side of the game you get when making evil choices, but I don't want to get ahead of myself just yet.

With that said, here is the playlist.  Enjoy!