Baldur's Gate Video Game Series

The Baldur's Gate series focuses on the adventures of a player-created character, who is forced to face their destiny and take up the fight against evil. As we traverse the fantasy world, we complete a variety of quests and fight with encountered opponents. As we progress, we are joined by companions diversified in terms of statistics, skills and character, and the appropriate composition of the party and skillful use of the strengths of its members is the key to success on the battlefield. In the first two installments of the series, fights take place in real time, with the active pause option. The third part of the series introduced a significant change in the form of turn-based mode.

A big advantage of Baldur's Gate games is the atmospheric soundtrack.

First Baldur's Gate debuted in December 1998 on PC It runs on the Infinity engine, which was later used to create such classics as Planescape: Torment or Icewind Dale. The game is still very popular today, and at the time broke the bad streak that the RPG genre had. A year after its release, the game received an expansion - Baldur's Gate: Tales from the Coast of Swords.

In 2000, we got Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn. It is a direct sequel of the first game. It was a huge success, and its rating on Metacritic to this day is 95/100; the production is still ranked among the best titles ever and enjoys cult status. The second game also got an expansion - Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, released a year later. In 2003, Black Isle Studios began work on the third installment with the working title Baldur's Gate III: Black Hound, but never had the opportunity to complete it. Work on the game was halted after the studio was unable to pay for the Dungeons and Dragons license.

For many years it seemed that the series would not continue, but in June 2019 Belgian Larian Studios announced work on Baldur's Gate III. It uses the fourth version of the their in-house 3D engine, the same one that the two Divinity: Original Sin use. Full version of Baldur's Gate 3 debuted on PC in August 2023; before that, the game was available in early access. The game was a spectacular success; according to the Metacritic site, its average rating from industry media was 96/100 (which placed the production a "notch" higher than its grand predecessor) and on the Steam platform it got "overwhelmingly positive" reviews. The high ratings also came with high sales; while still in Early Access on the Steam platform, the title found 2.5 million buyers. In September 2023, the game was released on PlayStation 5, while in December it was released on Xbox Series X/S.

Meanwhile, the first two games got remasters in 2012 and 2013. The studio responsible for them, Overhaul Games, adapted them to run at higher (and widescreen) resolutions and adapted them to new platforms (in addition to PC, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition and Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition were released on consoles and mobile devices). In addition, a remaster of the first Baldur's Gate received a new expansion titled Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, and its storyline is a kind of bridge between the first and second parts of the series.

The series also got a separate sub-series dedicated to consoles, which consists of Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (2001) and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance II (2004). The Dark Alliance spin-offs are based on rules from the third edition of Dungeons and Dragons and differed strongly in mechanics from the main series; instead of an isometric RPG, players got a full-fledged action RPG, which was closer to Diablo than to the classic Baldur's Gate. Interestingly, this mini-series was also supposed to get the third game, but it too was affected by financial problems related to the license.