Hi,

I've heard for years about how BG1 and 2 were the best RPG ever, and have wanted to play them for a long time. So, when GOG's sale arrived, I had no choice. I scooped them both up and applied the mods that allow both to be played as one game, along with all the "fixes and updates".

I must admit, I very (no, really, VERY) nearly quit playing after the first couple of hours.because of things most have heard before, such as:
1. Inventory HELL (the amount of time spent on inventory management is infuriating!)
2. One-or-two-shot wizard kills. ie - load > play > die > load > try again > die > load > try again > die > etc. etc etc
3. MOST ANNOYING: In my humble opinion, it takes way WAY WAY too much experience for characters to level up. If there were mods to cut this down, I would gleefully apply them. For me, the most enjoyable part of playing any RPG is receiving the option to level up a character, then deciding which attributes/skills to increase for that character, and applying them, AND THEN SEEING THE RESULTS OF YOUR CHOICES IN GAMEPLAY! HUGE bonus points go to games in which said attributes/skills increases are actually NOTICEABLE after the level-up! I absolutely HATE leveling-up, carefully and meticulously choosing a skill/attribute to increase, and then seen NO DISCERNABLE DIFFERENCE IN GAMEPLAY! Diablo, I'm VERY MUCH looking at YOU! BG does not have this problem as bad as Diablo, but the increased attributes/skills should be much more noticeable, in my opinion.
4. Quests - Can you san "vague"? Yes, yes, YES, some are very, very, very clear, I see that, but some are not!
5. Inability to disable character comments. ...assuming readers here have played the game.... need I say more?

Here comes the ......BUT...

Even though some things bother me, I had a "Whoa!" moment recently at about the time I leveled up a couple of characters. My wizard is now a fairly serious dude, and I find a great deal of FUN in dealing damage to monsters using his now-fairly-powerful spells!

Also, my tough-guy fighters are now actually more able to take a beating, and that makes fighting alot more fun, too. My tough-guys are acually kinda' tough!

So, YEP! I'm gonna' keep playin', and have found that I'm addicted, which is cool considering that I almost quit playing a week ago.

It's all about FUN!

nogwart

I appreciate your honesty.

Baldurs Gate is a unique RPG in that the natural instinct of most players (and used to be mine as well) is to rush forward and do storyline things or explore everything. But BG really doesn't want you to do that. Nor does it want you to explore every map there is. You have to carefully pick and choose where to go and what encounters to fight as a strong breeze at level one can kill you. This can be really confusing, as at low levels pretty much any encounter can absolutely murder you. But if you take your time, build the right party (or just make your own in MP), you can get through the game with minimal difficulty.

Like in traditional D&D, the first few levels are the hardest. Once you level up a few times, you'll have a feeling of empowerment. You have to work for it, but once you get it, it's sweet.

A few tips:

- Set Autopause to "Enemy Sighted" and "Enemy Defeated". This means the game will pause when you see an enemy or when you kill one. You won't randomly find yourself chased by hordes of enemies and can pick & choose what battles to do.

- Have a balance of characters. I like to have several ranged fighters and several melee fighters. You need atleast one mage and one cleric. A Paladin also helps due to extra healing and tanking but you'll be restricted on choices. Personally, Kivan is the most useful NPC you can pick up, but everyone's opinion is different. You can pick him up quickly, he can wear any armor, he's deadly with a bow, and can tank when needed. Short of casting spells he covers everything else.

- Enemy spellcasters can be a major problem. But there's ways to negate them. First is the second you see a mage (with auto pause on from above), immediately cast magic missile/use the wand of magic missiles on them. They'll be casting a spell such as Hold Person, Rigid Thinking, or worse. You can disrupt the spell this way, but you'll have to be quick. The AI likes getting the drop on you.

Another trick at low levels is on a group of enemies throw down a web nearby. They'll constantly have to save against being held. Then you can pick them off at distance. Web absolutely sucks to fight against, but can make a difficult fight child's play.

Another is to use Hold Person and other disabling effects once you get them. Holding a Wizard/Cleric can really screw up enemies. Plus it's fun as hell to give back to them what they've done to you.

- At the Nashkel Carnival, there's an amulet you can buy. The something of Missiles. It's basically a ten use fireball. Since you won't have access to Fireballs by then, pick it up. You can instantly nuke hordes of enemies with it.

Likewise, don't be afraid to buy equipment. Even if it's one AC adjustment, it can save your butt. It's always a wise investment.

The TAB key highlights nearby containers. On certain maps, if you use TAB you can find hidden objects. These range from diamonds, to +1 Ring of Protection, to a 9000 gold pieces Ring of Wizardry. They're all items you can get very early in the game that make it easier. Or you can just look up the exact locations if you want to.

Overall, Baldurs Gate has a pretty steep learning curve. Not the worst I've ever seen, but BG1's really unforgiving to the newbie. But if you stick with it, and learn it's ways, it will reward you. Good luck.

Thanks for this post. I'm new to the game, bought it when on sale and will appreciate your tips when trying the game out for myself.

This doesn't work in base BG1, only in Tutu or BGT. Using the BG1 engine, it's a pixel hunt on every map. Which is very unfortunate. Basically everything else is good advice though.

Hmm. I honestly didn't know that. Good catch.

In all honesty, most of my advice might only be applicable to BGT or Tutu. If so I apologize for that. i haven't played Vanilla BG1 seriously in a long, long time.

Thanks VERY MUCH for this tip! Having played Neverwinter nights 1 & 2, I tried the ALT key for this functionality, and when it didn't work, thought it unavailable. It's very good to know it does exist, and I'll be using it ALOT now... I just wish I'd known about it earlier. :)

I recognize a lot of your comments from my early BG1 days (through Tutu) too. It was very frustrating and I had no idea what to do. The most annoying was that we kept dying. ALL. THE. TIME! I started calling the game Baldur's Reload, because I had to reload so bloody often. Were quicksaving for almost every enemy killed and every small bit of the map explored.

Without doubt, the best advice I got was USE RANGED WEAPONS instead of toe-to-toe fighting. This made a HUGE difference for me. It's so much easier when you can pick off enemies before they manage to smatter your front fighters.

In my experience both Khalid and Minsc are good tanks. Let them get in the enemies faces while your other 4-5 people are hailing arrows and bullets down the throats of the enemies. That alone will take care of all but the toughest fights. Proficiencies get a bit messed up with Tutu, but both Khalid and Minsc are still very good tanks in my opinion. Just make sure you give them certain AC-lowering items.

To reduce inventory hell I strongly recommend to play via Tutu and use infinite ammo stacking and bags of holding etc. Having for example 300 arrows is a LOT better than having a few stacks of 20, which run out every so often, and causing you to have piles of those stacks of 20 in the inventory to reduce running back to shops all the time.

Once you learn how to play the game it becomes very fun. But that steep learning curve and early level frustration can easily turn people off the game.

Pardon my barging into this thread, but I have to ask how to set up infinite ammo stacking and bags of holding (I play easytutu etc as per rartino's guide - the stickied one).

Being a former paper-and-dice.AD&D player, the learning curve was not that bad for me. Once I learned auto-pause and managing weapons things weren't that bad. Also i try to follow the storyline thus mainly hitting areas where the opposition was beatable (though some fights took several attempt). My gf on the other hand had a very hard time learning the game (although she's a veteran WoW player) and gave up on account of all the managing and stuff you need to read. To each his or her own...

I can agree with you on 1, 2, 4, and am not sure what you mean by 5. But 3 I can not. Levels should last. Too many times in games I end up getting levels so quick that I never had time to really experience any in particular. If you don't get to spend time with a particular level, experience its strengths and weaknesses, then it is wasted. It might as well not exist. They quickly turn into empty content.

And leveling should rarely be a goal in itself. When they are, it's usually an indication that the rest of the content isn't good enough to hold interest.

You'll find it in the BG2 Tweakpack: http://www.gibberlings3.net/bg2tweaks/index.php

There are a LOT of things you can change. The documentation is good, but it's probably a good idea to not change something unless you know what it does. But max HP on level up, bags of holding and unlimited ammo stacking is quite nice to have. The map notes are very useful too. Removing the "You must gather your party..." line makes entering particularly Friendly Arms less annoying too. The game tends to go mental there for some reason.

I see there is a no traps or locks change there too. I've not used it myself, but depending on how many mazes and traps there are in BG2 I may enable it, as the inching forward searching for traps is quite annoying (and boring!!) because it takes too long to discover them for my taste. And Imoen tends to walk over the odd one here and there despite my best care.

Oh, and just to be sure; this mod works for BG1 via Tutu or BGT too, not just BG2 (as the name implies).

So, can this be installed over my existing mods? And will it work with a game already in progress or is it necessary to start over (even if I only install the unlimited ammo tweak)?

I'm not entirely sure about sequence of install, but I think this should be installed a bit down the list. So you're probably okay to install it on top of your current mods. Take a backup of the game folder if you want - just in case things go tits up.

Not all changes will work on a started game. I installed it after starting too, and some things didn't take. If it's supposed to be possible, I don't have unlimited gem stacking. But that hardly matters anyway as there are quite few of each type anyway. Unlimited ammo works though (think it's up to 9,999), and that is one of the big ones for me as walking around with half the inventory full of 20-arrows was a huge nag in my first playthrough.

Bags of holding and for gems and scrolls work too - all great improvements to reduce inventory muck-about.

Edit: Actually, I'm not entirely sure if bags of holding etc will work in your game since you have come to chapter 4. I did this quite early on, but after starting a new game. It could be that once the inventory of a shop has been set (when you visited it first time) nothing else can be added (apart from what you sell to it ofc). I'm not sure about that though, so give it a shot. It may still work.

I just started playing Baldurs gate Triology, started a Ranger-Archer elf character with full points in long bow.

Gotta say i am flying through the game, the average level of my party is around 6 and I just reached Neskel. (and then completed a rescue from Gnoll Fortress).

Got 3 ranged attackers, with 1 fighter, 1 fighter/druid and 1 drow cleric. I am killing people like crazy and I am LIKING IT ;).

My general tactics;
1. Auto pause when fight starts
2. Manual control over my Elf-Ranger-Archer (he has THAC0 around 5 with just composite bow+1)
3. Other 2 ranged attackers are on 'Range' script
4. 1 Fighter and 1 Fighter/druid on standard all rush attack
5. Manual control over drow cleric (for stunning, healing, hold etc etc)

hehe..

Everyone who rates the Baldur's Gate series as the best RPG game ever probably played it when it first came out. At the time, and for quite a few years thereafter, there was nothing close to it in terms of depth, complexity, and story.

I played it when it first came out, and I am re-playing it now that I got it cheap from GOG. Yes, it does seem clunky after playing Diablo and NWN1. On the other hand, for such and old game, it still holds up remarkably well. I enjoy playing a lot of old games from the 90s, and as far as old games go, Baldur's Gate doesn't seem that old.

Character advancement does seem slow now, but it seems slow because I'm more used to NWN1 (including quite a few player-made modules) where character advancement happens on a much faster pace. When I originally played Baldur's Gate, character advancement didn't seem slow at all.

Oh man, this was me ten years ago when I first picked up BG1. I almost gave up after the wizard guy at the Friendly Arm killed me for the fifth or sixth time, and after I got wiped out by a horde of gibberlings in the *first* area of the world map a few times....

My strongest advice is, ranged weapons! Once all or most of my first successful party had them, things got much smoother.