Veteran CRPGers will instantly recognize the name "Scorpia." Last night a sequence of barely-related forum comments eventually led me to go back and read her review of Baldur's Gate 1 from the April 1999 issue of CGW.

Here it is: http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/issues/cgw_177.pdf

Some observations:

- It's obvious that for the most part she finds the game average at best, and oftentimes mediocre. This was one game where Scorpia would not be in synch with most CRPG fans.

- Furthermore, it's clear that the editor(s) - Johnny Wilson and/or Jeff Green - assigned the game its 4-star rating, because the rating is laughably incongruous with the written text of the review.

- Despite the fact that I arrive at a much more positive overall impression of BG1 than Scorpia, I have to admit that many of the specifics she finds faults with are indeed shortcomings of the game. I think what happened for Scorpia is that she got "stuck" on some of the shortcomings that really bugged her and couldn't see that the game's upsides greatly overshadow its downsides.

Overall, it was fun reading a review that had a different take on the game and that also was written before the game became an almost unassailable legend.

Some people just enjoy games differently.

Yeah oftentimes reviewer overlook great games because they get hung up on minor faults of them. There are many examples of games that became classics with bad contemporary reviews.
A more recent example is Nier, which is a pretty good game in my oppinion. But many reviewers became hung up on minor faults, especially that fishing "problem".

Arcanum could fit with that, it got decent reviews but it was a dang good rpg.

Yeah that is a pretty good example. Never heard about it until about a year ago when I discovered it here. I still have no idea how I managed to miss it back in the day.

The reviewer obviously didn't like the game, even if the editors did, but in many ways BG1 is an inferior product when compared to other Infinity Engine games. Of course, it was the first, and some of that can be forgiven, but not all of it. In particular, the writing got to me. Not the plot itself, which was pretty standard fare for a D&D-inspired game, but the dialog, which was mentioned in the review. The pathfinding (also mentioned) is also really really terrible, and was (thankfully) massively improved for BG2.

In particular, people tended to spawn out of nowhere, make a bee-line for the closest character, force-initiate dialog, and then say something about how irritating it is that *I* disturbed *THEM.* And then you get a choice of three responses, each of which leads to a totally different piece of useful information, and then the person gets huffy and leaves, vanishing mysteriously off the map. However, since you don't actually have a chance to interrogate them, you'll have to reload the game to see all of the info they had for you. This pattern is repeated endlessly by fifty different equally rude NPCs, none of which are actually important but all of which have useful info.

It was a groundbreaking game, and it paved the way for several years worth of really excellent D&D based games, and the story was good... but the game itself isn't really enjoyable to me, at least not to the extent that PST or IWD or BG2 are.

Iv been contemplating whether I should play BG or not... Iv heard things that say its great and Iv heard stuff like the post above me.

For me it is still enjoyable, but it certainly is not as good as the other Infinity Engine games. Or Bioware games for that matter.
BTW going through the covers in the CGW museum I get the impression that they somewhat overlooked Fallout, although the first one got a pretty good scrore. Does anybody by chance know in which issues the reviews of Fallout Tactics and Fallout 2 were? The index does not help in this regard and they didn't feature on the cover. Fallout 1 review was in #162. It was great for the time, but not as good as many games that came after it. But as I stated above, I still like the first one. So if you like to try it maybe wait until BG1 is on sale (next probably around christmas) and buy it then. Did you ever play a RPG in the style of Baldurs Gate (overhead perspective, party of up to 6 characters, always pauseable withg the abilty to give commandos in pause mode)?

I actually have BG so buying it isnt an issue. If I am goign to play it I would like to install EasyTUTU. I beat Baldur's Gate II for the first time about 5 days ago and holy crap that game is fun. Im currently making my way through Throne of Bhaal. Iv also played Planescape and Id never though Id see a game where Id like every single companion. So after I beat TOB Im trying to decide whether I should try BG

Oh. you should probably use that NPC dialog patch then that was mentioned in another recent topic here.

Why do I need that patch?

You don't really need it. But as it adds some flavor to the NPC dialog to get it closer to BG2 dialog standard it'll probably make the game more enjoyable for you when you play them in this order. But I haven't had time to really look into the patch so I don't know how much it really changes.

Oh ok thanks for the help

While I consider both Icewind Dale games and Planescape Torment better Baldur's Gate is still quite fun, I've replayed it recently, 4/5 is a fair rating.

quite a lot, you can get romances with for example Branwen, or even Shar-Teel (the last one is only for evil masochists :D) and lots of banter. I like it a lot.