This was actually my second attempt at it after my first playthrough ground to a bit of a halt early on. See, I had been playing the game in what I assumed was the "proper" way - I started with only my own custom protagonist and recruited my companions from the world as you tend to do in Bioware games, paid attention to all the dialogue and generally tried to take my chaotic good alignment seriously. I found that over time, though, my party and particularly my main character really fell behind the curve and every fight seemed to devolve into endless saving and reloading.

This time around, I instead elected to create an entire custom party of evil dwarf clerics and played the game like a complete bastard - in fact, my first action after exiting the tutorial was to kill the starting companion Imoen and take her things, and the fact that the game actually let me do that says a lot about what kind of game Baldur's Gate is. What I love about it is very similar to what I love about the original Fallout or Neverwinter Nights - they're highly interactive worlds that generally try to avoid restricting the player where possible, and that open-ended gameplay is paired with open-ended mission design where you're often given broad objectives but left to puzzle out the details of accomplishing them yourself. At the same time, the game is narrow enough in its scope that you don't become completely overwhelmed with possibilities and the main objective doesn't become buried under endless distractions. In short, its a guided but flexible structure where the player feels very much in the driver's seat while still getting a coherent experience.

This is very much in contrast with Bioware's later games once they pivoted to console development. For comparison, there are two separate occasions in Jade Empire where a character attempts to kill you only to later ask to join your party, and in neither case does the player have the option to say no - or rather, you do have the option to say no, but they just ignore you and insist on coming anyway. In their pursuit of more cinematic storytelling, I feel like Bioware's formula became very rigid, lacking that level of interactivity and frequently railroading the player into doing things they may not want to for the sake of drama. For all that they advertised games like Mass Effect and Dragon Age on the player's freedom of choice, those choices are rarely more meaningful than picking a dialogue option which may or may not even affect anything.

Baldur's Gate though lets you be truly belligerent, and belligerent my little dwarf crew were, always choosing the violent option and striking first wherever possible, taking jobs from villains and generally just rampaging our way across the countryside as we chased down the members of the Iron Throne for no motivation beyond personal grievance at their having tried to kill us. Forget the plot to take over the kingdom, as long as we get to knock heads and make some money on our quest for vengeance we didn't need to know the details.

Naturally, approaching the game this way involves getting into a lot of combat (although that's kind of unavoidable to an extent) and I have to say I really enjoyed it. I don't know why but I personally enjoy real-time-with-pause over turn-based combat - you still get that tactical element where you get to really take your time and plan out your next move and co-ordinate all your guys, but there's also an element of chaos to it where you can never be totally sure how it's gonna play out once people start moving. After a while it almost starts to feel like you're planning out football plays. I also have a certain fondness for the D&D combat ruleset, it's a little awkward at times but more creative and varied in the abilities than a lot of other RPG systems I've seen, and at times using the right ability in the right situation gives almost the same satisfaction as solving a puzzle.

Ultimately completing the game was a little underwhelming, but if I'm honest I was only half-paying attention to the story after a certain point. Maybe the fact that I'm not generally a big fan of Bioware's writing is why I appreciate having the option to just kind of ignorantly bulldoze your way through the narrative. Still, I had a great time with it and it might be up there among my favourite games now. I just exported my characters to BG2 and so far it seems like more of the same so I'm looking forward to continuing the brutish adventure.