Friday, March 31, 2017

Fighting a Refreshingly Honest Evil in ‘Baldur’s Gate’

Postscript is Cameron Kunzelman's weekly column about endings, apocalypses, deaths, bosses, and all sorts of other finalities.

The opening thirty minutes of Baldur's Gate are some of the strangest in the history of role-playing games. You don't begin as a dirt farmer or a chosen one (although we do get there). Instead, it all starts in Candlekeep, a giant library that contains thousands of volumes of arcane knowledge, pulled from every corner of the Forgotten Realms. Whether the character you have just created is a level 1 paladin, sorcerer, or a thief, it becomes apparent immediately that you have grown up surrounded by the biggest nerds in this entire branch of the Dungeons & Dragons multiverse. You've lived in this monastery-slash-megalibrary for your entire life. You were raised by a man named Gorion. The game really starts when you're forced to flee this place in the middle of the night.

It is during this midnight journey that you first encounter Sarevok. He's a horrifying figure in spiked armor, and he stops both the player and their adoptive father in their tracks with his small band of adventurers who are dead-set on making the player, well, dead. An epic fight ensues, or at least an epic fight in terms of what the Infinity Engine could do in 1998, and the adoptive father lies dead on the ground. Sarevok has slewn him—although you don't quite know who Sarevok is yet—and the player is left to wander around this weird world.

Continue reading on Waypoint.



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