It's 1996. The traditional Western computer role-playing game is fading. The age of 3D graphics pushes the genre toward first-person action, into solo journeys in immersive worlds light on narrative and role-playing alike. And for those at the numbers-heavy, party-based end, the JRPG is ascendent. Wither the quests of TRS, Ultima, of classic dungeon crawlers. But hither comes Baldur's Gate to save the day.
Everybody and their dog was convinced that Western RPGs were dead," says BioWare cofounder Trent Oster. "It was all gonna be Japanese RPGs. Nobody in the Western world knew how to make [RPGs] … there was just no hope." If the Western RPG was dead, the Western computer RPG was doubly dead: Every one of those top 13 RPGs from '95 had come out on a console.
Three years later, all of those illustrious Japanese studios also appeared on the 1998 list. But close to the top, second only to Sega's little-played Panzer Dragoon Saga, a new name joined them: BioWare, the makers of Baldur's Gate.
The product of three exhausting and exhilarating years of labor by a team of roughly 15 people who didn't know enough to be daunted by the task they undertook, Baldur's Gate was a genre-stretching, disc-space-testing hybrid that broke new narrative, technical, and gameplay ground and established the identity of one of the past two decades' most storied studios. "It just redefined expectations of what a role-playing game could be," Oster says. "I think it really relaunched the whole concept of what a Western RPG is."
And now Baldur's Gate 3 is winning game of the year awards left and center. Hopefully the series will improve the "one installation a decade" pace henceforth.
Whispering now: something else released in 1996 was similarly important to the genre and being honest with myself I played it even more.