Introduction

Developer: Bioware
Publisher: Interplay
Baldur's Gate 2 official page: http://www.bioware.com/bgate2/

Dirty Drizzt

I was always a fan of the Dragonlance series; Raistlin had me enthralled for quite a while. I did read one Forgotten Realms book though. I don't remember the name anymore but it had that dark elf that everyone loves - Drizzt Do' Urden. He was just so friendly.

After reading a bit of these books a few of my friends got it in their heads to play a little AD&D 2nd Edition. We never really got much done, though. Most of the time we would make our characters for half the day. When my friend was DM, he would never let us re-roll scores for stats. Some of us weren't quite seeing eye to eye on that bit of wisdom. I remember one time one of us had an intelligence of 4, which is not exactly conducive to being a hero. As a result, we would normally end up having them die only an hour later. Either we weren't very good or we were putting our characters out their misery. You decide.

Winged weirdness

They're so friendly

Rock Paper Scissors

Well as much fun as playing RPG's was, the whole paper and dice thing was just a bit slow. Computer versions appealed to me quite a bit, particularly the old school games like Eye of the Beholder and Might and Magic. Fast forward to more modern times and the first RPG that most people will name off the top of their head is Baldur's Gate. For the most part, the game got excellent reviews. Now we have Baldur's Gate 2 under development, with some big shoes to fill. The developers had to be very careful on this. They wisely took player input and tried to work in everything that was feasible.

A little while ago Interplay showed up at our doorstep and gave us a little demo. Sadly, my silly butt only had headphones attached to my computer at the time. That has since been remedied. As soon as word got around that the BG2 people were here work stopped in our region of the office. We had managed to bring productivity to a grinding halt for anybody within earshot. The result was amazing.

We do have a full preview of the game that was done a few months ago. Read that for a more comprehensive idea of the game. In this article we will mention some of the big things that are new, along with a little bit of old info mixed.