Baldur’s Gate 2 is one of the most acclaimed RPGs of all time. Here’s why you shouldn’t bother playing it in 2023.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is almost upon us, and naturally, this might make you wonder about Baldur’s Gate 2 and, to a lesser extent, the first Baldur’s Gate. After reading about these games on the internet (a mistake) you’ll probably come across phrases like “Baldur’s Gate 2 is the best RPG ever made” and you’ll think, Damn, maybe I should get in on that. I’m here to tell you no. You do not need to get in on that.
Do not misunderstand: Baldur’s Gate 2 lives up to its reputation. It’s an astonishingly dense and satisfying fantasy role-playing game and one of the first big games to make it feel like the player’s choices mattered and took place in the context of a sprawling, well-told story. That was cool when it was released in 2000, and it’s cool now. I’m just saying that you might not be aware of what you’re getting into — on a mechanical level — should you decide to play it 23 years later.
One of the funny things about Baldur’s Gate 2 is that, for many years, its reputation was so glowing that its origins became obscured. There was a solid decade when you could read hundreds of words on Baldur’s Gate 2 without ever learning something core to its identity: It was a Dungeons & Dragons game.
More specifically, it was an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition game, which means it was built to replicate an experience that, frankly, should serve as punishment for most misdemeanor offenses and a few felonies. It is hardcore, a game that expects you to understand the high-level statistics and probability parsing it is doing behind the scenes in order to navigate its many tricky encounters.
Unlike many liberal arts majors, I am not afraid of numbers. Math is fine. But no one should have to learn about THAC0, an abbreviation for one of the most annoying RPG rules I’ve ever had to internalize. For the uninitiated: THAC0 is an acronym for “To Hit Armor Class 0,” a statistic in Advanced D&D 2.0 that determines the minimum number you have to roll for an attack to hit an opponent with an armor class of 0. Since THAC0 is meant to be a baseline reference and enemies a player encounters have variable armor classes, it becomes another step in the order of operations, where players have to subtract the enemy armor class from their own in order to learn the minimum roll they need to score a hit.
