BioWare never stopped making Baldur's Gate 2

God help us, it has been 25 years since Baldur's Gate 2 released, and even though a third game under the same name has since come out and got everyone very excited with its sexy-haughty vampire boys and whatnot, we're still talking about it.

Why?

Well, that's easy. Baldur's Gate 2 is a good game. It's a very good game, actually: a plane-hopping, swashbuckling, high-fantasy adventure filled with great performances and memorable characters.

But that's not quite enough explanation, is it? There have been a lot of very good games in the past few decades, and not all of them get anniversary write-ups. Heck, personally I'm more of a Baldur's Gate 1 guy, and yet I don't think I said a thing when that game's 25-year anniversary hit two years ago.

It's because Baldur's Gate 2 is a lot more than just Baldur's Gate 2. It represents BioWare hitting on an approach to design that would define it—and consequently, so much other RPG development—for over a decade afterwards. BioWare never stopped making Baldur's Gate 2 once it made it the first time. Dig in almost any RPG, especially one that has you roll deep with a party of whining misfits, and you can find a trace of it.

Party mode

The obvious question is, 'Why attribute all this influence specifically to BG2, and not the first game in the series?' Great question. Thanks for asking. BG1, for as much as I love it, came into the world still coated in a thin layer of early-'90s RPG stuff—friction-generating busywork and a combat-first philosophy.

Travelling between its hubs meant crossing multiple long maps of little but bare nature: wide stretches of grassland and trees. In fairness, BioWare took all the opportunities it could to speckle those maps with amusing little encounters, but it was tedious and old-fashioned. BG2 ditched that stuff. From now on there would only be hubs, stuffed with quests and things to do. When you fly between planets in Mass Effect or cities in Dragon Age, you can thank BG2 for cutting out the cruft.

But that's minor. What really set BG2 apart from all that came before it was its party. BG1's helpers were a collection of cliches and barks—meatshields you shouldn't feel bad about discarding if they happened to get gibbed by an unlucky crit. BG2's cast of freaks were people, man.

Your half-sister who struggled with her divine heritage, the smooth-talking rogue with a guilty conscience, the woman dealing with the grief of her husband's death as she (maybe) falls in love all over again. Also Anomen. Anomen sucks.

Do these remind you of anything? Of course they do. They're BioWare NPCs—characters you could slap a Star Wars name and put in KOTOR, or turn into Turians and Salarians and slot them in Mass Effect, or change literally nothing and put them in Dragon Age. BG2 was when BioWare truly tried its hand at making you fall in love with your companions and absolutely nailed it, and then it never stopped trying to do that in any major release after 2000. Except Anthem, and look how that turned out.

BG2 marked the studio realising its superpower wasn't encounter design, or combat, or worldbuilding (which is not to say it was bad at those things) it was that it could drive players absolutely nuts with passion for these tiny paper-cut avatars; that people were ravenous to build relationships, theories, headcanons on the basis of the personalities the studio's writers imbued their party-members with. They might even choose to set out with a statistically nonoptimal party because they like the people in it—unthinkable!

And having discovered this dark alchemy, BioWare never stopped using it. Every big RPG it made thereafter was defined just as much—if not more—by its party than by its narrative. The pattern of BG2 now defined BioWare as a whole.

The studio knew it, too. Mass Effect 2 and ME3's Citadel DLC are perhaps the peak of the whole style: ME2's main plot was almost an afterthought compared to its lineup of party loyalty missions—an anthology of vignettes each centering around an individual companion (BG2's party members had these, too).

Citadel, meanwhile, almost had the feeling of a mea culpa—BioWare knew you were upset about how ME3 had wrapped up so it let you throw a big party with your pals to make up for it. You could just as easily have made the same DLC for Dragon Age, or KOTOR, or BG2.

BG2 wasn't the first RPG to give a damn about its characters, but it was certainly the most impactful. It defined BioWare, sure, but it helped define Obsidian, Troika, Owlcat, Larian, even CD Projekt Red, a studio which doesn't even deal in party-based RPGs.

It fired the starting pistol on a philosophy of RPG design that continues to echo today. When The Outer Worlds 2 put out a companions trailer last month, giving you a quick overview of the game's party and wearily letting you know in advance that no, you can't sleep with them, it was echoing a lineage that traces its Big Bang back to the year 2000. When you celebrate BG2, you celebrate 25 years of RPGs, and that's why its anniversary really matters.