Picture this: you come to in chains, locked in a cell somewhere under the city of Athkatla. Your companions are caged within sight of you, and a wizard is working through them one by one with his experiments. What he actually wants from you is still a mystery.
That is how Baldur’s Gate 2 begins, and the game is more than two decades old.
Baldur's Gate 3 is a wonderful game, one I count among my personal favourites, and one that tens of thousands of people are still playing constantly three years on from release. That does not automatically make it the best Baldur’s Gate game, though. Another title shares the same world, one where the wild moments never let up (a wizard tortures your soul while you sit trapped in a locked cage, your closest friend may or may not betray you at the worst imaginable moment, a berserker bellows prophecy at a hamster named Boo with a completely straight face), and plenty of people would tell you that this game, not Baldur’s Gate 3, is the best Baldur’s Gate by a wide margin. Some go further and call it the greatest game ever made.
Over the course of Baldur’s Gate 2, you spend a hundred hours working out whether you have what it takes to become a god.
The villain players still flinch at
Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn, fully playable on Windows PC, continues directly from Baldur’s Gate 1, although it stands perfectly well on its own. You play a Bhaalspawn, one of the many mortal offspring of Bhaal, the dead god of murder. Because of the divine spark in your blood, you and those like you are being hunted across the Sword Coast. When the game opens, that hunt has already caught you.
Your captor, Jon Irenicus, is a skin-crawling, heinous, thoroughly messed-up villain. Once a respected elven mage, he was exiled by his own people for conducting forbidden experiments on people, a habit he has plainly never abandoned. Not long into the game you stumble across a grove of dryads he drained dry purely to test his methods: tree spirits left withered and silent for no good reason at all.
You do not have to face him by yourself, however. With a handful of friends at your side, you will probably make it through. Each of them carries nightmares of their own, and each will need your help in turn.
Series regular Jaheira loses her husband before the game has properly started and spends the remainder of the campaign battling grief alongside everything else. Aerie has lived her whole life as a caged circus performer with clipped wings; learning to fly again turns out to be the least of her troubles. Anomen is a knight-in-training so desperate to prove himself that his own poor judgment gets people killed, possibly including his own sister. Then there is Viconia DeVir, a dark elf priestess banished from the Underdark for the disastrous crime of showing mercy, at least according to the goddess she cannot stop serving.
A city you could explore before “open world” was a sales pitch
The story you live through bends to your choices. How your characters develop, whether NPCs end up happy or dead, and the fate of the whole world around you are all in your hands.
Well before “open world” turned into a standard marketing phrase, the docks, slums and government district of Athkatla were fully explorable from the moment you set foot in the city, packed with side content you could take on in whatever order you liked. Every class also receives its own distinct questline. A fighter runs a keep, a thief takes over a guild, a cleric is charged with restoring a temple. Each of these is a wholly separate strand of narrative locked behind the character you chose to build, rather than a side quest tacked onto a shared story that everyone experiences identically.
This is why the game survives so many replays. One longtime player did not complete his first full campaign until 12 years after buying it, because he kept starting over as a different class to view the world from as many angles as he could.
Twelve years is a long stretch to spend not finishing a single game. In fairness, there is a great deal going on. Across the roughly 70 hours most players need to finish the main campaign, you will be tortured for information, be forced to trust a fellow prisoner who certainly seems every bit as dangerous as your captor, uncover with horror what Irenicus is really doing, and then decide whether you, as a Bhaalspawn, are strong enough to confront your murderous siblings.
Throughout all of it you are wrestling with your own identity, with the monstrous Slayer form clawing its way out from beneath your skin, and with what that means for you and your friends. When godhood is on the table, will you be strong enough to ascend to Bhaal’s own throne? Or will you finish as crow meat, just another failed vessel added to a dead god’s list of dead children?
The blueprint BioWare kept reusing
Released in 2000, Baldur’s Gate 2 became the blueprint for several of BioWare’s later games. Knights of the Old Republic (2003) carried an alignment system and a late-game companion twist very much in the mould of Baldur’s Gate 2. Mass Effect (2007) and its loyalty missions play like Stronghold missions relocated to space. Dragon Age (2009) approached origin characters and their unique stories and missions in an eerily familiar way.
Ideas first planted in Baldur’s Gate 2 made their way into Baldur’s Gate 3 as well. Companions who respond to and pass judgment on almost every decision you make. A late-game choice about whether to embrace or resist a monstrous transformation in return for power. And that is a game still basking in near-universal praise and constant, never-ending replays.
All of which is fabulous for Baldur’s Gate 3, a game I find myself replaying more often than not. Yet why do I keep hunting for new ways to play that one when Baldur’s Gate 2 is sitting right there?
So consider this a challenge. The next time the urge strikes, Dark or otherwise, to replay Baldur’s Gate 3, reach for the second game instead. It is old enough that it usually turns up on sale for pennies, and it is high time you understood why players still flinch at Irenicus’s name decades later. You have nothing to lose. Except, perhaps, your soul.