Welcome to Dev Game Club, where this week we continue our series on Baldur's Gate. We talk about racing through versus following multiple sidequests, about tactical battling, and about the huge variance in verb sets for different party members, amongst other topics. Dev Game Club looks at classic video games and plays through them over several episodes, providing commentary.

Sections played: Chapters Two and Three

Podcast breakdown: 0:57 Baldur's Gate 1:02:11 Break 1:02:43 Feedback

Issues covered: meeting Drizz't, chasing side quests and not knowing where to go, balancing with side content, the hidden cost of racing through, replaying battles, dynamic difficulty, JRPGs vs western RPGs for grinding XP, low XP rewards, getting too much data, potential fixes for allowing multiple styles of play, giving the player points to spend, discussing XP accrual when you choose not to level up, milestone-based leveling, giving the player options, enjoying the tactical battles, wanting more clarity as in an action point system, the blessings of the Random Number Gods, multiple whiffs, old manuals, quest scripts ending and dropping into systemic play, QA and ISV, the possible ways in which different departments could have been responsible for a bug, a digression into multiclass vs character with two classes (and its interplay with race), the wide gap between verbs for different archetypes, verbs not represented in this game, the huge change to go to 3rd-5th and have skills, adding class abilities, discretely placed content vs curated content, finding the very specifically placed items that feel like tabletop, the possibility for an ecology, building tension without combat, introducing players to game worlds, timed quests, thinking hard about when to initiate timed quests, time and failure, time being an important element in your game.

Games, people, and influences mentioned or discussed: Temple of Elemental Evil, JFK, Elder Scrolls (series), World of Warcraft, Super Metroid, Ocarina of Time, Path of Exile, Fallout (series), X-COM, Calamity Nolan, Ray Muzyka, GURPS, Diablo, Dragon Age (series), Divinity: Original Sin, Ashton Herrmann, Ultima VI, Dan Hunter, Vampire: the Masquerade, Brian Mitsoda, Aliens, DOOM (1993), Warren Linam-Church, Kirk Hamilton, Aaron Evers, Mark Garcia.

Next time: Chapters Four and Five

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