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What is it about these games that keeps you coming back?

I bought the original Baldur’s Gate bundled with Tales of the Sword Coast close to when it was released, so I must have been about 16 at the time. Got BG2, ToB, and PS:T soon after, still have the discs lying around somewhere. Played all games several times, know the stories backwards and forwards. These games are now about 20 years old. I’ve played dozens of other (good) games since then. I have a backlog of good games that I have yet to play or finish, and more will surely be released. With my gaming time becoming more scarce I should really become more selective in what I play. And yet every two or three years, out of the blue, this thought pops up in my head:
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I should play Baldur’s Gate again.

I don’t know what it is about these games that keep drawing me back. It might just be nostalgia, but then again I’ve played other games that I liked and don’t really feel like revisiting. Not as much at least.
Could be the writing, which is excellent for the most part. But like I said, I know the story backwards and forwards. So there’s nothing really new to discover left.

Maybe I’m a completionist. I’ve mostly played as a mage, good, and with the canon party. Tried other classes, and I always intend to try new party members, but usually I settle on a group that is mostly the same. Maybe one member changes, depending on what class I’m playing. So maybe it’s that, getting an idea like ‘I could play a paladin this time. That way I don’t need to bring Keldorn, and give that spot to, say, Mazzy, hardly ever played with her. Ooh, and for the first game I could bring Coran, I’ve never played with him around. Or Kivan. Damn, why can I only bring 5’.

I guess I just like starting off with some bloke that barely knows how to swing a stick, finding some friends that aren’t much better, and bringing them to the near godlike beings that they will end up as. I know the journey, I know how it will end, still I’m having a good time gathering my party, and venturing forth.
What is it for you that keeps bringing you back? The story, the gameplay, the challenge of finishing the game solo with some class you haven’t tried before, trying the game with some mod that just sounds so good, something else?
JuliusBorisovZaghoulIseweinmonicoThacoBellsarevok57ZaxaresAerakarGusindaBelgarathMTH

Comments

  • SatrhanSatrhan Member Posts: 75
    edited January 2020
    Yes, video games can be art. "Art" does not have to be hanging in a museum or permanently installed outside a building to be art.
    Oh I agree. Movies, music, and other types of performance pieces can be, or are, art too. So there is no requirement for it to be a physical object.
    What I meant by my comment is that I hadn't considered that part of the argument why games can be art before.
    JuliusBorisovMathsorcerer
  • Grond0Grond0 Member Posts: 7,305
    I agree a significant motivator to take up BG in the early days was the fact I'd played the P&P game many years previously. Playing it for the first few years I did use the NPCs a lot and grew accustomed to their faces (their ups, their downs, their smiles, their frowns :p). Although it must be at least 10 years since I played BG with the sound on (a legacy of being a bad sleeper and not wanting to disturb my wife when I sneaked off to play BG during the night in a tiny house), it's still hard to see Minsc standing there without "full plate and packing steel" running through my head.

    I went through a period of experimenting with quite a lot of mods, but the majority of my gaming now just uses the unmodded game. I also mainly play solo and that provides me the opportunity to really dig into some of the game mechanics. It's amazing how detailed those are and how they're still being discovered all these years later. Solo play provides an opportunity to get to grips with things like weapon speed, initiative and the way APR works. Those have a big influence on the game, though the impact is generally hidden if you're playing in a party. One of the big advantages of the real-time nature of the computer game is the opportunity to leverage those factors in a way not possible in the original turn based game.

    I should also give a nod to multi-player as a reason for playing the game. @Gate70 might be able to remember how many years it is since we started playing, but I would guess something like 7 or 8 and we've had well over 200 attempts at no-reload in that time. MP does give quite a different feel to the game and the mechanics of it are also rather different to my normal game (for instance minimal use of pause, when I do that a lot in single player and playing at 30 fps rather than the 60 I use on my own). The constraints are different as well and I could easily imagine things like lag and indeterminate positioning (as a result of the asynchronous nature of the game on 2 computers) being very off-putting to new players. After a while though allowing for that becomes normal and just leaves you with a game that offers a slightly different experience to single player, but is just as enjoyable in its own way.
    StummvonBordwehrJuliusBorisovBelgarathMTHSatrhan
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