Baldur's Gate II Update

Recently, GameSpot visited BioWare in Edmonton, Canada to play Baldur's Gate II for a few hours. The game is nearly complete, and is on track to ship sometime this fall.

At this stage of development, most of the quests and features are implemented, and the game can be played through to its conclusion. There are over six chapters to the game, which begins in a dungeon where your main character has been jailed by a mysterious group of assassins. After you are freed by the thief Imoen, and in turn rescue fellow captives Jaheira and Minsc, you escape the jail and make your way to the city of Athkatla, where chapter two starts.

Baldur's Gate II is a huge game according to BioWare - it will allegedly have over 200 hours of gameplay, although you'll probably be able to speed through the main plot of the game after 60 or so hours. The first chapter is relatively short, but chapter two is massive, and has dozens of side quests in addition to the main story path. These side quests will vary in difficulty depending on when you encounter them. If you wait until you finish the other chapters before returning to solve some of these sidequests that appear early on, the challenges within these side quests will be accordingly more difficult. Ogres might now populate the dungeon instead of orcs, for example.

The variety of monsters in Baldur's Gate II is incredible - there are more than 100 different monster types in the game. Some Baldur's Gate monsters return for the sequel and many Icewind Dale creatures also make appearances, but the majority of the monsters are brand new. The new creatures will include many Underdark monsters like illithids, beholders, aboleths, drow, kuo-toa, duergar, and more powerful denizens of the deep earth. The environments we saw included an Underdark drow city, the tomb of a powerful lich, an extradimensional prison, and a domed, underwater city. The circumstances that will lead you to these and many other interesting locales are varied and intriguing. For instance, the reason why you will journey to the drow city is you have to recover some precious offspring for a powerful ally you meet later in the game. To infiltrate the city, your party members are polymorphed into drow.

Further along, we explored the beholder caverns, where drow and beholders are fighting - or more accurately, where drow are being massacred by beholders. We assume you'll find out why these two races are fighting as you progress through the Underdark portion of the game. In the beholder caverns, we fought regular beholders, as well as elder orbs. And sometimes, we fought over three at a time. Apparently, Baldur's Gate II will be much more challenging than any other previous D&D RPG. In fact, we also fought a powerful lich, who had access to ninth-level spells. Even our party of 17th-level characters was hard-pressed to defeat him, as he cast instant-death spells at our summoned allies and then cast a time stop so he could shoot off a meteor swarm, summon a pit fiend, and cast other spells before we could even act.

The player characters in our party included Nalia, a mage/thief who leads you to complete the fighter stronghold quest. There was also an evil, belligerent dwarf named Korgan, who will take every opportunity to fight with your good-aligned party members. Another party member was a bounty hunter who specialized in setting traps. And Imoen from the original Baldur's Gate has dual-classed into a thief/magic-user. All of the returning characters from Baldur's Gate were depicted using all-new character portraits.

Among the new features in Baldur's Gate II are the inclusion of three 3rd Edition D&D classes. Although the game was originally going to be a lot of character kits for greater variety of starting characters, Baldur's Gate II wasn't intended to have any 3rd Edition D&D classes. That has since changed: The sorcerer, barbarian, and monk are included in the game now, and although they are not identical to their 3rd Edition counterparts, they are very similar, and should add yet more options for you to choose from for your starting character. The sorceror is a spellcaster who doesn't have to memorize spells, but also doesn't have a spellbook. He knows fewer spells overall, but can cast more spells per day than a wizard. The barbarian rolls a higher hit dice for hit points and has the ability to rage for improved strength and hit points during battle. The monk, meanwhile, has a great array of special abilities, including enhanced unarmed attacks, greater speed, self-healing, and the dreaded quivering palm attack, which can kill enemies with a single blow.

Among the other information we discovered is that D&D fans will finally be able to wield and use the most powerful magic items in the D&D universe. Although we knew before that paladins would get their holy avengers, we now know that the staff of the magi is available as the ultimate quest item for wizards. Additionally, the hammer of thunderbolts - a weapon that lets you stack the bonuses of the gauntlets of ogre power and the girdle of giant strength in addition to doing double damage - is available as a quest item that must be assembled from various parts.

The graphics in Baldur's Gate II look good, especially for some of the newer monsters. The move to 800x600 resolution definitely benefits the look of the game. And the special effects for many of the new spells are also impressive.

We'll be receiving our build of Baldur's Gate II this week. As soon as we do, we'll bring you more information and screenshots.