Baldur's Gate

Baldur's Gate is a role-playing game developed by BioWare and published by Interplay Entertainment in 1998. It is the first notable game developed by BioWare. It later received a remaster developed by Beamdog called Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition and was released in 2012.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Great mechanics, inspired by Advanced Dungeons and Dragons.
 * 2) Good graphics for the time.
 * 3) Huge amounts of sidequests to do. It's up to you to do them or not, but completing them will grant you experience points. If you divert from the main plot for too long, your companions will remind you of what you need to do.
 * 4) The Journal allows you to keep track of what you need to do and contains a log of the story.
 * 5) Many NPCs that can be recruited into your party.
 * 6) You can interact with your party in many different ways to check if they're happy of siding with you or staying with other companions. Other games such as Dragon Age or Mass Effect would improve this feature. For example, there can be a feud between good and evil characters, and you need to calm them down.
 * 7) You can find many items that you can sell in shops or keep for later use. The weight limit pushes you to ignore weaker items, though.
 * 8) There are many factors that can influence your strength in combat. For example, you need to rest every 24 hours, otherwise your companions will get mad at you and your effectiveness in combat will be reduced.
 * 9) Online multiplayer is included, though is completely optional.
 * 10) Good combat that never encourages you to over-use certain moves (generally magic). Instead it pushes you to give commands separately to each member of the party.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The soundtrack is a bit monotonous.
 * 2) The graphics haven't aged well.
 * 3) During combat you will often have to pause the game to issue commands at your party, which becomes rather monotonous and frustrating. The game has auto-pause options though.
 * 4) In the multiplayer mode, all players in an area need to go in the same direction, which can create arguments between players that want to go in different directions.
 * 5) The Siege of Dragonspear expansion in the Enhanced Edition is not very good.
 * 6) Given the large amount of recruitable characters, it results in many of them getting little character development at all for the entire game.