Baldur's Gate 2 is proving to be much more interesting than Baldur's Gate 1
(originally posted September 15, 2022)
So, for example, it's early game in BG1. I've been kicked out of my hometown and now I'm wandering the same-y Sword Coast generic fantasy wilderness, fighting wolves and goblins. My companions asked me to head south to Nashkel because that's where the main plot is.
At Nashkel, I meet Noted Baldur's Gate Character, Minsc the Ranger, who is a buff bald man who talks to his hamster and is supposed to be protecting Dynaheir, his personal witch, while she goes on a pilgrimage. He tells me that she is being held hostage by gnolls (hyena men) in a stronghold to the west.
We go there, kill a lot of gnolls, rescue Dynaheir. Sidequest over.
That was quick, let's do another.
I'm wandering the same-y Sword Coast generic fantasy wilderness and a talking chicken comes up to me, begging for help. There's a dialogue option to say "this chicken is foul!" and everything. Insert laugh track.
Melicamp the chicken claims to be a mage apprentice polymorphed by a spell gone wrong, and asks me to bring him to his wizard master Thalantyr to get it fixed. Simple enough, it's only a couple areas away. The wizard says that this happened because Melicamp tried to steal some ancient magical items from him, but that he'll cast the Antichickenator spell anyway. It requires a human skull as a material component, but undead are common enough. I already have one in my pack from the graveyard a couple zones away.
Thalantyr casts the spell. The chicken explodes. Laugh track.
Thalantyr essentially shrugs and says that magic is dangerous and unstable, and as an adventurer and a fledgling Fighter/Mage I should remember to always respect it. Sidequest over.
I go back to killing wolves and goblins and gnolls in the same-y Sword Coast generic fantasy wilderness because I'm level 2 and my new friend Dynaheir has like 6 hit points and will instantly perish if a bandit so much as glances in her direction. Normal stuff.
In BG2, at the start of the game (literally right outside the tutorial dungeon), I'm in a city where the wizard cops will come down on me if I cast literally any magic within the city limits. This is a problem because most half of my party is made of spellcasters; even Lovable Meathead Minsc can cast some low level druid spells like Bless and Cure Light Wounds. If I want to cast all my basic buff spells or cast any healing or AOE magic, I need to do something about this.
An NPC tells me that if I want to bribe an official to get a magic license, I should head to the government building. The bribe costs 5000 gold, which is most of my money at this point after selling basically everything I found inside the tutorial dungeon. To be clear, the current main plot progression quest at this stage in the game is to gather 20,000 gold for an information broker to tell me where the main plot is happening.
I get my stupid magic license. Another wizard cop in the building waves me over and says he's willing to pay good money for a job. A supposedly nefarious individual, a murderous ranger named Valygar, has killed two wizard cops and is on the run, but wouldn't see my party coming because we're new in town. They want me to bring him in alive if possible so he can answer for his crimes against wizard cops. I agree because I need the money and because it's a content in a video game.
They literally give me the keys to his house in the city and have me snoop around. I find evidence that he's out in the woods to the northeast, near a small village connected to several other quests. I go there, and I find the cabin in the woods where this dude is supposed to be hiding out.
Valygar basically tells me that I'm a fool for doing the bidding of the obviously shady wizard cops and that he only killed them in self-defense because they were out for his blood. His literal blood, because, you see. Wizard cops. They need this guy's actual blood.
Because. You see. 500 years ago Valygar's ancestor made a giant magical orb. As the last of his line, only Valygar's blood can open it. The giant magical orb.
Since, you know, there's a giant magical orb in the city that appeared randomly a few weeks ago, phasing directly into a group of buildings in the slums. I walked right past it while I was heading to the government district to bribe that official. A grifter tried to sell it to me like it was the Golden Gate Bridge. Another grifter was trying to start a religion around it so he could charge people tithes.
(Aside: the city in question in this game is Athkatla, which worships Waukeen, goddess of the Free Market. Explains a lot.)
So I put Valygar in my party and go to the slums and enter this giant magical orb. Turns out it's some kind of multi-planar spaceship. There are some knights from the Dark Sun setting trapped in there and they are losing it over having to fight relatively normal Forgotten Realms monsters. They just cannot handle the fish people or the cannibal halflings or the flesh golems.
We fight through the inside of this giant planar orb. It has mini versions of various elemental planes on it. There's a beholder blocking the door to the navigation room and I have to assemble a robot from various pieces so it can smash through all the doors and distract the beholder's eye beams and give me a chance to kill it. There are puzzles to unlock all the doors. It's a whole-ass thing.
We finally get to Valygar's Evil Wizard Grandpa and I kick his crotchety old ass because by god I bribed that one stupid official for my magic license explicitly so I could cast the Breach spell and instantly rip down the 5947 defensive buffs every single enemy wizard automatically casts on themselves at the start of a given encounter.
So, of course, Valygar's Wizard Grandpa, on the brink of death because Minsc and I beat him over the head with our weapons repeatedly, says something to the effect of "damn guys, thanks for killing the malevolent extraplanar entity that possessed me and was kept inside by the wards on my planar sphere, finally I can die, thank you Valygar my far descendant............. but please..... I want to see the sunlight of the Prime Material Plane for the last time........"
"by the way brave adventurers, when you opened the door to this room the planar sphere automatically transported to Literally Hell and everyone's stuck there, the only way to escape hell is to go outside and kill a powerful demon and plug its heart into the giant golem engine inside of the Giant Magical Orb because i made this thing to run on demon hearts apparently... ohhhhh..... i want to see the sunlight....... valygar my descendant....."
So I go outside the planar sphere and I sure am on some kind of fire and brimstone plane and I sure do fight some demons and cut out their hearts so I can power this weird Giant Magical Orb and just get back to the main game world!
I finally do that, take the old wizard outside so he can see the sky or whatever, and he bequeaths to me his ring that lets me memorize more spells each day and also use of the Giant Magical Orb as a stronghold. Then I get two more quest leads, one about how to get those knights back to their home plane and one where another wizard cop asks me to make a deal regarding the Giant Magical Orb.
Because some dude talked to me when I was trying to get my magic license.
Which is all to say, when I'm comparing random sidequests I got from incidental NPCs speaking to me while I was trying to do something else, BG2 has way more going on. I'm enjoying it.
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