I might be a Baldur's Gate 1 stan, but it's undeniable that Baldur's Gate 2 is the more important of BioWare's original duo of games. Heck, it created a mould for RPG design that studios still embrace today, at least in part. Just look at recent RPGs like Avowed or The Outer Worlds 2, and it won't take you long to find the BG2 DNA.
But BG2 didn't emerge in a vacuum, and in a recent chat with Slandered Gaming it emerged that—while we can thank BG2 for a lot of our favourite RPGs since—we have a whole other game to thank for BG2. That'd be Final Fantasy 7, which lit a fire under BG2 director James Ohlen to go all out with the game's structure and companions, per Trent Oster—who worked on the original Baldur's Gate and has since become CEO of Beamdog, the studio behind the BG1 and BG2 Enhanced Editions.
"So, James had played Final Fantasy 7, and they had character interaction and romance, and he was scared shitless," recalls Oster. He had good reason to be—BG1's companions had their enduring standouts (Minsc, most famously of all), but they were ultimately just collections of barks, to be swapped out and ditched the second you met someone better or they got gibbed by an errant critical hit. They were tools, not things you cared about.
That is to say, they were a far cry from your pals in FF7, who you grew very attached to indeed. "[Ohlen] literally said, 'These guys kicked our ass. This is how a game should be. We don't know what we're doing.'"
Which is how you go from your party in BG1 consisting of folk like Ajantis, whose entire character was just shouting "By Helm!" whenever you selected him, to the whole plotlines that your comrades got in BG2—the first seeds of the loyalty missions that would reach full flower in Mass Effect 2.
It wasn't just companions, though, it was also how the game was structured. "With the setting as well," recalls Oster, "Baldur's Gate is kind of linked to one map, whereas in Baldur's Gate 2 it's kind of like a rollercoaster through some of the most great places in the realms—you're in the Sahuagin city, and you're in the Underdark, you're just hitting all these high spots that you've always read about in books."
If you've not played the OG BG games, it's hard to overstate how different they were, structurally. BG1 consisted in the main of a vast amount of bland 'generic countryside' maps.
Now, to be fair, pretty much all of them would be dotted with a few interesting or funny encounters, but there was barely anything to distinguish them from one another. BG2 carted you from setpiece to setpiece. I still remember the Windspear Hills, or Waukeen's Promenade, or Ust Natha. I don't really remember places in Baldur's Gate beyond, uh, Baldur's Gate itself. And it turns out we can thank Square for that.
