The Sunday Hardcore #2 - Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition

Sometimes, you just learn how bad you actually are at a game. 

And so it begins.

"What is this series?" you ask with sly little smile on your lips.

I answer:

This is a weekly series in which I take a game and attempt a hardcore run of it.

"What is a hardcore run?" you ask, playfully twirling your hair.

A no death run... more accurately put as 'one life' run. Once you die, it's over, you're done, you're game is over. You get as far as you can without dying, playing the game in a very different way due to this factor (though some games are kind enough to provide it as a feature, which is always a nice option).

"Why are you doing this?" you ask, tilting your head oh so slightly.

To see things differently. The way a game works and how you approach the entire thing changes DRAMATICALLY when death means 'that's all folks!' and it is interesting to observe it from this angle. It's also fun and challenging.

Also, Sundays are usually dull days with little to do, so this spices things up.

"What are your rules?" you ask, affectionately attaching an active taser to your dog's nose.

Play till death or for four hours, whichever of the two comes later. Because, it's very anti-climatic if I die 30 to 120 minutes in. If I do, I restart (with the freedom to change things up when there are options) and try to get as far as I can. If I keep dying the 'upper limit' is four hours, because if I'm dying loads then things are redundant. Oh, and deaths by QTEs don't count. 

This made me feel more existential than I'd like to admit.

I was pretty interested going into this hardcore run of Baldur’s Gate, since I’ve always been all too familiar with the highly lethal nature of the game, especially in this first part owing to the low levels and the power of luck accompanying it. I’ve spoken, in my reviews, about how luck can often mean the difference between life and death in the first game, so I was pretty curious to see how things are going to turn out when I don’t have the safety of Quick Saves and Loads to make up for minor mistakes, or major ruts of bad luck.

Why the Fighter/Cleric Half-Orc?

Hobgoblins are still a joke.

                I wanted to go for something durable, especially in the first game, capable of dishing and taking punishment while also having his own bit of utility. I would have ideally gone for some Paladin variant, but since I just finished playing through both games (normally) with a Inquisitor, I had little interest in playing a Paladin yet again. Furthermore, I knew where I could get a Warhammer +2 very early on in the game, so that amplified my justification for this choice.

                Above all else, I wanted my main character to have some good utility since I knew I was going to lose the other characters fairly often, and felt sure that I was going to see them get gibbed (and thus permanently killed off) and lose some critical abilities. The Half-Orc felt like the most solid choice, since the +1 to Strength and Constitution would give me great bang for my buck out the bat, especially the 19 Strength when combined with the Warhammer +2.

You know things are going bad when Xvarts do THIS to your party.

How did the run go?

                If my Torchlight 2 run went surprisingly well, this was the polar opposite. Constant errors, bad judgements and a few spouts of bad luck meant that most of my party spent most of its time dead. You know things are going bad when most of your party gets killed by a minor host of Xvarts. Honestly, I almost feel it would have been cheaper and comparatively easier to just use my main character with one or two other characters. Imoen has always been a solid character in the series and she served surprisingly well in this run as well, pulling her weight while not falling to bad luck when enemies caught up to her.

I'd lie and say I spent less than 1000 gold on resurrections. But then I'd be lying.

                My first casualty of war was poor Minsc, who was blown up a bear, rendering him fallen for the rest of this brief story. My Mages did not fare well, and the two of them (Dynaheir and Edwin) must have died around 8 to 12 times in between the two of them. Neither Khalid nor Jaheira pulled their weight, and both died a handful of times, with Jaheira exiting the scene as bloody chunks, and a dead Khalid being ousted from the party soon enough. Kiven, equipped with a Halberd +1, did the greatest amount of work after my main character and even managed to make it till the end. Alas, I came an end in one of the most random and pathetic ways possible. You’ll read about it soon enough.

What is different in a hardcore run?

Why does it have to be bears?

                Baldur’s Gate is simultaneously the same game, but is also dramatically different during a hardcore run. It’s really fascinating to play it with everything at the balance upon a d20 dice’s edge, though I’ll have to confess that my mistakes and poor tactics are what truly did me in more than bad luck itself… which is quite a shocker since I expected to get done in by bad luck.

Make sure you're well stocked, lest your Mages run out of ammunition and decide to punch things.

                Needless to say, your tactics, positioning and equipment all gain far more importance this way, since you want to maximize your safety while also keeping in mind the fact that enemies have to die. Baiting enemies one-by-one became an important tactic to dealing with stronger enemies, though that was also fragile since it was possible to be hounded by a pack of enemies far greater than what you can chew. You can freely use and abuse NPCs since their life expectancy is low, and you don’t necessarily want to bank on them when they can disappear from your world in a shower of red chunks. So you can use them for a certain purpose and then abandon them, or keep them around or in reserve as back up for when one of your characters dies.

Command, at work. (the dead duo were dead before Command turned this fight into a joke)

                The spells at your disposal also become far more important, as you learn the importance of disabling spells and just how useful they are. I used to use them in my normal playthrough, though I used to often end up brute forcing through some situations, running on luck and raw power. The spell ‘Command’ used to one of my favourites, and I came to love it even more, as it let me easily deal with some tough enemies by splaying them out on the ground so that my party could chop them up.

I actually used Colour Spray. It was colourful (and useful!).

                Perhaps that is the gist of this playthrough, the importance of all your tactics combined and all the little things. Luck can still make things go for or against you, but it ultimately comes down to your actions and positioning. Which should make a hardcoreplaythrough of the second game all the more interesting as luck is less of a life-or-death factor there.

The only two who usually stayed alive, ever. 

Final Moments

Baiting and killing is a fine tactic.

Till things go horribly, horribly wrong. 

Horribly, horribly wrong... maybe the Temple will provide some safety?

Unfortunately, our good friend here got caught in the cross fire as we fought wolves inside a temple.

He wasn't very pleased. 

And so it... ends?!!

If ever there was a truly random and almost absurd way to see the end of a hardcore run, this is it.

Yes, it all started with a misclick and misfire and ended with death.

Made me think of Dark Souls and its NPCs a bit, really.

I might actually return to a hardcoreplaythrough of this game again in the future, near future if I don’t get my new and improved desktop soon, since it’s interesting enough to give a second shot and I feel I’ll fare much better the second time around, knowing what I’m going up against in the land of no Saves and Loads.