Keep playing Baldur's Gate 1, finaly arrived at Baldur's Gate. Baldur's Gate is an strange game, I remember playing BG 2 before playing BG 1 and I wasn't that impressed with how primitive BG 1 was in comparison with BG 2, I remember giving up pretty early but replaying now... while BG 2 is far superior to BG 1 on alot of aspects, there is one thing where it is far better than BG 2, the story. I'm not talking of particular characters or dialogs, BG 1 had a ton of limitations, both NPCs and party members don't talk much, I'm talking of the framework of the story.
You start leaving the stronghold with your foster father on a hurry, Gorion doesn't explain why of the hurry, right after leaving Candleekeep, you are ambushed by a misterious man that wore the same armor of that skull armor guy from the intro. For some reason, he wants you, you assume pretty quickly that it probably isn't a good thing. Gorion tells you to go away and dies fighting the man. You, as the player, barely know Gorion, you meet him for the first time and a few minutes later he is dead and the foster father upbringing is the traditional cliche upbriging of 10 to 10 chosen ones. BG 2 later made the mistake of trying to dramatize Candlekeep, Imoen, Gorion and the whole abduction of Imoen, obviously that stuff was forced as fuck, on BG 1, Gorion, Imoen and candlekeep were of minor to no importance to the player. Gorion is later almost forgotten on BG 1 because he did his part, to show this misterious guy is ruthless and powerful and he wants your ass.
Before dying, Gorion gave you instructions, to meet Jeheira and Khalid at the Friendly Arms Inn but that is it, after that short intro, you are free to go everywhere, with exception of Baldur's Gate city, it is just a general direction, you don't NEED to go there. If you decide to take Jeheira or not, the main quest goal shortly become to investigate Neshkel mines because... there wasn't anything better to do? Neshkel mines is on the other side of the map and between you and it, there is a huge number of areas to explore. You are free to go almost everywhere, and during this exploration, you learn of the bandits, the iron shortage and the threat of war with Amn. Exploring the Friendly Arms Inn, Neshkel and Beregost, there are four attempts of murder on you and on the wilderness, you meet enemy parties that want to kill you to cash in on the reward on your head, placed by a group called Iron Throne. It doesn't take long for you to realize that those bandits, the iron shortage and the threat of war were orchestrated by the same group that want you dead so going to Neshkel mines and discover what is happening there makes sense.
You discover the story on BG 1 and everything that is happening in the world had somehow a connection with you, it made sense to discover what the Iron throne was and who this Sarevok is. Bioware did a great job of connecting the world with the player, by discovering the world, you discovered who Sarevok was and who you were. After Neshkel, you go after Thazok, the leader of the bandits and again, the only information you have is that they are somewhere to the north and you have to find their camp by yourself. Later on the game, you discover that the Iron Throne was pushing hard for war with Amn on a time where the only supplier of iron would be them, they would be powerful and be seen as the saviors of Baldur's Gate . To make their domination more secure, they were infiltrating dopplegangers on other trade unions and having their infiltrated agents do terrible business decisions that only benefited the Iron Throne. Soon they would have Baldur's Gate by the balls.
Obviously writing this makes it sound more awesome than it really was on practice, on practice it was killing trash mobs and having one paragraph conversations with NPCs but I liked how the story was down to earth and the true aspirations of Sarevok a mistery for most of the game, Sarevok didn't used "SUPER AWESOME DIVINE MAGIC POWERS of a SUPER BADASS 1000 YEARS OLD DUDE" to make the story go on, just plain backstabbing and playing dirty what makes him much more relatable than someone like Irenicus or more recently... Thaos ... even having alot less lines of dialog. I liked the story more when you discovered it by exploring the world instead of having extensive info dump NPCs that is the fashion these days.
NG!!! They are definitely on my Top Ten Most Annoying Enemies list.
