More Like Baller's Gate! No, You Shut Up!

Anyone remember that Baldur’s Gate console spinoff series from last gen? I just played through the first one with a friend of mine. I think I can safely say that co-op is this games only saving grace. Or to put it another way, this game sucks. It is just a dungeon crawler and the only story is relayed through a few NPCs that become sparser and sparser as you progress. I think there are six or seven total. It was fairly well received back in 2001 according to MetaCritic and only God knows why. Were we that naïve eight years ago? If this game came out today it would be immediately shunned. Still, I found it amusing enough to finish, something I would have never done alone.


What is it about playing a crappy game with a friend that makes it so much more enjoyable? By today’s standards Baldur’s Gate looks terrible, the 360’s emulation was hardly adequate causing plenty of slow down especially early on, and the story can be summed up as “bad things are happening and you have to stop it.” Yet most of the obvious shortcomings of the game became the subject of our jokes, which proved to be very entertaining. Much more so than the game could ever hope to be, anyway. The dated graphics led to us to do stupid things like take all the armor off the Elven Sorceress to see her ridiculous character model. The slowdown ended up adding a hilarious slow motion effect to some of the games more “dramatic” moments. Taking the armor off the Sorceress while playing by yourself would just be weird and creepy, and the slowdown would be annoying, but by having a friend to laugh with made it infinitely better.

The gameplay also consisted of very little. The Warrior spams A, the Archer switches between A and B, and the Sorceress spams B. This is an oversimplification, but not really by all that much. Rather than making the game arduous and boring it ended up causing the game to become more of a backdrop for a conversation. Similar to talking with friends while music plays in the background, we were just chatting while playing Baldur’s Gate. Occasionally the game would provide material for the conversation, such as the jokes mentioned above, but unless we were trading items or what not the game was rarely the centerpiece of what was going on.

There is something very enjoyable about sharing an experience with a friend and game makers have been cashing in on this for years. The old sidescroller beat ‘em ups like Double Dragon and Streets of Rage are essentially dungeon crawlers and those never lost popularity. Games like Castle Crashers and the new TMNT remake are proving we still very much want this kind of thing. It’s also nice to see developers going beyond these genres and trying to create more meaningful and teamwork oriented co-op experiences. Games like Army of Two, Resident Evil 5, Left4Dead and Lost Planet 2 all are trying to require teamwork rather than just throwing a second person into a single player game. Imagine how fun those are if people are willing to trudge through Baldur's Gate? Well, except for Army of Two, that one was still pretty weak.

Playing a game with human interaction is irreplaceable what makes co-op so enjoyable (pretty much by definition). While this isn’t the case for all games, it definitely applies to plenty. That would also explain why I think playing multiplayer games in a LAN setting is often more fun than over the internet. One thing’s for certain, there is definitely some appeal or I never would have gotten my roommate to finish Eternal Sonata with me.