My goal is to give a sense of the immense size of this game and to give you lots of teasers so if you haven't bought the game yet, you'll make the purchase or if you have it but stopped playing halfway through, you'll take the time to finish.  What you will find is screenshots of every single outdoor area in the game, as well as some of the dungeons.   The shots do not spoil the game as there is no information about the many wonderful characters and other discoveries you will find as you travel.  This is simply a look at some of the fabulous art that went into this game.  There are over 60 screenshots here for you to take in.  I'm most proud of my composite shot of the City of Baldur's Gate.  If you want to get right into it, you can click on the link in the upper right - "Take me to the Sword Coast".  If you are looking for a good Baldur's Gate news site that also features quite a bit of other information of the game, check out the Baldur's Gate Chronicles.  It's the best BG site I've found.  Otherwise, I'm gonna ramble some about how great the game is and give some tips that might help you out in the later stages of the game.

These many screenshots strike me as excellent tools if anyone is planning on making a walkthrough for BG.  I don't have the time or the energy to do it but anyone out there is free to steal the screenshots and mark them up noting where things are and where to go, etc.  If anyone does, please email me - I'd love to see it.  How did I get all these screenshots and manage to get rid of the ugly green box?  Lots of hard work....  My mage learned the spell Clarvoiance which basically removes all the black from the maps.  You can't get them to look like this by just walking around a lot.  Trust me, I tried.   Unfortunately, Clarvoiance doesn't work underground so some dungeons have some black but it's not bad.  To get the green squares out, I took two shots of every screen than used part of one to replace the green box in the other.  For 70 shots, it was a pain, but worth it.

I am so impressed by the quality of Baldur's Gate.  Everything from gameplay, to art, to music, to interface, to manual, everything is exceptional in this game.  I'm choosing to focus especially on the art here in BG Heaven because every little bit was rendered by hand.  I can't imagine how much time was spent to create this environment.  What you see here is a ton of work, yet remember, each one of these screens expands to about 25 640x480 screens when playing the game.  These maps are simply the overview maps, not the gameplay maps.  Not only that, I have put none of the insides of buildings here or any character art or spell casting art or any of the rest of the art here.  Now, I love Age of Empires as much as the next guy, but Baldur's Gate wins the 2D art award in my book.  I was stunned time and time again by the exceptional quality of the work.  I'm sure you will be too.

That's not to say the rest of the game has been ignored.  Far be it - this baby sports full AD&D rules to the letter and the organization and interface are perfect.  It's easy to learn, the sound is great, the character classes are wonderful - there's even a good bit of humor injected from a number of different characters in a number of different ways.  I nearly fell off my chair laughing when the fat lady in the city of Baldur's Gate said "I'm not fat, I'm big boned!"  Lots of other good ones too that I can't remember.  The Exploding Ogre Act at the Carnival was great too...  I don't think I can count the number of times I stayed up past 5am playing this baby.  Enough said.

Ok, you want some advice on how to win?   I'll give you the tips I can.  First, build up outside of Baldur's Gate as much as you can - it makes the city go pretty quickly.  The thief is the most important character in the game.  In fact, I don't think the game is winable without a thief.  Why?  A good thief can get unlock almost anything and with Hide in Shadows, you get a free preview of every battle.  You can pick your fights - it's like having the reveal map and no fog cheats in Age of Empires, except it's not cheating.   I used Imeon for most of the game until I ran into Coran - the Fighter/Thief.   I had him going at 98% stealth, with the shadow armor for an effective stealth of 113%.  That allowed me to still use the Boots of Speed which helped greatly.   Also, dealing with characters becomes much easier with a thief.  I'm not sure if this is a bug but when you are in Hide in Shadows, characters will talk to you and you will talk back but they can't see you and therefore, can't attack you.  This is great with Mages since they will cast spells but they can't hit you.  If you're patient, you can cause the mage to use up all his spells without hitting anything and then attack.   Personally, I think it's a bug but it's there and I used it many times to great success.

Through most of the early stages of the game, I didn't need too many magical weapons so I saved them until the end.  The spell I ended up using the most was the fireball spell.  It is a killer against the stronger enemies.  I outfitted all of my guys with ranged weapons - either bows or slings and then I had my fighter/mage with the wand of fireball, my fighter with the potion of fireball and my mage with the spell of fireball all attack immediately.  I won many a quick battle with that tactic.  It works great on mages too since they take damage even if they are invisible.  Also, you can hit enemies that can't see you when using fireball.  It's the only way i found to kill those Ballisks. 

Another class of spells I used a lot at the end was the Animate Dead for clerics and the Monster Summoning for Mages.  Against the big enemies, your goal is not neccessarily to kill them with your conjured friends, it's just to toss in something so they don't attack you.   Again, ranged weapons and especially fire arrows make quick work.  Lastly, one of the spells I needed in the final battle was the potion of speed.  That increases both your move speed and your attack speed / frequency.  Against mages, it's invaluable.  They can't ever cast a spell you hit them so fast.  Have enough to pass around and you'll do well.  The only guys that gave me real problems at the end were the ones that were resistant to magic.  Again, your thief comes in handy.   As much as possible, I string out the enemies so I can attack one at a time.   With the thief, I run behind the enemy and backstab them.  After that, immediately strike with the rest of your group.  Even after I knew what to do, it took me several tries in a few places.  Other than that, you're on your own.   Good luck!

Angel SpineMan