Welcome to deleted saves on this episode, Beyond the Gate, a retrospective review of Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 1 and 2.

In what seems like a life age ago, in the year 1969, a young Canadian boy named Ed Greenwood began writing a setting to fit all of his childhood stories of adventure and daring do.

In the mid 1970s when 2 creators named Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson began publishing the collected rules set for their various home games that became known as Dungeons and Dragons, Greenwood found a set of rules he could begin to use to allow others to live in his world which he named the Forgotten Realms.

In 1979, Greenwood become a regular contributing writer to the rules modification and adventure focused game magazine Dragon, which was a companion publication to the Dungeons and Dragons rule set.

By 1987, with the dawn of advanced Dungeons and Dragons being published, or what we in the hobby would collectively call Second Edition, TSR outright bought the rights to create and publish the Forgotten Realms with Greenwood's blessing and support as another playable world setting, along with her stalwart settings Dragon Lance and Greyhawk.

In the decades since, the Forgotten Realms has become the default setting for all modern Dungeons and Dragons games in some fashion or another, long after many others have risen and fallen.

Some, like the settings Ravenloft and Dragon Lance, which got a second chance at life, while others like Dark Sun, Planescape or Birthright ebbed and flowed and have all but disappeared from the gaming landscape known now only by YouTube armchair hobby historians and those of us, dwindling though our numbers be who have been in the hobby long enough to remember them.

I've got to meet Mr.

Greenwood once, briefly in 2011 at Gen.

Con that year, the yearly biggest and arguably best known event in tabletop gaming where the celebrities of the industry come to meet and greet, play games with the fans and shill whatever new product they have going.

In my very short interaction where I nervously introduced myself, this figure, who in my mind was akin to Zeus, was just an average white bearded and friendly sort with a twinkle in his eye and a ready smile.

I would not expect that of someone who, aside from creating one of the biggest settings in fantasy fiction this side of The Lord of the Rings, was a career librarian.

I know they say never meet your heroes, but in this case he was one of the good ones.

I say all this to give just a little more scope on yet another of my reviews of video game based around the Forgotten Realm setting in my seemingly endless supply of licensed titles based on the tabletop hobby.

In this case, I'm looking at two titles tangentially related to two much more widely known beloved CRPG titles, in this case Baldur's Gate 1 and 2.

But how does the Dark Alliance differ from the others, and does it have anything at all to do with the more recent smash hit Balder's Gate 3?

To that second question, my sad reply to you, dear listener, is no.

The two have nothing to do with one another other than sharing a fantasy city location.

The Dark Alliance titles occur a little over 100 years before the Balder's Gate 3 timeline in a video game timeline that actually makes sense for once.

But in response to the first question, well, that is a little more complicated.

While neither games have anything to do with the ball spawn crisis which is the plot of the CRPG titles in the wake of the in universe Time of Troubles event.

The Dark Alliance games take place maybe 30 to 40 years later and are meant to be showpiece games for the Dungeons and Dragons Third slash 3.5 edition rules which were similar to the Neverwinter Knights game.

What this means in a time of this choosing is that the rules of the game had been simplified, Thako was disowned, and extreme character customization was the name of the game.

It is this rule set that would further go on to influence the current 5th edition 5.5 edition rule set.

We don't talk about Fourth Edition and it's sad, desperate attempt by then owner Wizards of the Coast to turn it into World of Warcraft.

Anyway.

The Dark Alliance title share several other things with the titles that came before it besides setting.

Both were published by Interplay Entertainment while that studio still existed.

Both games had gaming royalty attached to the development such as Jeremy Soul and Chris Avalon and both were PlayStation Two titles and on the PS2 is where this offshoot series lived and died and that I rented but never owned these titles until recently when they were re released.

The first game was developed by Snow Blind Studios, who did a lot of interplays, console based offshoots of CRPGS with titles that included Fallout, Brotherhood of Steel, as well as others who used their proprietary engine.

And the second game was developed by Black Isle Studios themselves.

And believe it or not, both games are one unified story, which I will get into shortly.

But if you're hoping for a story rich, deeply tactical experience like your PC counterparts, I'm about to disappoint you.

Further, these two titles are hack and slash action role-playing titles with only the barest hint of the associated role-playing systems typical with the tabletop game that inspired them.

But does that mean they are bad games?

Well, let's dive into that, shall we?

Originally released in 2001, Baldersgate Dark Alliance is a one to two player game in which you can pick from one to two or three characters.

Vaughn the human Archer, Adriana the Elvin sorceress, and Kromlich the dwarven fighter.

So, hitting all the highlights right away, your chosen hero or heroes stumble blindly into the darkened, seedy city of Baldur's Gate, where they are immediately hit over the head and robbed by members of the local Thieves Guild.

Which sets them on a revenge quest to get their stuff back, while the blase in Toothless City Watch does nothing other than complain about the rise of the new Thieves Guild of late.

From here, the party must clear out a cellar of rats from the nearby Elf Song Tavern, which is about as cliche as it gets, then enter a crypt where the thief that stole from them was headed, only to find it crawling with undead due to a magical sphere that's an associated evil church had the thieves steal and hide there.

From here the Thief quest falls away pretty quickly when the party kills the new Guild leader and his even worse boss, a floating monster of ice stalks and teeth called the Beholder which was guarding A teleportation gate to the far off mountains where giants and hyena like Knowles patrol.

From there they must save a dwarf of an outpost, kill some evil elves, and slay an ice dragon.

Only to find out there is an honest to God's lizard man conspiracy theory going on and all those monstrous troops you were carving your way through are, at the appointed time, supposed to teleport into Baldur's Gate and lay bloody siege to the city.

All of this supposedly at the behest of a powerful ghost who holds the hidden Onyx Tower, a literal fortress of evil.

And this ghost has sworn unending vengeance on Baldur's Gate and has rallied a host of villains and critters to work for it.

Somehow the final stage of the game sees our more powerful hero storming this tower and destroying the spirit who was a hero of the city in life but was betrayed, and the three disappear into another portal that leads into a dark forest and an uncertain fate where the lizard man tells an off screen villain that the Onyx Tower is now free for them to take over.

This game is very linear unlike its PC counterparts, with very little chance to explore the world around it, likely due to both console limitations and development time limitations.

It is a game developed purely for the console gamer or what it was believed at the time, which was about a 10 hour game with a thin plot and a very Diablo like lute and chute isometric mechanic.

All the male characters are gruff and ugly sorts hidden under layers of armor and cloaks, and all the female characters are impossibly pretty with all the big jiggling particle physics the PlayStation two could provide.

This game is in no way means to be as immersive or as exploratory as the original Balter's Gate, and does in many way play to the cliches of what the perception of the average console gamer was back in 2001, or at least whatever a certain type was the developers had in mind.

It's not a terrible game, in fact it was reviewed quite well where it sits at an 87 on Metacritic for the PlayStation 2 and it supports to the GameCube Gameboy Advancement.

Xbox being a bit lower and back in the day got scores of eight and nines out of 10 from various outlets and was a commercial success selling 1,000,000 units across all platforms it was released on.

But it is a game you should absolutely adjust your expectations about before you even give it a try.

And as it was a re released a few years ago on Steam, GOG, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch and PlayStation Network as a digital only download, you can go ahead and give this one a try if you are willing to part with a ludicrous sticker price of 2999 for a fucking 24 year old game.

Hasbro Games which owns Wizards of the Coast and D&D now.

Must be some of the greediest guys on the planet banking on a nostalgia that has long since passed is all I can say.

This is definitely a sale game, even if the sale price sucks, but for what it is, it can be a lot of fun.

Released in 2004, Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance 2 takes place almost immediately after the first title and increases our

pool of heroes from 3:00 to 5:00 to pick from Doran the human barbarian, Viandra the Drow elf monk, Usuran the elf necromancer, Borador the dwarven thief, and Alessia the human cleric.

Again, this was a showcase for the diversity of character creation in the 3rd edition rule set, despite the fact that you as the player can do very, very little to adjust or modify any of these template characters.

Like its predecessor, this is an isometric hack and slash dungeon crawler based solely on loot gathering.

The Diablo clone that begins on the road outside of Baldur's Gate as the would be heroes find an overturned caravan under siege by goblins on their way to fame and glory.

Choosing to slay the little devils, the group hacks its way through their camp to discover the goblins have been growing bolder since the destruction of the mercenary thieves Guild from the first title who was keeping their numbers down.

Once in the city, the Booptacular caravan hire leader hires them to investigate a series of murders in the city that tie back to Blood Meyer Manor and its mammarylicious matriarch.

Glad to see Black Isle kept up the important trends from the previous game.

Anyway, the victims are being turned into monsters that are being sold to a Lady Firewind and some of those monsters are forming guilds of their own such as a new thieves Guild and a new mercenary company tied to a long standing in game world organization set on ruling the the world from the shadows.

And all of this is to cause enough bloodshed and pain to bring back the Onyx tower from the first game from its hiding place outside of the mortal realm.

About halfway through the game each of the characters goes through a 1 mission character arc where they either stop being semi villains or stop being blind dupes and come back to find that all the enemies that escaped from their previous missions have banded together under the mantle of the vampire warlord Mordock Seleneme, who was the mysterious voice the lizard man from the previous game was talking to at the end of that title.

The vampire always wanted the power of the Onyx Tower but couldn't get to it because of the ghost in the previous game, but now plans to use it to teleport into Baldur's Gate and turn the whole place into a city of the living dead.

Well, they will after going through the most dull part of the game, which is a visit to all four elemental planes of existence, and then they kill all those previous escaped enemies.

Toward the end of the game, the new heroes rescue the three heroes from the previous title who were kidnapped by Mordock at the end of the last game, then go about slaughtering the last defenses Mordock had built around the Onyx Tower, which now includes much of the zombified population of Baldur's Gate once destroyed.

In the final scene and after returning the zombies to their mortal forms, an unknown voice tells a stone sarcophagus that Mordock failed, and the ancient grave replies that the vampire's failure will not stop.

Their quote UN quote sacred mission meaning that there was supposed to be a third game in this series that never saw the light of day.

Surprisingly, the sequel did worse than the first Dark Alliance game, sitting at 78 on Metacritic and only being released on PS2 and Xbox.

But a lot of the outlets of the time gave the game a general 8.5 out of 10.

Now personally I think this title is better and a lot more fun than the original.

But hey, I have a habit of like liking #2 in a series of games better than the first, despite what everyone else thinks.

Well, almost every game series sequel.

There have been exceptions.

Unfortunately, the sales figures for Dark Alliance 2 are not publicly available, which usually means it's sold very poorly.

Outside estimates may be lower than 100,000 copies being sold due to some distribution problems.

Personally, I think this is a shame.

It does not speak to the quality of the game itself, but more of a mess that businesses made out of the property and title due to licensing rights and assorted tomfoolery, which is too bad, but there is very little little we can as consumers can do about it.

However, like the first game, it is now available pretty much everywhere on the systems as you can get the game in digital form for another 2999 for a 21 year old game.

Grab this on sale if you want an old school Diablo like clone and a licensed fantasy setting skin.

Now remember when I said there was supposed to be a third Dark Alliance game?

Well, it turns out there's a bit of a story to that.

Dark Alliance 2 almost never saw the light of day itself.

With the game almost ready to launch, Interplay cancelled its distribution rights with Vivinta Universal, which was to distribute the game in North America, but the team had already begun development on Dark Alliance Three, while Black Island Interplay were able to find a new distributor due to taking a huge financial hit and losing the license to Dungeons and Dragons, the team was then forced to turn and to make Fallout 3.

While some of you may cheer this, don't Interplay was now several $1,000,000 in debt and no development of 1/3 Fallout game was going to save them.

And soon all but two of the Fallout 3 team was fired.

So effective immediately, Black Isle and Interplay were dead and both Fallout 3 and Dark Alliance three were cancelled.

We all know what happened to Fallout 3, but under no circumstances will Dark Alliance 3 see some a similar resurgence.

Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast have no interest in developing new D&D titles, or at least they didn't until Baldur's Gate 3 turned out to be a license to print money.

But neither Hasbro nor Wizards learned why that was, and Hasbro has decided to keep for the game development in house, meaning they have, in recent purchasing sprees, bought up a bunch of utter bottom tier development studios to pump out five new games based on Dungeons and Dragons and the Forgotten Realms.

So I guess we'll see what happens in the future, but that future hardly looks bright.

And you may recall where I said these two games had a lot in common.

Well, there is one more thing.

I couldn't actually defeat the final boss of either game by myself.

Well, I know how they end by osmosis and watching some YouTube videos.

The end bosses of both games are brutally difficult for a single player.

I got all the way to the end of both games and tried valiantly to finish them, but I just couldn't.

These two enemies are geared to have two players hitting them at once, which is not an option for me, and I spent an hour each repeatedly getting destroyed trying to finish these titles.

Eventually I realized I was done and I was in no way interested in starting from an earlier save or from the beginning to redo the characters after two separate 10 hour game runs.

Maybe that's my fault, but I don't really care.

Which sucks as except for a few silly and patted parts, the lead ups to these ends were of the two games were pretty darn good.

Not great or memorable for most, but good in a way.

I feel like Dark Alliance one and two are a sort of sad send off to one of the best known and beloved CRPG developers in game history and cast a bit of a shadow across the titles that share their name.

I understand these early 2000s console games are just early 2000 console games at the end, but even by 2004 what was being done with the capabilities of the of the consoles back then isn't quite an excuse.

These two games feel more like witnessing the last days of a giant solitary Horry grumbling at nothing and trying to have one last bit of glory before the long and inevitable end.

Slain by the callous hand of middling greedy adventurers seeking neither fame nor glory of their own, but just to rob whatever they can found on the corpse of a legend and the RE releases.

Are in many ways a propping up of that corpse by opportunist to find one more round of squeezing what cash can still be scrounged up.

I feel like these games would benefit from a full on remake by a studio that knows ARP GS in and out, adding in more of that role-playing flavor and removing a lot of the linearity.

As I said, these aren't bad games, but they are games stuck in their time rather than being timeless classics.

I have a lot of love for these games when they debuted decades ago.

While I enjoyed my return to them now, I can see why this sort of misfired revival can help cash in on the success of an entirely fresh and unrelated game.

I do lightly recommend Dark Alliance One on Two being played now, but as I said, these are games you really need to rein in your expectations about, especially if you played any of the other mainline Baldur's Gate series.

These games are side stories on the way to bigger and more exciting tales.

A bit of fanfiction filler that the original authors gave the thumbs up to so their corporate masters would stay happy.

Pill.

Not even Mr.

Greenwood was a fan of fanfiction filler.

Just ask him his opinion on what Wizards of the Coast did to the Realms during the 4th edition years.

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