Baldur's Gate 1 Story

The lead writer of Baldur's Gate 1 Original is Lukas Kristjanson. LK wrote approximately 70% of the campaign (including most of the side quests), which is quite a feat.

I personally consider Baldur's Gate to feature the best writing of all the Infinity Engine games (PS:T is well-written also, but long-winded).

Unlike Icewind Dale, IWD2 and BG2, the writing is distinctively non-modern in style and employs the vocabulary and tone characteristic of Forgotten Realms literature.

Including narration, dialogue, Realmslore and the journal, there are approximately 550,000 words in Baldur's Gate. While many of the lore descriptions for items were lifted from FR literature, there is a lot of originality inherent in the writing of the story, quests and characters.

Along with the plot-critical dialogues, the writing for the deeply personal dream sequences (1,700 words), chapter-transitions, and political correspondence found throughout the campaign (3,000 words), are of especially high quality.

Baldur's Gate dream sequences:

A letter from Elminster to Gorion:

Other examples of correspondence:

Tamoko on Sarevok:

It is perhaps Durlag's Tower, however, that showcases the best writing Baldur's Gate has to offer.

BGScript: States & Responses

Also known as branching dialogues, BGScript dialogues trees consist of at least one state and one response. The state is the opening line by the NPC; the response, what the player character can say in return. Trees can consist of many states and responses.

Most commonly, the PC can respond in three different ways. Some responses are reactive to stats and choices made (cf. Baldur's Gate reactivity), but most are just for flavor. Take Charname's first encounter with Elminster, for example.

The PC may respond to Elminster's opener in three different ways:

The NPC then acknowledges how the PC responded to them:

Response 1:

Reponse 2:

Response 3:

That is branching dialogue at its most basic. At the termination of the tree, a script may fire in order to have the NPC walk off (as in this case), turn them hostile, call up UI modes, and so on. Dialogues can also trigger once a condition is met during combat encounters; for example, in order to parley, surrender, and so on. The encounter with Mulahey provides a good example. First, we beat him up. Then, he pretends to surrender: