Customer Reviews

Baldur's Gate Official Strategy Guide (Bradygames Strategy Guides)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(33)

 

 

I don't know what people are moaning about. A strategy guide should and does show you what to do. This does just that. Just because it doesn't hold your hand and point you through everthing, doesn't mean its a bad guide. There is a long walkthrough at the beginning that is not that helpful, because it's in a story format. After that it tells you a path to follow and a brief description of most of the sub plots. A list and description of mage spells, and a section for secrets. There is a list of how to create a perect character for each class, and at the very end a list of monsters and their hit points and thier level. What more do you want, it is a guide that relys on the fact that the person playing the game might be able to make thier on decisions.

This book is incredibly bad. Its mostly just the manual reprinted. Under the character section I didn't find how to make a good character, I found the exact same descriptions used in the game. People say this book is good because it doesn't hold your hand. This book just pretends your inept. The "walkthrough" was mostly the exaact same stuff that your journal gives you, with the other being the decisions that the person who played the game made.
It just tells you some of what you need to know to beat teh game, and the rest it jsut hints at. The guide just names the side-quests, it doens't help with any of them, also everything is piled around so that you don't have a cohesive, chapter by game chapter guide, rather parts of the chapter all over the book. For crying out-loud, they made two seperate walkthroughs, neither of which is very helpful.

Save your money, because this book is just an expensive manual.

This is a truly excelent strategy guide. Many of the features it has should be included in all strategy guides. Whether your a newbie to Baldurs Gate or an experienced player this book has something to offer. One feature that I truly thought was great was how they went through a walkthrough of the game (this does not have all the quests, so reading it wont ruin the game for you) with a sample character Diana Nightflame. Instead of the standard strategy guide that just has a dull section that tells you every secret, quest, and cheat it actually went through the game with a chracter giving you not only the info for hardcore experienced players but also a feel of the game for newbies. Another good feature is the ideal stat for class section in the back. What this does is give you a basic idea of what stats and skills you want for each class (fighter,mage,thief...). Although it is a truly great guide it does have one large drawback. Although it does go through all the quests I personnaly don't think it goes through in enough detail. The reason being I assume is so that you actually have some of the mystery to solve yourself. The problem is though if you are already looking in this section chances are you want to know exactly how to do each quest not just a small paragraph to just guide you along the right path. If what you want is just to be guided along go back to the sample character walkthrough and read that. Other than this minor drawback though this strategy guide is excellent and a must have for any Bgate player. Hope this helped:)

The Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn Guide by Versus is absolutely brilliant. It gives you all the secrets, tells you exactly where everything is, exactly what needs to be done to get what, how much XP you get from each quest, etc. It's nigh on perfect.

By contrast, this guide for Baldur's Gate tells you next to nothing. It has a "journal" where it tells you what there sample character did. I've always found such things to be useless. You have to comb through it to find any usefuyl information. The rest of the book is better. It does give you some good information in an organized form, but it's sparse. I want a guide to give me precise maps and give me all the little details of what it takes to do what and what's worth what, etc. This guide did virtually none of that.

I suppose that this guide is better than nothing, but if you're looking for a good guide for Baldur's Gate, look online. For instance, http://www.pottsland.com/baldur/ has a good collection of useful info. It's certainly far better than this guide.

In short, this guide is absolutely abysmal. Don't buy it.

I bought "Baldur's Gate: Official Strategy Guide" BEFORE I read any of the reviews. I was disappointed to see so many that informed potential buyers to save their money. After reading the reviews - and prior to the arrival of the book - I was sorry I had spent the money but decided to give it a chance. After reading the guide, I felt compelled to write a review supporting it. I feel the strategy guide gives the player as much or as little information as she or he wants to know. I found it very helpful. The only negative criticism I agree with is that it could have used a table of contents. In spite of the fact that it does warn you before you read each chapter as to how much it will give away, it would have been much better if I could have turned to exactly what I was looking for without having to go searching for it. All in all, I highly recommend it.

Some people apparently liked this book because it didn't give away too much of the plot.... why were these people reading a guidebook? The Icewind Dale guidebook was amazing. It had a complete walkthrough that took you through all of the little nooks and crannies of the game and separate sections for every item type and creature you can find/encounter.

The main section of this book is vague journal entries that are intended to take you throught the major plot moments. This was an awful idea as a typical entry reads something like "We hurried through the cavern encountering countless skeletons, spiders, and mercenaries". That will get you nowhere! If you're reading the guide you wanna know what corridors you will walk down and exactly who you will encounter.

The main narrative ignores almost all of the little subquests in the game. If you don't take on a good number of these quests your characters aren't going to have the experience you will need to beat the game. The section on subquests is nearly indecipherable.

The most inexcusable sin committed by this guide is it's horrible maps. The maps are not no help at all. The map of the sewers in Baldur's gate will not tell you what you will find in any given room or corridor.

I usually buy the guidebook for any rpg i play just to make life a little simpler, this book was no help at all. the game's non-linear setup would be challlenging for any writer but they coudl have at least labelled the maps!

The Baldur's Gate: Official Strategy Guide is good to have, it tells you about the main charatcers in the game that you will incounter. It also tells you about some of the places that you will have to go to and where they are located, but if you don't want to know all of this, you might want to still get it. The strategy guide does give alot away(it would be better if it had a table of contents)that one might want to figure out on his own, but it is always good to have.

Quite frankly the only truly useful thing in this book is one page where is shows the area numbers for all the maps. So I threw it in the recycle bin this morning.

It doesn't show hit points of enemies or any of the statistical figures or descriptions of where to find things you regularly expect from such guides. The walkthrough is completely lame and what info there is, is diffcult to find.

I recommend you head to gamespot.com to check out Dessloch's guide to BG. It's about 1/3 the price and has absolutely everthing you could want. Also useful is strategy info on websites linked from the BG page.

Don't waste your money on this guide.

This was without a doubt the worst strategy guide I have ever had the displeasure of laying eyes on. Not only is it poorly written, and organized, but it doesn't elaborate on any of the items, quests or sub-quests mentioned in it. The best they offer on any sub-quest is a two to three sentance blurb. Curious about a magical item? Continue to be, for this book won't help you out. If anyone wants to write a strategy guide they should look to Prima's Diablo (the original Diablo) guide. That was without a doubt, the best guide I have seen out there.

I use stategy guides to answer specific questions about games, items, and quests. This book is almost worthless. The maps and diagrams are too small to read and have no labels on any of the streets, buildings, or points of interest. At least one of the diagrams is of the wrong part of town. Many of the subquests are omitted and the ones that are included consist of one descriptive sentence. The book has no logical organization for finding anything. I have spent hours looking for some information on some aspect of the game without success or with very limited success. This is probably the most frustrating "Strategy Guide" that I own. I agree with John Ciko's review that much better information is available on the Internet.