Baldur's Gate

Baldur's Gate is a series of role-playing video games set in the Forgotten Realms Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting. The series has been divided into two sub-series, known as the Bhaalspawn Saga and the Dark Alliance, both taking place mostly within the Western Heartlands, but the Bhaalspawn Saga extends to Amn and Tethyr. The Dark Alliance series was released for consoles and was critically and commercially successful. The Bhaalspawn Saga was critically acclaimed for using pausable realtime gameplay, which is credited with revitalizing the computer role-playing game (CRPG) genre.

The Bhaalspawn Saga was originally developed by BioWare for personal computers. Beamdog and its division Overhaul Games developed remakes of the original games in HD. The Dark Alliance series was originally set to be developed by Snowblind Studios, but ports were handled by Black Isle Studios, High Voltage Software, and Magic Pockets, with the second game developed by Black Isle.

Black Isle Studios had planned a third series to be set in the Dalelands and be a PC-exclusive hack and slash game with pausable real-time gameplay. The game would not have been connected to the Bhaalspawn Saga series. The game was cancelled when Interplay forfeited the D&D PC license to Atari.

The series was revived in 2012 with Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, an update of the original Baldur's Gate using an enhanced Infinity Engine. The release of the Enhanced Edition marked the first release in the series in eight years, and was followed by an enhanced edition of the second Baldur's Gate called Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition. Beamdog was granted permission to develop new games with the license, such as Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, an expansion for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition. The license was later given to Larian Studios, who developed and published Baldur's Gate 3, released in 2023.

The Baldur's Gate series brought technical advancements over role-playing video games of the past. BioWare's Infinity Engine offers a pre-rendered isometric worldview, with sprite-based characters. Baldur's Gate was the third computer game to make use of the Lua scripting language. The engine was used for Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale series.

The earliest released in the series are based on a real-time modification of the second edition AD&D (Advanced Dungeons & Dragons) ruleset. The player's party can have up to six members, either created by the player according to the AD&D rules or non-player characters (NPCs) recruited by the protagonist from the game world.

Baldur's Gate 3 is based on Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, and the party is limited to 4 characters.

Numerous side quests and plot twists are associated with particular NPCs and can be activated if they are found in the player's party. Through extensive, context-dependent dialogue, many characters inside and outside the player's party are fleshed out and given an added level of complexity.