Baldur's Gate Improvements

One commonly expressed sentiment about Baldur's Gate is that is a fine execution of a not so great RPG concept. Not everyone agrees with the latter part, but the former seems commonly held.

So here are the obvious flaws I can think of in the execution...

Missing UI Functionality

• add a table with all character's hp (numeric), ac, carrying info
• display characters' hp numerically when renting a room
• display equipped items while buying/selling items
• be able to see your spellbook while buying/selling items
• display more than four items at a time while buying/selling
• display two characters' inventory at same time to facilitate swaps
• display info (stats, alignment) about NPCs interested in joining party
• display what connections are allowed on the overland map (if clicking on a site that's visually adjacent is actually going to cause you to go a long way around (e.g. the cloakwood), you should be able to TELL this)

Questionable Game-Design Decisions

• unpause in inventory robs the game of improvisation
• random encounters outside are too closely spaced, causing problems when you try to position your characters tactically and accidentally "set off" another encounter.
• tedious walks across large areas with no way to speed it up
• tedious inventory management if a character dies and you plan to raise dead (so I just always reloaded rather than deal with the tedium)
• character speech events triggered even when character is invisible (they do this to try solve a problem, but there are better solutions)
• "find traps" is far too tedious to actually use (you have to advance the character slowly, and the character won't automatically stop before walking over a trap)
• Characters take poison damage while crossing on the overland map, with no opportunity for you to, e.g. stop and cast 'slow poison' (They actually take it all when you arrive at a destination.)

Flawed Technology

• encounters with enemy parties allow player to draw off one enemy at a time; sometimes even unintentionally (i.e. you just never happen to advance close enough to 'trigger' the further off people, and never even know they were there)
• enemy parties don't cooperate, making clerics less cool than they could be
• random monsters in dungeons sometimes spawn in the midst of the party (apparently respawns happen on save or on load or something, but the player is never warned about this, and those of us trained to save every five minutes for fear of crashes shouldn't be penalized if we never actually reload; regardless, like an armageddon device, this design tactic just makes things worse unless the player is told about it)

Broken Map Design

• There's a trap in the firewine bridge dungeon whose trigger is so large that if you try to remove trap it, your thief has to step on the trigger to get close enough to remove it.
• Too many goofy areas where the designer expected you to have encounters in a certain order which it seems nobody would actually have; for example, the zombie farm east of Baldur's Gate, it was as if I missed an initial speech from the farmer because I had already killed some zombies before I met him.

mismatch with D&D

• There are a lot of weird range problems. E.g. Web is too powerful when used against the player by spiders; its radius is too wide compared to line-of-sight and missile weapon ranges (you can get a character caught in a web trap too far away for other characters to defend). Indeed, a good DM wouldn't tend to pick on the one character caught in the web, slaughtering him, because that's no fun. Not so BG.
• Missile weapons are way too powerful in BG.
• Monster Summoning is way too powerful in BG (largely because the summoned monsters provide cannon fodder)
• D&D spell system forces you to plan too far in advance (spell selection must be done the night before battles), robbing you of improvisation, and moreover making it clumsy just to learn how to use spells.
• Defensive mage spells are useless in a party context (e.g. mirror image)
• Magic is often unsatisfying; you encounter a higher-level mage who uses a spell on you, and you say, "Wow, that'll be cool when I get that spell", but it's not by the time you get it, because at that point, all the wimpier creatures fall before your mighty warriors, and the tougher creatures make their savings throws.
• Rolling up characters was flawed in pen&paper gaming, but rolling up characters is triply flawed in CRPGs.

Debatable Design (IMHO, not absolute truths)

• You *should* just be able to follow the plot and be at an acceptable level to defeat opponents; or else you shouldn't be told that the next major plot step is imperative for you to followup on until you have sufficient levels.