I recently finished Baldur’s Gate 3 and I really liked it. The story was good, characters were great and I like Forgotten Realms as an adventuring world. There was too much of it, but I still played through almost every side mission because they were real, interesting missions instead of ‘pick me ten blueberries’ or ‘deliver this letter to my neighbour’.
After BG3 I wanted to play something shorter and picked up an old favourite, Eye of the Beholder, a dungeon crawl also set in the Forgotten Realms game world. I bought it immediately when it was ported to Amiga 500 at 1991, 35 years ago, and played it several times during the following decades. The Amiga version comes on three disks and I only have one functioning disk drive left. This time I wanted to avoid the disk swapping and “cheated” and so I’m playing the GOG DOSBox version on a modern computer, but the experience and performance of the game is still the same.
I noticed that both games are very engaging. Today I was navigating the hell known as Dungeon Level Four, which is full of venomous spiders while the cleric can’t yet have enough experience for cure poison spell, and there are only a few well hidden cure poison potions in that level. The experience was intense, but I managed to get through the level with all my characters alive and not poisoned. This was very similar feeling as playing through some of the fights in BG3, or navigating the romance options and hoping I did not muck up my chances. White knuckles, tearing hair, you know the deal.
Eye of the Beholder runs smoothly on an Amiga 500 with 7 MHz processor and 1 MB RAM, from three disks totaling something like 2.4 MB or less. The graphics are good enough to support immersion in the dungeons. If this feels little, the even better Dungeon Master (FTL Games, 1988) has better drawn graphics (subjective, I know), as much content as EOB, and fits in a single 880 kB disk.
The three years old Macbook Pro I used for BG3 has M3 chip with a dozen cores at GHz scale, 36 GB RAM, and it was running hot and huffing and puffing under the strain. Comparing numbers across the architectures is meaningless, but the MBP still has thousands of times more processing power and RAM. I don’t even start comparing the GPUs, Amiga has her own co-processors responsible for fast graphics of those times, and I guess the MBP has pretty good GPU for a modern laptop, probably thousands of times more capable than the then-state-of-the-art Amiga graphics processors. Still, EOB on Amiga 500 was smoother and more responsive than BG3 on a modern high-end laptop.
Don’t get me wrong, BG3 is great and worthy of all the awards it got and I love the game, but would it have been less stellar with more reasonable specs? For me certainly not, I’m sure I would have loved it with BG1’s Infinity engine as much.
35 years old game and computer feel snappier than a modern game and computer, and both can grip me by the collar and draw me into their world as well.
Makes me wonder has this really been progress.
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pv@smolpub.mail.kapsi.fi