Overview
Baldur's Gate brings the world of the Forgotten Realms and the rules of Dungeons & Dragons into an RPG built around a party of characters, exploration, dialogue and combat where party composition plays a central role. Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn directly continues this approach by expanding the adventure beyond the Sword Coast and extending the saga begun by the first game.
The two Dark Alliance games take a different path. Rather than following the structure of BioWare's RPGs, they favor much more direct action and form a spin-off branch of the series. The same fantasy universe therefore serves as the setting for an experience closer to an action RPG, designed in particular for console play.
More than twenty years after Shadows of Amn, Baldur's Gate III brings back the name of the main series with Larian Studios and returns to the Forgotten Realms through a new story set long after the first games. These five titles therefore reveal two different paths under the same name: the party-based RPG directly inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, and the more immediate approach of Dark Alliance.
