Citadels (video game)

Lore & Background

The game is set during the fall of King Arthur's reign, where his kingdom loses to an invading force backed by Mordred and Morgan. With two separate campaigns, players are given the choice of seeing the Good or Evil side of the war, as they carve a path into an uncertain future for the King and his loyal men. Upon the successful completion of in-game side-quests, players will be rewarded with legendary heroes for use in the main campaign.

Reader's Guide

Citadels is notable primarily for its negative reception, which highlights common pitfalls in real-time strategy game design. The game received a Metacritic score of 20, with widespread complaints about pathing issues, missing or underdeveloped basic RTS features, unresponsive basic commands, tedious gameplay elements, and a poor tutorial with inadequate in-game instructions. These criticisms underscore the importance of core mechanics and user experience in the genre. Despite its Arthurian theme and dual-campaign structure offering Good and Evil perspectives, the game failed to execute on these concepts effectively. Its legacy serves as a cautionary example of how even a familiar setting and promised features cannot compensate for fundamental gameplay flaws. The game's obscurity and low critical standing reflect the challenges faced by smaller studios in delivering polished RTS titles.

Did You Know?

• Citadels was developed by Games Distillery and published by bitComposer Games.
• The game includes two separate campaigns representing the Good and Evil sides of the war.
• Players can earn legendary heroes by completing in-game side-quests.
• Citadels has a Metacritic score of 20.

Legacy & Impact

Baldur's Gate (1998) is widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever produced, and its influence on the role-playing genre is difficult to overstate. Critics at the time recognized that BioWare's debut title had breathed new life into a category of computer games that had been struggling to find its footing. The franchise it launched has since expanded through an expansion pack called Tales of the Sword Coast, two full sequels—Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn in 2000 and Baldur's Gate 3 in 2023—and a remastered Enhanced Edition produced by Beamdog, which marked the first new entry in the series after nearly nine years of silence. Modern role-playing developers continue to point back to the original as a foundational reference, and the game's design philosophy—deep character customization, meaningful party dynamics, and a world that responds to moral choices—remains a benchmark against which new titles are measured.

Gameplay Mechanics & D&D Integration

Every mechanical system in Baldur's Gate was built to mirror the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition rulebook, with the game handling the tedious arithmetic—dice rolls, ability checks, stat tracking—automatically behind the scenes. Despite running in real-time, the designers introduced a pausable mode so players could halt combat, issue a full sequence of orders, and even set the engine to auto-pause at preset moments. Character creation demands players choose name, gender, race, class, alignment, ability scores, and weapon proficiencies, and multi-classing is permitted but constrained by 2nd edition restrictions; a cleric-fighter, for instance, may only wield weapons legal to the cleric class. The inventory system is equally detailed: each character can equip items across categories like weapons, armor, helmets, rings, cloaks, and usable items, all governed by a weight limit tied to their Strength score. Exceeding that cap slows or halts movement entirely. The interface presents three action bars around the main screen, offering map access, party portraits with health and status effects, and context-sensitive commands that shift depending on whether one or multiple characters are selected.

Narrative Structure & Party Dynamics

The campaign unfolds across a prologue and seven chapters, each gated behind a specific objective that must be completed before the next segment unlocks. The story follows a player-created character journeying along the Sword Coast, a region of the Forgotten Realms high-fantasy setting, and the player may bring up to five named companions into their party, freely recruiting or dismissing them as the narrative demands. Interactions with non-player characters range from brief service encounters—buying and selling goods, identifying magical items, resting at inns to recover hit points and memorize spells, or paying temples for healing and even resurrection—to longer dialogue sequences that can trigger automatically when a character draws near. A reputation system quietly tracks the protagonist's moral choices, altering how witnesses and shopkeepers perceive them; a high standing earns discounted prices, while a low one inflates them. The game also allows players to import a character from a previous playthrough rather than starting fresh, and a fog-of-war effect conceals unexplored portions of each location until the party moves through them.

The Infinity Engine & Technical Foundation

Baldur's Gate made its technical debut on the Infinity Engine, a graphics and game engine that Interplay Entertainment subsequently licensed for other Forgotten Realms properties, including the Icewind Dale series and Planescape: Torment. The engine rendered the world from a top-down isometric third-person perspective across pre-rendered locations, giving the game a distinctive visual identity that set it apart from contemporaries. Players navigate and issue commands through a combination of mouse and keyboard, with the camera free to pan across the screen without requiring the controlled character to remain centered. Beyond the core rendering, the engine supported a suite of player-facing tools: the ability to toggle the AI on or off, assign custom scripts to party members, and customize each character's primary and minor color palette. The Enhanced Edition later produced by Beamdog applied a remastered version of this same engine, modernizing the presentation while preserving the original's structural design. The engine's architecture thus became a shared foundation for an entire generation of licensed fantasy role-playing titles.