Baldur's Gate

Baldur's Gate is a fucking awesome series of 2e Dungeons & Dragons CRPGs based in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. They were made by Bioware between 1998 and 2001, and comprise four games in total; Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn, and their respective expansions Tales of the Sword Coast and Throne of Bhaal. The games follow the story of a Bhaalspawn (the player's character) as they discover their identity and have to deal with both the effects it has on themselves and the threat of outside agencies who wish to use the player's character for their own goals.

The series uses the isometric Infinity Engine common to many of Bioware's titles, also used in such games as Planescape: Torment, the Icewind Dale series and the Knights of the Old Republic Star Wars games. Alongside Planescape: Torment, the series (especially BGII) is regarded by many as one of the best CRPGs of all time. The games are notable for being remarkably freeform and presenting a wide variety of options for resolving the problems that are faced, as well as supporting virtually any sort of alignment the player character chooses. The choices available and sheer number of side-quests that can be undertaken provide a vast amount of replayability to the game.

The games are also known for the great amount of dialogue and conversation options available, especially in BGII, where NPC party members frequently held conversations with the player and other NPCs in the world. These could range from hilarious (as in the case of Edwin or Minsc) to darkly serious.

If even the vast options available in the vanilla games were not enough, dedicated players have access to a wide variety of user-made mods that have been produced for the game, which vary in scope between fixing bugs in the game and improving AI to adding entirely new potential NPC party members complete with their own dialogue and quests. There are even conversions that allow for porting the Baldur's Gate content into the visually superior BGII interface - useful considering BGI's inability to support a higher resolution than 640x480.