Baldur's Gate 3 is the Star Wars The Force Awakens of CRPGs
(originally posted August 26, 2023)
Live playthrough notes on Baldur's Gate 3
This probably isn't going to be particularly structured or edited or even necessarily coherent.
Spoilers for the entire Baldur's Gate series and also Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer to follow
As said above, I think BG3 is a three out of five game, definitely not (to me, personally, this is subjective) the sort of revelatory RPG experience that some people have had. This user can say it because he's played most of the big tentpole CRPG releases from the past 20 years. Also I'm a born hater. Feel free to disregard me.
Biggest problem with Baldur's Gate 3 IMO: it has to be Baldur's Gate 3, the AAA CRPG here to revive an old franchise and finally bring Dungeons & Dragons back into the video game space with a vengeance, developed by Larian Studios, et cetera et cetera. The rest of my problems kind of stem from this and the development realities of making it this.
Aside: sure, Solasta (which I admit, I didn't play, sorry) is out there, but that's an indie using the 5e SRD, not an officially licensed DND product; Hasbro and WoTC weren't out there helping to market it. I am not immune to propaganda.
Here's what every tabletop DnD player knows: the low levels aren't that fun in a mechanical sense because you don't have many options. Shit doesn't get rolling until level 5 or so. You are some kind of barely competent goon who can fight rats in a cellar or maybe some wolves and goblins. The fun, other than the social aspect of playing with your IRL friends, is in the character growth; going from being Dude Ratsbane into Dude the Saviour of Baldur's Gate.
BG3 solves the feeling of your character progress stagnating mostly by trickling a never-ending stream of loot that would be completely busted in a tabletop setting. This is fine, this is what RPG video games do, it's what the other games did.
But like, narratively, BG3 is kind of a mess. The game never stops telling you how cool and awesome and special you are until all the narrative stakes and impact are completely sanded away and there's no reason to fucking care about any of it. You are simply on a carnival ride through the Sword Coast.
You start by traveling the planes in a spaceship. The companions have epic-level backstories (Mystra's ex! Decade's service in the Blood War! The Blade of Frontiers!) despite being level 1 dirt farmers. A forgotten deity hangs out at your camp so you can respec. Chances are you freed an immortal angel from her soul prison in the Plane of Shadow, then fought the literal avatar of death. As a mid-game boss fight.
...The final boss starts in a sewer.
It probably seems completely ridiculous that I'm arguing BG3 is too big and empowering. That's just what these games are like! Hell, when I first started playing I was saying the Mindflayers were the most interesting part of the game and fighting goblins and gnolls was boring. But a horde of goblins is appropriate for a level 3 party, and to BG3's credit it makes things more interesting by giving them all various class levels (warlock gob, ranger gob, fighter gob). I want to build up to the mindflayers, not fight them when I'm supposed to be worrying about goblins.
What I was actually saying in the previous post is that I wanted to see some of the weirder shit DND can do, and mindflayer stuff is a good place to start; they have big tentacle spaceships that hop dimensions! I sure hope we'll be doing things with that later!! But, because this is a AAA video game titled Baldur's Gate 3, it can't do anything with that other than make it some kind of generically world-ending threat that may shatter the entire Sword Coast - nay, all of Faerun (none of which we see!) - if not stopped by Prot'agon Ist'You the half-elf paladin and their Goth GF Shadowheart.
It didn't have to be this way... but it did, because the game is called Baldur's Gate 3. It has to be by the city of Baldur's Gate, never mind that 2 and Throne of Bhaal are hundreds of miles away. It has to be about the Dead Three still up to their bullshit, never mind that it completely invalidates what Gorion's Ward - what I, what you - did in the previous games, or how I (canonically dammit!) obliterated the final dregs of Myrkul's soul in the back half of Mask of the Betrayer.
(Aside: I fucking get it, it's comic book shit. Jaheira and Minsc can no longer be level 40 demigods who could solve this problem singlehandedly. The villains must always come back and the status quo cannot meaningfully change unless it was something that happened offscreen to set up the new edition's status quo. I get it, but I don't have to like it.)
The insistence on having the city involved (by all accounts it was a huge development hurdle) - plus Larian's Early Access pipeline (disclosure: the game was bought for me as a gift midway through early access, and I did not play or install it until the 1.0 release) - makes the game's pacing incredibly bizarre. I ain't a game dev, but it's gotta be partly because of early access right? The Druid Grove stuff is a meticulously crafted vertical slice, and then they had to bake the whole cake separately and try to make it match perfectly. The whole story just feels like it was made backwards like that.
To their credit, Act 1 - the tiefling refugees and the druid grove, leading into the search for the Adamantine Forge as a final climactic encounter - is great, obviously the most polished portion of the game (seeing as it was the Early Access stuff). This could be a solid level 1-10 module by itself with a bit of expanding and stripping out the Cult of the Absolute shit. I mean, you'd still be going into the fuckin carnival ride children's playground version of the Underdark, but if it's some long-forgotten corner that nobody gives a shit about, it could work. It'd be a great semi-freeform middle section. But in the context of how the rest of the game is... why the fuck does it start this way?
If we look at the whole game, Act 1 is a relatively freeform adventure where multiple factions are butting heads and you're trying to figure out what's actually going on, with the answer eventually revealing itself as the Cult of the Absolute. Act 2 is a climactic charge on the enemy stronghold, defended by their greatest warrior, before they can unleash their armies upon the Sword Coast. Upon learning that this has only caused things to worsen, hastening the Absolute's rise... Act 3 is about exploring a bustling city, doing a bunch of random quests, and then when you're feeling up to it you can take a left in the sewers and kill a giant Netherbrain with the powers of a god. But like, whenever, no rush. No worries if not.
The story is desperately shouting at you that time is running out and you must stop this nefarious scheme before the world ends etc etc, but yo check out this gigantic city hub map full of goofy little side quests. Don't you want to see what's happening at the ghost house or the broadsheet printer? Oh the impending Absolute threat with the whole-ass army outside? No big deal dude we swear. Steel Watch had it handled. Take your time.
(And like, yeah, yeah, Meteor will definitely crash in 7 days, whatever. It's a video game. I know.)
They could (should?) have shuffled it around, I think. Picture this: you start in the city of Baldur's Gate, doing basic tutorial adventuring, killing rats in cellars. Then, the nautiloid; you're kidnapped and infected and tossed back out on the streets and you don't know why you haven't turned. All the healers and higher level adventurers in town are gone now, recruited towards defending against some kind of approaching threat that you only hear whispers about.
Your only choice to find a healer is to venture outside of the city and brave the dangers of the realms. The city acts as a home hub zone with its own plotlines (like an evil inventor manipulating the council, hm) as you explore the wilderness nearby. You visit several locales: a nearby druid grove, housing tiefling refugees fleeing this new cult; a githyanki creche built into an old temple, in an uproar over the mindflayer threat and a mysterious McGuffin; a brief and deadly sojourn into the Underdark, where the cult has carved out a base of operations for their offensive.
All signs point towards the shadow-cursed lands to the east, where the Cult of the Absolute is headquartered. Their armies are at the city's doorstep, now. Teaming up with legendary Harpers and all of those you have helped along the way, you find a way to overcome the shadow curse, take the battle to the villains, and discover their true plot, saving the day at the last possible moment.
I feel like this makes more sense. I mean, if all those parts still have to be in there.
A more charitable take is that BG3 is trying to be imitative of Baldur's Gate 1. Once you're booted out of Candlekeep but you're still a level 1 dirt farmer, you're just in the world map. You do a bunch of freeform adventuring just to figure out what's going on, then you mount a charge on the Nashkel Mines once you discover it's core to the villain's scheme, and then you finally enter the city - a densely packed environment with all sorts of silly things happening - and foil Sarevok's scheme in the Temple of Bhaal.
But like I said above, the narrative stakes were different. It feels different. Or, perhaps what I'm saying, is that it feels the same, but BG3 either doesn't understand why it worked last time or does and is simply cursed to be a AAA game with AAA expectations for its scale.
Baldur's Gate 1, despite ultimately being about the Bhaalspawn Crisis, understood it was fundamentally a low level adventure. You fight wolves and gnolls and kobolds in the woods for twenty hours. The plot is about Sarevok's dark conspiracy to... make a shitload of money by manipulating the iron trade, causing a war, becoming an arms dealer, and fixing an election. It's reasonable that a squad of level 8 goons could deal with this. Jaheira isn't even at the level to fistfight her way up the druid ranks yet!
In Baldur's Gate 3, you go to the fucking Underdark at level 4 or 5. You spend a fair amount of time in the Underdark in Baldur's Gate 2, and (power differentials between DnD editions aside) you're probably somewhere around level 11 to 12 there - the end of the level curve of BG3 - and it's still a dangerous, intimidating location. They have fucking mindflayers down there dude. It's scary. Everyone knows not to fuck with mindflayers. Except you because you're cool and strong and have the special tadpole that gives you psychic powers instead of killing you.
I've played a lot of RPGs, I don't need to be told that my player character is cool and special anymore. Yes, it's nice that sometimes a dialogue option pops up that has [MONK] in front of it, but like, I don't care about clicking that option, I do it because it's there and it shows that the designers noticed my build, and I definitely appreciate it, but it really does nothing for me on a storytelling level.
I guess I'm just saying that I want the GM's fantasy, not the player's fantasy. If your narrative is going to be standard stuff, at least give me cool and interesting sidequests and companions.
Like, I dunno, what is Baldur's Gate 3 about? Its themes, other than being a rip-roaring Sword Coast adventure? I have to genuinely think about this for a moment because the narrative left so little impression on me. Hang on.
I guess family? All your companions have problems with their parental figures as their whole thing, except Gale who has big Divorced Guy Energy but you just know that dude calls Mystra "mommy". You do too if-and-only-if you play as The Dark Urge (aka the "I played the old games and want to make this even more like BG1 daddy" option {no judgement, this is what I picked}). BG1 was (broadly) about your status as a Bhaalspawn and as Gorion's Ward and how you would handle that legacy, which is to say, "murder bad or murder good?", so it tracks as something you'd do for a revival.
Perhaps "inevitable, irreversible physical change" (aka puberty aka growing old). Karlach's infernal engine, Gale's ticking orb, Wyll's forced TF into a store-brand tiefling. The imminent ceremorphosis from the tadpoles.
Though, no matter how much the writing attempts to position the illithid tadpoles in BG3 as a potentially dangerous, corrupting influence, the fact of the matter is that they're nothing but beneficial to you. They are your main character privilege powers and as far as I could tell there were zero negative consequences from going all-in. Kinda undercuts the whole thing.
What else? I'm drawing a blank. Proverbial deals with the devil? Not judging people based on their race?? I got nothing. Hell, why are the villains doing what they are doing other than because they are villains working for evil gods?
Ketheric Thorm is pure Dead Wife Guy. Gortash is just trying to recreate the plot from BG1 again while otherwise being a smug prick about it. Orin is Diet Sarevok to the point where the game literally digs up Sarevok and has him say as much. Absolutely zero pathos to any of them.
But I suppose in fairness, this is mass market AAA media. These are big, broad themes that are common to the human experience. Everyone's got family troubles, everyone has anxiety over the inevitable passage of time. It's Good vs Evil (but also if you want to be Cool Evil and beat up the Loser Evil people you can do that too). I get why it's like this. I just want more to chew on, something that makes me go "oh, yeah, that's some writing baby".
I can't help but think about Mask of the Betrayer, the sequel expansion to Neverwinter Nights 2 and the best of the Forgotten Realms CRPGs. The main campaign of NWN2 is as generic Sword Coast as they come: you start as a literal villager and slowly graduate to doing battle against the King of Shadows using your special Main Character Power, et cetera. It's all about something hoary like the making of a True Hero. The expansion is more interesting, actually doing things with the Forgotten Realms setting.
You wake up in a strange land: Rashemen, where Minsc is from, which is like 4000 miles from the Sword Coast. Your cool main character privileges have been violently removed, and instead you're stricken with the Spirit-Eater curse which will eventually eat your soul so that it may move to another host. Familiar enough.
The illithid perks in BG3 are cool and strong and you get a whole skill tree where you get to spec into what psychic powers you want. The Spirit-Eater has some strong powers along with a meter that constantly ticks down, inflicting worse and worse debuffs until it outright kills you... unless you consume spirits and souls to keep it topped off. Convenient that Rashemen is the land of telthor, ancient guardian god animals in an animist sense.
Your companions in MoTB also have parental issues - I can't deny that - but in more specific, thematic ways. Take my least favorite party member: Gannayev-of-Dreams, aka Gann, whose whole deal is that he's a hagspawn. A pretty hagspawn, which is supposed to be an impossibility. Gann was abandoned in the woods as an infant and raised by telthor, so he refuses to acknowledge the pantheon of Faerun. He's got a real chip on his shoulder regarding his heritage, since the hags don't want him for being a mostly-normal guy and the regular folk don't want him because he's a hagspawn (and seducing all their daughters besides). He puts up a Casanova-like front as he makes his dream visits to all the village girls, looking for love in all the wrong places while feeling like a pariah wherever he goes.
And like, sure, you could boil this down to "mommy abandoned me so now I fuck away my problems", but it's how he's written in the context of the story that makes it work. Every main quest and sidequest in MoTB ties into ideas about the masks people wear to hide their true selves, intentionally or not; faith in higher powers and what they stand for, and what might drive one to defy them; love, in so many different ways than simply romantic, and the challenge of seeing it through.
I don't get that feeling of specificity from Baldur's Gate 3. Why is it thematically important that Karlach fought in the Blood War and got an infernal engine? Her father figure betrayed her and she has a ticking time bomb that's different from the one the rest of the party has, I guess. Is this relevant to the Absolute plot? Not really other than Gortash is one of the villains; it could be the backstory of a cool barbarian lady in basically any other DND story. It is kiiinda related to Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus, the 2019 5e tabletop module marketed as a prequel to BG3... which I feel like just proves my point.
Baldur's Gate 3 is a fun game! I've played it for like 150 hours at this point. It's a great 5e toybox that makes some interesting choices about how to adapt the system to a video game. Larian is good at what they do! It's probably...? the biggest profile, biggest budget CRPG ever made, a meticulously produced game. It's got that money. For the hypothetical player who knows what Dungeons & Dragons is but doesn't know anything about Dungeons & Dragons or the Forgotten Realms, it's exactly what it needs to be.
It's also not what I want out of a CRPG. They rarely are.
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