Is a game that was released in 2023 to much hype and a shelfload of awards and was developed by Larian Studios, the Belgian developer of Divinity: Original Sin. I'm going to be frank with you, the metric fucktons of awards that BG3 obtained? It doesn't deserve them. I'm not being contrarian here either. It's good, but it's not that good. I shall explain. I'm afraid this is going to be spoilery. Sorry not sorry.
Now I am what you might call sort of a Baldur's Gate superfan.
I was hooked on the first one in 1998 with its combination of real time with pause tactical combat, lovely sprite on pre-rendered style, and witty dialogue as well as a plot which you can get invested in. What it did was it took the turn based approach of Fallout 1 and 2 and merged it with 2E AD&D rules, streamlined same, and then applied a Command & Conquer like interface to it all. Basically it ran in real time, you could pause, issue orders, and they'd go carry them out. This was a huge step ahead of most D&D games at the time which were either gridders, or the worthy but extremely cumbersome Gold Box games which were originally designed for C64 and which never really had an interface that moved with the times, to the point at which you found yourself battling the interface as much as the forces of evil. Then apply to this a selection of interesting and nicely voice acted compatriots you could get into your party, often with their own quests and motivations, and a plot in which the player (hereafter referred to as CHARNAME) found themselves thrust into the wilderness as a level 1 normie and had to sink or swim and eventually saved the day but only finding out the awful truth about their past (and it was linked with the big bad, yes, who had a plan to become the new God of Murder, and oh, he's your brother) If I had to fault the first one it would be lack of meaningful interaction and too much empty space. I mean, I like poking around in dungeons because They Are There, but some of them were maddening. Firewine Bridge sticks out badly in this respect. But for the most part, it was a long way ahead of almost everything on the market RPG-wise except possibly Fallout.
Baldur's Gate 2: Shadows of Amn came out in 2000. It didn't really change anything gameplay wise other than allow for higher level play and streamlined a few of the iffier things about the first game like speed up character movement, and had nicer drawn monsters. After all, why change what works. Its biggest advance was in the writing. The number of potential henchmen was reduced from 28 to 15, and every single one had both a recruitment quest and a loyalty quest. The party members also bantered amongst themselves or even came to blows if they hated each other. The main quest was also a personal one. You aren't out to save the day. You're out to save yourself. Saving the day was just a side quest, arguably. But it had everything. A world full of colour and life and larger than life characters, companions, excitement, desperately fighting for your life, and even romance (sadly, this is where the Bioware Romance Meme started but at the time we didn't think it all that cringe because it was handled in a very mature way without degenerating into wish fulfilment or shipping.) It also had a meaningful progression. So. You've saved the day in the first game. You're the big hero. But now, can you save yourself? That's a lot harder. Given that CHARNAME is also an offspring of the dead God of Murder, this gives them unusual powers and abilities but also threatens to destroy them. There was an expansion, Throne of Bhaal, which finished CHARNAME's tale off and was a reasonably good stab at making a meaningful epic level adventure, though in all honesty it was hamstrung by this very fact. It is extremely hard to make epic level D&D meaningful in my experience when the PCs can just blast holes in every setting or plot willy nilly unless the DM resorts to a cavalcade of magical bullshit devices to prevent this. At the end, you have to decide whether CHARNAME accepts apotheosis or not. And you get further development of all your henchmen as they reach the height of their powers. It was unfortunately rushed and I think it wanted to be a full third game but there wasn't enough content to justify it. They also tried to make up for this by having lots more big set piece boss and boss-adjacent encounters to really push the tactical combat aspect of it, and indeed there was a whole bonus dungeon called Watcher's Keep that was intended simply as the game saying, "okay, fuckface, you think you're hot shit, now come and solve this." You were then given a cavalcade of nasty puzzles and boss fights that pushed your ability to run your party to its limit.
Now BG2 was HUGE. There were a number of intricate multi-level dungeons that were just side quests. There were quests within the city of Athkatla where it was set as well. There were class specific quest chains as well as loyalty quests for every henchman you could recruit. The writing was absolutely on point. And there were big and deliberately difficult bonus bosses for people who liked reloading a lot just so they could find that one strategy that beats that one enemy. In the urban locales almost every building was utilised for something or another. In terms of hours, I really don't know. End to end I'm guessing about 90 but that's for someone like me who knows the game next door to inside out. I'd guess that first run, with all the blundering and bungling and reloading (it's tough as well) I'd estimate 100+ easily. And you cannot 100% it because of mutually exclusive companion quests and mutually exclusive class quests - actuially can I call out just how mega those are, they're all based on AD&D 2E's stronghold rules and they all involve you managing a home base of sorts. Yes, this means you get to put on a play if you're a bard, slay a dragon if you're a paladin, train apprentices if you're a wizard, and administer a fiefdom if you're a fighter. That sort of thing. So BG3 has some really, REALLY, big boots to fill. I mean, BG2 has been top ten of Metacritic's best PC games of all time for decades.
Now, the question you were asking at the outset of this rambly writeup. Does it manage?
Well... it tries. And that is frustrating.
See, Baldur's Gate 3 is a game which starts off really strongly. It's set about a hundred years in the future from the original games. Sort of early Renaissance style now. There's a surfeit of black powder but only in small amounts (because Wizards of the Coast are creatively bankrupt and the idea of making Forgotten Realms into a proper renaissance fantasy setting is beyond their abilities - more on this later) and you are a level 1 insert race and class here who is scooped up from the city of Yartar by a passing illithid nautilus and have an illithid tadpole shoved into your skull. However, the nautilus is attacked by githyanki riding dragons and in the confusion you can escape and find a couple of fellow abductees to get out of this place. After an obvious tutorial dungeon, you, a gith warrior called Lae'Zel, and an emo moon priestess called Shadowheart, manage to force the nautilus to crash near Baldur's Gate and you crawl out the wreckage.
You then have to discover why you aren't turning into mind flayers despite being tadpole implanted, and that this state of being in between ceremorphosis gives you unusual mental powers but also threatens to destroy you. On the way, you discover that there's other people in your situation, and find various people who promise cures, but eventually you are directed to a place called Moonrise Towers and then to the city of Baldur's Gate, where answers await. Oh, and there's an army of goblins and trolls and drow and all the other general nogoodniks of the setting who are carrying out a jihad for the sake of their god called The Absolute, which is somehow linked to your plight as well. And you have to stop them also. All in a day's work for a hero, surely.
Well, here's where it goes off the rails, and it does so in a way that a lot of modern media does. Now. Who remembers Lost? I do. It was a pretentious waste of brains that fizzled out because J. J. Abrams is a fucking hack and had no idea what to do other than to pile mystery upon mystery upon mystert. And who remembers Game of Thrones? I do. It started off really well but then you gradually realised that both Dumb & Dumber and George R. R. Martin had no idea how to end it and both had managed to write themselves into a corner in different ways, and had to resolve things simply by cutting off the branches and jamming all the plot threads into each other at random. And this is the problem with Baldur's Gate 3. While it's still in Jar Jar Abrams mystery box territory (literally in one case, though it's an icosahedron), it clips along nicely and feels interesting. Characters feel like they have interesting and fulfilling arcs. But then, well, once you get past the Shadowlands and Moonrise Towers, it feels like the writers had no idea what to do so they just, yes, jammed everything together with those well beloved plotglues of middling authors, the Deus Ex Machina and the Magical Bullshit Device. It turns out that in fact, Bhaal, the God of Murder, is not dead, but winked back to life in the setting's fluff a number of years back because WOTC are creatively bankrupt and think it's fun to just undo everything CHARNAME strove for in the original games in a move which feels like a targeted fuck you to the fandom. But he and two other evil gods, Bane and Myrkul, and their chosen ones, dug up an artifact called the Nether Crown (read: Magical Bullshit Device) which they attempted to use to control an Illithid Elder Brain, only for said elder brain to absorb its power and become a giant unknowable cerebral god ascendant. This is only revealed right at the end of the game. You would think that this would give you a nice spicy big bad triumvirate to take on, yes? Well, no. The three villains are basically pantomime moustache-twirlers with the exception of the Chosen of Myrkul, Ketheric Thorm, who actually has regrets and an attempt at a character. The Chosen of Bane, Lord Gortash, who at the outset of act 3 you see rise to the grand duchy of Baldur's Gate, is completely flat and uninteresting. Oh look, he's got giant magepunk mecha keeping order in the city now. That is all that is interesting about him. The chosen of Bhaal, Orin, who just happens to be the granddaughter of Sarevok the big bad of BG1, is a bloodstained maniac with a husky femme fatale voice who kidnaps one of your party members to force a confrontation. Once again, not properly developed. And the Nether Brain is completely unknowable and godlike and doesn't feel like a compelling villain but just something big and ugly and evil that pops into being to provide le epic multi-stage bossfight.
The developers claimed the game has 17,000 ending permutations. This is a total lie. It does not. I calculated how many it can have, and it's not that many. And even most of those can be grouped according to a handful of choices you, the player, made. It's not quite Mass Effect and "your choices dictate the colour of the big explosion" tier, but it's still a lie. You don't even get a Fallout style modular epilogue which was standard for party based games since, well, Fallout. You just get the narrator explaining what a big hero, or anti-hero, or whatever, you are, and then... credits.
Now, one thing that the original games had that was one of their best parts was really strong villains. Sarevok, the big bad of BG1, was introduced in the first hour or so, murdered the man you thought was your father while you ran and hid and the fact that the local goings on seemed to be linked to the many people trying to kill you made him very compelling. He also was charismatic and cunning as well as a huge plate armoured absolute unit. Indeed, he gained his evil overlord chops by conspiracy and intrigue. Basically imagine if Darth Vader was the Emperor as well. That's Sarevok. BG2 introduced you to Irenicus in the very first line of the game. He's the complete opposite. An archmage who is an outside context problem for you, CHARNAME, yet who is short tempered and disdainful and doesn't care about anyone but himself and possibly his sister and possibly his ex. The fact he's voiced by FUCKING DAVID WARNER is also a positive. Even the minor villains of side quests were interesting and fun. Be it Firkraag the dragon who basically baited you into confronting him in his lair and slaying a load of his minions just to see what all the fuss was about because he liked the idea of being a cat playing with a mouse, or be it Galvarey the villain of Jaheira's personal quest, who is more than willing to pre-emptively mew you up in suspended animation until further notice for the greater good. It's all compelling stuff. BG3 does not have equally compelling villains. Of the side quest ones, only Raphael is worthy of note, and he does have the hardest boss fight in the game with a very amusing theme on the soundtrack in the style of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The others, well, they aren't. I can't really remember any of them as being particularly standout. Just... generic really.
Oh, but the companions are mostly good. Well, mostly. They do have compelling arcs about 2/3 of the time. Wyll the warlock whose magical powers arise from a Faustian bargain and his quest to transcend the shadow of his aristocratic father while trying to use his powers for good, somehow. That was satisfying. Lae'Zel the gith warrior and the fact she was literally born to be a soldier and to follow orders and fight and kill and die and not ask questions for a Queen that openly did not care about her just because it was her people's will that she did, and how she can escape this sad fate and become a person with actual agency. Her arc was arguably the most satisfying. Shadowheart the Moon Priestess had an interesting arc as well that also dovetailed nicely with some areas of Forgotten Realms fluff. Astarion the Vampire Elf, though, felt like a horrible Mary Sue because he was SPESHUL and his arc was anticlimactic and unoriginal. The Druid you can obtain after act 1 I found so boring and meh that I couldn't even be arsed to put him in my party for very long, but became a meme within the fandom because you can have sex with him while he's shapeshifted into a bear. Apropos of nothing. I'm sorry but this feels like trying to make the next Minsc and Boo forcibly.
Okay, we're going to have to address this bit now.
Baldur's Gate 3 also relies far too heavily on member berries. Towards the latter half of the game, you encounter a bunch of characters from the original games. They are not voiced by the same people. They do not act like the characters from the original games. They also appear in complete contradiction to their epilogues at the end of the original games if you took them all the way to the end of Throne of Bhaal. They are thrown in simply to force some sort of a link between the original games and this. Jaheira appears during the Shadowlands chapter as the head of a Harper task force to try to lift the shadow curse and, assuming she doesn't get killed in the battle with Ketheric Thorm, can become one of your henchmen. She is probably the least defiled of the original characters in that she still acts like she did in the original games, although her epilogue in BG2 specifically says that though she "crossed the Realms twice over, she never returned to the Sword Coast or Tethyr." Minsc appears and can join if you didn't get Jaheira gruesomely killed. This is pure fanservice. Minsc was a compelling character because of his unique way of thinking. But no, they just flanderised him into "well built man who twats things with swords and talks to hamsters." Spare me. And then there's what they did to Viconia. You see, in the original games, she was a priestess of the night goddess Shar, who Shadowheart in this game is a priestess of also, and who in Shadowheart's arc is revealed to be the Mother Superior of the temple of Shar in Baldur's Gate in this one. Now, Viconia's arc in the original games was about coming to terms with the fact that she doesn't need to be defensive and on edge all the time and that she can let go of her past and become a better person. Indeed, if CHARNAME does this, whether through the romance sidequest or otherwise, her alignment literally changes. She goes from hiding her own depressed and lost nature under a veneer of viciousness and yanking peoples' chains for the fun of it, including in some really quite racist ways (though being a drow in the surface world she's also the victim of in universe racism as well), to being more accepting and moving on and realising that she doesn't have to let the past define her. So, what does Larian make her in their infinite wisdom in BG3? That's right, boys and girls! A STEREOTYPICAL EVIL NUN.
*fart* FUCK OFF GAME.
Her own epilogue in the end of Throne of Bhaal clearly states that Viconia went on to have other adventures and didn't fall back into worshipping the fucking goddess of the black dog because she was lost and alone and hated her life. Do you honestly expect me to believe that, even just for one second, you cavalcade of hacks?
I would explain how they brought Sarevok back from the dead for a side quest even though he also could be redeemed in Throne of Bhaal as well, but I can't bear to have to think about this. It is pure member berries and it is symptomatic of how Larian lacked the confidence to actually do their own thing.
Where BG3 redeems itself is the combat and gameplay, which was one thing I was skeptical about. It clips along nice and fast and plays awfully like the combat in the original Fallout. I also liked how you got abilities like shoving enemies off cliffs (even when it makes no sense, like throwing a fucking Beholder down a chasm when Beholders can hover), throwing healing potions at stricken party members to pick them back up, rushing attacks, leaping, even flying. Also breakable scenery, which is something I didn't know I was missing in these games when setting off a 10d6 fireball left everything inanimate miraculously untouched. They also made summons actually worth using for once other than as meat shields or specific niche applications (though to be fair Throne of Bhaal's high level summon spells were very worthwhile). I was afraid that it would be time consuming and horribly cumbersome like in the bad old days of Gold Box when you spent more time fighting the interface than the forces of evil. But it wasn't. It clipped along nicely. There is one thing I'll fault it on - it was a bit easy. BG1 and BG2 were pretty tough until you got to grips with how things worked. Yes, really; I found BG3 pretty easy really and this is despite me never having played 5E D&D on the tabletop. Having kitted out myself and my henchmen right, I could take down bosses and even bonus bosses on attempt one. The only encounters that gave me trouble were the Murder Tribunal, which I salami-sliced by surprise attacking the undead doorkeepers after having already passed the roll to blag my way in, then got the big guy stuck in his own Sanctuary spell which I circumnavigated by throwing area of effect spells just two metres to the left of him so it didn't count as directly targeting him; and Raphael, which was genuinely tough and took me a lot of goes (protip: cast ALL THE SUMMONS before going in, maybe even some Planar Binding to suborn his mooks, and save or suck effects that target WIS). Also Viconia the Mother Superior, but that was by dint of the fact that she had the world's supply of evil nuns backing her up.
Graphically and artistically they got it right. It looks like it's 100+ years after the first game. It's clearly gone aesthetically from a Low Middle Ages aesthetic to more of a Renaissance aesthetic. Heavy, ornate plate armour. Hounskulls and frog helms as opposed to bascinets and great helms and crusader helms. Doublets rather than tunics. Long coats and vests for mages though you can of course have a good old robe and wizard hat if you like that sort of thing. There's also a surfeit of black powder in the form of explosives and even cannon or very early grenades. Some areas are also kind of steampunk as well. Because they aren't reliant on effectively 2D backgrounds but proper 3D locations they can have towers and fortresses that feel tall and the verticality gives the combat an extra factor as well.
Yet despite this, I still stated up till 3am on two occasions playing it after losing track of time. So I enjoyed myself, at least for the first half. And it's definitely worth playing. But... it doesn't quite live up to the standards of the original games. There are some parts where it almost does. The Gauntlet of Shar is one of the best dungeons in any party based role playing game ever. The Grymforge is very cool as well, as is the House of Hope. But there are just enough missteps that means it's not really as good as the original games and at times feels like a sequel in name only; a game which is desperately trying to glom onto the reputation of a legendary series of classic RPGs because its developers don't have the confidence to do their own thing with Dungeons & Dragons as a system or a setting and which has the stultifying hand of WOTC's creative bankruptcy all over it.
I would give the first half a 93%, because it is fun and compelling and feels promising. But the second half I would struggle to give more than 73% because that's the score that Amiga Power gave games it didn't like or thought were mediocre but were afraid of the publishers pulling their advertising if they said as much. I don't feel like I wasted my time with it, but I'm not going to replay it for quite some time I don't think. If you want a real spiritual successor to the original Baldur's Gate games, may I recommend instead Pillars of Eternity and even more its sequel.
(IRON NODER 2023 #21)