Baldur’s Gate III is a perfect replication of the tabletop RPG experience, in that it’s inordinately tedious and unbelievably time consuming. “Aha, Avery!” You might say. “Clearly, you are imploring a classic reviewer jape, where you start with a hyperbolic take and then walk it back in order to provide an enticing hook.” Alas, my dear reader, I am not. My playthrough ultimately clocked in at an utterly exhausting 101 hours and 52 minutes, according to the in-game timer (145.6 hours according to Steam) across seven months, and yet still there's a part of me that wishes I spent more time, combing through my inventory, analyzing stats and crafting builds, and devising clever strategies and workarounds for the game’s various challenges. That is to say that there's a distinct and tangible benefit to all of that tedium, which is that it imparts the player with a sense of inhabiting a utterly massive world, not just in a geographical sense, but in sheer density of detail and choice. It’s fitting for a Dungeons and Dragons game, a 50 year old franchise, which like Star Wars and Lord of The Rings stands as a cultural vortex wherein everything that came before is an influence for it and everything that came after is influenced by it. Featuring no glossary or codex, first time D&D players, such as myself, while find themselves overwhelmed not just by the wealth of mechanics that Baldur's Gate III offers as an immersive tactics RPG, but by the sheer amount of proper names, fantasy species, and lore references on display, but the thing that makes the game special is how it takes thematic advantage of that complexity to enhance its story and characters.
Every component of Baldur's Gate III’s is about finding agency under systems and power structures bigger than oneself, and deciding how to use the power they gain, ranging from the Breakfast Club setup, to the homogenizing mind control and body transformation powers of the antagonist Illithids, to each of the character arcs found in the companion quests. Karlach struggles against the existential weight of the potentially lethal body modifications forced upon her by her former captors, Astarion finds himself tempted by his newfound freedom to reproduce the abuse he suffered under, Lae’Zael and Shadowheart find themselves forced to question where their allegiances lie, and so on, all while the party endeavors to defeat (or control, should you choose to) a force that would subsume the free will of every character you encounter into its imperialist domain. Hey… wait a second! By God! They finally did it! They finally made a thematically coherent [Footnote 1] Mass Effect game! [Footnote 2] Of course, a strong thematic backbone is nothing without good presentation and delivery to back it up, and in this case, the writing and acting provide brilliantly flourishes of detail, eccentricities, and emotion, allowing the heady ideas to have a thoroughly human presence. For a game of this size to have nearly every component directed towards its thematic vision is truly a feat of great direction.
This brings us to the subject of combat, where the game most frequently and directly asks the player to make use of the choices available to them. Baldur's Gate III takes the format of a turn based tactics game, (the superior turn based format), and adds in an immersive sim level of choice, from spells, potions, a wealth of additional inventory options, class abilities, and the idiosyncrasies of each unit, there are hundred of options technically available to the player on any given turn. While it can never have the flexibility of a human DM, the fact that Baldur's Gate III can even replicate the wacky anecdotes that come from tabletop gaming is another feat to add to its list of accomplishments. Still, the combat is designed in such a way to satisfy less creatively minded players, such as myself, as a core repertoire of bread and butter tactics are enough to get through much of the game, and even more granular decisions such as positioning can have massive effects on the outcome of a battle. There’s even a sense of good game feel, impressive for a slow paced top down game; casting the massive Fireball spell and waiting with anticipation as my i7-10700K and RTX 3080 struggle to calculate and render the onslaught of damage number and the flurry of flames, accompanied by a satisfying whoosh foley effect as the attack finally comes out, just never good old. Better yet, on Balanced difficulty, the encounters are hard and varied enough to encourage creative thinking, so that you can experience the flexibility of the systems even if you aren’t inclined to constantly use them. That is, until Act III, where the game reveals itself to be actually for min/max perverts and trial-and-error sickos. I don’t use those terms in a derogatory sense at all, it’s just that I, unfortunately, can’t count myself among their number. Dropping the difficulty from Balanced to Explorer did remedy this, although there wasn’t as much friction as I would normally like. Still, by that point in time I was glad to be able to cruise through the rest of the games and I was comfortable enough with the systems to still get a little creative, here and there.
Still, there are some game design aspects inherited from Dungeons and Dragons that merit discussion and scrutiny in the context of how they were adapted for this game. The critical roll system means success and failure on narrative related dice rolls is always possible and, but the sheer length of the game and number of catastrophic failures that can occur, resulting in losing a beloved party member encourages save scumming, whereas in a more focused tabletop-esque experience like Disco Elysium I was a lot more willing to roll with the punches. Even aside from that I do wish there were moments where success simply wasn't possible, call me a masochist if you want (okay, I am, but that's not the point here) but I want my more dramatic stories to hurt, at least a little, because that’s what makes them memorable and impactful. Thankfully there’s a choice near the end with no clean solution, one that asked me to weigh my character’s values against her sense of self and individuality, and yet still slotted in nicely with a fun, kick ass ending provided by her romance with Karlach. Being realistic my first playthrough of Baldur's Gate III will be my last, so I'm glad that it resulted in a story that felt memorable, meaningful, and personal to me.
Footnote 1: Well, mostly. This is a game where one of the major antagonists is marked as evil for his willingness to defy death and resurrect his dead daughter, but I can pay my skeleton buddy 200 gold to revive my companions on demand. Video games are truly wonderful.
Footnote 2: Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Mass Effect: Andromeda have a combined 146.6 hours played on my Steam account, so it’s really more like they made a (mostly) thematically coherent Mass Effect franchise. In one game!
Every component of Baldur's Gate III’s is about finding agency under systems and power structures bigger than oneself, and deciding how to use the power they gain, ranging from the Breakfast Club setup, to the homogenizing mind control and body transformation powers of the antagonist Illithids, to each of the character arcs found in the companion quests. Karlach struggles against the existential weight of the potentially lethal body modifications forced upon her by her former captors, Astarion finds himself tempted by his newfound freedom to reproduce the abuse he suffered under, Lae’Zael and Shadowheart find themselves forced to question where their allegiances lie, and so on, all while the party endeavors to defeat (or control, should you choose to) a force that would subsume the free will of every character you encounter into its imperialist domain. Hey… wait a second! By God! They finally did it! They finally made a thematically coherent [Footnote 1] Mass Effect game! [Footnote 2] Of course, a strong thematic backbone is nothing without good presentation and delivery to back it up, and in this case, the writing and acting provide brilliantly flourishes of detail, eccentricities, and emotion, allowing the heady ideas to have a thoroughly human presence. For a game of this size to have nearly every component directed towards its thematic vision is truly a feat of great direction.
This brings us to the subject of combat, where the game most frequently and directly asks the player to make use of the choices available to them. Baldur's Gate III takes the format of a turn based tactics game, (the superior turn based format), and adds in an immersive sim level of choice, from spells, potions, a wealth of additional inventory options, class abilities, and the idiosyncrasies of each unit, there are hundred of options technically available to the player on any given turn. While it can never have the flexibility of a human DM, the fact that Baldur's Gate III can even replicate the wacky anecdotes that come from tabletop gaming is another feat to add to its list of accomplishments. Still, the combat is designed in such a way to satisfy less creatively minded players, such as myself, as a core repertoire of bread and butter tactics are enough to get through much of the game, and even more granular decisions such as positioning can have massive effects on the outcome of a battle. There’s even a sense of good game feel, impressive for a slow paced top down game; casting the massive Fireball spell and waiting with anticipation as my i7-10700K and RTX 3080 struggle to calculate and render the onslaught of damage number and the flurry of flames, accompanied by a satisfying whoosh foley effect as the attack finally comes out, just never good old. Better yet, on Balanced difficulty, the encounters are hard and varied enough to encourage creative thinking, so that you can experience the flexibility of the systems even if you aren’t inclined to constantly use them. That is, until Act III, where the game reveals itself to be actually for min/max perverts and trial-and-error sickos. I don’t use those terms in a derogatory sense at all, it’s just that I, unfortunately, can’t count myself among their number. Dropping the difficulty from Balanced to Explorer did remedy this, although there wasn’t as much friction as I would normally like. Still, by that point in time I was glad to be able to cruise through the rest of the games and I was comfortable enough with the systems to still get a little creative, here and there.
Still, there are some game design aspects inherited from Dungeons and Dragons that merit discussion and scrutiny in the context of how they were adapted for this game. The critical roll system means success and failure on narrative related dice rolls is always possible and, but the sheer length of the game and number of catastrophic failures that can occur, resulting in losing a beloved party member encourages save scumming, whereas in a more focused tabletop-esque experience like Disco Elysium I was a lot more willing to roll with the punches. Even aside from that I do wish there were moments where success simply wasn't possible, call me a masochist if you want (okay, I am, but that's not the point here) but I want my more dramatic stories to hurt, at least a little, because that’s what makes them memorable and impactful. Thankfully there’s a choice near the end with no clean solution, one that asked me to weigh my character’s values against her sense of self and individuality, and yet still slotted in nicely with a fun, kick ass ending provided by her romance with Karlach. Being realistic my first playthrough of Baldur's Gate III will be my last, so I'm glad that it resulted in a story that felt memorable, meaningful, and personal to me.
Footnote 1: Well, mostly. This is a game where one of the major antagonists is marked as evil for his willingness to defy death and resurrect his dead daughter, but I can pay my skeleton buddy 200 gold to revive my companions on demand. Video games are truly wonderful.
Footnote 2: Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Mass Effect: Andromeda have a combined 146.6 hours played on my Steam account, so it’s really more like they made a (mostly) thematically coherent Mass Effect franchise. In one game!
HowaboutNora
2 days ago