So I hear the new Baldurs Gate is making bank like a knicker elastic shop next door to a French burlesque club – I don’t know, it made sense in my head – and a lot of people are going “Oh! Finally gamers send a clear message that they want good single player games with strong design and narrative, not just fancy graphics and live service twattery.” To which I reply, “You mean besides the previous twelve times they sent that message?” I mean, Christ, at this point it feels like saying “Prisoners in basements send clear message that they’d rather not be sodomized with a six inch wooden dowel.” But is Baldurs Gate 3 actually good or just riding the wave of the metaphorical demand for dowel removal and soothing bum cream? I’d never been one for this sort of top down clicky RPG before, but a couple of significant factors drew me to this one: editor Nick strongly suggested I give it a look, saying it’s doing some full on immersive sim stuff that sets it apart. Ooh, you mean you can break doors AND stack crates? And the second factor was that since the last D&D-based video game I have become a D&D player IRL, tune into Adventure is Nigh every other Saturday only on the Escapist plug plug, so when I started the game and the screen became deluged with icons like it was being subjected to the wrath of Windows 95, I understood what some of them meant.
And I could go in already knowing things that both Baldur’s Gate 3 and D&D generally are really sodding bad at explaining, like how the cocking Sneak Attack works. On that note, I also thought it best to try out the game’s flexibility by role playing as my existing D&D character, Mortimer, a weaselly con artist who min-maxes deception in order to weasel his way out of problems because’s he’s as much use in a fight as an actual weasel. So, the game starts and we’re on an alien spaceship that crash lands for various complicated reasons and we have to fight our way out of the wreckage, fending off purple squiddly dudes in robes. And I’m all like “Sorry, did we come in the wrong door? I’m here for Baldur’s Gate, why are in the last mission of an XCOM game?” But then we get away from the crash site and we’re in more traditional D&D land. Forests, embattled villages, dungeons, can’t move ten steps without hitting a trap or a gelatinous cube. We also swiftly load up the party bus with a bunch of fellow escapees and adventurers, all with diverse classes and complex backstories but more importantly representing a nice convenient meat shield for Mortimer to hide behind.
Turns out everyone’s got squirmy worms in their brains that will turn them into the purple squiddly dudes within days if we don’t find a way to hack them out, and so we’re set loose to adventure our way through that problem by dealing with five hundred different ones. And as the ground level gameplay kicked in, it soon became clear that the game wasn’t going to let me hide at the back of the party plucking my fantasy banjo and slinging the odd Vicious Mockery like the most infuriating little tit at the hoedown contest, you’ve got to micromanage all your party member’s actions and levelling choices. If you don’t go through them all individually telling them to go into stealth mode they’ll blunder in after your sneaky ass like three embarrassing parents coming to pick you up from the school disco. The world is extremely flexible with letting you make crazy jumps to bypass obstacles, but the pathfinding frequently has trouble keeping up. Something I was able to exploit to my favour during one combat sequence where I kept moving to the other side of a huge pit and causing two minotaurs to keep getting confused and changing direction like we were chasing a nervous bride around a honeymoon suite coffee table.
One thing I swiftly learned was that whenever negotiation broke down and a conversation turned into combat, I would usually get a lot of little goblin-sized bootprints all over my buttocks because deceiving and weaselling out of combat only worked often enough to make me completely bloody unprepared for the unavoidable fights. The winning strategy in such cases was to reload a save and try to cheat as much as possible. Which wasn’t great for immersion. There was no in-universe reason why Mortimer would drag an explosive barrel into the middle of a group of not yet hostile NPCs. “Don’t mind me, just thought this would look nice here, my goodness, your leader’s making a jolly interesting speech, why don’t you keep paying attention to that while I go over there and check on that thing that’s just inside firebolt range.” I also got a lot of mileage out of shoving people off cliffs. Baldurs Gate 3 will never use an impassable wall when a bottomless chasm will do. Even when there wasn’t one, sometimes I’d just climb to the highest point, make the enemy chase me up there, then shove them straight back off like an asshole kid on a climbing frame. Three rounds of that, I was starting to feel sorry for the stupid bastard.
Although the enemy AI seems pretty clued in on the patented labour saving cliff shove technique as well, so I was still having to retry combat encounters a lot. I saw a tweet this week saying “Hey, don’t reload after every mistake, roll with it, find a solution, that’s how you have fun with Baldur’s Gate.” Fine sentiment, except all my mistakes seem to end with my party getting pounded into mulch. Not sure how I’m supposed to roll with that unless it happens at the top of a staircase or angled surface. Maybe this was a consequence of my choices in life, but I felt I kept getting trapped in situations where gruelling combat was unavoidable. Like this one mission to rescue the druid leader from a goblin camp. I bullshitted my way in and found the dude easily enough but then he was like “Oh I can’t escape with you or consider this quest complete until you kill all three goblin leaders.” Now, said dude had the ability to turn into a giant bear, which would tip the scales in our favour a tad, but wouldn’t come with us at first. “Oh I could come rip shit up, but then you’d lose the opportunity to kill your targets stealthily,” he said. Oh, sure. I was totally gonna stealth kill three high level goblin leaders in full view of nine of their guards and within earshot of twenty more. I’ll get right on that. Get in the fucking party bus, Teddy Ruxpin.
So I don’t entirely buy this popular perception that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a super flexible game where every problem has multiple solutions, but I’m sure I barely scratched the surface of it in my usual limited one week of playtime. I mean, it’s no graphics powerhouse and the file size descended upon my hard drive like a fat bloke into a crowded bus seat. I wonder how much of its sudden popularity is due to outside factors, the growing distaste for the usual tedious gameplay loops and online flappery, the increasing popularity of D&D thanks to actual play serieses, Adventure Is Nigh Season 3 airing now don’t miss out, cross promote cross promote, but you know what, viewer? For all the times I got backed into a prolonged frustrating combat having been left to randomly explore a new area only to discover afterwards that it did sod all to get me closer to my goal, something made me keep pressing on. Something always made me want to survive this and see what was around the next corner. And I think that comes down to being a just plain solidly built game in terms of narrative and discovery. I wanted to keep learning more about my situation and my party members. Specifically, what they kept inside their underpants. It was vaginas.
Yahtzee is the Escapist’s longest standing talent, having been writing and producing its award winning flagship series, Zero Punctuation, since 2007. Before that he had a smattering of writing credits on various sites and print magazines, and has almost two decades of experience in game journalism as well as a lifelong interest in video games as an artistic medium, especially narrative-focused.
He also has a foot in solo game development - he was a big figure in the indie adventure game scene in the early 2000s - and writes novels. He has six novels published at time of writing with a seventh on the way, all in the genres of comedic sci-fi and urban fantasy.
He was born in the UK, emigrated to Australia in 2003, and emigrated again to California in 2016, where he lives with his wife and daughters. His hobbies include walking the dog and emigrating to places.
