Three years ago, which feels like five years ago and one year ago, in November or December, we rubbed tears out of our eyes as we welcomed death. The rolls had gone just right or just wrong and our characters linked arms and saved the Planes from annihilation at the cost of our own. In the hour or so following, we each role-played out the epilogues to our own stories. Then that was that. The culmination of a two year campaign to save the Runelands, a fictional world concocted by our brilliant Dungeon Master, concocted by all of us together. Nobody at that table would ever question the potency of tabletop roleplaying again.
Why did we do this to ourselves? What started as an excuse to hang out for a few hours every couple weeks turned into cause for eyerolls for the uninitiated as our excitement for each session would spill into common conversation. Suddenly we were boring all our other friends with stories of living skeletons with dubious motivations, halfing wizards and prophesied lizard girls, plague-witches, bejewelled barbarians, heroics, self-sacrifice. For two years we lived with ghosts in our heads with names like Bongo Tongo and Harvey Strengthy and every few weeks dropped ourselves into their imaginary world like Bastians in our Eventuallyending Story.
But it's hard to keep the energy up for so long, especially for a group of people fighting the tug of their thirties. People have kids, move house. Get together and break up. Move cities. Get together again. Buy houses. Fall out. Make other plans. Most great stories end before you want them to but I think ours ended right when it should have. Honestly, it's hard to get a bunch of friends together all the time.
Larian Studios was all like: what if you don't have to?
Baldur's Gate 3 is Dungeon's & Dragons: The Video Game. If you haven't heard of Larian or Baldur's Gate, you've heard of Dungeons & Dragons. D&D is a tabletop roleplaying game, which makes it a few rungs above theatre sports in complexity and a few rungs below it in coolness. Or so it was, anyway. Something funny happened over the past few years: the gulf between those poles began to narrow. Dungeons & Dragons released its 5th Edition, a new set of rules and mechanics that made it less complex and far friendlier to new players.
It also became a lot less uncool. To find out why, cast your mind back to the flashpoint years of 2015-2016. First came Critical Role, a web series started by a group of voice actors whose work you've heard if you've watched any kind of animated series or played a video game in the past 20 years. If you’d never thrown bones before, CR was a manual for how to start. There had been streamed and recorded tabletop games before and I imagine Critical Role captured a lot of audience runoff primed by series like The Adventure Zone, but CR galvanised the “Actual Play” genre with its commitment to roleplay and involvement in the community. The proof was in milestones like DM Matt Mercer being asked to canonise some of his homebrewed inventions by inclusion in the actual 5th Edition ruleset, in a brand new D&D cartoon based on their first campaign (The Legends of Vox Machina), and in a small media empire that’s grown to include multiple spin-offs, celebrity guests, and a bonafide grassroots cultural impact.
A year later, as Critical Role was picking up steam, everyone in the English-speaking universe learned what a “demogorgon” was via Netflx’s Stranger Things. Where Critical Role was slowly building an underground, Stranger Things came in from the top, dragging Dungeons & Dragons out of the 80s and into du jour for tens of millions of people at once. If Stranger Things lacked the how of Critical Role, it sure gave a ton of people the why with its graphic evocations of D&D-inspired lore. This two-pronged attack cemented Dungeons & Dragons as a viable pasttime in a way it hadn't been since the Satanic Panic. Hell, I guess that's pretty impressive.
Around the same time, a Belgian video game studio released a massive, elaborate fantasy roleplaying video game called Divinity: Original Sin 2 which hoarded accolades and made it obvious that Dungeons & Dragons might finally get a video game to match the power of its tabletop parent. What might not seem apparent if you haven't played Dungeons & Dragons is why this would be any kind of feat. Surely being able to actually see your character, to move them around, hear them speak, to jump, brawl, weep, and fire the searing blasts of magical violence in real time would be better than having it all just happen in your mind. But what makes playing D&D so special is what the mind makes possible which the limitations of code cannot. What makes it so special is the unexpected. The dice went sideways, your friend was feeling impish, the Dungeon Master was feeling prickly, a slip of the mind had you cast the wrong spell, and whatever script you thought you were writing is torn up in front of you all. These are the moments that feel indelible. Video game development, with its demand for purpose and intention, could never. For a player's impulse to be accommodated, it has to be programmed, which means it has to be anticipated by the developer. This is the root of one of the most common experiences a brand new video game player can have: trying to run over to something you can see and instead running into an invisible wall and wondering: why can't I do that? It's right there.
Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the Best Video Games of All Time. It's not one of the Best Video Games of All Time because it lets you do anything you want. It's one of the Best Video Games of All Time because, like a good Dungeon Master, it subtly coerces you into wanting to do the things you're allowed to do, both through world design and by making those things fucking own.
It does this by first understanding what you want to do and by assuming that you're essentially curious. A lot has rightly been made about how expansive and "free" the game is, but this is only the surface. You can't, for example, on starting the game, turn into a goose and make a life out of stealing rakes from irate farmers. But if you see a dog, you might wonder, what's that dog up to? And you can cast a spell that lets you talk to animals and have a conversation with it to no end besides your own delight. See a travelling merchant who's been killed by some bandits? You can use necromancy and talk to the body. You can chat to just about everybody. Even living ones, just about damn near all of whom have voices and lines of their own that share with you everything from glimpses of their daily predicament to surprise quests.
Quests, those adventures-within-adventures, are where Larian really brings that sly coercion to bear. You are never not on a quest and you're almost always on multiple at a time and where other games would fill your questlog like a tourist's checklist, quests here tie into and build on each other in ways that will strike you silly. Dark Souls has long been praised for its level design such that deep into a level you'll pass through a gate or climb a ladder only to realise you've completed a loop back to where you were an hour ago; Baldur's Gate 3 does that narratively. You'll feel the sheer exhilaration of a fairly dumb movie-goer multiple times in each of the game's three Acts, going: No Way, That Was THAT GUY? Almost everybody is relevant in some way, not in the sense that everyone is a mystical child of destiny but in the natural-feeling sense that everybody is acting and reacting to the same set of priority-redefining consequences assaulting the game's setting.
Sometimes, this is glancing intersections with characters whose stories have progressed off-screen, bearing the scars of the larger plot's insidiousness. But often they’re gloriously mutating and reactive to your own actions. You and your party are arch-troublemakers and that has all kinds of consequences for people you have and haven't met at any given point and you will hear about it. Here, Larian also confounds player expectations., There are more than a few times when, acting in a typically rewarded video game-y way like poking your nose everywhere it doesn't belong, you'll stumble your dumb ass into making things much worse just because you showed up and there's no way of talking your way out of it. To be clear, these are always completely optional scenarios too, not ones the plot has contrived, only arising because of your own actions. You can complete the entire game missing all kinds of these moments, but no, you had to go and open that door, and now the consequences are part of the story. Where this is elevated from annoyance to triumph is that the game constantly invites exploration, both physically by being visually diverse and stunning, but also conversationally with delightful character beats from your companions and whoever you've bumped into. Slowly you build trust in the game that whatever it's going to show you will be incredible, egging you on to take provocative or immersive choices at the risk of optimal gameplay. Yeah, you'll do stuff that's probably worse for your character. Because you know it'll be goddamn fun.
And still, you are free, because even in those moments where you've stumbled somewhere you shouldn't, you can almost always solve the problem in the short term by suddenly killing absolutely everyone. However, word, reputation, and the clashing of steel travels. Far beyond a point you feel comfortable reloading a save, someone with their cousin's grudge will spot you and ask you pay in ways you might not want to. My brain leapt out of my skull in one of these moments when, choosing not to continue the cycle of violence, I acquiesced to local law enforcement and accepted a prison sentence. Here we go, I figured. A little prison mini game where I have to either sleep a few in game days and serve my sentence or sneak out of here. Cute. Only as I felt my way along the moist limestone towards the stairs to make my escape, I met another prisoner, a politician who'd been unseated as part of a larger conspiracy for daring to support the father of one of your companions, the city's former hero. Talking to them I got some vital goss on the situation and chose to make this a prison break for two. They ran off vowing to rally support to our cause. Christ, you can't even go to prison by accident without it feeding back into the plot.
Still, sometimes violence is the only language that can brook a negotiation, and here the tongue is silver. I rolled a wizard character. I like wizards in tabletop roleplaying games because they're often the ones with the most versatile utility. The imagery of Dungeons & Dragons is all swords and bloodshed, but truthfully, combat is often the most arduous part of playing. Fights can drag on as players think about their moves and especially at lower levels before you can level city blocks with fireballs it can feel like a slog. But that's not so bad because Dungeons & Dragons is really a game about problem solving and sometimes the most fun solutions don't involve killing anything at all. It's teleporting across an unleapable gap, transforming into a ball of mist to shimmy through a pipe, gathering information from conversations with animals, evacuating the room of poison by summoning a gust of wind, or unlocking an unpickable lock. A wizard makes toys of these challenges in dazzling glamour. But when it comes time to roll for Initiative and start decking goons, Baldur's Gate 3 has made sport of bloodsport.
About mid way into the game, my party had become a troupe to be feared. We were Karlach, a ferocious barbarian; Astarion, a vampire rogue trying to recover from two centuries of violent trauma; Shadowheart, a cleric slowly uncovering her memories and purpose, and your most humble wizard. By then we'd gathered magic and magic items so that every one of us had some sort of teleportation spell and a sickening arsenal of kill. Anyone fool enough to step to us would have me snapping them into a magical sleep before teleporting to the other end of the dungeon while a suddenly invisible Astarion slunk up to the rafters, Shadowheart summoned celestial creatures with swords as big as people, and Karlach leapt into their midst and cut two of them in half before the rest woke up. None of us were in one spot long enough for them to pin down and if any of us were caught, Shadowheart would heal them instantly while Astarion's brutal sneak attacks took them out from the shadows. There was always enough tension for it not to feel trivial, to feel like our strengths and strategy had been for something, but the dice knew who to favour if they knew what was good for them.
On the other hand, let's return to the invisible wall problem. You enter the astral lair of a necromancer of untold power. You are somewhere between dimensions. Boulders and debris of unknown provenance float by some magic around you, buffeted by the winds of some cosmic hurricane you're in the eye of. And in the center of a floating plateau, the necromancer prepares his horrible ritual. The video game player in you knows you're meant to walk up to them, have some ideological showdown, then put your fists up. But objectively speaking, you have the drop on them. Can't you instead sneak up to them and stab them in the back? Or start raining hell down on them right now? Wait - can I just cast Telekinesis, lift them up from afar, and hurl their helpless body off the plateau into the crackling storm around you, killing them instantly? Yes. You can. You can push people off ledges, pull them off their perch using spells making them fall to their deaths, or even hurl pivotal story villains into the black. You can and you should and I can only imagine that's why Larian set so many big boss fights in spectacular arenas surrounded by huge chasms.
(Intentionally or not, the game subverts this invitation in one important fight where I avoided a terrifying battle by flinging a boss off the map only to realise an hour later I needed an item that was on their person, forcing me to reload a saved game and take a more direct approach. Always read the quest description closely, kids.)
Not just gristle for fans of gristle, these fights are almost always in service of plot, whether overarching or your companions' individual stories. Everyone has a story to tell and it's your job as the player to read it, slowly unravelling your friends' motivations and histories through arenas that will make you gasp with their breadth. I'll spare you rosy descriptions of towering statues of forgotten gods, crimson-carpeted vampire dens, and torture halls of Literal Hell (I won't entirely spare you) and just say that as D&D's strengths lie in enabling your party's ingenuity, Baldur's Gate's strengths lie in the party as well. Like any other plot thread, these can unspool in multiple ways to all kinds of sometimes terrible ways. I went down one narrative route with one character where the dice went wrong and I'd made some bad decisions and it led to having to either kill them or carrying out a genocide, returning to our former refuge and slaying our former supporters in the name of a dreadful god. Afterwards I reloaded a save and managed to eke out a more favourable outcome that eventually built to an even more stark divergence just because I couldn't stomach what my friend had become. Reloading a saved game in order to get a desired outcome is referred to as "save scumming" by the gaming community and generally frowned upon by purists, but given the alternative, I wanted to see what the future could look like for our party if things weren't so grim. This resulted in one of my favourite moments of the game, something that made my heart swell and sit a moment in shocked silence at its impact, even though it was just a line. In this new timeline, dozens of hours later - weeks of in-universe time - I found a flower I'd heard my companion say they'd liked. I walked over and gave it to them. And they made a goofy joke. This character, whose storyline had been steeped in misery and loss, whose resulting demeanour was so dour that players in Early Access hated them so much Larian tweaked their character so players weren't immediately so put off, had made a goofy joke. It was tender and silly and it cut right through me. I had rewound time and fate to see them redeemed and here they were, in this chance moment, happy.
Then, there's the rest. The stuff that doesn't work...
Then, there's the rest. The stuff that doesn't work. Let's start with a gripe common at tables I've sat around: dude, I have to eat food? In Dungeons & Dragons, your character undergoes a process of extracting nutrients from the world in much the same way your 7th grade biology teacher explained to you. Your guy gotta eat. Your imaginary guy gotta eat??? And this filters into Baldur's Gate 3 in the way that whenever you want to Long Rest, the function through which you replenish your Health and Spell Slots and other conceptual macguffins, you need at least 40 Food. What exactly the fuck does this mean? If you've never played Baldur's Gate, you have about the same idea as anyone who has. You press the Long Rest button, you have to choose various items of food/wine/etc you've hoarded in your travels, and a little ring counts up from 0/40 to 40/40 to denote that Yes, Now You Can Have A Proper Sleep. A wheel of cheese might be 6 Food. A bottle of wine? 4 Food. A different bottle of wine? 7 Food. Sure, people need food to live, but what food has what amount designated seems arbitrary and the way it plays out in game is a series of clicks through a menu. There's no gain to immersion here, it's just spreadsheeting. It's barely even a problem. If you're the type to open every chest, you'll almost always gather enough of the various Food Items by accident. But the times it is an issue, when you need to top up your friends right before the next adventure and find your camp chest only 38/40 Food full, it's more of an immersion breaker. You've gotta go back out into the world, find a random crate or chest or the nearest inn and either buy or pickpocket some food, go back to camp, and carry on playing. There could be something to this, but the way it's actually implemented is so undercooked that it just halts your game.
Hey, it sure helps none that the game's inventory system is chaotic as hell.
The economy in the game is bonkers. By the time I finally had a companion die irretrievably and had to call on Withers, a lich with the power of resurrection, I'd cobbled an entirely incidental fortune of about 20,000 gold coins. How much was it to reach beyond the impervious veil and in its greylands locate the once-divine spark of my companion, snatching it from death's unrotting molars and returning it to a fresh embodiment? A hundred bucks. My brother in Myrkul, I found that in an old box like 10 minutes ago and you're telling me that's all it costs to confound one of life's two absolute certainties?
Larian can patch these and other quality-of-life issues out. What will likely never eventuate, though, is the reported content cut from the game, especially that which makes Act 3 feel sort of... broken. A note on the final act of the game: the landing is turbulent. Act 3 takes place entirely in the city of Baldur's Gate, or at least some of it. An entire half of the city was cut from release, and while Larian surely had good reason for doing so, it's clear that the story's pacing was structured assuming it was gonna get done. The city we do get is beautiful, full of odd nooks and alleys and characters, beautifully designed such that it wasn't long before I was navigating around without a map, just using memory. It reminded me of CD Projekt Red's rendering of the free city of Novigrad in The Witcher 3 and how it felt like a virtual home, seedy underbelly and all. But as a setting for the main story, it feels half baked.
For example, the entrance to a grand mansion secretly home to a den of vampires, the inevitable setting of a ritual that would claim seven thousand and seven souls and the culmination of Astarion's plot line, should be in the Upper City. Instead you can only access it through an obscure side path that involves running over the city ramparts. If this was anything like the rest of the game, properly implemented there would likely be multiple ways of getting in, from a frontal assault to secret entrances to just flying up to the roof and smashing a window. Instead, the entrance we got felt jury rigged.
Let’s go again: Gortash is big and bad and a master manipulator and looks like an old Pete Wentz which might in some minds undermine the former three qualities but hey this ain’t real life it’s Baldur’s Gate, baby. This is the guy you’ve been chasing the whole game, the alleged instigator of the entire plot. You get into Baldur’s Gate and finally come face to face with him… right before his coronation as Archduke of the city. Ah geez. What would befit a coronation but a grand cathedral among the most influential and affluent of Baldur’s Gate? Did you guess: “a glorified guardhouse just upstairs from the local jail”? Welp without the upper crust Upper City in the game, this is the only location left to house it. At this point you’ve likely just fought his second-in-command - a shapeshifting assassin who can turn into a gigantic demon - in a cavernous underground lair surrounded by suicidal cultists and blood-and-skull decor in every flavour of eerie. Suddenly in the claustrophobic, barely adorned stone of this draughty old tower, the Most Evilest Guy Ever is reduced to merely the Most Guy Ever. There are plenty of other scenarios in Act 3 with far more consideration and surprise, but even those don't scratch the scale of much of the preceding Act with its terrifying atmosphere and grand scale. I loved being in the city of Baldur's Gate, but it felt like the story didn't quite know what to do with this gorgeous setpiece.
Technical issues abound in Act 3. The game buckling under the weight of having to account for thousands of potential story threads and interactions that have been abandoned or shaken out in some particular way, I kept having conversations with companions that pertained to events that never happened. Or events that had happened - that they were there for! - but which they’d… forgotten? Ever the enabler, I let Astarion usurp his former vamp daddy and finish the ritual himself, becoming a daywalking supervampyr. His personality changed quickly and he became unbearably arrogant, so I forced him to gulp an Astral-Touched Tadpole which gave him Illithid powers but also made him so hideous I put a hood over his face for the rest of the game as punishment. But in some moments when talking to him at camp, he'd bug out and revert to his old self, cautious and afraid, as if he hadn't surpassed the limits of both vampire and space-faring psychic squid-people alike in the span of a week.
After I'd already killed a particularly suave devil who'd extended a dubious offer of collaboration, the wizard companion Gale was complaining about the contract I'd signed and how I couldn't simply tell the devil "no." Dude I just lopped his frickin head off. Other companions would mourn the loss of companions in battle while said companion was in the background. Asking the warlock Wyll about his long-term plans, you could leverage his trust in you to admit he was going to hunt his former patron, the devil Mizora. Mizora visits you in camp at one point in the story to keep a closer eye on Wyll and you can optionally make her leave or stick around. I never bothered to make her leave, so Wyll told me about his vendetta... while Mizora was standing right next to him. The almost prescient realism and accounting for my decisions in the earlier game has given way to babbling mannequins whose idle animations I'd mistaken for agency.
Ultimately, none of these issues could erase what I'd felt besides. This is how Baldur's Gate 3 wins. How it is the apotheosis of all's hopes for Dungeons & Dragons: The Video Game, shortfalls withstanding. It engenders the kind of irrepressible need to tell other people about what happened in the theatre of the mind, no matter how fucking dorky and stupid it might seem to anyone who hasn't seen it similarly. It feels real, urgent, an actual experience qua Something You Did For Real and so dang magical you've gotta tell someone about it. These moments where creativity and emergent gameplay melt into hollandaise of the imagination that's so fucking good you can't help spooning a sliver of it into the nearest person, just a taste, just to hope their eyes roll back into their head in a moment of ecstasy as yours did because oh my god it WORKED, is why more and more people are falling in love with Dungeons & Dragons. Larian reverse engineered that secret sauce and shared the ingredients with everyone, whether they can gather their friends or not.