I have a weird relationship with Dungeons & Dragons in that it’s always been a presence but not a major one. I didn’t even start my tabletop role-playing game journey with Dungeons & Dragons; it featured much more FASA Star Trek and Traveller, and my first major GM experience was Golden Heroes.
I started playing with the Basic, Expert, Master, etc, boxed sets, and then I’ve played every edition since a couple of times. The majority of my TTRPG experience is a vast array of other games.
I tried to resist
I tried to resist Baldur’s Gate 3. I tried because I was convinced it would go the way of all the other party, turn-based games I’ve tried since I enjoyed the old Icewindale game. I’ve tried Pillars of Eternity, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, Sword Coast Legends and Divinity Original Sin games. All of them have failed due to a mixture of not being engaging, involving too much effort, being too hard or all three.
I was convinced Baldur’s Gate 3 would hit these same problems since Larion Studios developed it, and I’d already bounced off their games.
I think I watched too much YouTube content being churned out for the game. Not stuff that revealed spoilers or ruined the experience but reviews and general advice on the game, and I concluded that maybe this is a slightly less intense turn-based party game and is more of an enthralling experience.
I started to think the game was a fantasy Mass Effect.
Have people played Mass Effect?
One of the fascinating things about Baldur’s Gate 3 is the commentary that describes it as a virgin birth, yet Bioware always did this. The second game they released was even the original Baldur’s Gate game, but we’ll focus on Mass Effect as the ultimate evolution of their model.
Mass Effect shares a lot of similarities with Baldur’s Gate 3, as well as some differences. The primary similarity is how the dramatics of the game are delivered and how the narrative unfolds. It’s exactly the same as Mass Effect and earlier games like Knights of the Old Republic (with less voice acting). The chats while walking around, the icons signalling a character has something important to say, using personal narrative threads and progressing overall narratives via a hub (your camp in Baldur’s Gate and the Normandy in Mass Effect).
The game dramatically and narratively unfolds the same way Bioware games evolved to do.
There are some differences. Mass Effect is an FPS, while Baldur’s Gate is a party, turn-based game. The narrative structure of Mass Effect also feels like a trilogy of space opera films, while Baldur’s Gate feels more like a long-form TV show of 3+ seasons.
The fact that people are experiencing the richness in setting, story and characters as if it’s entirely new speaks to the degree to which this type of experience has waned, being replaced by massively multi-player games and gaming as a service. Ironically, evening Bioware was shunted towards gaming as a service for a period of time with disastrous results.
Why Baldur’s Gate 3 is enthralling to me
It’s perfectly pitched
What do I mean by this? It’s easy for a turn-based party role-playing game to turn me off, even though I’ve longed to experience a great game in the genre. The key reasons it’s perfectly pitched are: –
- I need the story and characters to be engaging
- It takes more effort to play than I’d like, but not too much effort.
- It never feels so hard it becomes frustrating.
- I can enjoy the setting without it feeling like a research project
Baldur’s Gate 3 gets it perfect and it’s why it has worked out for me when numerous others in the genre haven’t.
A party of player characters
Baldur’s Gate 3 does two things that work well: your character is silent, but the various companions are fantastic. It’s a key difference with Mass Effect, which had your character as a fully voiced protagonist, but that choice gives the game a different feeling. Mass Effect feels like the game has a main character with a supporting cast. Baldur’s Gate feels like a group of Dungeons & Dragons characters the gaming group created.
The feeling as you play Baldur’s Gate is that two things happened: –
The players created fascinating characters on a go big or go home basis. A cleric on a mission so secret she’s had her memory wiped. A narcissist of a rogue who is a vampire spawn. A tiefling barbarian with a demonic, mechanical engine for a heart. A mage who has to ingest magic items for fear he will explode with the energy of a tactical nuke. The list goes on, and all of these characters are focused on how their backgrounds project fascinating potential stories into the future.
They then had a session zero or gave the GM freedom to weave these desperate individuals into a campaign. Despite the various characters being disparate, unique and sporting main character energy, they are woven together into a common predicament, ensuring they are on a journey together to save the world from a dire end. This means they have all the benefits of being gloriously unique and bold while inheriting that subtle group cohesion with conflict you want in any set of player characters.
It is beautiful to see and glorious to behold as the narratives unfold, and I’m not even out of Act One. It helps that most of the characters are the sort of big issue, bold choices and future-focused story characters I like to create.
You look at the characters the players have created, and you can’t help but wish you were in a traditional role-playing game with characters operating at this bold level with all the personal, big-scale drama going on.
The environments are immersive
The environments in Baldur’s Gate 3 don’t just feel like places you traverse to get to the interesting bits; they truly have a sense of discovery. When a new part of the map is revealed or new locations are entered, you can’t help but want to soak it all in.
It’s also extraordinarily large, giving places a sense of scale. Primary inside locations are expansive. The outside locations have a sprawling sense of realism without getting lost in the scale. This gives the whole game a sense of zen and being happy just being there. The locations can also be truly spectacular. The Underdark and the small glimpse into the astral plane are worthy of specific callouts in Act One.
The feeling so far is of places and environments people live and breathe in with a lot going on rather than being glorified sets for game action.
The combat is fun
While I’m waiting for it to change and turn into something I like less, the combat encounters are a brilliant combination of providing sufficient challenge while still being interesting and rewarding. It’s what I call tactical enough.
Baldur’s Gate 3 offers a more interesting and rewarding version of Dungeons & Dragons combat than the tabletop game itself. The potential of Dungeons & Dragons combat always feels like potential whenever I play it. The combats always feel a tad undercooked or a bit too short, and you never feel like you can bring all your ingredients on your character sheet into what’s cooking. I realise this is as much about encounter design as it is about rules (as they are largely the same) but it doesn’t change the fact this has been my experience.
The combats are just the right mix of length and tactical variety. You feel you get to use what your characters bring to the table. The wizard truly gets to use crowd control. The spiritual weapon and spirit guardians cleric is a joy to behold. The glorious feeling of a Paladin with five spell slots, two attacks, and misty step is almost therapeutic on a level I can’t say I’ve come close to experiencing in Dungeons & Dragons despite having the same ability set.
If we move past the interface, the graphics and the encounter design for a second, the success of Baldur’s Gate combat has two main foundations.
Night arrives when you choose to have full rests rather than a full rest being constrained by when night arrives. This reduces resource uncertainty to the extent you’re not holding off on the big spells and the cool divine smites based on the uncertainty, you might need them later only for your character to reach the end of the day and wish they’d used them earlier. It changes the dynamic from holding back to one of active use. There is a reason I loved the always, encounter and daily model of fourth edition Dungeons & Dragons.
The fact you control all four characters in the group. This means it spreads out the success and failure. Key moments failing can still be disappointing, but you then roll onto the next character, and they get up in an enemy’s face and carve them a new one. This is different to traditional play, where if something fails, you then have four turns to wait for your next attempt to do something. While we have a level of turn efficiency in our Dungeons & Dragons games, that doesn’t make this a problem. The fact you’re playing all the characters in the combat does add to the experience.
It makes you care
At least it does me. I care about Shadowheart. I may want to shiv Astarion and put him out of his Vampiric mystery, but at least it’s an emotional reaction. The clever thing is he’s annoying just enough. I wanted to save the Emerald Grove, despite their temporary Khaga being a racist that had me partly thinking I should scorch the place.
Let’s face it: if I’d picked a vengeance Paladin rather than a devotion Paladin, that may have happened. I still went back and ganked Khaga once peace had been restored. I did dislike her.
It’s just really clever how it makes you like or dislike people and situations but never enough to drive you away but just enough to make you care in one form or another. This is a clever achievement, considering your silent character. It’s much easier to do in Mass Effect when your choices drive the flow of the conversation that comes from your character’s mouth.
I finished the Githyanki Creche part of Act One while writing this, and it is suitably dramatic, tense and high stakes, and I was fully drawn in by it. I’m not sure what I expected when I reached that part of Act One, but it wasn’t as full-on as what I actually got!
Role-playing through choices
The fact your character is silent and you care so much means you lean into role-playing through choices. This might seem normal, but it’s my experience that players in traditional role-playing games often find themselves more role-playing through talking rather than driving things to meaningful choices.
While Mass Effect felt a bit more intense regarding the choices it kept throwing at you due to its three-film narrative structure, Baldur’s Gate 3 also does it. It seems they are a bit further apart (based on Act One). My experience may have helped because I’m playing a devotion Paladin, so I need to maintain the moral centre rather than just going with the flow, but it’s working for me.
Since we can now change our character’s appearance, I’ve used it to add a scar over her right eye and change her hairstyle. Internally, this is the consequence of her battles so far, and she’s grown her hair to try and hide it (the cut happens to hang down over the right side). It feels like you’re role-playing even though you never hear the character say anything.
And, Finally…
I’m enjoying Baldur’s Gate 3 because it’s an experience I thought had completely died over a decade ago when I finished playing Mass Effect 3. It certainly looked like it as the most successful developer in that space was forced to pivot almost to disaster as part of the grand multi-player, massively online and gaming as a service push.
Ultimately, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the best Dungeons & Dragons game I’ve played since our fourth edition campaign, which might have been about fifteen years ago.
I’m not sure the release of Baldur’s Gate 3 will be the first step in the renaissance of this type of game, but one can only hope it is. If I were Bioware I’d be looking at Baldur’s Gate 3 and thinking, shit, that used to be us.