The Ambitions of ‘Baldur’s Gate 3' Weigh it Down, but Not Entirely
I will happily gobble down every Bioware Formula game I can get my hands on though.
It’s been about three weeks since I wrapped up my roughly 80 hour journey with Baldur’s Gate 3. Undoubtedly, it’s nice to have one of these games. You know, a choice driven RPG — CRPG or not — that the likes of Bioware and Obsidian made me love in the early 2000’s. The last one to come out that I engaged with was Greedfall, which is from the French developer, Spiders. My dislike of that game is well documented. It failed to display an understanding of the Bioware Formula, or the ability to execute on it. Baldur’s Gate 3, despite my issues, firmly does understand. We simply do not get many of these anymore, especially at a AAA level. Partly because the publishers capable of funding them have become so risk averse, and partly because the many moving parts of their design make them a tough beast to wrangle. And yet, Larian Studios have done the damn thing. They pushed out a massively ambitious entry to the genre at a AAA scale and revived a beloved series that has long laid dormant.
Key to any of these games are the supporting cast. Larian smartly cuts down the amount of recruitable companions from the original’s 25, and second’s 15, to manageable 10. The result is a group that is largely compelling. Many of their substories weave back into the core theme of agency. For example the tiefling barbarian, Karlach, is terminally ill, having been robbed of her physical heart when she was sold into the service of an archdevil. Or the Githyanki warrior, Lae’zal, who blindly follows the dogmatic societal structure of the Githyanki Empire. Each of them, along with most of the cast, have fully fleshed out arcs that remain interesting with each new morsel that gets spread across the three acts of the main plot. But it’s not just about their tragic lives that tie into big emotional scenes. Larian understands that it’s the mundane moments that matter too. Letting loose at a party to celebrate that you’ve somehow not died yet despite being infected by mind flayer worms. Sharing drinks, having your relationship predicted by a fortune teller, or simply hanging around camp. And of course, romance. Lots of it. This is certainly the most horny any of these games have been in my experience.
The CRPG genre can be unapproachable. The isometric camera can remove a more intimate view into the world and characters, but during dialogue here, the camera is brought down to eye level. User interface in the genre is often obtuse, but here it’s clean and legible. There is certainly a lot to look through, but rarely does it feel overwhelming. Dungeon and Dragons rules loom large over the genre, often to a fault. Many classic CRPGs seem to expect the player is already quite familiar with the D&D edition of their era. Once again, Larian smartly makes the game grokable even for those who have little familiarity with the world of tabletop RPGs. Information on what abilities do what is presented succinctly and is readily at hand. Physically representing dice roll on screen — at least outside of combat — is a neat trick to make every dice roll transparent in the way they would be in a D&D campaign. Of course, taking a tactics approach to combat over a real-time with pause ensures the player can breath and interpret all of this information at their own pace.
Maybe the most compelling aspect of all is how Larian melds the themes of the story with their design aspirations. Many have called Larian and their creation, the successor to Bioware or the spiritual successor to Dragon Age: Origins. There is some truth to this, but also, this is 100% a sequel to Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2. The expanse of options and possible branching paths is impressive. The fact that companions don’t feel like victims of the protagonist’s gravitational pull is an extension of this. Bioware, even by Origins, still place many limitations upon the players ability to co-author the plot. It’s fascinating to see how other players find radically different solutions, given the difference in character builds and narrative desires.
For example, early on you come across a druid camp whose true leader has been captured and their second in command, a far more authoritarian character, has taken over. If you’re playing a druid, it’s entirely possible to turn the new leader’s dogma against them and resolve the issue before you even find the original leader. For me, I didn’t have that option as a warlock, though in theory I could have just murdered this person. Instead, I chose to rescue the original leader, bring them back, and put the tyrant in their place. Along the way, all options have all sorts of choices that can splinter off into the rest of the game. All of this is tangled up in a story where you and your companions are struggling to keep a handle on their own agency, as mindflayer brain worms take hold of your minds. Though those same worms allow you exceptional powers such as the ability to influence the mind of others, even your companions. Which in turn brings a thoughtful metacommentary on how in this subgenre players are often enforcing their will upon characters in ways that rob them of their agency. There are just so many moving pieces and the fact that Larian has attempted such and largely pulled it off, is nothing short of a tremendous accomplishment.
However…
Turns out those guardrails on player co-authorship that Bioware puts up exist for a reason. Everything rests on a web of fragile chaos and when Baldur’s Gate 3’s reactivity breaks, it breaks bad.
(Major character story spoilers for acts II and III for the next four graphs.)
In the waning hours of act II, the companion Shadowheart has come to a crossroads. Much of this act has your group working through a Temple of Shar, the dark goddess Shadowheart worships. Shadowheart must make a choice to either continue down the road with Shar, or turn away. For the purpose of my party’s best interests, our goals did not align with Shadowheart’s if she remained in the cult. I had an opportunity to convince her to change, but it was a difficult skill check I could only roll twice on. First I failed by a single digit, then I rolled a 1… Shadowheart could only be saved by some save file magic, but I was willing to live with the consequences. We fought, she died. As Shadowheart laid on the ground in some miserable tomb, not a single companion remarked upon the fact we just had to kill one of our own. When we got back to camp, still, no one reacted. From her death to the moment credits rolled nearly 40 hours later, Shadowheart’s death went unremarked upon as if she never existed at all.
This isn’t even the worst of it though. Jaheira, a companion since the first game, also comes into the story in act II. During the final boss fight of this portion, she was struck down by the enemy. Again… no one reacted. Not Karlach who had just been fangirling over meeting one of the heroes of Baldur’s Gate, mere hours ago. Nor any of the people from Jaheira’s faction, the Harpers, who I allied with. Was this just a continuation to the earlier games that had similar issues? But they were operating off of tech and design theory roughly two decades older. What was Larian’s reasoning for this?
In act III you come across another old face, Minsc. He’s being tricked into working for the Absolute — the main antagonist — via a doppelganger pretending to be Jaheira. I’ve never liked Minsc, and also for role-playing purposes I killed him. I also killed the doppelganger. Finally, people cared. Companions had something to say, only they weren’t reacting to anything that had just taken place. Instead they bemoaned Jaheira leaving the group over Minsc’s death. All of them are seemingly ignorine that we saw Jaheira die weeks ago. When we killed the doppelganger, it transformed back into its original form!
Now if Jaheira is alive at this point in the game, and you do kill Minsc, she will indeed leave the party. So for whatever reason, the entirely wrong lines of dialogue were triggering.
For a game all about agency — where part of the fantasy of its design is to co-author its story and the relationships of the companions within — to break at a foundational level is deeply disappointing. As I marched through my nearly 80 hour playthrough it became clear what had happened across Baldur’s Gate 3’s development. Act I is as polished as it is, and much of the reason people have talked so lovingly about the game, because it was in early access for nearly three years. Three years of millions of people QA testing it and the result is, act I is far and away the most complete and compelling portion of the game. Act II is more focused for pacing purposes, as expressed by one of Larian’s designers. Act III is where the sheer scope of content and branching paths begins crumbling. There are technical issues a plenty from framerate to the broken triggers I just described. It’s paced poorly, and companion interactions dry up as you rocket towards just another story about saving a world from a big bad evil god.
“Baldur’s Gate 3 Has 17,000 Ending Permutations and over 174 hours of cinematics.”
It shouldn’t.
While the issues that began cropping up in act II and turned into a whirlwind in act III do not completely ruin my enjoyment of Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s hard not to call it a deeply compromised experience. One that I like, but when I look at Larian’s big swing, it serves best at highlighting why other companies keep those guardrails up on co-authorship. I can’t argue it’s a weird broken game that really goes for something I think is worthwhile, even if the execution isn’t quite there. It’s not that. I wish it was, but it isn’t. It’s a broken game that specifically breaks because of this industry’s obsessive nature towards the idea that bigger is better. Such is not a design philosophy that compels me, especially when the result is the most broken AAA release I’ve played at launch since Mass Effect: Andromeda.
It’s entirely possible that, given the game’s expansive possibilities, I could replay this a year from now and absolutely adore it. Of course patches and additional content that have been coming in hot, and even altering some of those 17,000 ending permutations, will presumably help. Maybe playing co-op — a feature I did not touch — which radically changes the notions around co-authorship, could be my jam. But as is, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a good game with big compromises I wish Larian hadn’t made.
