Opening Baldur's Gate

This is something of a first-and-continued impressions of the phenomenally successful Baldur’s Gate 3, released by Larian Studios in 2023. I delayed writing anything on the game for several weeks because I was simply not having a very good time with it, but I was pretty sure the game wasn’t to blame. To put it bluntly: I sucked, and it made the game deeply unfun to play. After persevering for around 20 in-game hours (with probably 5-8 hours lost in reloading saves after various failures) I finally started to get it, and find the fun.

Let’s start at the beginning: I haven’t seriously played a party-oriented, turn-based RPG since one of the original incarnations of The Bard’s Tale (1985) on an inherited Apple II system, somewhere between 1993 to 1996. In that case I fell victim to an early, elegantly effective form of DRM that secured the game from widespread copying and sharing, which made my copy nigh-on unplayable. Imagine, for a moment, if you could only cast any of Gale’s wizard spells if you had in your possession a physical copy of the printed set of typed codes that granted access. Indeed, without this, and without the internet to guide him, my poor tween self was stuck casting useless cantrips and was never able to advance very far in that game.

Subsequently, I have sampled other games in the genre such as iterations of Pokemon and Final Fantasy. I even fired up one of Larian’s previous efforts, Divinity: Original Sin. I could never get my head around the turn-based party combat mechanics of these games, though, and very quickly abandoned them. I wonder how much influence that sour experience of the Bard’s Tale had on me—when I was quickly overwhelmed by seemingly impossible fights each and every time I played.  

I am generally well-versed in different (computer) RPGs, but these are definitely highly evolved descendants of the DnD formula (Diablo, World of Warcraft, Elder Scrolls, and Mass Effect for example). Otherwise, Dungeons and Dragons, as a whole, is an enormous blank spot in my gaming history. This is despite my junior high years spent diligently marching from one end of the Forgotten Realms bookshelf to the other, and my early investment in Magic: The Gathering. But DnD and I were ships in the night—and in fact I remember how we passed each other. 

At the end of 8th grade, I had become part of a loose group of friends who had taken to playing Magic: The Gathering at the local library. I even remember that we typically met on Thursday afternoons. After a number of weeks of this, someone (I don’t remember who) recommended we check out Dungeons and Dragons together, and the group was excited to do so. And then my family and I moved to Australia.

So, like a fork in the road, my gaming life took a sudden turn away from this otherwise very obvious next step.

Upon entering the gameworld of Baldur’s Gate 3, then, I possessed a fairly thorough knowledge of the world of Faerun, various races including illithid, drow, and halflings, but an incredible paucity of mechanical knowledge about the game systems.

The most frustrating element was, I think, my inability to discern when a fight would even break out. Even worse than not understanding the various dice rolls, ability checks, and similar game mechanics, I found my illiteracy in terms of world, character, and conversation disheartening. I genuinely could not figure out which characters were quest-giving NPCs, or could become allies, or would attack me for just saying the wrong (or right?) thing. Or all three!

The world and its cast of inhabitants assembled by Larian is so much broader than those I have explored before, in Mass Effect or even Skyrim, for example, that I was truly ill-prepared to discern the seemingly endless options before me. There is a certain amount of goofy jankiness inherent in such a broad system, such as weighing the priorities of carrying a pendant haunted by a hysterical monk back to its dead owner when the entire material plane is under threat—but there is so much care invested in each of the characters and stories just waiting to be discovered… It’s hard to find fault with that. I have become invested in the challenges before my companions, and sympathetic to their personalities. I literally vocalized my laughter at Astarion’s reaction when I suggested he take the stage as the circus clown’s volunteer special assistant, for example. 

As time has gone on (some 40 hours thus far), I have become adept enough at the mechanical side of the game—in navigating the world, conversations, and combat—that I have begun to enjoy the ride much more. And I have not yet even set foot on the vaunted ground of Baldur’s Gate city proper, so it would appear that much more awaits.