Baldur’s Gate 3 is Too Much Game

I started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 in July of 2024. I rolled credits last week. Let’s get into it.

I’m gonna take a page from academia and actually state my theses up front, because I’ve got at least three of them and I want to mention them here in case I forget to later. Not gonna try and do it artfully though (I mean I think this intro has sailed that ship anyway).

THESIS 1: It continues to be fascinating to watch Larien push video games as close as possible to the TTRPG experience, and it continues be frustrating to experience the inevitable and impassible chasm between what they want to achieve and what they actually can achieve.

THESIS 2: BG3 is Too Much Game. Or rather, too much game for one person.

THESIS 3: I need to learn to have fun.

There’s probably more but that’ll do for now.

So most of what I have to say about Thesis 1 I already said in my Divinity: Original Sin II review, namely that no amount of mitigating systems can fully make up for the lack of a GM or the freedom to make choices the game hasn’t explicitly accounted for.

I think with BG3 it’s most noticeable in regards to the spider web of cause and effect stretching invisibly across every quest chain in the game, where there’s no way to know what far-flung consequence your actions will have without looking up a guide. My playthrough took 108 hours, and it probably would’ve been sub-100 if I hadn’t had to reload so many times because I spent three hours on a dungeon and then found out “oh if you do things in this order everyone dies.”

I want to be really careful here about distinguishing between my (possibly unhealthy) bias toward wanting to extract my desired story from the game and what is actually good and interesting design. Because while I might be pissed off about these kinds of unforeseen consequences, I can see the argument that it’s a more interesting story if you just make the best decision you can based on the knowledge you have at the time and then find out what happens.

I have a couple counterpoints. The first is that that requires trusting the writers of the game to have made the right decision regarding what would be the most interesting/satisfying consequence for my actions. And I don’t! I’m much more willing to trust a GM who knows me and has been playing with me for some amount of time, and who can craft a narrative around what they’re interested in and what the players are interested in, and make adjustments to that narrative as needed to avoid locking off storylines arbitrarily or leading us down a path we ultimately won’t enjoy.

The second is that that requires trusting the game to have given you adequate knowledge for making those decisions, and it simply does not do that. May I present to the court Exhibit A, Act 2, Moonrise Fucking Towers. Throughout Act 2, the game is pushing you to find and infiltrate/besiege Moonrise Towers. It does not at any point make it clear that doing so too early will in fact lock off several side missions, make the boss fight against Ketheric Thorm much harder, completely fuck up Shadowheart’s storyline, and probably lead to lots of NPCs dying unnecessarily. Surprises, twists, and unforeseen consequences can be narratively interesting, sure, but in an RPG that needs to be balanced against player agency, and I think for the most important choices the player needs to know what choice they’re making. (This also goes for basically every choice having to do with The Emperor, almost none of which are obvious.)

Also, Larien has yet to figure out how to make failure interesting, which while they couldn’t necessarily do it as effectively as a GM I do think they could do better. There are a few cases in the game where failure doesn’t just mean reloading a save, but none that are especially interesting, other than maybe getting taken to prison, which can be fun if the character actually has the right skillsets for staging a prison break, which Shadowheart (having accidentally murdered a civilian who walked into her Moonbeam right after combat ended, which again, a GM would simply not let happen) did not, so I had to reload and do the sea-creature fight down by the docks all over again, and I still have no idea what that was even about.

Because (oooh, a transition) there’s just so much going on this game. There are so many side quests, so much to keep track of, so much inventory to manage, so many character builds to try to understand, and just so many decisions to make, it’s exhausting. Also the map itself is way bigger than you expect it be and in Act 1 I apparently just missed a part we’re you’re supposed to rescue Lae’zel and so I just found her corpse later. And like I don’t actually care because I only ever played with Karlach, Wil, and Shadowheart (the three best characters in the game don’t @ me actually fuck it do, what’s-his-wizard is smarmy and arrogant, whiny vampire is annoying, and Lae’zel, well, she’s dead, so), but just to show how easy it is to miss important stuff because there’s just so much of it.

I do think a lot of this would be mitigated by playing multiplayer. I mean, you wouldn’t solo a four-person D&D campaign, right? Only having to manage one character’s inventory and understand one character’s build would be a huge relief, as would being able to collectively make decisions or even just let the rest of the party decide. And that could even help with some of my issues from Thesis 1, if you just sort of give yourself over to majority rule regardless of consequences.

But for me, all alone, it was exhausting, which, along with some health issues, is a big reason why this game took me over a year to finish. Less than half of that time was spent on Acts 1 & 2, but by the time I actually got to Baldur’s Gate I was so burnt out that I kept avoiding the game if I was feeling anything less than excited about it. I’ve logged 15 games since starting BG3, and that’s not even counting the hours spent in various rogue-lites that I don’t feel “finished” with yet and so I haven’t logged but also will probably never remember to. A couple of those games were ones I’d been avoiding before starting BG3, that’s how much I was avoiding it. I stopped in the middle of the final battle for like 2 weeks.

So this was yet another open-world RPG where by the end I was playing on the lowest difficulty settings and just wanted it to be over. I wasn’t having fun anymore SMASH CUT

PART 3: I NEED TO LEARN TO HAVE FUN

I always try to get “the intended experience” from a game, to not get in there and mess around with the gears and wires until I’ve actually finished it and understand it. But I’m 31 years old, my health is failing, there are TOO MANY GAMES, and I spent 1 year and 108 real-world hours playing a game that could’ve been exponentially more fun if I’d let myself change the settings sooner and/or install mods (I don’t think the mods were available when I started playing, but they were by the end; not actually sure if you can use mods halfway through a playthrough though, so this point is possibly largely theoretical).

And like, am I going to play BG3 again? Spend another 108 hours on it? Yeah, probably, I almost started a second playthrough the day I finished it. But I could’ve had my first, my canonical, experience with the game be so much more enjoyable. I need to let myself play on lower difficulties, install mods, do whatever to make the game fun, because that’s the point, right? And to some extent those could also be considered mitigating tools for GM-less RPGing. Anyway, that’s something I need to work on going forward.

Why, though, you might be asking, did I give this game 5 stars and am already thinking about playing it again if I was seemingly so miserable? The answer is: Have you seen this thing? Of course this is a great game! You can find a note that talks about how the statue is too greasy and then later you find a statue and you’re like “what if I just…threw grease on it” and you do that and now you can turn it and find a secret room, I mean come on! You can climb up into the rafters and fire spells at people in the next room and they won’t have any idea where you are! You can trap a boss against a table and then surround him with elementals that just pound him into the dirt each turn while he’s also in a Moonbeam! You can stack up barrels in front of a door to keep people from getting in to set off the alarm while you stage a prison break! You can talk to animals! You can have sex with a (druid in the form of a) bear! If that’s your thing! Weird how no one talks about that!

Whatever else Baldur’s Gate 3 might be, it is a remarkable achievement in gaming, and if you wanted to you could (and I know some people have) put thousands of hours into it and never touch another game. That’s not something I want, but I can see the appeal, and there’s a lot of fun stuff in here that I’m sure I’ll be dipping back in to explore at some point.

p.s. The epilogue glitched so Jaheira thought it was still right before the final battle. Also the power went out during the credits so I had to look up the post-credits scene on YouTube and I don’t really get it but I’m sure there’s a three hour video explaining it to me if I want one.

p.p.s. The Steel Watch Foundry is the worst dungeon Larien has ever made, it’s the worst part of the game, I hate it so much. Ok I guess technically the underwater prison place is worse but at least it’s interesting.

Actually, ok, this is maybe a good place to point out how this is another example of the flawed design, so: everything about the Steel Watch Foundry layout and what the game tells you about it, about the Steel Watchers, and about what’s his name, Gortash? is pushing you to do stealth here. But you can’t really do stealth in D&D. Like there’s no such thing as a stealth takedown, you just get a sneak attack advantage, and sure maybe with high-level rogue that would functionally be the same thing but I insisted on playing as a Bard for some reason and as previously stated I do not fuck with Astarion. So that’s strike 1. Strike 2 is, you can at least sneak past the Steel Watchers outside, and the game has told you that they’re like impossible to fight so obviously that’s what you should do, right? Well turns out if you leave those guys alive then when the workers are escaping later they’ll just get merked and the game does nothing to warn you about that or even indicate that it knew that was gonna happen. It’s just “yay you freed them!” and then they die. Again, just not something a GM would let happen. And obviously I wasn’t about to replay the whole damn thing for a third time just to keep some random gnomes alive.

Anyway, hate the Foundry, truly a miserable experience.

p.p.p.s. Seriously, the bear thing, why is that never mentioned? I’m not arguing for or against it I’m just saying, pretty notable that that’s just a thing you can do in this mainstream award-winning branded video game.

p.p.p.p.s. Speaking of the brand, my hottest BG3 take is that I wish Larien had made another Divinity game instead. But presumably they wouldn’t have gotten anything like this kind of budget without the D&D of it all.

p.p.p.p.p.s. Having never played the first two games I read Matt Bell’s Baldur’s Gate II from Boss Fight Books (which also summarizes the plot of the first game). It’s a really good book, digs into what playing that game was like at the time and also his own personal history with RPGs, highly recommend it. And it’ll give you a little bit of insight into some of the characters, setting, and plot of BG3 if you also haven’t played the first two games.