Baldur's Gate 3: The Stakes

"Your Achilles' heel
Is a tendency
To dream"

R.E.M. - All the Way to Reno

Baldur's Gate 3's supposedly slated for release (finally!) at the start of autumn. I enjoyed but am not such a great fan of the series (Planescape: Torment being markedly more memorable) as to be too personally invested. However, make no mistake, regardless of your personal opinion of BG1&2, a lot is riding on BG3's success. Decent tactical, narrative, choice-heavy cRPGs are a rare bird, and in contrast to other old genres like pixelated roguelikes or point-and-click adventure games, they cannot survive on occasional garage projects. Kudos to Iron Tower, but it hasn't really lent the same renewed legitimacy to RPGs on the whole that Wadjet Eye lent to 2D detective ventures. As for Owlcat, everything about their two showings thus far appears strained at every seam.

 

Neverwinter Nights launched along with the Inifnity Engine's last gasp in 2002-2003. For more than a decade afterwards developers piled onto the overcrowded "action" bandwagon with Diablo-style hack'n'slashers and Elder Scrolls copycats, rarely peppered with true RPGs like NWN2 and Dragon Age. Not until 2014-16 did RPGs see a revival with Divinity: Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, Tides of Numenera, Tyranny, Dragonfall... but it didn't last. By 2018-2020, two anticipated titles which should have kept the trend going, PoE2:Deadfire and Wasteland 3, both stagnated or outright tanked in quality, thanks to a combination of over-reach, confused design priorities and misconceived political activism. With that, the Black Isle old guard and their proteges were scavenged by the all-devouring void of Microsoft and have ceased to be relevant.

The major problem has been spelled out numerous times: in terms of production costs vs. payoff, true RPGs* fall into a no man's land focused on a small minority of intelligent gamers demanding complexity, but requiring massive content development work-hour investment which in turn mandates mass appeal to boost sales, which means idiot appeal. The main way to dodge that is under the umbrella of a large company willing to invest in a small amount of artistic legitimacy to balance out its brand image. This is basically the service Black Isle Studios provided to an increasingly stagnant Interplay and Bioware to Electronic Arts. On the flip-side, large companies strangle creativity by their very lowest-common-denominator nature, so will excise any content the least bit controversial, or novel... or interesting... yielding role-playing in name only. As soon as they purchase quality, the EAs and Microsofts murder it.

There's an alternate route, name recognition, staking out the geek niche and giving them reason to support you directly, which is basically how Troika Games managed to stay afloat as long as it did and finally produce a true masterpiece, buggy as it was; crowdfunding also gave us the short-lived RPG revival in 2015. But for this to work, we come back to that all-important word: legitimacy. Fans have to actually believe that "role-playing" means something. If all you can deliver is fireball-slinging or dice rolls and force-fed, one-sided, infantile "woke" propaganda, you have irreparably poisoned the well. After several big-name flops, Baldur's Gate 3 now represents the genre's saving throw, and a failure will likely drag RPGs down to the level of garage projects, hoping beyond hope for a Vagrus or Age of Decadence once a decade.

And, sadly, from everything I've heard about BG3, it will flop. Maybe not as badly as Siege of Dragonspear. Maybe not financially. Our many nostalgic preorders may have already put Larian in the black. But the simple fact that it utilizes D&D5e, with all the oversimplification and wishy-washiness that implies, bodes ill for its legitimacy as role-playing, and aside from "looks pretty" none of the other chatter around it has sounded encouraging. Quite the opposite.

So.

Having made the mistake of preordering the damn thing years ago, I might as well roll up a placeholder character, finally take a look at the early access teaser and try to guess whether the end product will have been worth my cash. Let's see how badly Larian's about to screw the Cerberus.

 

 

 

 

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* For the genre's importance and appeal, simply look at how many other genres try to call themselves RPGs without delivering that gameplay: everything from "kill ten rats ten times daily" MMOs to two-button browser games, to roguelikes and squad management, to linear 2D adventure games, to Diablo clones, all desperately counterfeit the RPG label to purloin themselves that all-important legitimacy.