Baldur's Gate 3 - or - My Life as a Drowid, 7

"Just a little too late

Been so long gotta do a double take

Don't remember your face

It's all in the words and the way that we relate

Don't belong, don't believe

Mind in motion makes me weep

Twisting 'til I transmutate"

KMFDM - Get Out of My Head  *

 

"When this is over, I walk on alone" I promised before ending the abomination.

And so I took little joy in the corpse's insistence on reuniting us for one last night. We drink wine, but I am content with water. We are expected to wear finery when I am more at ease in rags. We maimed handful wander beneath a minstrel putting on a show as for a crowded city square. We ape the merrymaking of yokels and guttersnipes, we who contested with gods and worse.

Yet still... not a one of us failed to uncrease our brows at the sight of each other. I hail their ambitions, each freely undertaken, and they freely welcome my lack of same. I have torn friends asunder. I have doomed lands entire. I have toppled the greatest and aided the least. I have not suffered fools. In hindsight, the passions which flared in me at such folderol ebb, and little do I find to celebrate or to mourn. Nor would I thread the path back, for all its infuriating turns, for in the end it has yielded me my reward.

I taste the coming seasons on my tongue. The world's sweep wends beneath my feet. Light and dark mingle.

I am free.

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Several games into their collection, I still cannot stomach Larian's adherence to the childish, goofy storybook aesthetic. My comfort zone stretches to tatters among the bleak, stately, grim, dignified and aloof. And this ain't no Tyranny or Dragonfall, no Torment or Bloodlines. I've tried not to let it spoil better mechanics, but the constant mood discrepancy between the overblown seriousness of its subject matter and the light, casual adventuring tone and high-kicking heroics wore on me all too frequently. The company's simpleminded Diablo-clone hack'n'slash roots are still showing after all these years.

Three observations can demonstrate my attitude toward Baldur's Gate 3.

1) I have written more about it, good and bad, than even about its betters.

2) I have repeatedly lost interest in it, finishing Act 2 by the end of last September and Act 3 mid-April and the boss fight earlier tonight.

3) I feel no impulse to replay it.

We'll get back to that last point later. See previous BG posts for my complaints about blind decision-making, "lolrandom" adventuring, the many fights meant to be automatically lost the first time and replayed once you notice their gimmick (e.g. Grym, twice, once you see he can be taunted and once you see what activates his vulnerability) and especially the characters ruined by idiot-appeal much like Wrath of the Righteous'. What did it get right?

Well, visually it suffers no shortage of detail. If your RPG experience mostly consists of oldies or budget-strangled projects like Age of Decadence or Dragonfall, stepping into the likes of BG3 or KC:D is shocking merely for... well, having stuff to trip over. BG3 is both lushly and studiously detailed. While Act 3 was visibly less fleshed out in so many minutiae, overall the campaign still projects a "they thought of everything" feeling.

What are the odds a druid of that level would be taking his freshly learned cave-cow form for a spin around that NPC's camp? Well, as it turns out, pretty good.

The music, also, while not gloomy or bombastic enough for my tastes, does a good job of expanding on a central theme, with variations for places like the circus or house of hope. Granted, I preferred Tyranny's variations on a theme, but that's as far as I can complain. The pervasive voice acting is honestly more than I need, but again it's consistently professional, with some like Minthara sounding truly outstanding.

BG3 also features some of the best level design I've seen, convoluted yet still intelligible. Unfortunately the four-character party limit also says something about 5e's oversimplification and Larian's further homogenization. Classes overlap so much more now that there are fewer roles to fill. Druids are just shittier clerics, wizards can swap spells out anytime they want, everyone can cast scrolls, everyone's an alchemist, everyone uses crossbows, waypoint teleportation to compensate for making you constantly run back and forth (instead of trimming the back and forth) and in-combat blink, misty step, too easy teleportation combined with Larian's own abuse (everybody superjumps like the incredible hulk) wastes some of that level design's potential.

Then you've got that classic D&D dice-rolling frustration.

I had to repeat the 30DC check several times but wound up rolling a natural 20 on the 99DC check on the first try. Go figure. For my own part I ran through "tactician" difficulty refusing to either use tadpoles or change equipped spells on the fly (of all the idiotic crutches) and many reloads were just forced by a bad roll or by nonsensical jump scares. You're walking by a random spot when bam: killer teleport-monkeys!

 

Granted, it was pretty funny when the spellcaster it abducted and silenced turned into a panther and bit its face off, but over-reliance on such utterly random ambushes combined with no need to memorize the right spells every day just underscores the aforementioned "lolrandom" idiot appeal. Don't plan ahead, just react. Compounded by Fifth Edition's own oversimplification, plus the blasphemous abandonment of the alignments and the captivating cosmology which came with them. Don't establish a personal ethos, don't roleplay, just hit shit and make purely emotional decisions on the fly.

 

I keep talking about computer games' need to outgrow their Betty Boop stage, an analogy particularly apt to Larian's habit of making characters wobble in place as an idle animation, just like rubber hose limb cartoon characters (how many times have I reloaded fights because it caused me to mistarget? least it ain't as bad as D:OS1) and I've often said a good virtual world makes you feel small. BG3 drops you into some amazingly lush, convoluted, gigantic environments... but it only puts you yourself into such perspective via the occasional grand vista.

I complained that in WotR, despite the great pains it took to put you in real danger early on instead of giving you freebie levels, those low levels paradoxically didn't feel low because of the overblown enemies and import of your actions. BG3 restricts your level to 12... which would be great if you were undertaking deeds appropriate for such levels, instead of four level 9-10 characters knocking out a divine avatar or level 12s dropping a monster that can enslave multiple realms of reality. (And of course it's not enough that it's an elder brain, it's gotta be a super-duper "evolved" elder brain to boot.) A more restrained plot with more attention to narrative and not just visual detail would've served it better, not to mention the dropped plot threads or nonsensical twists.

I kept wondering when the whole Zariel / Elturel chatter would coalesce into a coherent side story. Based on how much attention it got in act 1 I thought it would be a whole act or at least a zone like the underdark; disappointed when your visit to hell revolves around something completely unrelated. Apparently they're all references to some pen and paper adventure? Then there's your ally's nonsensical panic attack at the end to join the villain, just to artificially balance out the two armies. Or the stand-in hero being apparently omniscient inside his bubble, immediately up to date on current lingo, politics and necessities. Or the rather simplistic resolution of all other conflicts as good guys vs. Absolute. My rather murderous drowid (gave Shadowheart to the Sharrans, killed the druids in Act 1 and therefore also left the Shadowlands shadowed in Act 2, took the middle road with Astarion, condemned the aasimar to existence as a battery, killed Minsc

 

 

etc.

no, really, etc. and I mean that

 

- was still treated to the good ending with little or no mention of my past misdeeds and nothing really warranting mention next to the final boss fight yea/nay. Even NWN2's staggered reveal of multiple big players was more interesting, since they operated at different levels instead of every single one being a divine champion or mythical figure or worlds-ending abomination or ... fucks goddesses, whatever. I did at least enjoy tossing my allies at that dragon in the finale, but still, would've appreciated less DragonballZ one-upmanship in power levels.

I will say that after the past decade's insanity it's nice not having to devote much of an RPG's summation to social justice warrior nonsense (Deadfire, Wasteland 3, etc.) Oh, BG3 warrants a few eye-rolls in that department, like the women being physically stronger than the men or every companion being a hot-bodied ready-and-willing bisexual (and getting chided by the damn corpse for not romancing) or the gaiety from homognomos to random male citizen talking about his husband to the shemale at the circus, but at least it doesn't completely take over the story. Close enough for jazz.

During "early access" the biggest outrage seemed to come from it dropping earlier installments' real-time-with-pause claymation for turn-based mechanics. I was on board with that change before I even heard of it, and the finished product is far more tactically sound for it. In fact I'd have pushed for a hex grid as well. I do notice that particular bitching died down fairly quick after release, so maybe everyone noticed that Larian achieved the most complex mix of weapons, abilities, positioning and environment interaction we've yet seen. For that alone BG3 well deserves its renown. Furthermore, your choices carry through to later encounters and even later acts more thoroughly than most RPGs have even attempted. From companions to NPC availability to random redshirts, those you spared, helped or hindered routinely crop up again, and have something to say about it. The sheer number of quest advancement options outstrips other cRPGs easily.

 

But when it comes to roleplaying, I'm reminded the Baldur's Gate series always tended to lowest-common-denominator. Not only was it a middle ground between Torment's storytelling and IWD's choiceless dungeon crawl, but hinged on a "chosen one" plot, banked more on cutesiness and random goofiness, jumped randomly around in themes, threw in more overpowered loot or class combos and so forth. Much of what is wrong with BG3, what detracts from its otherwise expert approach, simply stems from its continuation as BG's "accessibility" according to munchkin definitions of roleplaying, and Faerun/D&D's own datedness.

Which brings me back to point #3 from above. What would I want to see more of here? The hag's quests were better written than the rest. Astarion and Minthara had their moments. But that's not much. I played Tyranny or Bloodlines four times over. Torment and Tides two-and-spare times each. The first Pillars of Eternity at least thrice. I can see myself replaying Kingmaker, as for all its faults its basic plot was solid and its setting and atmosphere apt. And as for looking for third-party modules, Solasta has a better set of core mechanics to work with.

But after finally working up the interest to finish BG3, I mostly just find myself wondering what the competition's been cooking in the meantime.

 

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* short-circuit detonation (Gale) red comet glare ignite (Lae'zel) not to mention a flying brain is literally a mind in motion... the world's not short on rebellious teenage anthems, but I'd stake a small bet they were listening to this song in particular at Larian during production