I Finally Played Baldur's Gate 3

I grew up on the old Black Isle and BioWare (and Troika, Obsidian, etc.) games, and the original Baldur's Gate was a particular favorite of mine—I still vividly remember the first time I played, meeting Imoen, exploring Candlekeep. I think I held off on playing BG3 this long mostly just because it was such a daunting undertaking for somebody with a full-time job and a bunch of other hobbies, but perhaps I also had some apprehension that it wouldn't live up to a bunch of hazy, rose-colored teenage memories.

And, of course, nothing really can (I probably won't ever play the BG1 and BG2 remasters, because I know they wouldn't hold up to my memories), but BG3 came a lot closer than I expected—much closer than the disappointing Pillars of Eternity or the good-not-great Torment: Tides of Numenera had. Absorbing and engrossing almost all the way through, with as many moments of really transcendent excellence, right up there with some of the best CRPGs I've played, as it had moments of jarring narrative failure or mechanical frustration. Having enjoyed it so much, and having just sunk more than a hundred hours of my time into it over the course of the past couple months, I'm boiling over with thoughts about the game, the writing, its influence on tabletop D&D, the state of the hoary old Forgotten Realms, and more. Check out that ominous new label. Get ready for a couple weeks of BG3 posting!

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Let's start with the game itself, and let's start at the ending. I know I'm not literally the last person in the world to play the game, even if it feels like it, so fair warning: Many spoilers follow.

I won't belabor this—other people have written novel-length Reddit posts about it already—but the conclusion, at least of the “good” branches of the plot, is a disaster, full of gaping plot holes (why is Orpheus able to turn into a mind flayer at will?), jarringly absent conversation choices (the Emperor just turns traitor, without even a DC 30 check to change his mind; Lae'zel doesn't offer to sacrifice herself for Orpheus; nobody really makes any effort to talk the PC out of any number of quasi-suicidal or literally suicidal options; etc.), and lore handwaving to justify narrative railroading (oops, only an illithid can do this), not to mention a bunch of side plots fizzling out where the development team clearly just ran out of time and resources (e.g., the whole thing about Karlach's heart, Dammon, infernal metal, the Steel Watchers, etc.). It's sloppy, it's disappointing, it's easily the worst thing about the game…but I don't really mind it that much.

A game's gotta end somewhere, both narratively (in a sense, any hard stop to an enjoyable and immersive story is going to be disappointing) and technically. Development resources aren't unlimited. And a clunky, abrupt ending like this with a bunch of seams showing just seems to be par for the course for games as big and otherwise open as BG3. You can't build a mechanically satisfying and economical conclusion that wraps up dozens of different threads of player choices. You're already committing a bunch of resources to evil and otherwise “bad” endings that most players will never see (and of course, given the way people engage with videogames these days, you know that most players aren't going to make it to any of the endings); you literally can't afford to offer a hundred different paths a hundred different bespoke endings. So you just collapse most of your narrative threads back down to a single decision point and give everybody the same handful of options. Turns out only a mind flayer can operate the MacGuffin, please use the one mind flayer we have handy or choose from this very small menu of characters who can, abruptly and with barely any protest from any of the other characters, turn into one. It sucks, but it sucks in a familiar and understandable way.

And the thing is, not only am I accustomed to videogames having to make these bargains for the same of economy, I'm just not invested enough in the main story to be all that put out by it. This side of things is a problem that isn't unique to games: Save-the-world narratives pretty much always fall flat. I'd love for popular media in general to knock it off with these stories, and videogames in particular should, knowing how their players are going to behave, turn 180 degrees away from the urgent and the epic to embrace the picaresque. You know the player is going to want to touch everything and talk to everybody and peer into every nook and cranny. Don't fight it. Make smaller-scale narratives where the protagonist is a bumbling idiot. Be more like my beloved Disco Elysium, a game so lackadaisically paced that it sometimes forces you to read a book or sit on a bench or internalize your thoughts before the clock will advance enough for something to happen.

But BG3, of course, is not, and cannot be, a picaresque. It's goofball epic fantasy, and epic fantasy is going to have a dumb save-the-world plot you don't really care about, and the ending probably isn't going to be very satisfying, and that's okay. So let's return to the beginning. I actually bounced off the game at first (I've owned it for more than a year, but only got properly stuck into it a couple months ago), and the sheer goofball derangement of the Forgotten Realms was a big part of why.

Like I said, I grew up on a bunch of old CRPGs set in the Forgotten Realms, and I read novels set in the Forgotten Realms, and then, as the saying goes, when I became a man, I put away childish things. I had long filed the whole setting away in my mental library as “kid stuff,” a view reinforced by my much more recent engagement with the OSR-o-sphere and its deeply entrenched contempt for “kitchen-sink fantasy.” (Not to mention the long-overdue reassessment of many corners of the Realms, from Chult to Kara-tur, as being probably irredeemably racist.) Unlike, say, the recent D&D movie (which I quite enjoyed), BG3 does not ease its audience into the gonzo looniness of the setting. Right from the jump, we've got dragon-riding githyanki attacking an illithid nautiloid. In Hell. It's ridiculous. It was not, for me, a compelling hook.

But I persisted, eventually, and although I will never be able to take illithids seriously (the final boss of this game is just the Big Brain from Futurama, for Christ's sake), I did develop first a grudging appreciation for the tadpoles as a narrative device and then an ungrudging appreciation for the writing of the Absolutists and the mind flayer characters, particularly the Emperor. The tadpole situation is a much better excuse to bring the main party members together, and bind them to each other, than we usually get from games like these. It gives the player a narratively coherent reason to team up with people like Astarion and Lae'zel whom a reasonable person might otherwise be inclined to fight or leave at the roadside (but for the nagging thought that this is obviously a major character and abandoning them would mean missing lots of game content). And the Absolute offers a strong justification for, and puts a clever spin on, a bunch of bad guys joining forces. The writers could've made a bit more of it, but I liked the few observations that characters made about how diverse the Absolute's army was, with humans, goblins, drow, and all manner of others working together for a common purpose. Makes a fun contrast to the plight of the tiefling refugees! (Should the game have done more with that angle than have Zevlor briefly tempted by the Absolute? Yes. But even the suggestion of it was fun and provocative.)

And the mind flayers! Omeluum is fun, and a great kind of amuse-bouche for the Emperor's big reveal. The latter is an outstanding character, and I find the philosophical questions raised by him, and interactions with him, even more interesting here in 2026 than they probably were when the game first released. The Emperor is, in a lot of ways, a model for artificial general intelligence. He is fundamentally unlike other minds (and does not have a soul, or at least not in the way that humanoid characters do) but does a creditable job imitating them and interacting with them on their level. He has literally digested a human mental corpus, not to mention figuratively digesting an enormous amount of information about humanoids from books and first-person observation. He tailors his appearance, his personality, and his apparent values to appeal to his interlocutor, to seem “human,” to seem like a trustworthy ally. It's all an act, it's all instrumental, but it's so authentic-seeming that it's hard to say where the act ends and the real Emperor begins. Is there anything beneath the mask? (And it's authentic-seeming both diegetically and extra-diegetically, by which I mean that, within the fiction, he seems genuine, and as a player of the game, the way he's written is no less convincing than the way any of the humanoid companions are.) Is he trustworthy? Is he human, or close enough to be treated like anybody else? Clunky heel turn at the very end notwithstanding, the game doesn't ever come down clearly on one side or the other. Great stuff.

Much of the main plot, especially from the middle of Act 2 onward, does exemplify a lot of the worst qualities of “cinematic,” railroaded RPG storytelling. Oh, there's the duke we've been looking for. Can we just jump in and rescue him now? No, two of these guys are bosses in the next chapter and you're not strong enough to fight all these guys at once, so you just have to stand here and watch as two of them leave. Then you get to fight one of them; he's the big boss for this chapter. Cool.

But like I said, pleasant surprises in the writing of the Absolutists and mind flayers aside, I wasn't in it for the main story. The side quests are always the best bits, and that's as true as ever here. Some of my favorite parts of the game were companion quests, which I'll get to in a subsequent post (this is long enough already), but there were a bunch of others I loved—the cursed Thorms, the murder mystery, the haunted mansion, the wizard's tower, all of the hag shenanigans, and perhaps above all the House of Hope. And quite apart from the specific plots of the side quests, I was just in heaven around the middle of Act 3, with the whole Lower City open to explore. One of the best urban environments in a game, maybe the best I've ever seen in a top-down RPG like this (and yes, that includes Revachol…maybe). So vibrant, so real-feeling. Would I love to spend a whole game just wandering around a city like that, barging into people's living rooms, rooting around in mausolea, robbing banks, exorcising ghosts? Yes. This wasn't a whole game, but it was pretty damn good.

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Next up: the companions. And the implementation of the 5e rules, plus the idea that this is “the best videogame representation of tabletop roleplaying ever.” And some thoughts about our dear benighted Forgotten Realms. October is BG3 month, I guess!

A Contemptible Struggle

 

Time for another depressing one that has nothing to do with games. Sorry!

Thing is, I’ve been thinking about the Cornell case a lot this week. In addition to thinking about the crime itself, and the environment that produced it, and our benighted political and cultural climate, I keep thinking things like, Well, who cares what I think? I’m a nobody, and does anybody really need another man to weigh in on this right now? But there is one aspect of this that I do need to push myself to write about, and even if my tiny platform only reaches a dozen men, some of those men probably need to hear it. We mustn’t fall into the trap of assuming that all of our friends, everybody who’s “like us” in some cultural sense (has the same hobbies, the same interests) shares our values and knows what we know.

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If somebody I’m close to—a friend, a cousin, a friend’s kid, whatever—were accused of a heinous crime like this, I think, to be truly honest, that I would reflexively reach for exculpatory explanations. I would have, deep in the pit of my stomach, the fear that the accusations were true, but I suspect that that fear would only strengthen my desire to explain, to rationalize, to excuse. I would not reach for explicit victim-blaming, knowing how vanishingly rare false accusations are, but I expect that I would grasp for an explanation along the lines of “This must have been a misunderstanding.” There must be more to this story. I know him, and he wouldn’t do that.

Again, though, that’s if the accused were someone close to me. One of the things I find most sordid, depressing, and alarming about this story is how many men, including quite a few men with large platforms, men in positions of authority or credibility, have reflexively reached for explanations like these (or worse) despite having no relationship whatsoever to the accused.

I hope it goes without saying that if someone close to me were a victim of a crime like this, I would reflexively defend and support her. In a situation where everybody involved is a stranger to me, though, my response isn’t emotional, although it is a kind of second-nature reflex just by nature of having read about or heard about crimes like this so many times. I know the statistics. I know what my female friends and family members went through during their college years (which I suppose does make it emotional, to some extent). I know what frats are like. I immediately assume not only that the woman is telling the truth but that the men aren’t the only guilty parties, that they’re beneficiaries of a corrupt culture that abets and protects them.

What does it say that so many men instead react to this story as though the accused were all their brothers, their sons, their dear friends? Why do they feel so strongly that These nice boys wouldn’t do that? Why not reflexively think of the woman, equally a stranger, as their friend, their sister?

Some of these men, of course, are themselves rapists—some are rapists who know what they are, and want to stamp out any accountability for crimes like theirs; some are rapists who don’t believe that’s what they are, and are alarmed to find things that they themselves did when they were younger, and perhaps still do (coerce or trick or drug women into sex that isn’t what they think of as forcible rape but also isn’t in any sense consensual), now correctly described as rape. These men are scrambling to defend themselves more than they’re thinking about the accused. (I think this is what’s going on with a lot of the big names on Twitter and elsewhere in social media defending the accused or casting aspersions on the accuser.)

But there are a lot of men who are genuinely, if misguidedly, concerned for the accused, and for some broader idea of “justice” and, God help us, men’s rights. To some degree this is a consequence of decades of diligent far-right activism, the relentless promulgation of a fantasy narrative of totalitarian feminism and political correctness run amok. But that alone can’t explain it, and it certainly can’t excuse it. You can’t earnestly believe in a “war on men,” or believe that women receive disproportionate help and support in our society such that things need to be proactively counterbalanced to make things fairer for men, if you have any genuinely close relationships with women. Which suggests that none of these men do have such relationships. And whether it’s the misogynist attitude that precedes the inability or unwillingness to form those relationships or vice versa, it’s clearly of a piece with the fact that so many men see seven (or fifty-seven) strangers as their brothers and the woman those men abused as something less, or nothing at all.

If your reflexive response to hearing about or reading about this story was to feel sympathy for the men, to be concerned that they were being treated unjustly, to be indignant about their names being publicized, please reflect on that for a moment. Why are their feelings, or their treatment, or their good names more real to you, more important to you—why are they more human to you—than the woman they assaulted? What do they have that she lacks?