Baldur’s Gate 3
Play it on: PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PCs (Steam Deck OK)
Current goal: Survive the Shadowlands
I gave Baldur’s Gate 3 the old college try back when it first came out but, while I admired much about it, the combat didn’t quite click with me, and I abandoned the attempt somewhere late in Act 2. Following the recent news that the game’s final major patch has now landed, though, I opted to give it another shot, starting fresh from the beginning, and it’s all going much better this time around. Something in my brain has shifted, and where the combat once often felt like a slog, I’m now enjoying making the most of my party members’ varied abilities to overcome the game’s many challenges.
However, that doesn’t mean that things always go my way. I’ll avoid spoilers, but early in Act II, there was a battle which my party survived, but in which a number of innocents perished. I know it’s possible to handle the battle such that this doesn’t happen, and I thought long and hard about loading an earlier save and preventing this tragedy from occurring. Ultimately, though, I decided that the story is more interesting to me if I keep it pure, accepting the consequences of this failure, even if it means I miss out on some “content” later on, as no doubt some of the characters who died would have had more to do in the game’s third act if they’d survived.
I think of it this way: if this were an actual tabletop RPG campaign I was playing and one battle wound up having dire consequences, I probably wouldn’t beg and plead with the DM to let me try the battle again from the start. That’s not really how D&D works; failure is interesting in its own way, and I think this tragedy should only make my party members hate the game’s main villain even more. Plus, this way I have an incentive to play the game again at some point in the future and keep all those characters alive. Part of what makes Baldur’s Gate 3 so impressive is the way that its story can flow in many different directions and accommodate the results of so many successes and failures. I personally wouldn’t feel right about forcing things to go the way I’d like them to. Here’s to living with our failures! — Carolyn Petit
And that wraps our picks for the weekend. Happy gaming!
