Baldur’s Gate 3 is a masterpiece built on a bad tabletop game
To paraphrase Carl Sagan: In order to understand if Baldur’s Gate 3 is a good video game, you must first reckon with the unlikely corporate empire that is Dungeons & Dragons.
On the one hand, evaluating the overwhelming successes of Baldur’s Gate 3 is easy: The game is a masterpiece. The depth of its characters, the complexities of its narrative, the staggering amount of stuff you can do in this game is almost too much to wrap your head around. It is a game so gargantuan, it’s remarkable that so much of it feels so personal, so bespoke. But the longer that I spend with it, the more that I discover friction between the game and me.
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It’s hard to lay all my issues directly at Baldur’s Gate 3’s feet, or even at its developer, Larian Studios. It’s Dungeons & Dragons. I’m afraid that the tabletop game, from which Baldur’s Gate 3 draws all of its mechanical systems, is a tedious, unfun system in which to play a video game. I’m not even sure there’s a solution to these mechanical nitpicks, either. Baldur’s Gate 3 is tied to D&D in every possible way, including its lore, and the newfound popularity of the tabletop RPG is part of the reason that Larian’s adaptation has been such a success.
Baldur’s Gate, the place, is a location in the D&Dsetting the Forgotten Realms, a generic but also dense and weird fantasy
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