Game of the Year 2023 – Best Narrative

thesixthaxis.com:

Video games have proven themselves over the years to be great at telling stories. Sure, many games will concern themselves with battling world-ending evils, but there’s just as much capacity here for smaller and more intimate tales as well. More importantly, as you take control of characters, and as games are so often capable to weaving your choices and decisions into the narrative flow, you can become thoroughly immersed in these digital worlds.

When it comes to telling tales, CRPGs all face an uphill struggle. They very often have long, interesting stories full of magic and lore and paladins and all that, but they’re generally delivered through huge amounts of text, which can seem like an insurmountable obstacle to an unsuspecting player. Enter Baldur’s Gate 3, a game that does basically everything it can to fix this problem. Every line of dialogue is not only voiced, but motion captured as well, really helping to make characters believable in the world. The camera doesn’t just float above people during conversation, either, instead actually showing characters faces and mannerisms during conversation. Then there’s the cutscenes which are often epic, occasionally filled with dragons, and always just gorgeous.

Of course that would mean nothing if the story it was telling wasn’t up to much, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is a pretty thrilling story. It begins with a mindflayer putting a tiny worm into your eye and quickly becomes about a cult taking over the world. What happens at the end? Well, only you can decide that as whatever it is will depend wholly upon your actions. I once failed to rescue a very important person and then had to slaughter an entire village that she had been protecting from a curse, costing me multiple