This Baldur's Gate 3 quest is a must-play for game designers

gamedeveloper.com:

This weekend while moseying through Baldur's Gate 3 on a train ride up to Boston, I wrapped up what might be my favorite quest in the game yet: an Act 3 quest to rescue a child named Vanra who's vanished from a tavern in the city's lower gates.

"Save Vanra" wraps up a series of events that the player can kick off in the game's first act if they choose to wander into a nearby swamp and seek the counsel of a capital-H Hag named Auntie Ethel. Though the overall arc of the quest is familiar for fantasy RPGs. (A kid goes missing, probably kidnapped by some magical scourge. The player chooses to save or damn the child), how it's structured felt like a breath of fresh air.

The quest is not put together like a linear rescue mission, but rather assembled through a staggered set of encounters that delivers a wide amount of agency and equally exponential possibility of unintended consequences. From the moment Auntie Ethel is first introduced to players, she has the potential to be a high-level foe, a possible ally in the main quest, or a neutral party to be ignored.

I chose to go against Ethel, and rescue the poor residents of Faerûn by the horrible Hag. Larian Studios rewarded me not with an easy path to the moral high ground, but a set of challenges that sold the fantasy of struggling against a trickster fairy creature.

If you haven't played this part of Baldur's Gate 3 yet, here's your chance to either flee from spoilers, or blaze through a quick summary of my time with the quest.

The Auntie Ethel questline has two major foundations: first, the locations to progress the quest are rarely highlighted on the in-game map. Time and again, the player needs to deduce what the next steps are by paying careful attention to the world around