Baldur’s Gate 3

January 27, 2025

I am not an RPG player. I don’t generally have the patience for it. This might sound like a weird thing for a WoW player to say, but I really only enjoy the end game aspects of WoW like raiding and Mythic+ dungeons. The leveling is a hurdle that I have to get over to get to those things.

There have only been a couple of exceptions over the years. The first RPG that I ever played was Might & Magic in the early 1990s. I definitely didn’t have the patience for that and never made it very far into it but I did enjoy the way the game looked. The first RPG that I ever actually enjoyed and finished was 1996’s Super Mario RPG.

Super Mario RPG

The next RPG that I truly enjoyed was Dragon Age Origins in 2010. I enjoyed the characters and the world enough to overcome the hassle of some of the RPG aspects. I liked that the world was dark but the characters were so alive and vibrant and had such personality. The world felt alive with everything going on outside of the main story. A lot of RPGs don’t have enough of that for me.

This brings us to the present era where friends of mine were insisting that I’d love Baldur’s Gate 3 even though I couldn’t get into the previous entries in the series. Ironically I’m already invested in the world of Baldur’s Gate because I’ve read most of the Forgotten Realms novels by R A Salvatore. Still couldn’t get into the games. I couldn’t get into the Divinity Games either.

The first thing that sold me on Baldur’s Gate 3 is that the character creation isn’t obnoxious. That’s always a plus.

The next thing is that the characters are actually charming in their own way. From pulling a terrified cleric out of a magical portal to meeting a rogue that has confused a wild boar with something far more sinister.

The interface is easy enough to understand at a glance which a lot of other RPGs struggle with, the world has a grit to it that is also beautiful at the same time.

Maybe you’re solving a relatively small problem for someone in a town, or you’re fighting your way through a massive encampment of goblins. There’s a lot of variety right from the start.