Post 117: Baldur's Gate 3

I've been playing this new game, Baldur's Gate 3, and the story has really been blowing my mind. It's a role playing game, meaning you're allowed to make decisions about each and every scenario you end up in, from conversations, moral dilemmas, and the many interpersonal conflicts your friends get into, all the way up to grand war strategy, battle planning, and of course the tactical means by which you destroy your enemies. This is nothing new, but I've personally never played a game that does it so well. It feels very similar to writing a story myself, because every little decision I make turns the story in a unique way, and often those decisions turn out to have consequences later. A lot of games SAY they're going to do that, but ultimately end up having a color coded ending that doesn't really change at all. This game is not like that.

I'll give you a fun example from the very first part of the game. The game starts when you get kidnaped by something called a Mindflayer, an evil tentacled creature that infects the player character with a Mindflayer Tadpole.

Yes, it is just as disgusting in the game, only it's animated too. Yugh. After a daring escape when the ship crashes, our character realizes that in just a few days they'll be painfully transformed into a Mindflayer by the Tadpole in their brain. To solve this problem, they go adventuring in the area of the crash to try and find a solution. This is where the storyline starts branching off into different paths.

One solution involves aiding a bunch of refuges that are running from a war with creatures that spawn from hell. These refugees are under attack by a large camp of goblins that think they've stolen an artifact that actually one of your new buddies you met after getting kidnapped has in their possession. Long story short, if you help the refugees, along the way you get one step closer to figuring out why the artifact is important, and you get one step closer removing the Tadpole. There are a couple of solutions to helping the refugees:

• Invade the goblin camp guns blazing, kill their leaders, and thwart the attack they're planning on the refugee camp before it can happen.
• Smooth talk your way into the goblin camp, sneakily off the leaders, and thwart the attack.

Sounds like a simple choice, only if you smooth talk your way in, more options come available. Turns out having a Tadpole makes you something of a superstar among the goblins. You learn they recently started following a new god called The Absolute whose been handing out Tadpoles like candy, and that they give you all sorts of powers. This presents some new options:

• Embrace the power of the tadpole and join the goblin leaders to kill the refugees.
• Or, trick the leaders into attacking the camp and committing to a poorly planned assault.

Any of these options gets you closer to learning why you have a Tadpole in your head in the first place, who put it there, and how you can get it out (if you even want to remove it anymore). Some get you very close, while some leave you with more questions than answers. Some leave you feeling like a hero, and others leave you feeling like a monster. This kind of storytelling is so interesting to me because it automatically gives the person engaging with it a ton of agency. Giving the main character agency in a novel is a big part of how much the reader can connect with the character, but in a story like this, where the main character is the reader, it can make it feel like the world is connected directly to the person playing the game. Scenarios like this one repeat throughout the game, and get you further along the path you choose as you go. It's amazing what they've managed to do with the game, and after waiting three years for it, I'm more than happy with the result.

To round out the story, I chose to sneakily off the leaders and save the refugees, but I've seen some pretty spectacular videos where people have tricked the leaders into running their whole army of goblins straight into a bunch of explosives, or charged into the camp with army of their own, or found some other ingenious way to do the goblins in. Nobody seems to choose to let the goblins win though. I can't blame them. They're pretty awful creatures.

I can't wait to see where the rest of the game takes me, and I hope it maintains this level of player choice the whole time, unlike some games I've played before. Looking at you, Mass Effect.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley