I’m not sure I’ll ever play Baldur’s Gate 3 again. I know there are a million different ways to experience all of the various decisions and outcomes, not to mention different classes to play, romances to experience, and builds to experiment with, but I feel so connected to my original run that I don’t know how I’d feel about doing something differently. Would I actually be playing as that character, or just fighting the Silken, Lolth-Sworn Drow, Great Old One Warlock in my head?
That, and the game is just far too long. Needing to keep up with new releases as something of a necessity, I find it hard to carve out time for backlog games. When I do, I fight the urge to revisit games I know I love to instead play classics I’ve been meaning to get around to. Sometimes this pays off, and sometimes it doesn’t, but I always try to look for the value in something new. Even though there’s so much I haven’t seen in Baldur’s Gate 3, it would not feel like something new, but instead comforting and familiar like an old family home. Except the home is being bulldozed to build new apartments. And well, maybe I’m in the market for a new apartment.
Baldur’s Gate 3 Is Too Big To Replay
I’m not referring to Larian’s official tweaks to the game in the form of fanbaiting patches. While I don’t like this direction and feel such adherence to the whims of the most online members of the fandom can be a death knell for lesser games (I still feel it is partially to blame for Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s failure), these are not bulldozers. Aside from the patches that pieced together the actually broken parts of Baldur’s Gate 3 at launch, these changes are off-putting by nature, but not all that destructive.
What I’m talking about is less destruction and more remodelling. People outside of Larian who see Baldur’s Gate 3 as a playground for their own storytelling aspirations, and have the talent to pull it off. Lacking this talent myself, I have settled for basing a D&D adventure around the bustling activity and cosmopolitan nature of Act Three, but others have taken this far further. Whether it be new classes, additional scenes, new encounters, or brand new maps, modders are smashing Baldur’s Gate 3 down to its Lego bricks and building something cooler in its place.
As far as I am concerned, I have played Baldur’s Gate 3. Only once, only as a warlock, only romancing Karlach. Only doing one side, if any at all, of the dozens of transformative choices you make in the game. I realise I could play it again and even without actively trying to, see a completely different version of the game. But there is a mental block. It is a game I have played before. A game I love, yes, but no matter how many different decisions I make either forced or organically, I will be playing a game I have played before. That’s never quite as exciting as playing something new.
But Fans Are Turning Baldur’s Gate 3 Into A Different Game
But with all of these mods and fresh interpretations, BG3 becomes new again. Not just a conversation I didn’t have or a quest I didn’t find, not even getting Dissonant Whispers from Shadowheart until the Earth Tremors, but an actual new game. It feels like Minecraft in that way, in that there is the base game, that exists and is great and everyone loves it, then there are a bunch of completely unrelated experiences made by the community that retain that Minecraft (or Baldur’s Gate 3) feeling, yet are totally fresh.
Minecraft is not the only game like this, of course. Roblox is another hugely popular game where the draw is playing things someone else has made – though of course the monetisation and reliance on its often very young audience for content has been a consistent source of controversy. Fortnite also has community maps, while Dreams was built on that principle – it’s a video game-making machine where you can play the video games other people have created.
Could Baldur’s Gate 3 be next? Obviously the vast majority of the draw with Baldur’s Gate 3 is that it’s an excellent video game with in-depth systems, secrets still waiting to be discovered, and offers so many possibilities (along with the warm soup comfort of doing the same thing over and over again). Though Skyrim is also awash with mods, most people stick with it because they love the Skyrim underneath, and Baldur’s Gate 3 will be no different for the next decade.
But the community ripping Baldur’s Gate 3 apart to let something fresh grow will be the thing that gets me back eventually. Knowing I can go to Menzoberranzan, or fight new demons, or just see some extremely weird D&D thing that some guy felt Baldur’s Gate 3 was incomplete without gives it that exciting new feeling. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game that deserves to endure. The community is making sure that happens.
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OpenCritic
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Top Critic Rating:
96/100
