HomeFeaturesBaldur’s Gate 3
The final RPS Advent Calendar 2023, December 24thI’ll be honest: it’s quite an obvious one this year
I’ll be honest: it’s quite an obvious one this year
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun
Alright folks, it’s time for our actual Game Of The Year reveal. Do I actually have to do a tease for this? Do we not all know what it is? Fine. Roll for initiative.
It’sBaldur’s Gate 3!
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Larian Studios
There’s a direct to DVD action movie (starring sports entertainment superstar The Edge) called Money Plane, which is about a casino where nothing is illegal because it’s on a plane. In this film, Kelsey Grammer says “you wanna bet on a dude fuckin' an alligator? Money Plane.” I kind of think this is the ethos of Baldur’s Gate 3 - I don’t specifically know if you can bet on the outcome of someone fucking an alligator, but you wanna turn into a cheese after getting in a fight with a djinn? You wanna walk in on a bugbear and an orc mid-coitus? You wanna sneak into hell? Baldur’s Gate 3.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Larian Studios
I may not have finished it, and at this point I’ll probably have to start again from the beginning, which is always my Achilles' heel with these games. But boy, am I looking forward to starting the Baldur’s Gate 3 journey again. I long for those first moments inside the Illithid Leviathan. But this time, I’m determined to keep both my character’s eyes in their skull. And look, I don’t want to make this into a big thing, I’m just saying that I’ll gladly slaughter every last one of my other companions if it made Karlach happy.
Alice0:Very excited for a future mod to edit this down to a manageable hour or two.
Image credit:Larian
Kiera:It may be an odd thing to admit when it’s my job to write about them, but sometimes I go through a ‘no games’ phase. This is when I find myself lacking the motivation to play anything at all and I’m not in the mood for any one genre. I picked up Baldur’s Gate 3 relatively later on, after the initial hype phase had passed and it managed to invigorate my enthusiasm for RPGs again.
As a regular Dungeons & Dragons player I knew I’d love it, but it genuinely surprised me how good it is. Baldur’s Gate 3 introduces a world where choices actually have consequences and I feel like I have an impact on the world, which is the highest praise I can give a game.
I know there’s always a temptation to resist something that’s popular or considered ‘mainstream’ but this is one of those rare occasions where the hype is genuine. If you love RPGs you must give Baldur’s Gate 3 a go! You can talk to Yorkshire cows and Scottish eagles, that’s reason enough to play.
Edwin:I’m still in Act 1. I’m told it’s the best Act, so I’m trying to drag it out, but I also feel a strong inertia born of Cool Anecdote Overwhelm. Baldur’s Gate 3 exists to me as a million oddball headlines and forum gossip about e.g. people reverse-pickpocketing demons to make them explode. There’s still a game in there somewhere, right? Or does it now exist exclusively on Reddit?
Ed:And I’ve only just reached Act 2. But my time with the game’s shared with two other pals as a way of keeping touch, so sessions aren’t always possible week in, week out. When they do happen, though, we’re fully absorbed forhours. We haven’t played a game together that’s commanded our attention quite like BG3, and we’ve learned to embrace where our poor decisions take us. Often, it’s two hours spent in a single fight trying to break out of prison. And we’ve learned that every fight is significant. In fact, that everything is significant. I genuinely don’t know if we’ll ever play a co-op game as good as this once we’re done - in 2046.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Larian Studios
Katharine:Honestly, any game that lets you a) turn yourself into a wheel of cheese, and b) still have everything function as if that were a perfectly natural and expected consequence of your ill-timed magic probings after said transformation… Just outstanding work, Larian. Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to be one of those all-timers we’ll be talking about for years to come, and it’s precisely because of daft nonsense like this that allow it to stand head and shoulders above everything else released this year.
