Everyone and their dog is playing Baldur’s Gate 3 right now. The RPG blew developer Larian Studio’s expectations and amassed 500,000 concurrent players on Steam within just days of its launch. Sitting pretty amongst the likes of Counter Strike: Global Offensive and DOTA 2, we’ve never seen a game of this ilk take over the world so successfully before. It’s wonderful to see a game all about making your own decisions on a grand adventure so easily capturing the imagination of millions, and that’s before it even comes to consoles where a mainstream audience is free to embrace it. When that happens, the floodgates will truly be able to open.
For now though, it’s been fascinating to watch nobody play Baldur’s Gate 3 in the same way. That’s the entire point, it’s a game designed to embrace the biggest and best qualities of its source material to offer a virtual alternative to tabletop excellence and the unpredictability it has always fostered. Critical Role’s Matthew Mercer stacked an endless pile of crates atop one another to climb a castle’s rampart instead of tackling the quests that would otherwise get him inside, subsequently astounding the game director who didn’t even know this was possible. There is nothing more exciting than a game outgrowing even the expectations of those who brought it to life, either through commercial success or mechanical expression.
However, this level of freedom also brings with it a baseline of fear. Baldur’s Gate 3 is super overwhelming, especially for those with little background in Dungeons & Dragons and a fear that any decision they make will see them miss out on major pieces of content or parts of the game others might stumble across and fall in love with. This potential FOMO isn’t to be seen as a negative though, and is instead to be celebrated because your own path across Faerûn is unique in ways that only you are able to quantify. Embrace everything you see and everything missed in equal measure, knowing that one day, you might stumble across it in another playthrough or perhaps never at all. There is nothing wrong with experiencing things in your own way.
This took a while for me to accept as I created four characters over several hours, unable to decide on a race or class before even starting the game, let alone losing myself in everything it had to offer. I hadn’t even taken my first step, and I was struggling, unable to progress until I threw caution to the wind and decided on an unlikely hero who would grow alongside me.
It was only then that Baldur’s Gate 3 began to make sense. My adventure would constantly take me off the beaten path as I made new allies and experimented with spells and abilities I had never heard of before, let alone understood how to apply them. Narrative difficulty gave me the freedom to explore without constantly having my ass kicked, while I slowly came to terms with the fact that while I had a laundry list of main quests to tackle and an evil tadpole wriggling around in my brain, I could still take my time with every step I took. It all revolves around me, and Baldur’s Gate 3 wants you to understand that element of self-importance.
You can go anywhere, do anything, make mistakes, and bask in your victories however and whenever you like, and the only real punishment is having to reload a save or live with your decisions. Besides, you’ll likely be making them all over again soon enough anyway. The same goes for the gameplay mechanics, which I’m constantly feeling guilty about as I mainly use basic attacks and spells instead of pushing the boat out and embracing my inner D&D nerd. I’m taking things slow, often trying to seek out smaller battles off the beaten path where I’m free to experiment or use spells that a more important skirmish might be ill-suited for. BG3 presents a world that is big enough to accommodate all of these approaches, and I learned to never once view them as the game throwing me a bone or my approach not being correct.
Given its obscene player count and rampant discussion surrounding it, chances are that, so many are delving into a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 for the very first time. They are bound to be overwhelmed or screw up in some ways, but those foibles shouldn’t be a reason to turn away or decide it isn’t for you, but to laugh in the face of your mistakes and show no fear in making more of them. Play the easy way or the hard way, so long as you’re having fun and embarking on an adventure to be remembered, that’s all that matters.