In the movie About Time, the men of the Lake family are able to travel backwards through time. On his 21st birthday, Domnhall Gleeson's Tim Lake finds out he has this power, and decides to use it to improve his romantic prospects. I've always related more to the way his father James (Bill Nighy) chooses to use the gift: reliving days repeatedly just to get more reading done.
I've often wished that I had more time to devote to all the books I'll never get to read — if I could even just read all the ones I already own that would be enough — and CRPGs are the kind of video game that make me feel the same way. I just started Baldur's Gate 3 last Thursday and it already has me wishing that I had infinite free time to explore it and the entire rest of the genre completely.
This happens each time I start playing one of these lore- and choice-heavy role-playing games. It happened when I played Disco Elysium, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age: Origins, and plenty of others I've started but never finished. These are the games that I put an hour into and have a great time, then get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of choices and world-building and put them down, never to return.
This isn't going to happen with Baldur's Gate 3 because, fortunately, it is right at the intersection of what I want to be doing and what visitors of this fine website want to be reading about. I have an incentive to focus my full attention on this one, to push past the feeling of being overwhelmed, and really commit to seeing as much as possible of what Baldur's Gate 3 has to offer.
But when I started playing it last week, I couldn't help but start thinking about all the other CRPGs that are currently sitting in my various PC libraries. Thanks to my own interests and Epic Games Store giveaways, I have more than I will ever have time for. I played the opening hours of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire last year, had a good time, and always meant to come back to it, but I never had the opportunity.
Even when I've reviewed a CRPG, fate has intervened to prevent me from finishing it. Back in 2019, I reviewed Wasteland 3, sunk 50 hours into it over the course of about a week, was approaching the end, went back to the opening to capture some B-roll, and an overzealous autosave overwrote my late-game file. I liked that game a whole lot, but can I ever really make the time to devote 50+ more hours to finishing a game I've already mostly played?
I'd certainly like to! The tendency of CRPGs to prioritize role-playing choices, worldbuilding, and deep systems over graphical fidelity has always endeared them to me. Whenever I start one, I want to spend 100 hours seeing everything it has to offer, getting to know every nook and cranny of its world the way a creative non-fiction writer like David Foster Wallace would when writing a footnote-filled essay about state fairs or cruise ships.
But I also have a tendency to start thinking about what's next too early, to move on mentally before the work is fully complete. I want to learn to be in the moment and enjoy the thing in front of me. Maybe Baldur's Gate 3 can help me learn to do that.