Among my social circles, I was always that guy who played the video games that most people hadn’t heard of. Considering that the farthest these social circles ventured into gaming was FIFA, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was kind of a niche game for them. It was during my first few days as a bright-eyed games journalism hopeful in 2017, when I was tasked with writing a list of best RPGs of all time, that I first heard of Baldur's Gate.
It was rather embarrassing, actually. I had included all the big names, a good mix of classics and modern hits, waxed eloquently about how immersive they were, and even peppered in a personal experience or two; I was pretty proud of it when I submitted it. This was during the pre-covid era, so I watched as my then editor scanned through it, picking out typos as they went along.
Once done, they turned to me and simply said. "Dude, where's Baldur's Gate?" It took me a second to realise they weren't asking for directions to a train station, and that's then it sank in – my knowledge of video games was not as extensive as I thought it was. I did a bit of research, but given that the last game in the series had come out 17 years before that incident, I didn't give it much thought. Life went on, shit happened, and Baldur's Gate faded from memory.
Then came 2018's God of War, which saw Kratos take on some tiny dude who looked like Conor McGregor, named Baldur. Maybe he's related to that RPG, I thought. There was a gate leading to other realms involved too. Was this the gate everyone kept talking about? But, it didn't matter, I had Valkyrie to slay.
Fast forward to the 2019 announcement of Baldur's Gate 3, at 12:30am my time. Among the trailers was one where a random medieval soldier stumbled down a street full of corpses, watched as his body mutilated itself, and turned into a Cthulhu-looking motherfucker. The flashes of lightning revealed massive tentacles in the sky. How very Stranger Things, I thought, continuing to not really care what this series was about.
However the biggest revelation came when our resident TCG expert, Joe Parlock, told me that Baldur's Gate was in fact not an actual gate, but a city popularized by a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I guess it wasn't that thing from God of War after all.
As we got closer to the launch of Baldur's Gate 3, I started to learn more about it via random news snippets, other editors chatting about it in Slack, Instagram Reels, and almost any other avenue you can think of. But, while you'd think more information would make things clearer, I was only more confused by the enigma that is Baldur's Gate.
One bit of news that I happened upon was that you could fuck a bear. Surely that's a joke, I thought; why would there be bestiality in a triple-A game? And why is no one outraged about this? I later learned about the Druid part, but it's still weird, if you ask me. Then, there was something about penis sizes too. Why does that matter in a game? When the hell will that ever be relevant? Is this an RPG or one of those hentai games on Steam?
This sense of confusion is only compounded by TheGamer's editors' Slack bragging about which character they slept with last night or who they're all thirsting after now, like an entire frat house in heat. I thought this was supposed to be a dark RPG with Lovecraftian horrors trying to destroy the realm. Instead, the only thing people appear to be rolling for is a chance to get laid.
Leaving the overall horniness aside, watching random clips of gameplay doesn't answer any of my questions either. One particular clip featured a party walking up to a dead squirrel and reviving it to ask what happened. Nature's cutest rodents appear to be assholes in this universe, as all it did was insult the player, who then booted it into a tree trunk, causing it to splatter. May I remind you of the body horror and psychological horror that the announcement induced? This is not the gore I was expecting.
Most recently, however, voice actor Mathew Mercer stacked 45 crates on top of each other and used a magic arrow to teleport himself onto the ramparts of a castle, rather than going in the hard way. I'm all for breaking games, but this is just ridiculous. How did the game allow this? Of course, Mercer is a D&D master, but the fact that this was even possible, without the use of source code fuckery is mind boggling.
So, do I want to play Baldur's Gate 3? Yes. Do I know what I'm in for? No. Am I terrified? Hell yes. All I know is that back in 2017, when I asked my editor what Baldur's Gate was, they should have said more than just "It's D&D if it was a video game."