Crisis of faith
RPG old school fans had been left as dry as fans of Valve product fans for oh so many years. Just like with Gaben and his fear of the number 3, Baldur's Gate tripped on the way to it's third entry and for a hot second there it seemed as though that was never going to be picked up again. The series slipped out of the hands of Bioware and from there seemingly tumbled into the void, or down into a mystical mythical lake, never to be lifted again except by someone worthy of the right to rule all of England. And it seems that someone was Larian, as not long after their smash hit CRPG Divinity Original Sin 2, Larian threw all future projects onto indefinite hold and have been hard at work making Baldur's Gate 3 to this very day. And for the record I absolutely love the work their doing, I may never have even gotten around to playing the Original games themselves if I hadn't fallen for Larian's work first. Yet even as they toil away hot in anticipation to craft the first gold standard for AAA CRPG, there are those who sneer and disregard all that hard work.
Now at first I'll admit I both didn't understand this and found the attitude a tad elitist. It just sounded like a hoard of gatekeeper fans pushing their spectacles up the bridge of highslope noses before pointing at a sign on the wall saying 'No turn based allowed.' And to be honest alot of it is exactly that, people who cannot and will not settle for anything that doesn't copy the exact same base gameplay model that Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 used. In a tortured little way I can sympathise, if I fell in love with a game for being one thing and then it drastically changed itself into something else I'd be a bit confused and not sure how I feel about the series anymore. But then I think to the few times when a series has pulled this off to ludicrous gusto, such as the jump from turnbased RPG to 3rd person action RPG in Fallout, or the jump from action fighting game to turnbased RPG in Yakuza, and then I remember that it's not important that the gameplay of a series be consistent, just the soul behind it.
And yet, with that being said, after having played Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition and dipped my toes into Baldur's Gate 2 Enhanced Edition, I'm actually feeling a lot of the same sort of emotions. That crushing disappointment that all this potential is going to fizzle away with the third entry as we essentially just start from scratch. It doesn't feel like the game coming our way is a continuation to the same saga from the first two games, and acknowledge well this is a feeling coming from a preview build of a game not finished yet, but even in a best case scenario I can't see this coming despair being pulled around. Which isn't to say Baldur's Gate 3 is looking like a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, it looks simply unreal, but it's just not the game that fans waited over 2 decades for and doesn't really have the potential to be. This doesn't even come down to "All that time created expectations that could never be filled", it's simply just a subversion of expectation that makes this game not really Baldur's Gate 3 at all, but something of it's own creation entirely. (I'm going to be spoiling things going forward if you haven't played the Baldur's Gate games and yet still care about that sort of thing.)
This really occurred to me when I realised how the level cap worked in the original Baldur's Gate. I'd played a lot of these RPGs before and so thought I knew everything; grind to about Level 20 and hit the cap where I'm powered up to take on everything. (20 is usually the pinnacle) But that was absolutely not the case this time around. Instead, for my Cleric I only ended up hitting around about Level 8 by the end of the main Campaign, 10 by the end of Siege of Dragonspear, and I wouldn't understand why that was until I played Baldur's Gate 2 and realised that when I ported my character over, they were every bit as powerful as in the last game. All the same spells, pretty much the same experience, (None of the gear or money, obviously) it was as though the adventure were continuing on. Because you see, that is what the Baldur's Gate series, the Bhaalspawn saga, represents; one continuous epic D&D campaign.
A campaign is rarely ever made up of a single adventure, and never really a single session, but is this beast or wyrm that writhes, twists and changes over the course of months, perhaps even years, as characters go from the nothing they were to the titans they are to become. And I've never seen a game that has managed to capture that feeling from game to game like Baldur's Gate has. Sure there are plenty of games which pick up the same story from the last game, even some that use the same character and remembers their choices, but it always comes with some sort of caveat which means the story moves forward but the gameplay just doesn't. Take Bioware's own Mass Effect series. At the end of Mass Effect 1, you'll be close to hitting max level, (I believe it was actually impossible to hit it in one playthrough for the original as I remember) but by the next game you'll be back to level 1. There's a good reason for that, obviously, but is still feels like a copout. From Mass Effect 2 to 3 the exact same thing happens, except this time there is no good reason. You're just summoned to a tribunal and apparently one week without space adventuring made you forget every cool technique you learned along the way. It's disjointed.
I never questioned it because that was just the way all these games were, until I played Baldur's Gate and realised there was a better way. Straight away in Baldur's Gate 2 you're facing enemies and challenges that match your skill level, making it literally feel like you're picking up where you left off. (Even more so with the Enhanced Edition's Siege of Dragonspear which quite literally takes you up to the moment the first game passes over to the next one) With this in mind, suddenly I start to understand why Baldur's Gate 3, which for all intents and purposes follows a completely new character on their own quest, doesn't really feel like it deserves to be part of the Bhaalspawn saga. If it's not the same hero continuing their journey to the next milestone, then why are we pretending that it is?
Of course, the team at Larian has assured fans that the connections will be there and we'll all understand why this game deserves to be called Baldur's Gate 3 once the full thing is out, but I'm just not really sold on that to be honest. I mean what's the most significant tie in they can muster? Revealing that the protagonist is yet another Bhaalspawn? Even then it would still be another character's journey. Through this narrow lens it isn't hard to disregard every potential move that Larian makes as insufficient and concluding that Baldur's Gate 3 is not, in fact, Baldur's Gate 3. But I'm choosing not to see it like that. Whether for my own health, or my own pigheaded stubbornness, I'm willing to allow the final product of BG3 to speak for itself even if, as I'm becoming more familiar with the spirit of Baldur's Gate, I'm not exactly seeing it speak too loudly from the game in front of me.
All this is to say that I understand a bit more the plight of the disillusioned, and sympathise with them just that tiny bit more, even if I ultimately disagree. Of course, for those that are upset just because the gameplay is different, they literally have no excuse to whine, there are plenty of alternatives on the market which they're welcome to. However, for those who have come to buy into the journey of the Bhaalspawn, and wanted to see another direct continuation that felt like your old friend reaching out and inviting you back into the fold one final time, I feel for your loss, but hope you don't intend to write this off before it's seen through. I'm not saying that I trust Larian to deliver a game everybit the title those people want it to be, but that I believe in the possibility that they might deliver a game which is something you didn't even know that you wanted. (With luck. Hopefully)
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