It’s always a joy when a big, dense RPG that’s actually worth the timesink comes along. The Fallout: New Vegas-es and Knights of the Old Republic-s of the world are few and far between, and I cherish them dearly when I’m lucky enough to play one. I’m no stranger to a big content-heavy roleplaying game, and I’ve bounced off my fair few of them. Tyranny was a lot of fun, but ultimately something I fell out with when I found myself unable to progress. Larian’s earlier efforts in Divinity: Original Sin (1 and 2) had a lot of charm, but I never finished those either. Baldur’s Gate 3 is something I’ve been craving for a long time, an itch well and truly scratched in an incredibly satisfying way.
I am so fucking bad at it.
I don’t mean the moment to moment gameplay: I’m a 5E veteran well and truly, having been playing and running games in the system since its inception around ten years ago. I know the mechanics, the best spells, the optimised builds, the whole thing like the back of my hand. But Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t just a D&D game - it’s a web of choices, consequences, causes and effects, some things not coming back to bite you until many, many hours down the line, far beyond the scope of a quickload’s ability to rectify. It’s a game in which it’s very easy to fuck up, and not know what you’ve fucked up until it’s beyond repair.
Let’s talk about my first playthrough of the game. Spoilers to follow.
Attempt #1: ‘This will probably be fine’
My first playthrough - at the prescription of a friend - was as a Wild Magic Sorcerer, a subclass I’m fond of. I find wild magic conceptually very fun, so I had no problem with this.
Things went pretty well at first! I mean, I missed a lot - a lot - of points of interest in the first act, but I hardly hamstrung myself. ‘I’ll get that done on the next playthrough’, I thought - no big loss. I was blazing through the main questlines, picking up the sidequests only when they fell directly onto my beeline path towards completion. I wasn’t consciously trying to rush through it - just very engaged by the main plot, and earnestly wanting to see how it all played out before spoilers could find me.
So I missed Auntie Ethel, the owlbear cub, a load of Tiefling refugee interactions, etc. etc. Fine! Nothing that can’t be done the second time round.
Act 2 was where the problems began.
There’s a settlement: a large tavern, where the aforementioned Tiefling refugees have gathered under the protection of a veteran warrior and her warband. Within moments of arriving, it’s possible to activate an encounter in which the cleric maintaining a protective spell around the encampment is attacked and possibly kidnapped. I say ‘possibly’ here, because it is avoidable - but I didn’t know that at the time. When the fight suddenly ended and she got spirited away by literally the last surviving enemy, I assumed it was a scripted event. And it was not!
What follows is a brutal massacre, in which you must kill all present after they’re overwhelmed by the curse the cleric was holding back. This dead-ends a lot of sidequests, as well as significantly affecting the main questline. A botched prison break shortly thereafter yielded similar results: no survivors. I was failing quests left right and centre, for no better reason than not understanding how my choices (or, sometimes, lack thereof) were going to play out.
By act 3, I knew I’d fucked it, broadly speaking. When I was getting everything wrong here, I simply started to accept the failure as somewhat inevitable - to be corrected on playthrough number 2, with the benefit of hindsight. When NPCs died preventably, I let them stay dead. I managed to break a main quest by writing myself out of every option for success through my earlier failures, resulting in an unwinnable fight I had to wind back a couple of hours of saves to prevent, by finagling the least-failed option. So jaded was I by the end, I had no real objection to raising a sword - or, in my case, a fireball - against innocents, if it was convenient to do so. This was the failed world-state, after all. It didn’t matter. They didn’t matter.
So, in this fashion, I finished the main quest - many stones unturned, many loose ends left loose. I won the game, in the conventional sense.
I sure didn’t feel like I had.
Atop a pile of corpses
The allies I’d made lay dead, almost to the last. The people I’d once helped or saved were merely bodies along the path behind me by the time all was said and done. My companions, broadly speaking, received their due misery for my failure - their families dead, their destinies unfulfilled, their terminal conditions uncured. This was the world I had laboured to save: bloody, broken, and empty. This was the victory I had earned.
In this way, Baldur’s Gate 3 carries within it an excellent parable: that one can ‘win’, and still lose in every way that matters. That - succinctly - a single-minded dedication to a narrow view of success necessarily entails a million failures outside its scope.
I felt like I’d let my allies down, but mostly I felt like I’d missed out. Yes, the game is very immersive, with some incredible characters you can’t help falling in love with, but it is a game in the end: a collection of content, a lot of which I didn’t experience. Probably, I would have had this feeling to some extent at the end of any playthrough: since some decisions are mutually exclusive, you simply can’t do absolutely everything the first time round. But the nagging feeling seemed more severely accentuated by my specific failures than inevitability.
So - what else was there to do, but jump right back in?
Attempt #2: ‘Once more, with feeling’
This time will be different, I vowed. I rolled a Tiefling monk this time. I don’t play monks much, so I reasoned that would spice things up via novelty alone. The game has a ‘Dark Urge’ option for your player character, which it recommends saving for a second playthrough; this being mine, I went for that too. Given what the Dark Urge entails (spoiler alert: it’s a lot of murder), this might seem like a less than ideal path for someone who was trying to end the game with fewer fatalities. But believe me - no intrusive thoughts could match the body count of sheer, unmitigated carelessness. You can do a lot more damage by accident than you can ever do on purpose. Well, with some exceptions, anyway.
So, I got to work in the Wilderness of act one with fine-tooth comb in hand. I scoured every inch of the explorable land, save those dark and webby places my arachnophobia bade me from entering. I rescued a woman from the clutches of a hag, though the game seemed to disagree: I knocked her out to spare her, and she just stopped fucking existing, somehow. I tried to diversify my party composition by bringing along the companions I’d neglected the first time, but Karlach was too irresistible a frontliner and Wyll too fucking useless to justify his slot; I’ve mostly found myself bringing the same people along for the ride. I traded out Gale for Astarion, at least, not being one to let a locked door ruin a good time.
And yet - has failure begun to manifest yet again? I tried to rescue the owlbear cub, and that fucking vampire twink scared it off. The woman I incapacitated in the hag’s lair certainly isn’t around to thank me for my efforts, having tumbled into the ether while I wasn’t looking. Some poor bastard in a burning building managed to die while I backdrafted myself over the banister, having forgotten my rudimentary understanding of fire safety. And poor Alfira - the first sacrificial lamb of my Dark Urge playthrough - stains the floor of my woodland camp still, like the telltale heart.
I’ve not yet arrived at the part of the story where my recklessness can start doing real damage. But is history doomed to repeat itself?
Heavy is the head
Contrary to what I’m getting at here, this playthrough is more about experiencing more of the sidequests and exploration that I missed on the first attempt than, I don’t know, rectifying some overblown guilt about virtual death tolls. I’m reminded of Sans in Undertale, admonishing the player directly for bending and toying with the game’s timeline to squeeze every drop of enjoyment out of it, at the expense of the characters therein - for completionist’s sake.
![Let the record show I never did a Genocide run - but I did watch the Sans fight a billion times, so that's hardly any better. Let the record show I never did a Genocide run - but I did watch the Sans fight a billion times, so that's hardly any better.](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc393227d-2c9b-4db9-8ea2-8434fa1c0562_861x379.png)
But nonetheless, the failure is haunting. It compels me towards this ideas that there’s a ‘right’ way of doing things: an ideal set of outcomes, with every problem resolved, no blood on my hands (literal or otherwise). Well, that’s not the way life goes; why should the game be any different? It’s infinitely more valuable to make one’s peace with failure, with imperfection, with some measure of inadequacy, than to rage fruitlessly and agonisingly against it.
Though I’ve never watched Star Trek, there’s a Picard quote I find extremely poignant: “It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.” In some ways, it feels like if there’s a lesson to be drawn from Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s the inverse and equal one: you can do everything wrong, and still win.
Maybe that’s not an especially robust philosophy, but I suppose it’s comforting, in a way. It’s reassuring, sometimes, to know that a victory is never fully denied to you. To make your peace with the choices you’ve made, and whatever consequences they may entail. To live with failure, and find it not so heavy a burden after all.