This Holiday, I’m Learning To Love Baldur’s Gate 3

I love the holidays. It’s always nice to reunite with the family I don’t get to see often. There’s a lot of kids these days and it’s wonderful seeing them come into their own, forge relationships with one another, and play with each other and their new gifts on Christmas. It’s a very fulfilling part of the year filled with wholesome rituals like this. My favorite though, even more than seeing those beloved kids, is getting to descend into a vegetative state while tackling one big game. Sometimes it’s a classic, like when I played through most of A Link to the Past some years ago for the first time. Other times, I’m catching up on the biggest game of the year that I could barely get to. This year, unsurprisingly, the game that I’m taking on is Baldur’s Gate 3. This game and I really need this holiday.

Can I admit something here? I’m not too crazy about Baldur’s Gate 3 at the moment. It’s not that the game is bad in any way, but that I haven’t had the time to dig into it and learn to love it. And boy does it feel like a game that needs that investment. I’m about 20 hours in and struggling through the introductory area—which feels like it should be better tutorialized, though that’s neither here nor there—but I feel like I’m about to clear a hump that’ll fully sell me on the game.

This holiday is especially going to come in handy for Baldur’s Gate 3 because unlike most other games I’d tackle, it isn’t just long but difficult and dense in ways new to me. Its combat is of a speed and nature I’m not used to. My brief time in the Underdark has proven I don’t quite have the mettle to tough it out. Truly every encounter I’ve had has been a close one, suggesting that I’m either underleveled, clueless, or both. The goblin camp, which impressed me as much as it provoked my anxiety, took me several hours of picking away at tiny skirmishes, which I’d often fail and reload in order to roll better. I’d have barely survived the final one if it weren’t for Halstin’s remarkably overpowered build at that early point in the game.

I have a hard time wrapping my head around just how open-ended scenarios can be in Baldur’s Gate 3 and adapting my character builds to maximize their current potential. I simply don’t know how to make Shadowheart stop missing every attack and have no idea what range I should play her at. My Tav, who’s a sorcerer as of now, is apparently an Eldritch Blast machine, which makes the fact that I’ve played him at close range till now kind of ridiculous. Really, the only thing that works as intended is Astarion, who makes up for his occasional misses by landing more successive critical hits than anyone else in my party at the moment. So sure, if he wants to bite me at camp, he’s earned the right. I might just be a dumbass, but this is all stuff I could iron out with time; time that I’m buying myself by surrendering my entire holiday over to this game and figuring it out.

I also just straight up lost a character. Lae’zel—the githyanki on the nautiloid in the very beginning—was straight up murdered in the road after the game gave me a few chances to save her. Without the guidance of one of my best friends, I wouldn’t have known I initially missed Gale either, but at least I was able to correct that one. I not only have to worry about getting good at the game, but optimizing my way through the world’s largest game.

Despite these frustrations and setbacks, I come across occasional moments of brilliance, whether its in the early turns of some of these characters plots or beats in the larger world, that fully envelop me. For example, the twist early on in Wyll’s storyline has me itching to plumb his story for further developments and luckily for me, an impromptu rescue mission I took into a burning building has prompted exactly that. A fight that I feel I definitely took far too early on—against a one-eyed monstrosity in the Underdark called the Observer Beholder—proved to be a thrilling gauntlet and my surviving it definitely signaled a turn in my understanding of the game’s mechanics and flow.  And then there’s Karlach, whose recruitment was the last significant beat I accomplished before setting the game down and who I simply think is very very neat.

Suffice to say, there’s a lot to unravel about this game and wrap my head around and I’ve evidently barely scratched the surface of Act I as is. It’s as tantalizing as it is frustrating, which is why I’ve put Baldur’s Gate 3 down as many times as I have and subsequently picked it back up. I feel like if I don’t take advantage of this break, I may never quite fall for the game the way that everyone else has and I really want to. I want to be head over heels for the game that’s enraptured the community like Elden Ring did last year. But whereas I felt on the forefront of that, I feel so behind now. I know what must be done though, and I tell you what: it’s a good thing the holidays are meant for catching up then. So long world, I’ve got a fantasy to sell myself on. I’ll see you on the other side.