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Are You Game?

Today's article, from Cracked, may seem at first to be a niche gamer thing, but there's more nuance there than we usually get from the internet's foremost dick joke site. So it might be of interest to even non-gamers (are there any of those anymore?)

Baldur's Gate 3 Is A Huge Deal  

Before I get into the article, a bit of history about Baldur's Gate. If you're not familiar with D&D, the eponymous Baldur isn't the Norse god (whose name is more properly spelled Baldr) but a character in a particular D&D setting. Baldur's Gate, in-game, is the name of a large city, named for said character, where surprisingly little of the actual story takes place.

The original BG came out in, I think, 1999? I can't be arsed to look all this shit up. Over 20 years ago. It was based on the mechanics of D&D's 2nd Edition, which had its faults, but with which I was intimately familiar, having DMed in that ruleset for a decade. The interface is a top-down map view (actually isometric, but whatever), not the modern first-person perspective, and even back then it was starting to look a bit dated. Didn't matter. Because the game was awesome.

As usual for single-player role-playing games (there were options for playing in a group, as appropriate for a D&D game), you'd create a character and set them loose in the created world. There, you fight battles and meet NPCs to help you fight the battles. Pretty early on, you meet the greatest game companion character of all time: Minsc the Ranger (and his miniature giant space hamster, Boo). Yes, even better than the girl from Bioshock Infinite. Or Atreius from God of War. Better by far than the famous Lydia from Skyrim (though there's another possible companion in that game that comes pretty close).

And the plot was, apart from some weirdness toward the end, a masterpiece of adventure storytelling. Look, as a writer, that's what I care about, more than game mechanics or graphics.

Couple years later, BG2 came out (there were also some expansions for both), and in terms of gameplay it was better, though the storyline was somewhat less strong. In BG2, you had the option of importing your character from BG1, or creating a new one.

There's a bunch I'm skipping over here, but it's a game series I kept going back to between bouts of more modern style games like Skyrim or Fallout. Many, many years later, after the original game publisher had long since gone the way of D&D 2nd Edition itself, an independent studio combined the two games and their expansions, and added a bridging storyline that... well, I felt it just didn't work as well; a lot of the charm of the originals was discarded in favor of punishing game mechanics.

So this BG3 game -- which I've been avoiding too many spoilers about, but I had to read the Cracked article -- is from yet another publisher entirely, and I will certainly play it when it comes out.

Fortunately, according to my sources, they're including Minsc and Boo. Otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, it's not Baldur's Gate.

Now, on to the article itself.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the most important games of all time. And it’s not even out yet. While other games scamper to push out a product to meet the demands of their uncaring, non-gamer corporate overlords, Larian Studios remains boldly free and independent of any of the two or three companies which are buying up all the world’s media.

Remember I mentioned Skyrim and Fallout up there? Well, those were made by Bethesda. And Microsoft freaking bought Bethesda. I'm still holding out hope that the creative team stays mostly the same for future games (there's a space adventure from them that was supposed to come out this coming November but got pushed back), but I fear the gigantic corporate influence of Microsuck might defang the more interesting aspects of those games. Microsuck has produced one and only one decent product in all the years of its existence, and that's Excel (and they stole the code for that). And yet I keep using them; the alternatives don't support gaming as well, and I despise consoles.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a high fantasy RPG set in the world of the official Dungeons and Dragons IP owned by Wizards of the Coast, who publishes both D&D and (my favorite game) Magic: The Gathering.

Just to explain this a bit, again since not everyone reading this is as big a game nerd as I am, M:TG, like D&D itself, isn't a video game, but (unlike D&D) a tabletop card game. I'm sure there are online versions of it -- hell, I play D&D with friends online -- but I don't give enough of a shit to find out.

The fact that Larian Studios, a Belgian gaming publisher, remains free from a massive corporation is a good sign. The studio has stated they’re not looking to sell out and they can still work independently with Wizards of the Coast (who is owned by Hasbro).

Hey, maybe some of the pubs in the game will sell Belgian beer.

Incidentally, Hasbro also owns My Little Pony. So, technically, MLP could be used in D&D products without copyright infringement. Just saying.

In Belgium, the work week is legally 38 hours with workers being compensated for any overages.

The article doesn't go into this too deeply, but I think the reason it's mentioned is that it's pretty well known that here in the US, game developers and coders work insanely long hours for... well, usually pretty decent pay, but not great pay.

But there’s a larger cultural reason why this game matters so much. It’s the future we’ve always dreamed of, and nerds are king. We’re the mainstream now. We’ve come a long way from the Satanic Panic surrounding the early days of Dungeons and Dragons.

If you're following Stranger Things on Netflix, which I'm convinced WotC paid lots of money for product placement in, that whole unfortunate and misguided episode gets a nod there. The show is set in the 80s, before WotC bought the D&D intellectual property from TSR, who never gets mentioned, and in the latest season the Satanic Panic is part of the plot (I won't spoil it further).

The irony there is that the greatest danger to kids then was not D&D, but the people screeching about Satan. This sort of thing continues to this day. As a parallel, you know how certain people started bloviating a bunch of lies about how a cabal powerful Democrats ran a child sex ring from the basement of a pizza place in DC? Well, it turns out that a lot of those liars were themselves diddling children (google Southern Baptist pedophilia scandal if you have to). Every accusation from them is a confession.

To be clear, I'm not saying everyone on the other side was innocent. People are going to be good or bad, regardless of politics. Just that it wasn't a grand, overarching conspiracy. Point is, when you look at real outcomes, the real moral hazard in the 70s and 80s was sports, not fantasy role-playing games.

The most anticipated media is all IP which has traditionally been considered “nerd stuff”. Whether it’s the newest Marvel release or the upcoming Lord of the Rings series from Amazon, its nerds all the way down baby.

I knew we'd win eventually.

Who knows, when Grampy Biden leaves the oval, maybe we’ll even have a gamer president.

Trump's not a gamer; he's a player. There's a huge difference. Yes, I think he's going to run again, and win (by cheating; remember, every accusation is a confession). I'm not here to start arguments on that; just making an observation.

Still waiting on that D&D movie though…

They made one, what, decades ago, now? I remember watching it. Probably before this writer's time. It also sucked Mordenkainen's Tiny Balls (that's a D&D in-joke).

Why are we so attracted to these kinds of stories? And in a high fantasy setting particularly? Well, because dragons are cool as hell obviously. And less obviously, because the game allows us to walk a clear moral path. Baldur’s Gate 3 lays out that path even more neatly. We get to be righteous.

That's... one interpretation. One of the best things about the original Baldur's Gate and its sequel was that you could certainly choose to be a force for good in the fantasy world, and most of the story choices rewarded such behavior -- but you could also be evil, and that path works with the story, too. I enjoy playing both kinds in games. Like, sometimes I'll create an absolutely immoral character in Skyrim, like an assassin, just to explore that side of things. To me, this makes for a good game; knowing that you do have the choice, even if you don't take one of the paths. What's the point of being righteous, even in fantasy, if you don't have an alternative?

But yes, I find that in the existing BG games, the best storyline happens when you choose to do good.

Well, I've rambled on long enough when I could have been playing a game. I hope I made some sense. And I look forward to BG3. Minsc and Boo stand ready!