Hey, everyone! You folks having a good summer? Everybody finish all those big, incredible games we’ve been playing the last few months? Wow! Zelda! Final Fantasy! So much to do in the incredible world of games we could just play forever! And that’s too bad because beep beep, it’s new game time, assholes. You better start running your Barbarian ass around Sanctuary on the double because there’s another game coming that we’re all going to have to pretend we finished when we talk about it: Baldur’s Gate 3.
If you’re not familiar, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a sequel to Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2. What if I just ended this paragraph there? If you’re on this site, you already know what Baldur’s Gate 3 is. Frankly, there’s a 50/50 chance that you just want to see if what I say in my cute little list lines up with what you already think about the game. Anyway, it’s a very big world with big choices from a company famous for making RPGs with big worlds and big choices. You don’t really need to have played the original games, largely because this one takes place far later and hearing "Hey, ya! It's me, Imoen!" too many times will make you question whether the Earth should exist.
In other words, to paraphrase what your mom said, Baldur’s Gate 3 is massive and it’s going to take a lot of work to handle it. The developer has bragged that the game has 174 hours of cutscenes and tens of thousands of potential endings. There’s so much to do that it can feel a little intimidating to jump in. With that in mind, here’s everything you should do before playing Baldur’s Gate 3.
Finish Any Games You Were Casually Enjoying
Obviously, not everybody is going to instantly jump from their current game to Baldur’s Gate 3. But maybe stop fucking around and beat Ganondorf. Just do it already. You’ve got all the supplies you need. Stop searching for Koroks. What, are you going to Platinum a Switch game for your own satisfaction? Go outside. And yeah, if you haven’t finished Final Fantasy 16 yet, it’s hard to stop now. Unless you’re about two thirds through the game, at which point you really can stop now. I won’t spoil what happens, but that’s only because what happens spoils what happens. Or lack of what happens. Folks, I’m saying the game gets boring and that’s even after it decides to forgo the better half of the color palette. Other games, like Diablo 4, never had a huge color palette to begin with so if you wanted to drop it now, you probably could. Plus, the longer you wait, the more seasons you’ll miss, which somehow will make you too guilty to ever have to pick it up again. All the time in the world, baby.
Decide What Character You Want
Baldur’s Gate 3 has a deeply detailed character creator that could take you hours to go through. From the big choices like class and species to the smaller choices like whether you make your character look like a high school crush you never talked to or saw again. All of these choices could have an impact on the game, so you want to go in having an idea of how you might like to play. Especially if you make that character act like your college crush and they’re so cool and they’re good at Protoss stuff and they don’t care if they get a B in Anatomy because they knew that life isn’t about grades, it was about living. Sometimes you wonder what happened to them. Sometimes you wonder if they’ve got a family now too. Sometimes you wonder what life would be like if you had told them how you felt when you had the chance. You tried looking them up on Facebook but came up with nothing, even in old college groups. Your life now is great, don’t get me wrong, but you’d joyfully watch your children fade to nonexistence if it meant you could get a chance to go back and do it again.
Brush Up On The Latest Dungeons & Dragons Rules
The good news is Baldur’s Gate 3 does most of the math and walks you through choices that would normally fall to a pencil, paper, and dice. But it’s still helpful to know the game it’s based on and newer rules. In all likelihood, you’re already very familiar with Dungeons & Dragons because as a kid you bought a bunch of the books and boxed sets in hopes that your friends would want to play. But they didn’t want to play at all - even at your birthday! - because it involved a pencil, paper, and math. Maybe they kind of made fun of you. This was before hot people realized there was money and potential acting gigs in rolling dice and talking like the Great Vowel Shift never happened. But somehow when all your friends became goth in the 10th grade, Vampire: The Masquerade was on the table. Oh, really? Literally, like a decade after you tried to get some of them to play D&D and they said no. And, what’s worse? What’s really worse? It’s that you had the Ravenloft set - which you told them at the time was cool and scary! At least the Planescape campaigns you bought are now worth a couple hundred bucks on eBay.
Don’t Think About The Fact There’s Bear Sex In The Game And You Might Never See It
This one is going to be really hard for a lot of gamers. It’s never fun when a trailer for a movie or a game features exciting scenes that you don’t see in the final product. And going by how large RPGs work, I’m sure having bear sex won’t be easy and a lot of people won’t see it at all. You’ll have to be the right class, romance the right person, make the right story choices. There’s a chance you’ll never achieve bear sex no matter how hard you try. There’s also a chance that you’ll realize that you’re spending way too much time thinking about this scene and how to get it. You could check a guide, but you’d have to Google “Bear Sex Video Game.” Even when you do it in incognito mode, Chrome calls the FBI immediately. Still thinking about it, huh? Right now you’re wondering if the bear hibernates after. Never seeing what happens is going to live in your head rent free.
Buy Baldur’s Gate 3
Seems obvious.