I have continued to put a ridiculous number of hours into Baldur’s Gate 3. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game this intensely and consistently. I mean, I typically don’t play games that require a great deal of focus and personal investment on work nights, since I know they tend to make me ignore the passage of time, but I’ve not only started doing that, I’ve been doing it consistently enough to go from staying up until the wee hours of the morning to stopping at a reasonable time. Turns out two straight weeks of obscenely little sleep thanks to a combination of Baldur’s Gate 3 and stress will shake me out of my worst sleep habits. I’ve managed to stop playing between eleven and twelve at night for four nights in a row as of writing this, and only once squeaked in under that deadline solely due to the game crashing as I started “one more thing”ing myself into what might have wound up being the wee hours. Still! I’m counting this as a win, if only because I’m still enjoying myself and am now clear-headed during my work days (even if I’m still recovering from a severe sleep deficit and struggling to stay away right after I eat lunch). Baldur’s Gate 3 really has a lot going for it and I really don’t have much of anything negative to say about my play experience in the one hundred played hours I’ve accrued on my save file.

Which isn’t to say that there aren’t problems with the game, of course. A lot of people, with more experience, knowledge, and authority than I, have written extensively about the problems of race in this new branch of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise, which it somewhat predictably flubbed. It’s not like Wizards of the Coast or any part of the D&D franchise have anything but a bad record as it is and, for whatever reason, Larian (the developers of BG3) imported that record entirely. Perhaps even uncritically, though I’ll admit I haven’t really done much first-hand research beyond what I’ve read that other people have written about the game and what I’ve seen through the plot’s racial tensions as a main contribution of arc one and as a sort of constant noise throughout the rest of the story. I mean, I ran into a comedian in Baldur’s Gate, during act three, who challenged me to a joke competition and then exclusively told racist jokes. I tried to tell any other kind of joke and absolutely no one laughed. I know there’s a whole thing about how racist comedy tends to play well in the greater public consciousness of the US, but so do tons of other forms of comedy. It was just a bizarre encounter that didn’t really seem to serve any purpose other than to point out that the people in the room for the joke competition were all racist assholes. It is sheer privilege alone, because I chose to play an Elf, that made my experience of the game so frictionless and I can only imagine how awful to must be to play as one of the marginalized people in this fantasy world.

It feels so odd to have been able to start up this incredibly complex, thought-out game, and make a character without running into any kind of content warnings. During that first section of gameplay, that can take anywhere from minutes to hours, you make tons of decisions that will change your entire game experience in a way that you can’t really change unless you’re constantly keeping your character disguised with magic. There is no warning that playing a Tiefling will set the entire world against you. There’s nothing about what sort of horrible, gorey situations you’ll be exposed to if you play the Dark Urge character origin. There’s no notes about what your experience will be attached to any kind of character, custom or premade, and some of the Origin characters have dealt with some pretty awful stuff that can be impossible to escape without skipping huge chunks of the game. I mean, the only warnings I’ve had about any of the game’s content is the ESRB rating and that is so vague as to be entirely useless as far as content and trigger warnings are concerned. Sure, you can skip cutscenes or chunks of conversation and open up the dialogue history to read through what happened without being forced to see it (a technique I’ve had to employ a few times as particularly awful bits of violence or torture play out in front of my character), but it can sneak up on you. There’s no warning for so much stuff that will just happen to you as you play this game and your only recourse is to react to whatever you’re seeing fast enough that you can skip it before it goes on for too long.

And I count myself privleged that my trauma triggers are things I can skip. I can jump past any torture scenes (psychological and physical). I can see abuse coming and intervene or skip chunks of dialogue. I can act to free people being held against their will (most of the time). I have recourse for what I can’t stand to expose myself to and I’m able to get away from it in such a way that I’ve been able to enjoy about 99% of the time I’m playing the game. For people whose trauma is based on the way they’re treated by the entire world? Those whose appearance and genetics make them a target, who have unwittingly stumbled into recreating their lived experience in a video game that promised escape? There’s nothing to warn them when an otherwise pleasant character is going to suddenly start filling their conversation with a mix of microaggression and outright racism.

Safety tools are one of the most important parts of an RPG. I genuinely count myself lucky that the only person who has ever been hurt by a lack of safety tools in any of the tabletop roleplaying games I’ve run has been me. I can’t believe the naivety of my past self, who believed that they were not something I’d need despite probably being one of the people most in need of them at just about any table. Thankfully, I learned better. More and more people are learning better as the culture shifts and we start to express concern about the effects our games have on the people at the table. So much of the modern RPG world depends on this consideration (especially the instant you look outside of the D&D 5e sphere) and so many RPGs are being made that explicitly take this level of concern and care into account. Which is why it feels so incredibly alien that a game so focused on recreating the tabletop experience that it spent millions of dollars and seven years of time getting it right would just ignore this entire aspect of tabletop gaming.

A big part of me wants to disclaim that you can at least skip scenes if you want to, unlike in Ghost of Tsushima, but most scene skipping doesn’t really work unless you know what scenes to skip. You can’t know to avoid an optional miniboss that involves watching torture happen to a restrained person without seeing it laid out in front of you. You can’t skip the entire quest line involved horrific, grisly murders without drastically altering the course of the game in a way you probably want to avoid. There is never any warning about what you’re about to be exposed to at any moment of the game. You just have to run into it and make sure you keep your hand on the space bar so you can quickly skip things that might otherwise ruin your day. Which is complete horseshit given that there is literally an option that lets you just turn off nudity for the entire game that PROMPTS YOU TO MAKE A CHOICE when you not only first install the game but any time you reinstall it or have to verify your game files after a crash. You can also turn off tutorials, turn them on for every run, or even do some hybrid combination of the two to get you your desire amount of in-game help. All of which doesn’t ven mentioned the pop-ups that have to do with game mechanics, which are so rampant they’re almost annoying. There’s so much precedent for being able to turn on or off not just entire visual aspects of the game (nudity), but customizing how many and what kinds of popups appear, so why can’t they do something like that for content warnings?

It feels like such an obvious lack in the game. There’s millions upon millions of dialogue lines. Over a hundred hours of cinematics and movies and dialogue scenes. There’s thousands of ridiculously complex magic items. Combat is so complex that I’m still not sure I understand all of its ins and outs. I’m one hundred hours in and have been at the level cap for ten percent of my play time so far, and there’s STILL so many quests left to do in just this one particular playthrough. They put so much work into this game, so why couldn’t they have spent just a little bit of time adding content warning popups and an easy system of opt-outs? Maybe just turn the visuals off, turn off the sound-effects, or remove some of the worst bits entirely if the player wants to avoid it. It would be so easy given the incredible functional complexity of this game (well, compared to the battle mechanics, physics, and expansive dialogue trees, anyway). I just wish they would take this stuff as seriously as they take nudity and being able to bone a bear.