I finally passed one hundred hours in my save file of Baldur’s Gate 3. I’m really not sure how much time I’d have logged to the game if I could somehow account for the lost progress due to crashes or the hours lost to reverting back a couple or more save files because a choice without sufficient context was going to ruin my experience with the game. I don’t mind reverting in these cases, given how what sometimes feels like a flippant or jokey answer in a dialogue tree can wind up being taken very seriously and sometimes there’s a mismatch between what the game suggests will happen and what actually happens (which seems to be cranked up to eleven as a Dark Urge character). Overall though, as I’ve looked back at my one hundred recorded hours, I realized that a huge amount of that time was spent incredibly focused on the mechanical aspects of the game rather than the roleplaying and inter-character aspects of it. Sure, the ratio is probably much more balanced than most similar games I’ve played, but it feels odd at first blush to realized that it is closer to a standard video game RPG than to my experiences with the tabletop rolepalying game this CRPG was inspired by. As I’ve thought about it more, especially as I played last night, I noticed that, despite only doing one major fight last night, I spent about eighty percent of my play time focused entirely on mechanics. A couple percent of the remainder goes to puzzle solving and logistics and then the rest goes to watching dialogue play out and doing my best to roleplay my player character.

I’ve casually read reviews of Baldur’s Gate 3 over the past month, trying to figure out how to express how I feel about this game as a whole. I’ve mostly focused on how fresh the game felt, general escapism, and most recently about what feels like a pretty huge lack of an important tabletop gaming feature, but that’s only a small portion of my gaming experience from hour to hour. Sure, some days wind up featuring lots of roleplaying and dialogue, but I tend to see it bookend my game time, doing a bit of talking as I start the game up, pick up quests where I left them, and figure out what my goals are. After that, I’m almost always in for a few hours of puzzles, dice rolls, logistics, and combat, before I finally turn in quests, make camp for the night, and talk to my companions. There’s plenty of talking sprinkled in amongst the combat, but most of it serves as a precusor to a battle or a momentary distraction as I run from one battle to another. Even the exploration winds up being pretty mechanically focused as I try to balance my general spell load with my characters’ physical loads. One hundred hours of keys, alchemy ingredients, plot items, potions, elixirs, throwables, situation-specific armor or weapons, and wealth weights a few hundred pounds and I need to make sure it’s balanced between the constant party member characters who use all that stuff (though I’m thankfully able to move things between inventories pretty liberally in combat, so long as I’m not changing anything a character has actually equipped). So much of my game time involves mechanics of some kind and I’ve written almost nothing about them so far.

The only review I’ve found that comes close to encapsulating how I feel about the game is this one from Polygon. Most of where my opinion diverges is the in the writer’s assessment of the difficulty of combat, but I have been playing this game for one hundred hours now and she wrote her review just over two weeks after the game came out. She probably had to hurry in a way that I have not had to. I’ve been overlevelled for most fights, thanks to my desire to explore every little bit of everything, and only now, in the mid-to-last stages of Act 3 am I finally running into combat encounters intended for the level I’m at. I was able to power through a lot of fights relying on nothing but my understanding of the basic combat mechanics, plenty of basic strategy, and my own somewhat diabolic, mastermindish nature (its not for nothing that I’m usually the GM in most TTRPGs I play). Only now, as I’m finally hitting parity, am I really beginning to struggle in combat. For instance, I spent most of last night redoing a battle I kept losing. I had devised a solid strategy going in and had it immediately destroyed because of the way Baldur’s Gate 3 differs from Fifth Edition of Dungeons and Dragons. In BG3, being knocked prone breaks concentration on any spell the prone person was holding onto, on top of everything else it does in 5e. This makes Prone one of the most powerful conditions in the game and I would have drastically altered my play style if I’d realized I could do more than just beat down spellcasters before I’d hit one hundred hours of game time (though this certainly explains why characters occasionally lost concentration when I wasn’t apying attemption to them in past battles).

Ultimately, though, I agree with the review that this is an amazing game that is probably suffering because it is associated with Dungeons and Dragons. Maybe even because it is built on the backs of the studio’s other CRPGs, the Divinity: Original Sin series. There’s so much rich storytelling in this game and it all takes a back seat to the constant need to tweak numbers, find mechanical loopholes, and mercilessly beat down your opponents. It might actually be better if it were closer to 5e than it is, because 5e does not have half the combat mechanics that this game does. There’s a whole host of conditions that don’t exist outside of Baldur’s Gate 3 and the game explains none of them unless you go digging through tooltip menues for hours at a time. Even then, because they’re not formally explained and gear trickles in so slowly, you could discover what might have been a mighty combo if you’d only just kept this one item from fifty hours prior, but you didn’t so this potentially cool item is just one more bit of drek that you sell to increase your mountain of gold. I’m sure all this stuff makes combat fun for some people, but my experience has taught me that literally none of it matters until you suddenly find yourself in a battle where even a single extra point of damage will make or break the encounter. Then, and only then, will it be useful. Maybe a quarter of the time. The other three quarters of the time, you somehow miss an attack you had a ninety-nine percent chance to hit and then you get absolutely blown away because the initiative tracker broke and either the specially summoned baddies get to all go immediately rather than have to skip their first turn like all of your summons do or they get to take their turns despite their places in the initiative already being passed by the time they were summoned.

There are so many mechanics to this game that I don’t know them all. I wound up winning that battle I was struggling with last night not because my strategy finally paid off or because I got lucky, but because an NPC used a spell that knocks back creatures who fail their saves and, for whatever reason, that NPC could exclude all of my allies from it and my spellcaster could not. They were literally the same type of wizard and one of them could ignore all types of allies on the field while I could only ignore party members. It was ridiculous and the entire battle was a cakewalk from then on. It was infuriating since that was my sixth try at that battle and only on this try did the NPC decide to cast this spell. I still don’t know if I could have won that fight without those three targets getting blown off a cliff to their deaths and I might never know. It’s not like I’m going to go back and make myself fight that battle all over again.

Which is the problem with this game. It is a CRPG. Despite the incredible variety of systems in this game, the huge amount of choice it grants you, and the absolutely stunning ability get incredibly invested in so many details that absoluely don’t matter until they suddenly do, it is ultimately an inflexible thing. The reviewer described it as attempting to wear down the program with the insistence that she should be able to do something. I’d describe it as coming up against the bounds of the game. The people who made this game did an incredible job of opening it up to so many styles of play and the incredibly intense and sometimes opaque mechanics are a part of that, but they’re ultimately still limited by the fact that they couldn’t create a game that will negotiate with you. Because that’s what a good GM does. They will talk through what you want to do and figure out a way to make it happen. Anything can be tossed aside in favor of doing what the players want to do. A CRPG can’t do that. Which is why, despite how open and wonderful the game is, it reminds me more of playing with a rules lawyer GM who will never agree to anything that doesn’t have an explicit rule governing it.

To take it a step further, the mechanics of the game (and combat) remind me of Dungeons and Dragons 3.5, which had a rule for everything everyone could come up with. There were intense, complex, and thorough rules that, if you mastered, you could use to win just about any contest you might encounter while playing it. The price for this level of capability was that you stopped playing a game at some point in the process and played a system instead. The world and story would often fade away as you drilled down on the mechanics and wound up experiencing the whole game through them. Eventually, you would surface for air, do some roleplaying, and then immediately dice would come out and you had to hope you’d maximized your stats enough to actually make friends with the person you’d just spent half an hour talking to. I still can’t believe I used to live like that. Now, as I contemplate the long future of my time on this video game, I find myself grateful that things aren’t quite that bad, but it definitely is making me hesitate as I consider doing additional playthroughs.