It took over 130 hours, but I did it. I beat Baldur’s Gate 3. I finished every sidequest, explored every map, fought almost every enemy (there’s some parts near the end where fighting every enemy will get you killed because there’s no end to the number of enemies that will appear to fight you), and finally brought an end to my Dark Urge character’s story. Shadowheart and my character were in a committed, monogamous relationship, my character had denied their Dark Urge so hard it got yote from their body, and everyone lived. I want to append “happily ever after” to that last statement, but I’m pretty sure that Lae’zel is either going to get herself killed or attempt to conquer the Material Plane. Also, while Karlach lived, the jury is out on whether or not she gets to be happy (her ending cinematic was the only one that felt particularly fulfilling, I’ll admit, since all the others felt kind of just “over”). I fought hard to bring what seemed like the best end to the story I began on August third, exactly a month and a day later, and I’m pretty sure it all played out as well as I could have hoped. I mean. as well as I could have hoped given the circumstances. Everyone grew a little bit, no one became an evil megalomaniac, and we all saved the day.

There was a lot to discover late in the game. I’m pretty sure I only got it all because I staunchly refused to move on until I’d completed every single quest and I was dogged in my pursuit, banging my head against each and every puzzle until I figured it out or fought my way through. I found every loophole, fought every mighty beast, read EVERY SINGLE BOOK, and learned a lot about the world. I honestly think that, as much as it was often frustrating and limiting early on, playing as the Dark Urge wound up giving me a very interesting look into the story as a whole. I’m not going to say why, because spoilers, but there were a LOT of close calls along the way and I’m very glad I always forgot I had inspiration to use on rerolls until I was desperate to undo a failure I’d just rolled. This meant I almost always had a full four inspiration when push came to shove. The only time I ever felt like I didn’t have enough Inspiration was towards the end, when I was rolling for a lot of intense Plot Stuff and needed a sereis of ridiculously high rolls to succeed.

There was a lot of stuff in the third act of the game that seemed to call back to the previous games, but I never played any of those and I missed most of it. When it was clear that something was a reference I just wasn’t getting (most of Jaheira’s and Minsc’s stuff, for one), I usually took some time to research the context for it. While all the super important stuff included an automatic History, Religion, or Insight check to provide me the information I needed (though I had what seemed like a 50-50 chance of succeeding those checks and learning what the context was, so they weren’t always super useful), nothing else got explained outside of a few laborious conversation with Jaheira and Minsc as I dug into their backstories. Which didn’t really explain things so much as just provide tidbits of information that answered my questions without telling me what I really wanted to know. Regardless, I usually wasn’t bothered this lack of information very much, but every so often a situation snuck up on me that had me feeling like I was feeling my way through a dark, lightless room.

Probably my favorite part of the final portion of the game was my visit to the House of Hope. There were a lot of memorable moments in there, but the battle at the end of that sequence absolutely takes the cake. It was the most difficult battle in the game since I not only had to keep my characters alive, but someone else. Sure, she wasn’t weak by any means, but all her damage was radiant and that was a rough place to be dealing mostly radiant damage. I nearly wiped my party out in some of the little battles before the climatic one because I hadn’t noticed the buff that dealt damage back to anyone who did radiant damage to the creature with that buff. It was intense and it was one of the few battles I actually lost. I didn’t even have time to think if I could do it better if I just reloaded. The person I was protecting got nuked and then the rest of my party got swarmed by fire damage that ignored fire resistance. It was ridiculous. All while this amazing song played in the background. It was also the only loss that didn’t feel cheap or dumb (I have had so many glitch-deaths that it stopped being funny when I hit a situation where it just kept happening and I eventually had to just push through and resurrect the characters who died after getting through the battle with half my party MIA). It was clear that I was woefully unprepared for the fight and taking a second stab at it went much better. Turns out I was saving all those potions of Universal Resistance for that exact moment. Which is funny since I guess Hellfire ignores Fire Resistance but can’t ignore Everything Resistance.

My least favorite part was the actual end of the game. It felt short and kind of abrupt. I’d have liked to spend a bit more time saying goodbye to people and wrapping up the campaign. I just fought the final boss and then, once that was done, everyone did their final bits of dialogue, indicated what they were going to do after we rested up from that battle, and then it was over. There were a couple tiny vingettes, but that was it. I want more. I know Karlach already got an expanded ending because people were so upset about that absolute ray of sunshine not getting enough time, so I’m hoping we’ll eventually see more from the other characters. Some of this abruptness might be the result of the choices I made (maybe I just wound up with almost entirely paths that had no extended cutscenes or wrap-ups), but it just felt like a let down when I finished it at ten o’clock on the night of September fourth. I want more. I’ll have to pretty much entirely replay the game, though, to get it. Unless I want to replay this character entirely, but with different decisions, an option available to me thanks to my tendency to create new, pun-based save titles every time I hit a major plot point or stop playing for the night.

Anyway, I’ve go a ridiculous number of hours logged to this game now, thanks to the early-access stuff and my stupidly-long playthrough, so I’m going to take a break before I dive in again. Maybe do my second run on the PS5 since it will probably run the game better than my poor old PC could… I’d love to see the game in actually good graphics. Not that my PC was particularly bad. It just struggled with large populations and loading things into the world. The latest patch, filled with optimization tweaks for arc three, specifically, helped a lot, but there was a time when I had a framerate of 1 or 2 while in Baldur’s Gate itself. Upgrading my PC is on my to-do list, but it’s an expensive item and it will be a while before I can act on it. A long while. At least I’ll have the PS5 version to enjoy if I want to be on my couch and cross-save means I don’t have to commit to one form or another. I can swap between PS5 and PC all I want. Which will probably be never. I need some proper couch time after over 130 hours sitting in my computer chair in my little computer closet.