#anyway if you discourse at me on the behalf of a game that won goty I will block you

[dykeishheart]

Baldur's Gate 3 is so fucking wild to approach from the standpoint of criticism because it's such a mixed bag of stuff and so much of it is incredible but just as much of it is terrible. The worst part is that it's unclear how much of either of those is due to the broader legacy of D&D.

Like, in Act 1 you get a really fucking strong story hook that can basically go anywhere, and then it does! The parasite gives you story, characterization, motivation for all kinds of roleplaying, and a plot that feels at once entangled with every single piece of optional content and removed enough to let each disparate piece feel individually impactful. Every minor and major character is affected by the main instigation of the plot, and that is incredibly difficult to pull off in a way that doesn't feel one note.

Then in Act 2 all the threads of seemingly unrelated things snap into sharp focus. The history between the druid's grove and the dark justiciars gets reprised here. The conflicts between the hells, the Gith, and the illithids gets further entrenched. You finally get the big villain reveal, something very difficult to do at the midpoint of a story. The cult is presented in such clarity of scale that it blows away everything you thought coming from Act 1. The open-endedness of the first act is narrowed into a series of reveals that feel deeply and profoundly personal because each one is nested and they all illustrate more of your party members in new light.

The problem though is with the plot itself. The storytelling is remarkable, but take a moment to reflect on what it actually is and you'll see why it's such a bugfuck task to actually critique this game thoroughly. Let's recap: A secret trio of really powerful figures who worship forbidden gods have conspired to use mind control to secure power over the entire Sword Coast so they can live as gods unopposed, and the only way to stop them is for a band of heroes to brandish a religious relic from a racist and xenophobic ethnocult to banish the mind control monsters and take control back from them.

Does this sound familiar to anyone else? Does this maybe sound like the protocols of the elders of Zion?

Now, to be clear, I don't think this was an honest and intentional parallel. But, it is a parallel that exists and feels irresponsible to ignore. The fact that the kabal the cult of the dead three are using mind control to enslave western society the sword coast and can only be defeated by christian faith a religious relic wielded by holy crusaders your party is. Well it's not good.

Further, there is a very broad problem posed by this game being inexorably tied to the lore of The Forgotten Realms. Primarily it is a problem in how the different races are portrayed. This is really old by this point, and to Larian's credit I think they handled the racism inherent in D&D lore about as gracefully as it's possible to without overwriting it entirely. But the fact remains that due to the way the world works in this setting, a LOT of the written in-universe justifications for certain factions behaving the way they do in the plot of Baldur's Gate 3 boils down to race. Why are there so many Drow among the Absolute? Because they're evil. Why are the main enemies in Act 1 goblins and hobgoblins? Because they're evil. Why are the Duergar enemies and the Deep Gnomes slaves? Because Duergar are evil and gnomes are helpless victims. Even if you then write justifications for that later in Act 2 that don't revolve around race it still doesn't change the fact that the evil races are bad guys in your story. Bringing up how the political machinations of the Absolute are the real reason all these people did what they did is almost like saying "look see I made exclusively POC villain gang have a deep backstory, therefore it's not racist" so like, the problem has not been solved.

I don't really have any closing thoughts on this it's just like. Man.