'The Game Just Fundamentally Undermines Itself': Game Designer Breaks Down 'Baldur's Gate 3's Most Fatal Flaws

Yeah, I agreed with the headline, hoping to see some discussion about how the game doesn't have a finished evil route and how bugs or failures of logic can cause the game to unfold in ways that don't actually make a lot of sense. Instead, we have this purist "save-scumming is bad" perspective hiding behind a sense of academic authority.

I do think the narrative really breaks down in act 3. I do think the game fails to give your actions in the first two acts weight. Murder-hoboing your way to Baldur's Gate, or consuming a shit-ton of theoretically inherently evil tadpoles never gets in the way of you simply defeating the grand evil at the end of the game and making all your previous decisions inconsequential, and I think that's a failure of the game Baldur's Gate 3 was intended to be. In this way, I do think the game undermines itself; you can't both set out to be a grand adventure where all of your decisions are supposed to shape you and your world, and refuse to let the players actions result in actual consequences. But it doesn't come from inconsistency in dialogue or a perceived lack of information.

Hell, the authors whole argument regarding the failures of the combat system doesn't even hold water. Perhaps the most egregious case of having a "correct" method of winning a fight is the golem at the forge in the Underdark, and nothing stooped me from killing that boss, on tactician difficulty, using strictly my evergreen tools. The achievement popping up and telling me that I failed to realize I could use the giant hammer in the center of the forge to functionally skip the fight is the only reason I knew I did it "wrong", and in part thanks to the achievement, I felt accomplished in doing so. I genuinely don't think there's any moment in the game that decidedly punishes you for trying to rely on your bread and butter combat tactics, beyond increasing the challenge presented by an encounter while still keeping it very winnable.

Analyzing whether Baldur's Gate 3 is a "good" or "bad" game, definitively, is just not a simple concept, even within the confines of the author's method. Player action has a massive impact on whether they find success or failure in combat, puzzle-solving, exploration and individual story-beat/dialogue. There are win and loss conditions, there are tensions created in getting to those outcomes, and by-and-large, players have the tools and knowledge at their disposal to reach the outcome they want while avoiding others. In a "bigger picture" sense, I would argue that some of these qualities break down; decisions fail to have meaning as you approach the end of the game, which is a problem that could reasonably contribute to one calling it a "bad game", ie player action failing to determine outcome. If one wanted to focus on that perpsective, a reasonable argument could be made, but at best we're cherry picking and giving weight to one quality that matters immensely to some observers and less to others. So is it a perfect game? An immaculate one? Absolutely not; it fails to do one of the major things it set out to do. Is it a bad game? Absolutely not. It is, by all means, good, as a game, even under the terms the author of this article sets.

I’m not very far into BG and never have played tabletop DnD, but it has shown me how much “on rails” and handholding there is in many open world RPG games. Currently I have multiple ways of fulfilling my main mission and no idea which is better or right. It’s a circumstance I’ve never seen in another game and did catch me off guard a bit at first and was maybe slightly frustrating, as I want to make the right choices, but I thought of how it would play out in a tabletop game where the players really do not know and see it more like a choose your own adventure now.