Saturday Morning Gaming: Baldur’s Gate III

I saw that Baldur’s Gate III came out and I was torn on whether I should get it. I mean, I bought the original Baldur’s Gate when it came out, back when Maribou and I were in our first apartment.

Never beat it… but, finally! After a couple of decades and change! The sequel to the sequel came out! But, man, I never actually *BEAT* the original.

I wanted to play a Lawful Good Monk, you see. They have you explore the first area and get your first quest and then go to The City and, along the way, you encounter a couple of Evil Dudes. One is Chaotic Evil, one is Neutral Evil. They offer to join up.

I always declined. I went on to the next area and the first thing that happens is that you get in a fight with a spellcaster who casts a couple of magic missiles at you and you quickly die, being level 1.

“No, no, Jaybird!”, I was told. “You’re supposed to pick up those two guys and have them act as meat shields for the spells. Then you can kill the oppositional bad guys as your companion bad guys get killed!”

And I found myself asking “Who, exactly, is Chaotic Evil here?”

Anyway, Icewind Dale came out and I put together a *PERFECT* group of adventurers and HOLY COW IT IS THE BEST GAME EVER. Difficulty is set up just right. You have meat shields, you have archers, you have spellslingers. A few years later, Neverwinter Nights came out and it was even better. If you find yourself going up against a magic user who uses magic missile, you find a “shield” scroll about a minute beforehand. It’s awesome and it feels *FAIR*. Anyway, I became an Icewind Dale/NWN partisan (and then a NWN2 partisan).

Baldur’s Gate was one of those great games that I knew about, had purchased, but never beat but always kind of wish that I had. Hey. Maybe I could have been a fighter. 18 Constitution? Maybe that guy could have taken a hit to the chest with a couple of magic missiles, right?

Alas.

Anyway, Baldur’s Gate III came out and I was wondering “should I even really look at it? I mean, I never even beat the first one despite being old enough to have done so.”

But then I looked at the reviews and saw this:

Okay. Sold.

So the first thing I want to do is check out whether I can make *MY* Lawful Good Monk. And… well… here’s my experience with Character Creation. I boot up the game and it makes me register my game a second time and I have to go through the ordeal of coming up with a login that isn’t “Jaybird” (because that’s taken, of course) and getting through some ads and then, finally, logging in and seeing the game ask me:

Show nudity? Calm down! We just met! But then I thought: Would this be a *PROPER* review if I didn’t say “yes”? So, in the interest of making sure that everything was covered, I picked “yes”. For science.

Then we got into the character creation proper. What body type do you want?

We have two variants of two kinds. There’s muscular and *REALLY* muscular. Nope, “fat” is not an option.

Okay. Let’s take the less muscular of the other kind.

Let’s change his face…

Let’s change his hair…

Oh, and he’s missing something…

Perfect.

Now we just have to pick a job… They have all of the big ones:

But the one that I want is *MONK*.

Ah. Perfection. You get to pick your background:

One of the things that I noticed was that you do *NOT* get to spend hours rolling your dice over and over again. You get points. You get 27 points. You get to spend your 27 points however you please. There is nothing you can do to get 28. There is nothing you can do to get 26. You get 27.

So you can’t spend a couple of hours rolling dice.

Pity.

That was always my favorite part of Icewind Dale.

But now you have your dude, now you have your stats, now you have your background, now you have your class… And so now you are ready to click “NEXT”.

And then the game says “now make your guardian”.

And I don’t have the strength.

Maybe tomorrow.

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is a screenshot of BG3’s Menu Screen. All screenshots taken by the author.)