Why I Refuse to Play Baldur's Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t just one of the best RPGs to release this year, but it might just receive Game of the Year honors. Not only that, it’s hit rarified air on Metacritic, tying for the second highest score of all PC games, landing a single point behind Disco Elysium (another game I need to play…).

The game appears to check every box that I want in a video game:

• Strong stories like Final Fantasy
• Freedom of choice to create unique playthroughs like Mass Effect
• Twitch integration to have your viewers mess with you a la Crowd control
• It even lives in the world of Dungeons & Dragons which I want to learn more about

Quite frankly, it sounds like a perfect game squarely within my wheelhouse. I could see myself sinking hundreds of hours into it.

And that’s why I need to stay away from it for as long as possible.

As I discussed last week, I struggle to find the time for gaming as it is. Not only does my backlog of games that I want to play continue to grow, the ones I’m playing right now provide plenty of distraction enough, especially considering the way I play RPGs or any type of open-world game.

When I play those games, I dive all the way in and don’t plow my way through the main story. If you’ve watched any of my Tears of the Kingdom streams, you’re well aware of this. In fact, one of my recent VoDs shows nothing but me getting distracted by those red exclamation point markers denoting a new quest. Add on being rewarded for exploring Hyrule and finding Koroks and Shrines and it’s easy to see why I’m a big sucker for those kinds of game loops.

I’ve found that diving into games in this manner can elevate a mediocre game for me. I feel like Final Fantasy XIII and XV fit that bill as well as a more action-based game like Assassin’s Creed III. Sometimes, it backfires gloriously.

Mass Effect: Andromeda is the best recent example that I streamed. I so desperately wanted to go all-in to the lore of settling a new galaxy and uncovering the secrets of its history. While I got to build and establish colonies, the rewards for doing so were incredibly meh at best.

To add insult to injury, it barely affected the story at all. These colonies just existed. So much so that if you maxed this part of the game out, you got a cutscene that did nothing more than say a planet is named after you. Yay?

You get to that point by doing various quests around each planet. On rare occasions, you’d get some really cool lore about the history of this strange galaxy. More often than not, the quests were pointless fetch quests built in to pad your playtime and try to trick you into thinking you had this huge open world to play in.

Diablo IV, which I’m playing off-stream currently has the same issue. Every time I saw a blue exclamation point denoting a side quest, I did it. The more I did so, the more I felt like I was being suckered in to Mass Effect: Andromeda’s filler bullshit.

When I went into Act 2 as level 42, I felt something was ridiculously amiss, especially when another play would run by me at half my level, riding a mount which I haven’t unlocked. It turns out that, if you focus on the story only, you could be in Act 4 at around levels 25-30.

I had so far to go and barely saw any reward for my in-depth gameplay. Not only do enemies scale with your level, removing any benefit from an over-leveling romp, the higher-tier renown rewards, which you get from sidequesting, are all locked until you beat the main story.

Needless to say, I’m now just doing the main story because I’m not repeating that mistake again.

I bring all that up to make this point: if I’m willing to already throw hours upon hours that I barely have simply in the hopes that I feel like I’m fully immersed and rewarded by a game…what’s going to happen when I actually am?! I know exactly what will happen: I’ll play ungodly amounts of time for the next few years like I have with the main Mass Effect trilogy.

I have a real bad habit of trying to clean on to the next bright, shiny object in gaming and completely derailing everything else that I’m working on, including current Extra Life playthroughs.

I refuse to play BG3 for that reason. Once I do, I fear I may never return.

This Week’s Schedule

The Notre Dame sims start tomorrow and I’ll be in-person at MiracleCon in Oklahoma!

$75K Stream = Huge Success

Once corporate matching hits, y’all will have helped me raise nearly a combined $1,200 for Extra Life and the Maui Strong fund in just a single night!

I had a blast and I can’t wait to schedule the next Crowd Control stream in September!

For transparency, here are my Crowd Control revenue numbers. The $44 was what I started with from Beta testing that hadn’t yet been paid out and was added to the top number which was purely from Friday night’s stream.