A Passionate Critique of Baldur's Gate III (with personal redesigns!)

I love roleplaying games. The promise of a roleplaying game is simple: no matter what you are or who you choose to be in this story, you have a right to participate. Obviously, a video game cannot account for the full breadth of player creativity like a GM could in a pen and paper campaign, but within its set parameters it should seek to embolden it, encourage the player to see past the limits of their own creativity in the best of cases.

This article is divided into two parts, the first being my character design notes of what the cast would look like in my perfect world, and the second part interrogating the old and harmful design principles the game upholds, something that tarnished my overall enjoyment of the game after having put more then 200 hours into it over the last three years.

PART 1/ DESIGN NOTES:

*Please bear in mind that I drew the main cast while playing Early Access, and thus much of the characters' end-product-personalities were not yet accessible and Karlach was not around for much later.

Astarion: In my Palace of Heaven this man has a charming Southern drawl. He is a B-side Disney villain. I realize his whole *thing* is being a seductive vampire assassin, sure, but I see no reason why being an old and fat elf can't be a desirable thing in this fantasy world. He was tortured and starved, so what? Don't vampires retain the features they had when they were turned? I rest my fucking case.

Shadowheart: NEEDS. MORE. GOTH! 80s tradgoth, with thick, smeared eyeliner. Bigger hair to hide her precious secrets. On that note, I think she should have shaved her head in Act 3 for her act of aesthetic devotion towards Shar. The middle part was a serious downgrade from her blunt bangs. My vision of her is also gnomish, perhaps half-gnome.

Lae'zel: In general, gith features feel a smidge lukewarm in terms of what could be done for a race that survives amongst the stars, I wanted to stretch out her limbs and make her more gaunt to advance the feeling of "alienness". I also modeled her armor after the silhouette of a football player's get-up, with a jockish oiled pomp to match.

Wyll (+Mizora): Wanted to retain his noble, Baldurian bearing while injecting a sort of vagabond samurai energy into his choice of clothing. A long cloak is much more mysterious. For Mizora, I went more with a medieval-manuscript-type devil, perhaps still welcoming in the way an elegant cat might be. I don't think there's any reason why devils have to look so much like humans.

Gale: I love classic wizards. I think utter devotion and passion to a craft can make you forget to do things like comb your hair or eat right or *checking notes* have an inexplicable six pack? Larian's on my shit-list for that, too. He should have bad posture from nights poring over books, seem like someone who has a distinctly stale smell about him from the old parchments and ancient weapons he's surrounded with. Larian gave him greying hair, but I wish this guy was actually an old guy. (Then maybe I wouldn't mind the six-pack so much, hm? OK, I'm sorry.)

Orin: performative nature of shapeshifting -> dancer, meeting a more ancient sort of beauty standard, beading like blood droplets, “ballroom hair” gelled to skull and loose braids like entrails

Thorm: huge DS2 King Vendrick inspiration, visibly “hollowed out” ribcage design indicating loss of what he once loved and valued, visibly mummified (surely necromancy doesn’t restore all features of the living), more imposing silhouette, more skeletal references in armor

Gortash: “Panic! at the Disco meets Bollywood”, an upturned collar resembling a cobra hood (the man’s a snake), an emblem-speckled torso of false achievements branching down into flaring golden tassels, exaggerated nobility, much thicker outer coat of a luxurious textile befitting an archduke

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PART 2 / OPTIONAL RANT AHEAD:

EVERYONE IS BEAUTIFUL, AND I HATE IT:

I wish more people would express concern about why Larian's choice of companions draws solely from the tall, humanoid category of races at their disposal, why there is no option to choose a heavy build for your character, why there are so few elderly and fat characters populating the world as a whole aside from one-off monsters and villains. In appealing to the broadest demographic of modern players, this grand fantasy adventure is done a massive disservice to the breadth of creativity fantasy should strive to achieve. It is too stained by the vanities and close-mindedness of the real world, when there should be no reason why the people who by random chance happened to be snatched up by a mind-flayer ship and sent on an epic quest with us could not be fat, older, a gnome, or otherwise looking much unlike a swimsuit model. Why have we gone backwards from only women party members suffering scrutiny on passing some arbitrary hotness test to now both men and women having to contend with it?

ROMANCE IS THE WIN STATE:

Guys, I hate to be a shitter but I think all this emphasis placed on how fuckable our travelling companions need to be detracts from all the other ways in which we could be empathizing with them. And seriously, it needs to be addressed, are the awkwardly-staged sex scenes for players who do not possess the imagination needed to figure out how it would go down for themselves? It's deeply belittling and immersion-breaking, considering it reduces your own character to a rigged mannequin to be performed at. Their angle of approach in DOS2, with an older British man relaying it to you in a narrative format was at least entertaining and more colorfully rendered than two dolls hover-grinding on each other.

I SAVE BABIES / I KILL BABIES / I DO NOT CARE OF BABIES (UNLESS THERE'S COIN):

Morality in Baldur's Gate III also feels hilariously unexplored as a concept. This is another fault of the way D&D is set up I believe, by creating an alignment system that has you from the outset determining how much or how little your character approves of things like mass slaughter and how uptight they are about enacting it. I remember being shocked at the blanket alignments assigned to the playable races in the D&D guidebooks (dwarves tend to be good, orcs tend to be evil). When coming to a dialogue tree in BGIII, I often looked at the options on offer and had to gawk at how plain-faced and poorly-worded they were. If you played an "evil" character with the "Dark Urge" origin as I did my first run, a new way of speaking became available to you. Mainly, your character could remark in the middle of most regular conversations "sorry, wasn't listening, too busy fantasizing about brushing my teeth with your bones and using your blood to rinse". Except not as exciting and much more like a creature of camp from the 80s. I would be completely fine with this if the game reflected camp in any capacity visually. It's a game that feels simultaneously stuck in the past and hideously modern. Truly, the worst of both worlds.

*RANT OVER*

I thank all you lovely people to be supporting me still, I promise I am working on BIG THINGS and will be excited to share this with you all soon! I am planning much behind-the-scenes content on this upcoming comic, so I hope that will make up for the small period of radio silence on here.

Much light,

Casper