When I first decided to play Baldur’s Gate 3 earlier this year, it was for a number of reasons. It had been a while since I played a solid video game. I was coming out of a mental health spiral and felt like I had some energy to put into fun again. But mostly, it was because…
While doing some bookkeeping work associated with my Baldur's Gate 3 blog posts, I came across a prediction from an anthropologist. Background that you'll already know if you read any of my BG3 posts in the past year: back in playthrough 8, I named a hireling after a friend of mine. The hireling was Arctic Druid Angela;…
Multiplayer technical problems Playthrough 1/14 was marked with a number of technical problems. I hope that by going over them, I can spare you from the same difficulties in your own multiplayer BG3 playthroughs. Here's the TL;DR version, if you want to skip this section and move on to the next: According to Larian, and our own…
Approval One major issue with our multiplayer stories was with approval. Every non-player character has an approval rating of the protagonist. What we learned in this playthrough is that each player character in multiplayer BG3 has a separate approval rating. By far the biggest adjustments of a character's approval come during the cutscenes. A cutscene will involve…
Scratch Real Angela loves dogs. One of her closest and dearest friends is Hodor, a floppy dog who's mostly folds. As we approached the location where a player could meet Scratch for the first time, I went into all-out overly-dramatic mode: "This is it. The most important quest in the game. Nothing is more important, not even…
The other characters When I play BG3, I play a role. In my first playthrough, I played Jank Halversen, a stereotypical slimy Bard. Assuming a role other than myself comes naturally to me, from years of playing table-top role-playing games, LARPs, and working at the NY Ren Faire. That's why I can indulge in the silly fantasy…
Note: I have received Angela's specific permission to use her name and images I've captured during our playthroughs in my blog posts. Another note: I originally wrote this as one long essay. As with playthrough 13, I've split it into multiple posts to hopefully make it easier to read. This Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough did not take…
In April 2025, Larian Studios released Patch 8 for Baldur's Gate 3. The two biggest changes introduced by the patch were: Cross-play - This means that it was now possible to have multi-player games in which some gamers were on desktop computers and others were on consoles. Previously, multi-player games were restricted to just one of those…
TL;DR: I never should have purchased this game. Warning As I type these words, I'm filled with "gamer's rage." If you're not a video gamer, you may not understand this. If you are, you're familiar with the feeling: The one that makes you pray that a game's designers suffer from spontaneous castration due to various unrelated causes.…
This is part 5 in a series of 5 posts. Start from the first one if you want this post to make sense. Bear in mind that I’m Wiccan. When I talk about the Wicked Witch Sandalwood, it's just a story. This is not a SPOILER ALERT! Sandalwood asked me not to issue any spoiler warnings. She…