Baldur’s Gate 3 Gets Better The More You Understand Dungeons & Dragons
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
Given how immensely popular Baldur’s Gate 3 was when it fully launched in 2023, I think it’s easy to forget that the journey there had a lot of us playing the first act of the game for the better part of three years. In that time, the idea of playing Dungeons & Dragons was seeded within me, growing more and more annoying and harder to ignore by the day as it dug its roots into my brain. By the time I actually finished a full co-op run in October 2023 (I have kids, it took a while, forgive me), I’d also fallen into watching Dimension 20. Before long, my desire to play Dungeons & Dragons had become a full creepy eldritch tree that wasn’t letting me think about much else.
You can imagine my joy when I got an invite into a mate’s group, and we’ve been playing at least twice a week since. I did try to pick up Baldur’s Gate 3 again to do an evil playthrough, but it just wasn’t the same; it lacked all of the stuff I love about D&D, namely the very silly voices and the fully reactive world. The change in immersion from “I choose what to say from a list,” to “I say what I want at any given time” is one that video games just can’t compete with. So, at this point, I just sort of assumed that Baldur’s Gate 3 was done for me.
Despite that, the news about patch 8 started to trickle out, and by gumbo, I couldn’t help but want to play with the new subclasses (even though mods have added them in unofficial capacity already, and I’ve ended up playing with mods anyway). I was apprehensive about how much I’d enjoy it, but it turns out learning D&D back-to-front actually means I’m substantially better at Baldur’s Gate 3 now, and more importantly, I completely understand the dice that are rolling in the background.
