Who's up for another round of "Yesterday In Baldur's Gate"? No-one? Tough! It's all I've got.
My played time now stands at a terrifying fifty-five hours, of which I very much doubt even as much as an hour was idle time. It also appears that I'm still in "Act 1" which, if true, and if the acts were all to be of roughly equal length, would suggest a final running length of somewhere around a hundred and fifty hours.
I'm guessing what it means is either that I'm spending a huge proportion of my time doing things I probably don't need to be doing, or that the three acts are not of equal length. Possibly both.
How Long To Beat has a "Completionist" run coming in at 179 hours, with a brisk trot through just the main storyline taking a little less than half that long. They also show something called "Main + Extra" at 115 hours although what that means, exactly, is anyone's guess.
Is this a good thing? Should a single video game take up that much of anyone's time? It certainly isn't necessary to take that long for a game to feel like something special. I completed Disco Elysium in forty hours and that felt like a major event. Broken Sword 5 lasted sixteen hours and Cloudpunk, which I found very absorbing, took me just eleven hours. Quality over quantity, I guess, although I suppose it's a bit rich to balk at both together.
Games eat each other, though. Since I started playing BG3, I've put in far more hours than I'd been used to doing for months, if not years, but I've also played nothing else. Regular readers may remember I was quite happily trundling along in EverQuest II, with vague plans of taking several characters through the new expansion over the rest of the winter. Well, that's not happening.
Of course, EQII will still be there when I finish Baldur's Gate 3. Probably. We hope. If anything's going on there now that I ought to know about, though, I'm missing it.
I'm not completely wrapped up in Faerun. I got an email from Artix about a giveaway in AdventureQuest 3D that was tempting enough to get me to log in, even though I really don't play that game much at the best of times. When someone offers to give you a bunch of cash shop money just for logging in, though, it's rude to ignore them.
But that only took five minutes. Other than that, it's been BG3, all day, every day. It's compelling but also confusing, which is quite a strong combo for me. I do like not really knowing what's going on in a game.
Take that three-act structure for a start. I'm not sure it exists, formally, inside the game but it's referenced everywhere outside it and I have clearly misunderstood how it works until very recently. I was sure there was a hard transition between the "Mountain" zone and the "Wilderness" and I think there probably is but the transition evidently isn't where I thought it was.
I've spent a very great deal of time in the area in and around the Githyanki Creche and the semi-ruined temple where it's hidden. I thought that was in Act 2 but it's not. I thought it was on the other side of the mountain pass, too, but it's not that, either. And I thought it was going to be the end of my game but it turned out I was mistaken. Bloody close call, though!
As I almost always do in RPGs that let you form a party as you go along, I'm sticking with the first characters I met. I know you're supposed to swap them in and out but I almost never do that. I stay loyal to the ones I've got, even if they're useless. I only really drop someone if I find them too offensive in some way to put up with.
My team has been Gale the Wizard, Lae'zel the Fighter and Shadowheart the Cleric from the start. I have a bunch of would-be companions in camp but they never get to come adventuring with me. I'm comfortable with the team I've got.
It's almost mutual. I like all three of my team and two of them like me. Shadowheart isn't so sure, mostly because I friend-zoned her. Twice.
That bit at the start of the game, where you can toggle off Sex and Violence, doesn't go far enough in my opinion. I was hoping it would mean no shenanigans in camp but my character has been propositioned several times, which is not my idea of an adventure.And I'm not having any of it. So to speak.
A refusal often offends, as the oh-so-witty sign in too many gift shops likes to warn us, but luckily a firm "No" doesn't seem to have offended Shadowheart enough to make her pack her hammer and leave. In a way it wouldn't be so bad if she did because she's certainly the weak link in the squad. I though clerics were supposed to be good at healing but she seems more like a trained first-aider than a battlefield medic. She also can't hit the side of a barn door with that hammer...
I like her, though. And I like Gale. But I like Lae'zel best of all, which is why, when we found ourselves unexpectedly embroiled in a long sub-plot involving her opportunity to Do The Right Thing by her Queen-Goddess, I backed her all the way. Another reason for Shadowheart to take against me, now I come to think of it.
Anyway, I cheered Lae'zel on while the crazy doctor tried to get the tadpole out with her organic crab machine and we broke it, which led to a fight that did not go well for the doctor. Then I backed Lae'zel in her obviously doomed but very proper attempt to tell the Creche Boss the doctor had been a wrong 'un and that's why we killed her. He didn't buy it so we had to kill him, too.
He wanted the Artefact that was keeping us all alive and which is something super-important to Shadowheart for... reasons... so I gave it to him.
Hmm. I'm beginning to see why Shadowheart's going off me now...
He called the Queen, who made us an offer we couldn't refuse. Well, we could have but she'd have killed us.
Of course, she was always going to kill us anyway, that was obvious, but you try to spin it out, don't you? I kept backing every play Lae'zel made, right up to the very end, when we got sent into the Planes to kill the Mysterious Presence who's been saving us every so often and instead of fighting back, she bared her neck and said we could kill her if that's what we wanted and that finally turned out to be the line I wouldn't cross, even for Lae'zel (Who also wanted to sleep with me, by the way, but who took my refusal a lot better than Shadowheart.).
We went back to the Creche and told the Queen. She was Not Happy. She told the Inquisitor and his gang to kill us and then vanished. At this point none of us had many spells left and we were all quite badly injured so, obviously, I thought that was it.
Except it wasn't. By the simple expedient of using every speed-increasing option available and running like hell, I managed to get far enough back into the main part of the Creche for Instant Travel to start working again, then I ported back to camp.
Just me. Everyone else was dead.
I was considering whether to load an earlier save or just recruit a whole new team, when I remembered that leather-faced ghoul who hangs around at the back of the camp. Didn't he say something about bringing my people back from the dead, for a fee?
Yes he did and it wasn't even a lot. 600 gold and he rezzed all three of them in the camp and it was like the whole thing had never happened. The script made a vague attempt at dealing with the anomaly but it wasn't convincing. It wasn't until we all went back the next day, at full health, and killed the Inquisitor like the script assumed we'd already done that the dialog started making sense again.
Then, since we were there anyway, we cleared out the entire Creche and looted everything. That took a while. Lae'zel, who seems to be an absolute mistress of self-deception, somehow squared all of that with her upbringing and religion and now she loves me more than ever. Even Shadowheart is willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, since we still have the Artefact and no-one stayed dead.
And now, as far as I can tell, we really have done everything there is to do in Act I, or at least everything any of us cares much about, so after I post this we'll be going through the Real Mountain Pass and into the Real Act 2. Probably.
I imagine things will only get more confusing from there.
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