This wasn't going to be a post about Baldur's Gate 3. It was going to be a more general grab-bag of media stuff. That's not quite how it turned out.
I'm still playing BG3, although I haven't actually played any video games at all for nearly three days, which is something of a peace-time record for me. I won't bother with the details of why I haven't been playing, most of which relate to work, illness and responsibilities, but the plain fact is, I haven't had the time, the energy or the inclination to log in these last few days.
Before that, though, and since the last time I posted about BG3, I was playing a lot. The main plot progresses even though I'm not particularly trying to push through it. It turns out in Act III just about everything circles back to the central narrative, even when it looks like it won't.
There have been some very significant battles, some of which turned out to be a whole lot easier than I was expecting, something for which much of the credit goes to two years of accrued experience as recorded on the internet. I haven't specifically been following walkthroughs but I have been skimming guides and wikis to see if there are things I should know or ought to avoid. It makes a big difference.
So does running through the opening couple of turns of a big fight to see exactly who the enemies are and what they can do, saving as I go, then going back to the beginning and altering my tactics accordingly. It absolutely is cheating but it's a lot more fun than taking two hours to do a huge fight properly and then losing. If I do it that way, I have to redo it anyway so how is that any purer?
The fight that most surprised me was the one with Orin. I really, really hate Orin. She's utterly obnoxious, with no charm or wit or any kind of mitigating factor to dilute her sheer unpleasantness. I'd been very keen to kill her for a while so when I finally found her lair I was looking forward to getting into it with her...
...and then she turned into some bat-winged monstrosity with what looked like complete invulnerability to everything I could throw at her. I had a few experimental tries, stopping as soon as it was obvious my team was going to be obliterated, then I decided it was completely hopeless and gave up.
I went to do something else instead because even at this late stage there's always something else to do. Only I was still wondering how the heck anyone was supposed to beat an opponent who has seven layers of invulnerability that refresh every turn. It seemed very unfair.
So I went and looked it up and it turns out it's not because she doesn't.
What she has is invulnerability to seven attacks per turn and every strike of a multiple-part attack strips one of the layers. I'm still not sure if that's clear from the in-game description but it makes one hell of a difference. All you really need to do is have someone blast her with a low-level spell like Magic Missile that comes in six or seven bursts for one cast and then she's vulnerable to everything else that hits her.
Which in my case was Lae'zel, hasted, standing next to her and battering her with a Silver Sword. Orin literally didn't get a single action before she was dead. It was extremely satisfying.
It would have been nice if all her little minions dropped dead of shock but of course they didn't. It took a good long time to clear the rest of them up but none of my party died so I count that as a clean win.
Unfortunately, I chose both to loot Orin's corpse and release the captive prisoner the moment she died, then save in case something bad happened. Then the fight went on for a while and after it was all over I couldn't figure out what had happened to the hostage so that meant more googling.
I found her eventually and spoke to her. I've rescued so many people now, I forget where she was. Most of the people I save aren't where they're supposed to be by the time I want to talk to them. I'm used to it now.
I hadn't even been sure who the victim was. Every one of the accounts of the fight I've read talk about the hostage being one of your Companions, someone who could have joined your party, had you not left them languishing back at camp.
All my companions were still twiddling their thumbs by the fire. The only one that was missing was the little girl with the cat, another waif I rescued at some point and offered sanctuary.
She'd been hanging out with Withers, the leather-faced not-a-mummy who does all the resurrections. They seemed like an unlikely couple but they looked like they were getting on pretty well so I left them to it until one day the kid just vanished. I asked Withers where she'd gone and he said something about how she'd found out I knew her parents were dead and lied about it so she didn't want anything more to do with me, which seemed fair enough. I mean, I was going to tell her but the time never seemed right.
Well, it turns out he was wrong and in fact Orin had crept into the camp, killed the cat and kidnapped the girl. If I didn't already have good reason to hate her... (Also, Orin did at one point impersonate the girl and tell me a horrific tale about Orin making her eat her cat before I saw through her little ruse but then Orin does that sort of thing a lot and I never take much notice.)
Anyway, it seems all is good between my character and the girl... what is her name? Yenna! That's it. She's back at the camp now, cooking soup for all of us. She seems pretty untraumatized, considering. In my head-cannon she's going to adopt the dog, Scratch, who I picked up right at the start and who lives in the camp and they'll be best buddies now the cat's gone.
So that was one fight. There have been a whole bunch of others. One very satisfying one was the top floor of the fireworks factory, which I did almost completely from the outside, lobbing fireballs through the open window and watching the entire stock of fireworks explode and kill half the people inside before the rest made it out the door, where we picked them off from the tower opposite.
I've worked out that in many cases the best tactic is to start the fight from outside a choke point like a doorway and force all the enemies to come to you. The AI and the pathing in BG3 is good but it's far from infallible. Often the enemies can't figure out how to get to you and they never know where their own traps are so they frequently arrive half-dead from their own ordnance. Which is nice.
These are the kinds of games within the game that keep me going now the basic plot has collapsed under its own weight. I think the shark-jumping moment for me was when I found that now I'm supposed to go down below the city to recruit a Brass Dragon to join me in the final battle. That just felt like someone wasn't taking the whole thing seriously any more so why should I?
That's where I am now, anyway. I feel as though it's not impossible I might get to the end although how the last battle is going to work with all the allies I've acquired I can't even imagine. Every turn is going to take about an hour.
Or of course I could just shelve the whole thing and wait for the TV show. HBO has greenlit a series set in Baldur's Gate after the game finishes so presumably there'll be a recap of what happened.
The showrunner is Craig Mazin, the guy behind The Last Of Us, which I haven't seen but which seems to get good notices. No information on when it will be out but I would imagine 2027 at the very earliest.
Luckily for me, long before then I will finally be able to watch HBO legally. Only today I saw the announcement that HBOMax is launching in the UK next month. About bloody time!
There are a bunch of subscription options, starting with the ad-supported cheapie at £4.99 and going all the way up to Premium at £14.99. I'll probably take the £9.99 Standard package with no ads. I've just dropped my Apple+ sub because neither Mrs Bhagpuss or I was using it so the timing is good. There's plenty on HBO I'd like to see. Or there used to be, anyway. I can't say I've checked for a while.
I'll get on that right now.
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