Recommending new games to my wife after she rolled credits on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3 has been as tough as the Dark Urge resisting the compulsion to rip off Gale's arm.
Larian's masterpiece was the first game to really grab her and refuse to let go — at least, the first in her adulthood. As a kid, she only had a couple of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Game Boy Advance games, so she and her siblings poured hour after hour into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario World: Super Ma꧟rio Advance 2. That was more out of the necessity of boredom than any particular love for that game and, now that she has access to the hundreds of titles in my library across Steam, PS5, Switch, and Xbox Game Pass, she's rarely shown interest in playing any of them.
How Different Would Baldur's Gate 3 Be With The Dark Urge As A Companion?
I෴f you don't play as The Dark Urge, you'll never meet him, but Baldur's Gate 3 ✃could do with his brand of chaos.
The Road To Baldur's Gate 3
But, Baldur's Gate 3 was different. It started with me just talking to her about the game, relaying the little stories that emerged as I made my way through Act 1 on PC, talking about how I ran into some ogres who I convinced to become on-call members of my party. Then, later, about how I summoned them at the exact wrong time, causing my ogres to focus on fighting the spiders I had already recruited to my team instead of my actual opponents. She had played some D&D (and listened to a lot of Critical Role) and hearing my stories got her intജerested in trying out a game that seemed to be effectively translating that tabletop experience.
So, we bought another copy of Baldur's Gate 3, this time on PS5, and started a co-op campaign. That lasted for a few sessions, but she wanted to play more often than I did (I still had my main campaign to finish after all), and eventually she was playing hours and hours of BG3 by herself. Though I had a 60-hour head start, she finished the game before I did — I'm still stalled out in Act 3, too busy with other, smaller games to give the mammoth RPG the time it deserves. She had the benefit of only caring about one game, and she gave it big chunks of her free time until she finally finished it with roughly 200 hours invested.
Starting With The Best
A new hobby had taken root, but where could she go from there? The natural games to recommend were other choice-driven RPGs with a fantasy bent, so I introduced her to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire (which, bonus points, includes the cast of Critical Role) and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Divinity: Original Sin 2 (the🧔 previous game from Larian which shares a lot of DNA with BGไ3). Neither took.
The problem was that, by starting with Baldur's Gate 3, she’d already experienced the apex of the genre. You may like other isometric RPGs better — 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Disco Elysium, for example, is different enough that it's not really worthwhile to compare them — but none are operating at the scale Baldur's Gate 3 is. Other CRPGs may have voice acting, but it's rare for all dialogue to be voiced. Other CRPGs may have the occasional cutscene, but it's unheard of for a game with this many branching paths to have animated cutscenes for every conversation. No game, until now, has combined the flexibility of an isometric RPG with the presentation of a game like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Mass Effect. It will be difficult to sell my wife on any older RPG going forward. Regardless of quality, she'll probably feel they're missing something.
Instead, she's settled on another "unicorn" game: Red Dead Redemption 2. Like Baldur's Gate 3, RDR2 was made at a scale and level of detail that no other studio could achieve. In Red Dead's case, that means a ridiculous amount of animations and a teeming world filled with animals, but the size of the accomplishment is the same. Maybe that's the only way forward after playing a game like Baldur's Gate 3: to play something completely different, but just as seismic.
