Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game about making choices. Encounter an imposing, demonic creature in the depths of a cavernous underground temple and, depending on how the player has created their character, the monster may be convinced to kill off its hellish accompanying soldiers and even banish itself back to the inferno. The enemy might also be defeated more conventionally, with slashes from a sword and blasts of electricity, knocking over barrels of grease and setting the battlefield on fire.
Find the player character tasked with retrieving an important item locked away in a well-guarded room and it’s possible to sneak in to retrieve it, perhaps lie effectively enough to be granted entry, or, once again, simply turn everything surrounding that protected room into a bloodbath.
The Baldur’s Gate series began in 1998, created by BioWare, the studio that would go on to make popular role-playing series Mass Effect and Dragon Age. The first two games (Baldur’s Gate 2 was released in 2000) established BioWare as one of the foremost developers of a clunkily named subgenre: the “computer role-playing game” or CRPG. As BioWare’s post-Gate work increasingly blended direct action with role-playing, though, it drifted away from the statistics- and text-heavy subgenre, which found itself relegated to a niche in the market. Fans had to look to the work of developers like Belgium’s Larian Studios, which found success with sprawling, traditional CRPGs like 2014’s Divinity: Original Sin and its 2017 sequel, Original Sin II, for games made in what seemed to be a dying design ethos.
This summer, Larian took over where BioWare left off nearly 23 years ago and released Baldur’s Gate 3. To the surprise of many, this modern CRPG has found an enormous player base, breaking records on computer game storefronts and receiving widespread acclaim.
Spend a bit of time with the game and it’s not difficult to see why it’s caught on. Baldur’s Gate 3 is not only a throwback to a style of role-playing design enjoyed by those already won over by past games, but a fresh argument for its approach to RPGs. It makes what’s always been compelling about the subgenre accessible to players who might otherwise have been put off by the learning curve of seemingly impenetrable games.
The allure of CRPGs has always been the enormous range of choices—in combat, in exploration, in conversation, in interactive character development—afforded by their design. It’s a subgenre based on the guided creativity enabled by table-top RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons that foregoes the need to get a group of equally committed friends together for regular sessions with a complex board game. (The Baldur’s Gate series, in fact, takes place in a Dungeons & Dragons setting and is based on its design rule set.) Player drawn to the free-form exploration of an open-world game, the grand-scale, interactive stories of a mainstream RPG, or the flexibility in combat offered by many modern action games can find all of these elements wrapped up in a CRPG.
