People who play RPGs like to say that RPGs are more fun when you accept the consequences of your actions. Don't upload a save file just because you failed the persuasion test and got into a fight. Let your failures drive the story! Accept the consequences! Before starting Baldur's Gate 3, I told myself that I would continue on this righteous path. I stated, no scum save
At first, I dispensed with my habit as prudence. This is Larian sandbox RPG. It has bugs, it's crashed a few times, and bugs can lead to mass killings. Saving after each fight is actually a way to keep score in the event of a technical failure. It's not "saving the wreck", which originally referred to roguelike savings support to escape permanent death, now generally refers to saving before taking a risk, so, if you don't like what happens, you can rewind time and change your options or try to get better dice rolls. I wasn't doing that. Except, wait a minute — how did saying that cause that to happen? I didn't mean that at all! Maybe just this time...
10 hours later, yeah, I'm forever a Call of Duty player who's only fired one shot: ready to reload. I save before every risky move I make and abuse these balls. I'm still a little conflicted about it, but how can I resist fixing things when it can be so easy?
I suspect that everyone who plays Baldur's Gate 3 will experience this self-isolation to some extent, so I decided to use my authority (writing on a website) to go ahead and pardon us all. Let it be known:
I hereby release all past, present and future Baldur's Gate 3 to save the Deceivers from their RPG crimes. You can save your game guilt-free.
As I got used to the quirks of Baldur's Gate 3's attempt to simulate a tabletop D&D campaign (which is pretty fun, by the way), I started to relax and let my miserable mortal face more of the consequences. I really didn't want the number of goblins I killed last night, but that's the way the story went, and I'm sticking with it.
I still slipped a reload through that unexpected carnage, though. Once I committed myself to the violence, I wanted to finish the last of the group without taking a break. It didn't make sense for my party to traverse through a goblin site, rest for dinner and eight hours of sleep, and then reappear in the midst of the guts in the morning to finish the job.
Unfortunately, my party's roughness, some really nasty rolling, and the discovery that a seemingly intangible object was blocking the movement ended up being a disaster during the final boss fight. I could have run away from the fight and tried to keep going, but of course I just reloaded and did the fight again. It was easy the second time around, which left me confident that Reload was the right narrative choice. It didn't make sense for my party to suffer multiple deaths in what was, after all, not all that horrible fighting.
Please don't ask me to repeat it out loud, though: I don't want to hear how ridiculous my justification actually sounds. Trying to find "meaning" in dice rolls...
Although, there are times when I really think you have to save the scum a bit to get the most out of a game like Baldur's Gate 3.
There will always be misunderstandings and miscommunications between you and the game. With a human DM, you can talk about it, but I can't just ask Baldur's Gate 3, "Hey, if I silence my party, will it stop them from hearing the harpy's siren song, or does it not work that way?" , and then re-uploaded my file after knowing that it definitely doesn't work that way. I could just accept the consequences of my experience and factor them into my story as the cost of learning a lesson, but without the freedom to reload, I think I might end up playing so carefully that I get bored.
Larian knows how we are. You can quickly save and reload everything you want in Baldur's Gate 3, and the 100 gold fee for restoring your character or companion isn't much of a barrier, making it easy to experiment with classes and builds. What Larian does say, however, is that "it's important to remember that there are no truly wrong answers, but that there are a lot of consequences."
"In the long run, the story will be defined by your choices and the consequences of your actions," the studio wrote in a recent Steam post. "You will always have choices to make. Trust the dice, they will always show you a good time!"
So I think we can all agree here: RPGs are more fun when you accept the consequences of your actions and trust the dice. Except when the dice are wrong.
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