Just two days after flying back from Los Angeles (where I attended). The Game Awards 2023 to judge his fashion personally), I felt the familiar tingle of nausea in my throat. But this wasn’t just a sniffle – within a few hours, my elbows were hurting, my head was pounding, my core temperature was rising, air couldn’t flow through my nostrils, and my throat was burning like it was riddled with knives. Tests showed it wasn’t anything serious, but my body was telling me to slow the hell down, so I did the work and reluctantly downloaded something Baldur’s Gate 3 (using a code for GOTY provided by Larian Studios).
I say reluctantly because I’m not a turn-based RPG girl, and I’m even less of one Dungeons Girl. But it felt like my discomfort would give me the time to try out what many (including the Game Awards) consider to be the Game of the Year for 2023. For the next five days, I did nothing but eat, sleep, and role-play, blurring the lines between my fevered reality and the fantastic world of Faerûn. It wasn’t until my fever subsided that I realized: Shit, I’m addicted.
Faerun Fever
The sheer magnitude of Baldur’s Gate 3 is enough to overwhelm – and that scale is obvious even before you see how big the map is, before you realize how intricate the story is, before you discover how many side quests await you in its dank caves or dark corridors can bump. This becomes immediately apparent when you reach the character creation screen and face the gargantuan task of choosing your race, class, heritage and appearance.
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At this point, just minutes into my playthrough, my foggy, feverish brain begins to panic – should I choose a beefy barbarian? A wise clergyman? Do I play the roles as myself or as someone else who is completely fantastic? The options are before me and intimidating like the college job fairs of yesterday – what will I be? I scour the internet for advice from My city, other gaming sites, Reddit and more. After much thought, I decide to create a character partially inspired by me (Italian name, bard who loves attention) but not entirely inspired by me BG3 Avatar of me (a wood elf with long hair who is much nicer than me). This process takes me almost an hour.
As I step out of the crashed nautiloid ship onto a sandy beach, I’m still not sure if this experience is for me. There’s so much to explore, so many menus and icons and items (and lines of text describing those items) and dialogue options – not to mention my reluctant companions who I can’t immediately understand (a testament to the brilliance of those who do wrote these characters). “Overwhelmed” is an understatement, and it makes me cringe at the game in front of me. But I’m sick and can’t do anything but watch The ultimate Real Housewives girls’ trip (which I usually watch with my partner) so I move on.
After a few hours of awkwardly chatting with Astarion, Shadowheart, Wyll and Lae’zel and fumbling my way through the first few battles, something suddenly clicks. The gameplay loop begins to satisfy my lizard brain, the hunt for more prey excites me, the immersiveness of the world and the way I can move around in it fascinates me, despite the nagging sinus pressure in my head, which feels like an ililithic tadpole stretching against my brain cavity, I can’t put the controller down. A DualSense breaks, I replace it with the one that charged. If someone dies, I’ll do it again. By midnight, both are too drained of power to continue playing (I have a pretty crappy third-party charging port), so I reluctantly climb into bed to try to sleep.
I’m pumped full of cold medicine, so I fall asleep quicker than usual, but not before my brain kicks into gear and starts going through all the things I just did Baldur’s Gate 3 and all the things I promise myself I will do tomorrow. I need to find the Githyanki crèche, I need to find Karlach (without Wyll who wants her dead in tow) and convince her to join my crew, and I need to figure out the best way to change my bard build , so that I can be more helpful in battle.
The next morning I wake up still very sick. I stumble into my too-hot living room (New York apartments and radiators, baby), blindly pour myself some coffee, swallow a few pills, place the Kleenex within reach, and boot up my PS5. A rush of excitement envelopes me like it’s the day after Christmas, like I’m 13 years old again, and a game I’ve just been given beckons with its siren song: “Come, get lost in this world for days.”
As a 33-year-old woman enslaved by the rigid confines of late capitalism, I no longer have a chance of following that siren song and immersing myself in a massive game for dozens of hours at a time. But thanks to this terrible cold, a youthful lack of responsibility has given me an opportunity I can take advantage of Baldur’s Gate 3 my entire universe. And I, congested and sore but relieved at such a rare reprieve, do just that.
I played for 25 hours Baldur’s Gate 3 within the last few days. There is no turning back.