Picking Apart Baldur's Gate 3, Part 3 (The Only Thing You Should Care About: Loot.)

If I have to wade through your story, I want my dopamine hits, darn it.

It was a bold choice to ship this game with only one romance option.

I wanted to write a third and final article about Baldur's Gate 3 (BG3 for short), a really great game that most people have moved on from, but I want to talk about the most important part of any RPG: LOOT.

Treasure is the main driving factors of RPGs. The reward. The dopamine rush. The presents under the tree on XMas morning. If you can make getting loot really satisfying and exciting, it can paper over an infinite numbers of sins. (Looking at you, Diablo.)

Baldur's Gate 3 has a TON of loot. An enormous number of different items. It feels like everyone in the company got to design one item. No wrong answers. This is mostly very good, and also sometimes very weird.

Y’all basic.

Loot Is Important

One of my big problems with current desktop D&D is that the magic items in the game are very similar to back in the 1980s. This isn't a compliment. In olden days, the designers were still trying to figure out how to make a game at all. The magic items they made tended to be kind of dull (+1 sword), very flavorful but kind of useless (Decanter of Endless Water), or completely bonkers (Deck of Many Things).

In this area, more than any other, the BG3 designers really cut loose. There are a host of items in this game that are completely new to D&D, useful, and full of flavor. ("Flavor" meaning they feel appropriate to the setting and add color to it.)

A lot of magic items can cast spells once per long rest. In other words, they're consumables you can use without fear. Getting free stuff is always fun. The staff that can cast fireball once a day got heavy use in my group.

A lot of items combine multiple abilities, both passive and usable. Again, a nice change, though one sometimes more suited to computer games. I love an item that gives little bonuses to three useful stats, as long as a thinking machine is handling all the math for me.

One test I'm using for whether an item works is: Would it be appealing in the tabletop game? As in, is it useful, fun to play, and simple enough that your half-drunk buddy can administer it?

I like this item. It’s a goofy joke design, but it has a neat passive ability and a daily use ability. They’re good enough to be used but not broken. 10/10. No notes.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Has Mountains of Stuff

Over the years, I've tended to make my game designs cleaner. I like to cut out stuff that isn't interesting or useful and leave only things where I believe some player might actually get real value out of it. That is my personal aesthetic. Not everyone shares it.

One of the best articles ever written about game design is about Magic: The Gathering. It is about how they make magic cards for 3 different player psychologies. Basically, power gamers (Spike), people who want to solve puzzles and make useless things useful (Johnny), and people who just like big, impressive things (Timmy).

When I evaluate whether an item is a good design or not, I have to remember all the different sorts of players the item can appeal to. Thus, while some of the items seem impossibly fiddly to me, there are other players who love trying to get them to work.

BUT. Once you have figured out what your players are like and what sorts of things appeal to them, you have to make sure your item appeals to somebody. If nobody ever wants it, it could probably be cut.

Here is a list of all the item types/abilities in BG3. There's around 80 of them!

This is a LOT. And I think that a bunch of them have abilities like: "Enemy has 5% lower chance to hit you for 2 turns." I can't see anyone getting excited about that. The only reason to keep that ability in is to bloat your item list. It's a distraction that pads out an already enormous game.

And yet ... Maybe what I just said is wrong. For some players, the important thing is VOLUME. More rules, more items, more encounters, more stuff. For these players, removing anything is bad. And this is also a legitimate aesthetic. Really shaggy things can be cool.

So what is to be learned? I think the answer is the same one I always give: Take a moment to figure out the product you are selling and the group of players you want to sell it to. Then follow through.

It's art, after all. Follow your vision.

The rules for this item are complicated and fiddly, but if you work hard and think about it, you can build your character in a way that makes it sort of useful. Happily, there are players who get all their fun from solving puzzles like that. Me, I sold it.

The Curse of the Consumable Mountain

It is very difficult to get people to use consumables in your RPG. It's not hard to understand why. Humans are hugely loss-averse. When you use a potion, it's gone forever. You are permanently weaker. Players HATE that.

Some games deal with this by larding the consumables into the game, one mountain at the time, until the player is coddled and reassured that they actually use them. Which is why, when I finished BG3, I had about 1000 potions and scrolls. I probably used 1% of the consumables I found.

Losing a few minutes in an 80 hour game sorting potions isn't really a big deal, and a lot of players really get off on having 50 sorts of scroll.

So is having this huge part of the game that most people are scared to interact with a problem? And, if so, how is it solved?

I think it's a fixable problem. (Again, if it is a problem.) Some examples of solutions… In my Queen's Wish games, potions come in refillable bottles, so you always get them back when you return to town. The items in BG3 that cast one spell a day are also psychologically easy to use. In the tabletop game, wands recharge every day. Also a decent answer.

A Few Final Comments

When a computer RPG has a very complex terrain system with lots of elevations, it becomes tempting to have every fight be complex with a spread of enemies at all sorts of different heights.

If you succumb to this temptation, I personally think you should keep it under control. I found fights in BG3 where it became really hard to target the high-up enemies.

Also, casting fireball is fun. Yes, spreading out all the enemies everywhere and at all the possible heights is the design standard now. But let me have one simple fight every once in a while where I can torch a big group and feel awesome?

That said, the balance in this game is very strong. At the end of my Tactician run, everything felt pretty easy, but I occasionally got a fight where I was still in real danger. Nicely done.

The open-endedness of this game is genuinely terrific. It lets creative players come up with all sorts of ways to be weird. (I did a basic, meat-and-potatoes, sword and spell playthrough.) For example, you can play 99% of the game as a cat. To see how comprehensive and versatile this system is, this video is excellent.

In Summary, At Last

I think Baldur's Gate 3 is an all-timer. One of the best computer RPGs. Anyone interested in the genre can have a great time picking this game apart. It has so many good ideas, implemented extremely well.

And that, finally, is all I have to say about that. Time for a vacation. Then I will write another game, now that I have been reminded that, yeah, these toys really can be a lot of fun. I need that sometimes.

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Our newest indie role-playing epic, Geneforge 2 - Infestation, is now out! Rated Very Positive on Steam. It’s good! Also now out for the iPad!

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