Baldur’s Gate 3: A horrible beginning
A thing like that in my brain? Baldur’s Gate 3 starts off disgustingly.
The first minutes of Baldur’s Gate 3 make one thing immediately clear: a small role-playing game with a personal, perhaps only local story, as was the case with Disco Elysium, does not await you. It’s a story that prepares to take on destructive proportions and surrenders entirely to the urtypical fantasy of its template. There isn’t really any preliminary skirmish, and you don’t have to slay a few rats in a basement first to prove yourself as an adventurer piece by piece. Instead, like countless other characters, your own hero is kidnapped by a mind flayer, a term many may have heard since Stranger Things at the latest, and soon after makes the acquaintance of a parasite that is implanted in the head in a deeply unpleasant, horrible, simply disgusting way.
“Who are you?” asks a shadowy voice afterwards and opens the curtain for the character editor. Of course, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a classic role-playing game and doesn’t give me a predefined hero, unless I want one. While you can choose one of a total of seven different Origin characters, all of which have a clear backstory and six of which are also limited in class choice and appearance, you can also optionally create your very own character.
As you may have read in my first impression, I opted for the clever combination of both in my first playthrough: The Dark Desire. While this is technically an Origin character, I was still free to specify everything myself. From gender and race to hair, piercings, and even anatomical details like your own genitalia, there are plenty of options to choose from, even if the editor isn’t as excessive as some other recent games.
Which class would you like?
Still, the creation of my first character takes well over an hour, although the purely visual appearance of my green dragonborn was decided early on. The immensely difficult agony of
The character editor in Baldur’s Gate 3 is extensive and detailed.
Instead, the choice arose elsewhere: Twelve different classes, each with their own subclasses, are available for selection. If you want, you can even go a step further here and include the option of multiclassing, which occurs in the course of the game, but even without such experiments Baldur’s Gate 3 is already very complex and tempting. Do I want to play a paladin, where sooner or later I will certainly break the oath? Or rather a monk, who in the best case can sneakily hit opponents on the back of the head s head? How about a warlock and surrendering to dark magic? The options are many and should be considered carefully, although there is still the possibility to change your class later for a few gold pieces.
In the end, the choice fell quite simply on a barbarian, who stands in the front line and later deals out properly as a berserker with a fancy sword or a blood-drenched battle axe. In combination with
Besides the appearance and a class, it is also necessary to set the background.
my background as a Dark Desire, which for some unknown reason now and then feels an intense lust for murder and finds corpses frighteningly fascinating, this seemed to me to be quite a sensible combination – raw violence has always been a helpful companion in role-playing games, I once had someone tell me. After a few attributes are distributed, it can already start… I thought.
In Baldur’s Gate 3, however, it is mandatory to create a second character, the so-called guardian. For this character, you can go through all the steps of the editor once again, whereby a class and attributes are waived. What exactly this ominous guardian is about and why he plays such an important role that you can set him individually, the game doesn’t reveal at this point – but don’t worry, this will be clarified in any case in the course of the main story.