There’s a moment early in Baldur’s Gate 3 involving an owlbear that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. It made me sad, then it made me wince, and then laugh. It has it all – pathos and comedy in equal measure, executed perfectly by Larian Studios, the veteran RPG developer entrusted with what’s sure to be the biggest Dungeons & Dragons game of the last decade.
I regularly rank Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn (1998) among my top-five favorite games of all time. But before I tried the latest early access build, my feelings about Baldur’s Gate 3 were complex.
Baldur’s Gate 2 was BioWare at the peak of its creativity, an enormous game made in a mature, tested RPG engine that built on the strong performance of the first Baldur’s Gate. Alongside its forerunner and the related Icewind Dale games, its style of gameplay defined the “Western RPG” genre for several years.
The game, which made great use of the Dungeons and Dragons license, checked all my boxes. It was both deep and wide – chock-full of entertaining characters, interesting stories, and challenging combat encounters. Further, the game had enormous replay value; several key sections had multiple paths and solutions, and an evil party was not only viable but incredibly fun.
A Lasting Legacy
In the years that followed, I played a horde of similar games, each one striving to pick up the mantle of the earlier BioWare experiences. BioWare continued to farm its own fertile field – first with Neverwinter Nights, which spawned a vibrant community but in the end felt too generic to me, and later with Dragon Age: Origins – a great game that spawned a franchise of its own but simplified its mechanics in sequels in pursuit of a wider audience.
Later, I dug into Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity – which I found solid and compelling – and its very underrated sequel Deadfire, which was even better. In recent years, Owlcat released two sprawling and ambitious games that used the Pathfinder license, Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous; at times, both get very close to recreating the Baldur’s Gate 2 magic.
I also kept coming back to Baldur’s Gate 2. I immediately picked up the excellent enhanced edition by Beamdog when it was released on Steam. Though the game has aged now, I still had a great time revisiting it.
And yes, I played Larian’s earlier games, Divinity: Original Sin and Divinity: Original Sin 2 – the engine of which served as the foundation for the development of Baldur’s Gate 3. They’re solid and highly entertaining; the combat is especially innovative, making great use of environmental effects. Still, the reliance on gimmicky fights and some subjective annoyances with the story and characters made me question whether Larian was the right developer to carry BioWare’s torch.
When I got thinking about the long list of games in the Western RPG space I’d played over the years, I realized something. Games, even subgenres of games like Western RPGs, have been around long enough to have a genuine history – a legacy of a highly diverse mix of styles, genres, and periods, just like art, movies, and books.
Games at the Half-Century Mark
I wrote last week about my early days making text adventures. It’s a genre commonly known today as interactive fiction, kept alive by a focused group of indie developers and hobbyists. So when the Kickstarter for the 50 Years of Text Games book cropped up, it seemed like something I should add to my library. (Like Kickstarter deliveries tend to do, it showed up on my doorstep last week when I was least expecting it.)
Yes – text games, by the book’s definition, do go back fifty years. The book opens with the history behind the first version of Oregon Trail in 1971. It’s a surprisingly dense and scholarly piece of work (and text-heavy, naturally).
Chock-full of interviews with the creators of the games, 50 Years of Text Games digs into the history of how the games were created and why each of the selected titles was an important milestone. I expected something special when I first saw the Kickstarter campaign; the result is better than I hoped for.
From Oregon Trail to Zork to Dwarf Fortress, the book includes everything from traditional interactive fiction to experimental games, strategy games, role-playing roguelikes, and more. My one critique of the book is that its thesis is based on an odd collective bucket. “Text” games, as used in the book, describe a method of execution and presentation, rather than a coherent genre; entire books could be written about just interactive fiction, or just roguelikes.
We’re a long way from solo developers stealing snatches of terminal time in university labs, spinning up a game to entertain their friends. The industry is mature; there is enough depth to support scholarly analysis of small segments and genres. Like fans writing niche histories of 1930s noir films, gamers and developers alike can dissect and reconstruct a long legacy of shared experiences.
Retro is Cool (Again)
The idea of “retro games” isn’t new; genres come and go, and lots of games bank on nostalgia. The pixel art of Stardew Valley evokes a certain time and place; many indie games on Steam try to recapture the joys of Castlevania or traditional platformers. What is relatively new is that sometimes these retro reboots become entire genres on their own.
id Software’s Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake were not only ground-breaking but genre-defining. First-person shooters have thrived in the market ever since, as Doom and its cousins evolved into multiplayer games like Counterstrike, story-based experiences like Half-Life and Bioshock, “looter shooters” like Destiny, and large triple-A bedrock franchises like Call of Duty and Halo.
When I first heard the phrase “Boomer Shooter” I immediately understood what it meant. Games like Ultrakill and Dusk cater to a specific fanbase, getting back to the roots of the genre thirty years ago where very little got in the way of fast run-and-gun gameplay. At the same time, good Boomer Shooters also draw in a new audience with modern design conveniences, better UI, and innovative mechanical twists.
These days, Boomer Shooter is itself a well-defined category. Articles list the “Fifteen Best Boomer Shooters You Can Get on Steam.” The Doom franchise itself went back to its roots in recent years, with the core gameplay of Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal being a lot closer mechanically to Ultrakill than the sideways step taken by the earlier Doom 3.
Misty-Colored Memories
The best games are memorable in the same way the best movies and books are. I still recall every detail of that first (overlong) dungeon in Baldur’s Gate 2. I remember brutal finishes to Civilization games, cursing Gandhi as he nuked me for the third time. And I know that impactful moments in more recent games like Pathologic 2 will stick with me for the next twenty years.
For several years passionate arguments raged about whether games would ever be “mature” enough to be considered an art form like movies, music, and books. That question has long since been answered; if a game like Disco Elysium isn’t art, I don’t know what is.
Evoking emotion is something games have always done well. Now, with entire retro subgenres of games and a fifty-year history, they can evoke memories just as well.
After dipping into Larian’s early access for Baldur’s Gate 3, I’m confident they have honored the legacy of BioWare’s original games. At the same time, especially with the resurgent interest in Dungeons & Dragons, Larian has built a surefire hit for the modern era. I enjoyed my time with it so much that I quickly set it aside after a few hours; I’d like to experience it completely fresh when the game is finished.
I owe that much to my memories.
Baldur’s Gate 3 leaves early access on August 3. 50 Years of Text Games is still available electronically on itch.io in EPUB and PDF formats from the author here. See you next week!