Game News Baldur’s Gate 3 is the best game of 2023, and yet it suffers from this problem common to modern games

Game news Baldur’s Gate 3 is the best game of 2023, and yet it suffers from this problem common to modern games

By writing about Baldur’s Gate III, people will think that I’m trying hard on the game. However, I assure you that I spent an excellent hundred hours in the world of Faerun and that I loved it. adventure for its characters, its story, its freedom, its choices and the richness of its combat system. For all these reasons, I consider that Larian Studios’ latest production fully deserves its title of game of the year. Despite its qualities, there is still one element that I found disappointing in Baldur’s Gate 3: its ending. And I reassure you, the rest of the article is guaranteed without spoilers.

See Baldur’s Gate 3 on GOG

Is the journey more important than the arrival in Baldur’s Gate 3?

Obviously, the goal is not to go into detail about what happens at the end of Baldur’s Gate 3. From the point of view of what is told, I would even say that it is satisfying and that it provides a feeling of accomplishment. On the other hand, it was more in the way things were done that things bothered me more. While the slightest quest in BD3 is particularly developed, often with interesting ramifications and twists, the big denouement seems quite direct, even rushed. Things move straight to the end, making it feel like everything is moving too fast compared to anything we’ve done before. Last conversation before the battle, final fight and short epilogue, and voila, Baldur’s Gate 3 is over.

Fortunately, the developers recently added an epilogue in which our characters come together a few months after the events of the game to discuss what has become of them. This has the merit of bringing a little more depth to the whole, but it still remains something in addition to the main ending in my eyes. If I was fully satisfied with my experience of Baldur’s Gate 3, I can’t help but think that I witnessed a rushed ending compared to the overall pace of the adventure. And on the other hand, several obvious reasons can explain such a result.

The endings, poor relations of modern video games?

After an adventure which will inevitably have taken several dozen hours to see the end of it, we can imagine that the developers of Larian Studios wanted to quickly give the players what they wanted when arriving at this moment in the story. Or, we can say that the teams had reached the end of what they had to say. To be sure, you would have to ask them directly. In any case, one thing is certain: this feeling of being faced with an ending that is not as good as the rest of the adventure is not new and that this has unfortunately become a trend in modern video games.

Take God of War: Ragnarok for example. Everyone was marked by the epic fight between Kratos and Thor at the start of the adventure. On the other hand, some time after the game’s release, some players were disappointed that the outcome did not, according to them, live up to this fanfare start. And unfortunately, this is an increasingly common pattern in the video game industry: a spectacular and striking beginning to a less impressive endingeven disappointing.

It must be said that for developers, what matters is first of all to hook the player through what we call the “first-hour experience”. Conversely, the ending receives less attention for a simple reason: players don’t finish their games. And the developers have known this well since the introduction of achievements and other trophies. This radically changes from what was done previously where reaching the end was often a victory rewarded by a long, striking CGI cutscene. Well, obviously, Baldur’s Gate 3 is not exactly in this case because to say that its ending is botched would be a lie. But yet, we can safely say that it is not as good as the rest of the adventure. As such, BD3 perfectly illustrates the expression “the journey matters more than the destination”.