Baldur's Gate 3 - Jeff Vogel Analysis Part Two

Couchpotato spotted part 2 of Jeff Vogel's Baldur's Gate 3 analysis:

Picking Apart Baldur's Gate 3, Part 2 (Talkin' 'Bout D&D)

It turns out that game balance was a mistake all along.

It's always a huge holiday for me when a turn-based, story-heavy RPG manages to break through and be popular with the Normals. This makes lots of new RPG fans. Then I can sell my games to them eventually, much as a catfish eats the scum at the bottom of a lake.

It's also a great opportunity to pick apart a good game's design. Find out what works and what doesn't work and what the state of the art is for RPGs right now. If a game sells well, that means every choice it made was correct, and you should pick over the carcass for ideas to steal with all speed.

Baldur's Gate 3, by Larian Studios, is a huge, sprawling game. It has a real "No wrong answers" feel, where just about every idea made it in somewhere. I want to spend a post or three picking apart the game system, pulling out specific structures and ideas, and looking at them in the light.

This will all be a bit disjointed with lots of small individual topics. But it's worth it, because this is a very interesting game.

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