Baldur’s Gate 3 won Game of the Year at last year’s Game Awards, and for good reason. Here at The Punished Backlog, the game made many of our own Best of 2023 lists, to the point that we just had to talk about it!
On the latest episode of The Punished Podcast, we explore the game’s relationship with tabletop D&D, and discuss our favorite characters, little magical moments, strengths and weaknesses, the gorgeous Patch 5 epilogue, those wild side quests, and much, much more.
The Punished Podcast Episode 7
As I explain in the episode’s intro, we encountered some technical and scheduling issues and had to record audio across multiple sessions. The end result? A mega, three-hour episode! If you loved playing a hundred (or more) hours of Baldur’s Gate 3, hopefully you’ll enjoy hundreds of minutes of our spoilercast discussion.
Spoiler warning: This episode is spoiler-heavy, but this post is not in case you’d like to read the excerpts below.
Content warning: This episode has swearing and often delves into NSFW content.
MP3 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts
Amanda Tien | Joe Chivers | Kei Isobe | Ben Rashkovich
Timestamps
By panelist:
- Full panel – 0:00
- Amanda, Kei, and Joe – 44:28
- Amanda and Ben – 1:14:17
- Full panel again – 2:53:00
By topic:
- Intro – 0:00
- Endings – 4:58
- Characters and Party – 9:52
- Romance (Part 1) – 29:30
- Favorite Moments and Acts – 34:00
- Lowlights – 49:20
- Companion Quests – 56:28
- The Emperor (Part 1) – 58:38
- Future of BG3 and Larian (Part 1) – 1:02:15
- The D&D movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) – 1:13:20
- Side Quests – 1:14:20
- The Emperor (Part 2) – 1:18:52
- Romance (Part 2) – 1:21:25
- Cazador’s Palace – 1:26:48
- Early Access & Patches – 01:28:33
- Finale and Act 3 – 01:34:20
- D&D Comparisons – 01:50:00
- Replaying – 1:58:00
- Save Scumming, Elden Ring, TOTK – 2:04:16
- Future of BG3 (Part 2) – 2:12:06
- Character Backstories – 2:20:26
- The Epilogue, Developers, and Mass Effect 3 – 2:36:00
- Next playthrough? – 2:53:00
Excerpts
Kei: “I think gimmick bosses in tabletops can always be a little weird. In real life, you have to telegraph it so hard to get your players to behave in a certain way that it’s not always conducive to the nature and experience of tabletop games. But in a video game, it comes across a little bit better.”
Ben: “One beautiful thing of Act 1 and Act 2, that Act 3 doesn’t really do, is that they set stuff up is that the payoff is in your imagination. What happened to the mushroom people? We don’t know! That’s just part of the world. But everything in Act 3, they’re constantly closing the loop, it’s a checklist… There’s not as much wonder or surprise… But when replaying the game, as a Dark Urge, you think you know what it is in Act 1, and yet it’s amazing the ways it can still surprise you.”
Joe: “My three favorite characters were Astarion, Gale, and Karlach. Karlach, to me, is the most positive vibes person in the whole team. She’s great. I think we could all have someone like her in our lives. Astarion, potentially, has one of the most fleshed-out backstories in the game. It’s hard, it’s difficult… that dude’s been through a lot. And I like his personality. He reminds me of Reaver in Fable 2, what a flirt of a man that he is. And I think with Gale, he started off a bit full of himself. It’s easy to write him off as a wizard that believes he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread, which probably hasn’t been invented in Baldur’s Gate anyway. But I think once you get to know him, and give him the chance to be vulnerable with you, he gets a lot more interesting.”
Spoiler-Free Excerpts About the Baldur’s Gate 3 Epilogue
Ben: “The epilogue was extremely emotional for me because A) of how much time and energy I put into playing the game, and what the game meant to me who has been a lifelong D&D player, and B) because I thought that for all the jankiness of Act 3, it was such a love letter, and the Epilogue is the closest we got to the developers talking directly to us. I felt like I was in a room with Larian developers, and I felt so emotional. I was so grateful to them. I was so happy that they could receive my gratitude, and I felt their gratitude. It felt like we were in conversation.”
Amanda: “The epilogue shows so much love… When there’s something like the epilogue to Baldur’s Gate 3 or that anniversary video for The Witcher 3, I have a moment where I feel like I’m a part of this. They are seeing me, and I am seeing them. I know how much this game must’ve been a part of their lives, and they’ve made something that’s a part of my life.
I think, as someone who strives to create art of any kind that is meaningful, even a video game blog post, we hope that our work resonates with someone. That no matter how fleeting, or if it’s short or long, you hope that it means something to someone the way that it meant something to you. Being able to find that connection… Art is this unique thing that can exist separately from you, it is a third separate body between you and this other person, and yet it is something that you are both experiencing and you are both connecting and it matters to both of you.
And so those moments that you’re describing, like that Baldur’s Gate 3 epilogue, are rare places where you can feel the planes colliding and overlapping. It’s a fuzzy space, and it feels magical.”
Ben: “That totally crystallizes some of my thoughts. I was reflecting on how the goodbye trope is a trope in video games that you can’t really get in other mediums. Probably because, I imagine, video games are the kinds of art you spend the most time in. You don’t spend 200 hours with a painting or a movie. And I’m thinking of games like Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, or Sea of Stars—they’re mostly RPGs—but there are these thin places, a part where the walls come down just a little. The fiction, you see through it a little bit. It doesn’t ruin the immersion, it makes it deeper. And it’s such a special thing, and I think it’s something that Baldur’s Gate 3 has done better than any other game I’ve ever played.”
Amanda: “Yes, the goodbye party is this opportunity to kick back and celebrate, as you would hope to with any friends. And I think it speaks to a real-life experience that we all have as people, where you realize that the time that you have together is ending, and it is precious and beautiful. The time that you’ve had together means so much, but also that, in the time to come, there will be new adventures. It’s bittersweet.
And for a video game, where you’ve spent hundreds of hours talking to these other, “not-real” people, but you have made bonds with, that you’ve made choices together… [It’s a medium of art] that probably feels the most like life in that way. You’re active. You’re not passive in the way that you watch a movie or a television show. You’re making choices, you’re talking to them, you’re encouraging them to be their best selves. It’s a space where you’ve put yourself into the game, because the game has allowed you to do so. And you recognize and appreciate the work that someone has done to make that possible.”
Song Credits
- “Down by the River” (Borislav Slavov) from Baldur’s Gate 3
- “Main Theme II” (Borislav Slavov) from Baldur’s Gate 3
- “Raphael’s Final Act” (Borislav Slavov) from Baldur’s Gate 3
- “Bard Dance” (Borislav Slavov) from Baldur’s Gate 3
Update: March 22, 2024 — RIP the idea of DLC or Baldur’s Gate 4! A few days after we pushed this episode live, the leads of Larian shared at Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2024 that they do not plan to make any DLC or make a sequel. You can read more about that news in this piece at Polygon.
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Joe is a games critic and English literature graduate who knows far too much about video games and critical theory. He once wrote a Derridean reading of the animal masks in Hotline Miami. You can find him on Twitter @jchiverswriter.
Huge video game, comic book, and anime fan. Spends way too much time watching things he doesn’t like. Hates Zack Snyder. Mains Falco.
Ben is a lawyer by day, gamer by night, and overactive board game Kickstarter backer by dusk/dawn/witching hour. He loves Metroidvanias and Soulslikes, pixelated RPGs, and games about games. He's also passionate about board games and tabletop role-playing games, and is fascinated in a mega-nerd sort of way by academic theories about play. He’s got a new Twitter account for writing at @BenRashkovich.
Amanda Tien (she/her or they) loves video games where she can pet dogs, punch bad guys, make friends, and have a good cry. She started writing for the site in 2020, and became an editor in 2022. She enjoys writing about mystery games, indies, and strong femme protagonists. Her work has also been published in Unwinnable Monthly (click here to read her cover feature on Nancy Drew games), Salt Hill Journal, Poets.org, Litro Magazine, Public Books, and more. She was the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Columbia University's Culinarian Magazine, and served for two years as the Managing Editor of Aster(ix) Literary Journal. She recently graduated with a MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. Her writing, art, graphic design, and marketing work can be viewed at www.amandatien.com. She does not post a lot on social, but you can find her on X and on Instagram.
