COVER FEATURE
After more than two decades, the wait is finally over. BALDUR’S GATE III is here and, as Robert Jones discovers, it’s changing the scope of what an CRPG can offer forever
The wonder of Candlekeepand Imoen. Gorion’s fall. Recruiting the heroic Jaheira, Khalid, Minsc and many more. The wind-swept beauty of the Sword Coast. Deep in the mines of Nashkel. Cloakwood. Baldur’s Gate, the City of Blood. Sorcerous Sundries. Sarevok and the Temple of Bhaal. Dreaming deep. Waking in Athkatla, the City of Coin. Khalid’s tragedy. Dancing with the Shadow Thieves. Boo, Edwin, Bodhi and others. Yoshimo’s duel with fate. The de’Arnise Keep. Spellhold.
Dreaming deeper. The horrors of the Underdark. Suldanessellar’s majesty. Fighting elven mage Jon Irenicus in hell. Walking the planes. Choosing whether to sit on the throne of Bhaal or destroy it.
Fragments of a story from the past, drifting out of memory slowly for decades, resting in shadow until the chance arrives to be reborn under the Great Wheel…
Today, in 2023, my initial experience of the Baldur’s Gate series rests in my mind as a selection of distant but memorable, beautiful moments. Whatever bad experiences I had with the series when originally playing it over 20 years ago are now scrubbed from my mind, leaving only the series’ epic, poetic, heroic tales told in fragmentary form. Memorable characters, events and quotes surface and then fade, but recreating that initial new experience of questing in its world, as millions of PC gamers had back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, has been beyond reach.
And, aside from a brief foray back to Faerûn’s Sword Coast in the belated Siege of Dragonspear expansion pack, despite being such a legendary CRPG series, Baldur’s Gate has felt distant as of late, as its stories start to slip from memory and the impact it once had on PC gaming appearing diminished by the passage of time. It’s easy to forget these things, after all, as even counting from when Baldur’s Gate II’s story comes to an end in its Throne of Bhaal expansion pack, released in 2001, it has been over 22 years since. That’s plenty of time for PC gamers to dream of a third entry in the Baldur’s Gate series, then forget about it entirely.
Maybe Baldur’s Gate II antagonist Jon Irenicus described this sense of passing time, forgetting and loss best… “I… I do not remember your love, Ellesime. I have tried. I have tried to recreate it, to spark it anew in my memory, but it is gone… a hollow, dead thing. For years, I clung to the memory of it. Then the memory of the memory. And then nothing.”
WAKING FROM A DREAM
Treading carefully, I pick my way through the cursed forest located within the Sword Coast’s Western Heartlands, darkness and shadows closing in on me from all sides oppressively. I hold a glowing magic lantern, a
