Baldur’s Gate 3 suffers from a false sense of urgency

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The role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3 is exciting many players in 2023, but if you look closely, the masterful role-playing game has a problem in the storytelling that counteracts the fun of the game and from which many role-playing games suffer. A false sense of urgency.

What kind of problem is this? Every role player actually knows it:

  • The world is on the verge of an abyss, the apocalypse is imminent, in a few days the “army of ice zombies will come over the wall”/“the evil wizard has taken over the world”/“the worm in our head will explode and transform turning us into a tentacle monster.”
  • But there’s this little girl whose cat ran away. And there is also a cellar vault in which there could be a +1 sword of courage. And actually you would have to beat up 500 crocodiles to make the leather armor that looks so cool.
  • Baldur’s Gate 3 in particular suffers from this discrepancy between what the story tells us and how we should and want to play. This is a kind of ludo-narrative discrepancy.

    • Baldur’s Gate 3 was played for the equivalent of 1,225 years on the first release weekend – exciting facts and figures

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    Every NPC wants us to hurry up and causes pure panic

    Why is this particularly bad in Baldur’s Gate 3? In the first few hours of play, Baldur’s Gate 3 puts incredible pressure on the player from a narrative perspective: because you have a parasite in your brain that will inevitably and actually immediately, in a few days, so the game says, will lead to you turning into a mind flayer transformed.

    In the first few hours of Baldur’s Gate 3 you are constantly confronted with this countdown. Every companion you meet has the same panic, just desperate to get rid of this thing.

    This discrepancy is particularly evident in a discussion on reddit. Some thoughts from this:

  • In the story of Baldur’s Gate 3 it is regularly implied that a particular battle or the game in general is “time-sensitive” and must be completed as quickly as possible. This is intended to create excitement and speed up the gaming experience
  • In reality, there are hardly any such limits – except for some quests – and the role-playing game actually invites you to play at a leisurely pace where you explore everything. Because that is the strength of Baldur’s Gate 3, the countless side missions that can be solved in different ways

    • One player says: “I’m sure that’s why a lot of players miss so much in Act 1, because every single companion you recruit tells you: We need to get a heal as quickly as possible! Everyone tells you to get off your ass and hurry up.”

    Another user said: “This false sense of urgency is such a constant in role-playing games that my brain just blocks it out like a filter. I’m sure my poor companions were very desperate, with all these parasites in their heads, and I was like, “We’re going to walk through the wilderness for another half an hour and then we’ll call it a day.”

    What can you do about it? Apparently, an old author’s saying from SF author Douglas Adams is the healthiest way to “deal with urgency in roleplaying”: I love deadlines, I love the whooshing sound they make as they pass me by.

    More about the game and people who are in too much of a hurry:

    World Record: Speedrunner completes Baldur’s Gate 3 in 4 minutes by putting Shadowheart in a box

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