The personal feud with a witch shows what makes the RPG so awesome

Just before Baldur’s Gate 3 was released, the developers gave us access to the full game. MeinMMO editor Benedict Grothaus has looked around extensively (once again) and has already found his personal nemesis – and judged it.

Penis. There, please, I said it. Satisfied? When we finally got the press version of Baldur’s Gate 3, my first step was the character editor. Just out of curiosity what crazy possibilities there are.

After all, the character’s sexual organs can be freely adjusted, so of course I had to find out right away: what are the options? The result: humans and elves have more penis and vulva options than others. Disappointing, but overall okay.

Now that we have the mandatory part behind us, I would like to finally get to my actual story. Since Monday I’ve been able to view the full version of Baldur’s Gate 3 with a special press build. Of course, that’s not enough to extensively test such an insanely large game.

In Baldur’s Gate 3, so much crazy stuff happened in quick succession that I had trouble deciding on an anecdote. The one with that damn witch stuck with me the longest. And by Lolth, the game knows how to make situations like this special!

Danger: I try to keep the text as spoiler-free as possible. Be warned though: my impressions might contain at least some info from the first act! Here is a bear sex scene as a distance to the field report:

I do bad things and the companions… like it?

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an RPG that relies heavily on telling the stories of special and powerful personalities. We are one of them. When choosing a character, 12 classes are available, which can still be combined later in the game.

In addition to your own character, there are the 7 “Origins”, i.e. characters that have a pre-made story that is told in the world. I’ve decided to play a mad, bloodthirsty killer who can rarely control his urges.

Actually, I thought that I would be very alone with that very quickly. But Larian, the developers of Baldur’s Gate 3, somehow have an even darker sense of humor than I do. No matter what I do, no matter how bad I am, somehow my group always thinks it’s good.

In one situation, a magician needs to be rescued from an unstable portal and reaches out for help. As a Dark Urge, my only choice was to brutally chop off the hand instead. Two people from my party liked it. That’s when my very crazy journey started.

The feud begins: “The left or the right eye?”

Baldur’s Gate 3’s main quest involves getting rid of a disgusting parasite that can bestow strange powers. The cost, however, is that you might become an upright, tentacle-faced octopus. I do not feel like it.

A possible cure promises a witch, or Vettel. D&D players may also know the beasts as “Hag”. These are basically swamp witches who offer “help” but always ask for absurd things in return.

My Hag wanted one of my eyes. Since I went down the completely insane path anyway, I agreed. The result:

I definitely expected worse. But the bill was yet to come because she couldn’t remove my parasite. Despite this, she claimed to have kept her end of the bargain. Since I disagreed, a lawsuit ensued.

Without a fight: Sometimes a simple push is the solution

I then fought my way through a dungeon for hours that was actually above my level. However, Baldur’s Gate 3 allows completely unconventional approaches to be used.

In my case, that meant I just murdered a guard from behind instead of getting lost in a big fight, and robbed the witch before the fight. Then I surprised her on a bridge.

Nevertheless, she easily finished me off again and again for 2 more hours in direct combat, despite excellent planning. At some point the saving idea came to me: I don’t really have to fight them.

Since she’s on a bridge anyway, I just put my strongest character in front of her and used the special ability Push. The witch sails into the dark hole before she can defend herself, I won and can finally go on killing in peace.

The end of the quest is even stranger, by the way, because I was originally supposed to free a young woman as well. But she wasn’t as grateful as she thought. She wanted the witch to bring her husband back.

As a D&D veteran, I knew this wasn’t going to go the way she wanted. He would have come back a zombie, half rotten and brainless. That’s how it happened when I found the magic wand that was supposed to do it.

This shows how morbid the game can get at times: the young woman, maybe in her early 20s, gratefully took the wand and her zombie husband to start a new life with him in Baldur’s Gate. Do not ask …

New to Baldur’s Gate and RPGs? The ideal class for you is the fighter:

Creative solutions instead of exhausting boss mechanics

What made this quest so special for me is that I didn’t expect all of this to happen myself. Actually, I just wanted to see what happens – and then reload the game. After all, I want to keep my eyes.

But the dialogue and the resulting possibilities were so exciting that I thought: Oh come on, explore a little more. At some point the save would have been so far back and I liked the story so much that I kept it all. This happened to me more often while playing now.

Plus the fight reminded me that I’m not playing Dark Souls or anything like that. I don’t have to learn any mechanics or prepare for fights by finding the right poison and spell against the boss. I just need to find a way to skip prep – like a cliff.

There are tons of situations like this in Baldur’s Gate 3:

“Oh I think I hit you”

At the end of the test, I played in co-op with MeinMMO boss Leya Jankowski and colleague Sophia Weiss. Here the gaming experience is completely different than solo, because many more situations are unplanned.

It all started with the fact that Sophia and her monk almost turned off the lights for me. In tutorial. With a thoughtless click, she edged me and I was down to one life point, about to go into an important fight. For assessment:

So that this doesn’t become a case for the HR department, boss Leya came along shortly afterwards – as a majestic druid in the shape of a polar bear. We looked at the world together and almost died in the first major fight because the fat, uh, strong bear fell through a brittle spot in the middle of a lot of opponents that you actually fight individually.

You can find a more detailed test from the colleagues at GameStar. More information about multiplayer can be found here:

It’s extraordinarily difficult to put into words what actually makes games like Baldur’s Gate 3 so good. Anecdotes like these best reflect why the RPG is so incredibly fun and why it will surely keep me busy for well over 100 hours.

Such stories are not exceptional situations, they happen all the time. They fit into the world and depending on how you approach the game you can have a completely different experience. What I can only advise everyone to do at the moment: don’t try to be too “good”. Nobody thanks you for that.

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