Despite its many awards and exceptional player reception, one game couldn’t truly capture me the way I hoped, until I finally gave in.
Every once in a while comes a game that takes the internet by storm, getting rave reviews, having tons of hours of content created on YouTube and other platforms, and it becomes the main talking point on social media. Two years ago, that game was Baldur’s Gate 3. On paper, BG3 is virtually perfect for me:
I am a longtime Dungeons and Dragons player and fan. Along with friends from back in the day, I used to play consistently every week, going through lots of short or long campaigns, and sometimes getting lost mid-session to «distractions», like friends starting to play Halo PvP for whatever reason.
I love spending hours customizing my characters in video games, be it during the character creation phase or afterward.
I am always caught «rerolling» characters to try all the various classes and builds a game has to offer, to the point that most of my time playing games like World of Warcraft and Oblivion Remastered is spent creating characters, customizing them, and trying all their abilities until I find the ones that speak to me the most.
I loved playing DnD, and seeing how BG3 is a video game form of one of my favorite games ever, it seemed like a perfect fit. My friends and I had this beautifully crafted DnD campaign where we had to agree to play dwarf characters exclusively, as the setting was this long-lost dwarven kingdom that was in need of restoration. As I did most times back then, I rolled a rogue dwarf with a crossbow, and he was a bit naive and power-hungry. Very early on, the party encountered a demon prince who was threatening the kingdom, so I had my character sneak up to him to attack him, but he was aware of my presence and just left me gifts. The party was oblivious to what we said to each other, and they believed I was betraying them and their quest, so they found a way to have me either killed or arrested at all costs.
I escaped an ambush that culminated with an explosion and made it so that my character seemed dead, but I came back with a different name and appearance, thanks to a Hat of Disguise, and continued the campaign from there. At that point, my goal was to betray those who betrayed me, and I successfully did that during a session where everyone else was down to negative HP or dead. This was the last session of that campaign, but I still recall it fondly, and it’s something I expected to relive in BG3 in a way. However, I found out very early that romance was not only in the game, but it was also a rather big part of BG3. This led me astray from the game for a long time, and I couldn’t really enjoy it — until I finally truly gave the game a try.
Romance in Video Games Seems to be Great For Everyone But Me
I never liked romance options in video games. I am a huge fan of well-written, possibly emotional, setting-heavy RPGs, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that my vote for best RPG of 2025 is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Yet, I never really got into the Mass Effect series despite my passion for fantasy and sci-fi because romance was such a big deal in it.
I didn’t like it when the option of romancing certain characters was added to Skyrim. It pushed me away from games like Stardew Valley and Dragon Age. Romance in The Witcher 3 was quite awkward for me to sit through, and I just skipped it entirely in Cyberpunk 2077. There are more examples, but I guess these are some of the most notable, especially with how many people enjoyed romance in these games.
