In a year filled with competition for Dungeons and Dragons, Baldur's Gate 3 remains an ace up the IP's sleeve. Despite recent setbacks in regard to expanding the game's multimedia frontiers, Hasbro is still chasing another success on par with Larian's work—but Baldur's Gate 3 won't be able to truly set the blueprint for what the company has in mind now.
The future of Dungeons and Dragons is in something of a strange place with the game's 'new' edition. The new core rulebooks have seen a generally positive reception, but they're far from flying off the shelves; in fact, many vendors are lagging behind when it comes to this new era, with these revised core books hard to find in the wild. In practice, therefore, most 5e tables are sticking to the version of 5e released in 2014, especially considering many of 2024's changes are ideas many DMs have already homebrewed in.
What Baldur's Gate 3 Fans Should Know Before Playing Dungeons and Dragons for the First Time
Baldur's Gate 3 fans have a head start in D&D, but the transition isn't seamless, with differences in rules, roleplay, and mindset.
A Dungeons and Dragons' MMO Will Need To Strike Out From The Shadow Of Baldur's Gate 3
Despite the D&D Beyond VTT controversy earlier this year, a project with misguided management that saw 90% of its staff be laid off, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast are still looking to push Dungeons and Dragons into more and more media. The failure of the Sigil VTT likely set back plans massively, as the 2024 edition was framed around that VTT, but the continued success of Baldur's Gate 3 has left executive ambitions unquelled.
The hype around Baldur's Gate 3 led to the announcement of many D&D gaming projects, such as Gameloft's in-progress survival title. Furthermore, a Dungeons and Dragons MMORPG, though not something the company can announce right now, is something that Wizards' new CEO John Hight is interested in. The concept of a D&D MMORPG is one that's been batted around for a while, and attempted a number of times—with the most recent of these being 2013's Neverwinter. However, the relationship between the TTRPG and MMOs is more complex than some would expect, and a full go at this concept would need to meet the exact sort of precautions laid out by Hight.
D&D's Previous Flirtations With MMOs Prove That Baldur's Gate 3 Can Only Inspire So Much
Before D&D 5th Edition, there was the incredibly divisive 4e, which was the latest edition from 2008-2014. This version of the game was the one most caught up with the rise of MMOs and, in particular, World of Warcraft. While it's an oversimplification to say that 4e was trying to turn the game into a WoW clone, it's undeniable that the ruleset took heavy inspiration from that title. Compared to previous editions, 4e has more set-in-stone tank, healer, and DPS roles, in addition to more gamified language and a design philosophy which revolved around a planned VTT that was never completed. It also played more into the idea of being massively multiplayer, with the lack of emphasis on loot and magic items being a deliberate choice to make characters more portable for play at other tables or at conventions.
Needless to say, 4e is far removed from 5e—the latter of which serves as the basis for Baldur's Gate 3's gameplay. It should be noted that Baldur's Gate 3 has definitely created the most impressive framework yet for translating D&D into a video game, and its multiplayer component shows promise for bringing its systems into a wider world. At the same time, however, any developer that takes up this mantle should consider how much would have to be changed to take on MMO-adjacent elements, and thus how much a theoretical MMO project would need to remove itself from BG3's own mechanics. 4e, the revised 2024 Edition, and the 'West Marches' form of play would be good places to look for inspiration, should a D&D MMO enter development.
Baldur's Gate 3
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 96 /100 Critics Rec: 97%
- Released
- August 3, 2023
- ESRB
- M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Larian Studios
- Publisher(s)
- Larian Studios
WHERE TO PLAY
- Engine
- Divinity 4.0
- Genre(s)
- RPG
