James Ball

The latest Dragon Age game is unbearably right-on

The characters are all essentially nice, they discuss their problems like they’ve had too much therapy and they resolve conflict appropriately. It’s insufferable

issue 07 December 2024

Like all other forms of culture, video games offer a way to escape from, or reflect on, reality through fiction. Unlike almost any other form of culture, they are interactive – you, the player, control the experience.

Nowhere is this more true than with immersive role-playing games (RPGs), in which the player embodies a character forced to make moral (or wildly immoral) choices in a fictionalised world, which change the narrative of the game for good or ill. That might sound nerdy (it is), but it’s big business. Baldur’s Gate 3 has comfortably topped $1 billion in global sales, and won numerous industry awards.

Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you lots of choices. It’s up to you whether yougo heroic, woke or genocidal

It did this despite being criticised as ‘woke’ for its various inclusive options. In Baldur’s Gate 3, your character can be gay or trans, have heterochromia, vitiligo, and be of almost any race.

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