Earlier this week, a tweet made the rounds in which a games writer said thatLarian Studiosshould add a real-time combat option toBaldur’s Gate 3. I don’t want to put this guy on blast, but I think it’s worth breaking down why that’s a bad idea.
Most importantly, it would require completely rebalancing the game. Every encounter in Baldur’s Gate 3 feels exceptionally fine tuned and, often, designed to teach you something new. ThePhase Spider Matriarchtaught me how to use the game’s magic inventory effectively.Gremishkastaught me how to win without using magic.Death Shepherdstaught me how to divide and conquer enemy forces effectively. The game is built like a Swiss watch or a German car. Action combat would mean rebuilding those delicate machines with entirely different, often incompatible parts.
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The second reason it’s a bad idea is that Baldur’s Gate 3 is alreadya massive success with gigantic crossover appeal. Larian doesn’t need to add an action combat mode to appeal to normies who don’t typically play isometric RPGs. The game already appeals to normies. Any resources the studio would put toward a real-time combat mode would be those it wouldn’t be putting toward building expansions, fixing existing bugs, and/or working on Baldur’s Gate 4,Divinity: Original Sin3, or something entirely new. Larian makes great turn-based RPGs and has a newly massive audience. It would be a waste of time to become something different in hopes of winning over a few extra players.
Additionally, Baldur’s Gate 3 shouldn’t add a real-time mode because the triple-A games space is homogeneous enough. I wrote earlier this year abouthow God of War Ragnarok and Final Fantasy 16 were functionally identical to play, as each of the games funneled you from stylized action encounter to stylized action encounter along a gorgeously rendered linear corridor. In that piece, I talked about how, 20 years ago,Final FantasyandGod of Warwere nothing alike. Final Fantasy 10 was a turn-based JRPG with anime character designs and storytelling. The original God of War was a character action game, with some platforming and light puzzle-solving, and character designs inspired by Greek myth in the same way that 300 was inspired by Greek history. Those games looked and felt nothing alike but on the PS5, their descendants are dead ringers for each other.
That’s bad. Not because it’s wrong for two different teams to be inspired by similar things and make similar games, but because across the industry, developers are getting the message that there is only room for one kind of single-player triple-A game: cinematic, hyper-linear (unless it’s an open world so big you’ll never see all it has to offer), with action combat. Baldur’s Gate 3 is cinematic, in a way, but it rejects the other tenets of commercial design. It isn’t linear, but it isn’t an open world in the traditional sense either. And it has turn-based combat when most games have ditched it for twitchy action.
It’s not like its design choices are unprecedented, but it’s worth holding onto that difference, rather than sanding it away. There are tons of action games you could be playing right now. There’s only one Baldur’s Gate 3.
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