#362: The crew discusses Baldur’s Gate 3 and The Dark Urge origin character, how they can be used as a metaphor for intrusive thoughts, and the severe lack of therapists and social workers in Faerûn.

Josué (00:01.95)
Welcome to GT Radio on the Geek Therapy Network. Here at Geek Therapy, we believe that the best way to understand each other and ourselves is through the media we care about. My name is Josué Cardona and I am joined by Marc Cuiriz Link Keller, and Lara Taylor. Everybody, what y’all playing lately?

Marc (00:12.497)
Hello?

Link Keller (00:14.667)
Yo.

Lara (00:16.879)
Hey!

Josué (00:23.242)
Anything? Anything good? Anything near? Tears of the Kingdom? Yeah? Pardon, Marc, what are you playing?

Lara (00:24.903)
Tears of the kingdom.

Marc (00:28.428)
Kitty Collector.

Link Keller (00:28.834)
Oh, I’ve been…

Marc (00:31.581)
I’m playing kitty collector.

Josué (00:33.09)
Kitty Collector Link?

Link Keller (00:35.63)
I’ve just been putting just, you know, a couple of hours into a little indie game that I’m sure none of you guys have heard of. It is a sequel. It is part of a series. Just a small, small little game nobody knows about called Baldur’s Gate 3 and… Whoaaaaa!

Link Keller (01:00.748)
Yeah.

Lara (01:00.899)
I mean, that’s also what I’m playing.

Josué (01:00.994)
I thought you were going to say moving out too. Yeah, but yeah, Baldur’s Gate 3. I think, have we all been playing it? Marc, are you playing? Yeah, for sure.

Marc (01:03.156)
Yeah.

Marc (01:08.32)
I am looking at my steam right now. I have played it for a solid 84 minutes because I literally bought it two days ago.

Lara (01:15.995)
I’m sorry.

Link Keller (01:17.01)
84 minutes that’s pretty close to the amount of time that I’ve put into the game which if I pull if I pull open My steam right now it says No, it says 227.9 hours

Josué (01:17.186)
That’s a bet.

Marc (01:21.605)
Oh yeah, I-

73.1

Marc (01:30.252)
Oh wait, hold on, I’m sorry, that says 73.1 hours played recently.

Link Keller (01:35.75)
Yes, because I had already put over 100 hours into this game when it was in early access and one might suspect that maybe I would chill out about it. No, not even a little bit. I’m going harder than ever. I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m constantly thinking about it. Right now I am thinking about it. Are we actually done? Can I go play?

Lara (01:43.21)
Mm-hmm.

Josué (01:44.081)
Oh.

Link Keller (02:04.043)
My babies.

Josué (02:04.214)
Before you go, can you tell us what the game is and what it’s about?

Link Keller (02:08.658)
It is a RPG. The first one came out in, I wanna say 96, 98 maybe? Late 90s, early 2000s. And I played those games, Baldur’s Gate 1 and Baldur’s Gate 2 a shit ton in my youth. And I have been excited for more Baldur’s Gate since 2007.

Josué (02:27.822)
same.

Lara (02:28.646)
Mm-hmm.

Link Keller (02:37.494)
when they started promoting Dragon Age Origins as the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. I’ve been craving it. It did not hit that mark for me, but Baldur’s Gate 3, it is more Baldur’s Gate. It is a different game. It plays a little bit different. It plays a little bit more similarly to Larian Studios’ other games, Divinity, Original Sin, and that sequel, but it is still in its heart.

Baldur’s Gate game and so I am having so much fun playing. You get to make your little character. It is in the Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition rule set. So most of the basic Dungeons and Dragons stuff is in the game. And yeah, I made my little character and I collect my little friends and we go on little adventures and then we do mass murder and stealing and…

Kissing? Mmm!

Lara (03:41.187)
Mass murder and stealing? I haven’t done any of that. Well, maybe mass murder. Of goblins.

Josué (03:48.142)
So many goblins.

Link Keller (03:48.248)
Just a little light murder. So anyways, I’m having an absolute blast with this game. It’s been something I’ve been excited about for years. And it’s fantastic. I’m enjoying it so much.

Josué (04:04.138)
Well, I too have been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and that’s not really what I want to talk about today. I picked the topic, it’s not really about Baldur’s Gate 3, but there is a character in Baldur’s Gate 3 that you can choose that I want to talk about and just to kind of set off the conversation. But I will say that Baldur’s Gate 3 more than any other game that I’ve played… maybe ever?

But you can tell me what other games do this. And I recently played Divinity Originals sin two. I’ve played, I think I’ve played, you know, a variety of RPGs. But this game feels like it has, it almost feels like anything is possible in the sense that you have many different, like you meet somebody and you’re like, oh, I could befriend this person or I could kill them or I could kiss them. Like, I don’t know, like, anything feels possible.

And so I’m very hesitant at some things because there are some games where you’re like, I’m just gonna say this to see what happens, but I don’t really expect there to be a consequence. And in this game, I’m like, attack? No, I’m not gonna attack because if I attack, I’m gonna end up killing them. Or I might die, yeah, yeah. It’s gonna be a whole thing. And so the game is a lot of fun and it feels like there’s high stakes because I know an epi-

Link Keller (05:08.89)
Heheheheheheheheheheheheheh

Lara (05:13.629)
Mm-hmm. You might die or you might die. Yeah.

Josué (05:27.978)
character can die and then that’s it. Like their whole storyline, they could have been on your party, in your party for 207 hours or however many.

Link Keller (05:37.53)
Hahaha

Lara (05:38.231)
and the one wrong statement and that person dies in a battle.

Josué (05:41.006)
Or you could have killed them at the beginning. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that I find impressive about the game. And I think that’s one of the reasons why right now it is beloved and getting very, very high scores in reviews. And so you can create your own character. How many of you created your own characters? All of you? Same. So I created a character of my own.

Lara (06:00.771)
I’m excited.

Link Keller (06:02.913)
Yes.

Josué (06:08.182)
Which is almost identical to yours, Lara, not surprisingly. Hahahaha

Link Keller (06:12.193)
Wow.

Lara (06:12.907)
Look, I’ve never played a Dragonborn. I wanted to play Dragonborn. I love Rangers. I want to be a Ranger. Yeah.

Josué (06:15.99)
Mine was a Dragonborn. Yep, yep. Yeah, yep, yep. So I created a character and then I saw, it wasn’t a review, there’s this YouTube channel called Fextralife where he does a whole bunch of coverage of the games and in a very technical way. Like this is one of those games that I’ve been studying. Like I watch hour long videos on every class before I decided what I wanted to do. And he made a video on this, one of them,

Link Keller (06:17.455)
Hehehehehehe

Josué (06:44.914)
Origin characters that you can choose. I think there’s 12, right, that are actual characters in the game that you can pick. And 12, is that too many? I think there’s 12 characters throughout.

Link Keller (06:54.362)
12? That’s way too many. There’s six companions which you can pla...