I finished my playthrough of Baldur's Gate 3 a while ago, but I've never really stopped thinking about it. I'm vicariously experiencing a second playthrough while I watch my wife play, but the constant stream of new games – a river that will continue to rage with Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and Dragon's Dogma 2 soon – has proven too harsh a current to swim against. One day, when my memory of Baldur's Gate 3 has faded a bit more, I'll find time to replay it, but that won't be for a long while yet. In the meantime though, I find myself wishing I could take my character into other games with me.
I know this sounds like those terrible promises NFT hawkers used to make about being able to take guns from game to game, but I don't mean it literally. There's just a feeling I got with my Baldur's Gate 3 character that I find myself missing. There was a depth to their responses and you were never short of options, but it's more than that. It's more like they're my friend and I miss being around them.
Baldur's Gate 3 is a very long game, so you're with your character for over 100 hours – you spend far more time with them by your side than most other protagonists. With the depth of the character creator, they're also incredibly personal. Not just a default character, or even a combination of specific features, but truly yours. They are, in reality, just a combination of features, but the list of features is so vast and the combinations so unique that not only are no two characters alike, but as you see them side by side, it's hard to imagine them coming from the same character creator.
Maybe I don't even want to take my BG3 character anywhere. Maybe it's more that I want the character creator everywhere. I'll never play it enough to make as many characters that I have ideas for, and I keep seeing more cool ones as people share clips on social media. I know from screenshots and discussions at TheGamer that we have a huge range of designs amongst the staff here, and that's a tiny sample size compared to the literal millions of options out there.
A Few Of TheGamer's Tavs
There's also some nostalgia talking, despite the game being less than a year old. There's a reason we have such strong affection for the movies and songs and video games from our childhood. It's not really that they were better, it's that life was. We had the freedom to spend all night and all weekend playing a game we loved, then talk to our friends about it all day in school. The idea of playing back through Baldur's Gate 3 immediately after finishing is alien to me now, knowing the huge range of games that's out there. As a kid, I'd have beaten it twice and be planning out a third. I still remember the different journeys each of my Mass Effect characters took.
I've already played one game I'd be happy to call my Game of the Year in 2024 (Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth) and we're not even two full months in, with several exciting ones on the horizon. I'm not pining for Baldur's Gate 3 because there's nothing else worth caring about or because other games have left me disappointed. I just can't seem to fully let it go. Not the world, not the adventure, and certainly not the character.
Baldur's Gate 3 Lets You Write Your Own Character's Story
Every time I see a new BG3 post online – and they remain frequent – I'm always impressed by how different their character is and how much it folds into the overall world. These characters are special because they not only each feel like they belong to us, but because they also belong to the game. A lot of custom characters look jarring against the other more curated designs the game sculpts itself, but our Tavs feel as hand-picked as Astarion, Shadowheart, or Karlach.
In that case, wanting to drop them at random into other games I'm playing seems like a bad idea – which is probably why it reminded you of NFT salesmen. But then, I don't really want to take my character with me into another game, I just want to carry that feeling. My Tav is a major reason Baldur's Gate 3 has remained in my thoughts so long after rolling credits, and every character creator I use in future will inevitably be compared to BG3's and most will likely come up short. I already miss all the Tavs I'll never get to make, and when I eventually replay it, I hope my next one can carry on their spirit.
