GO TO HELL

BALDUR’S GATE III is taking us to dark places, and it’s making darkness a mechanic too.

- Jeremy Peel

Go to hell,” says Gale. The usually cocksure wizard and optional player character of Baldur’s Gate III stares down the flames of the party’s campfire. This is a man whose leather-bound chest conceals a Netherese Destruction Orb which, given time to count down, will produce a nuclear-level explosion, ripping him apart – yet he still gets up every morning to turn a phrase and find his next spell. Tonight, though, he’s brooding. The events of the last three days have given even him cause for concern. “Go to hell,” he repeats. “It’s an everyday expression. So trivial it’s almost meaningless. But we’ve seen hell. It’s real, and it isn’t trivial.” Like the rest of the party, Gale has endured a kidnapping. He has survived the crash of a flying slave ship crewed by mind flayers. And, even now that he has escaped, he remains the unwilling surrogate to a tentacled baby that will kill him on birth. Likely very painfully, before the week is out. It’s hard to think of anything much more hellish.

Yet Gale isn’t speaking figuratively when he says he’s seen hell. As it turns out, Baldur’s Gate III actually begins in hell. More specifically, the first layer of the Nine Hells, Avernus.

DEMONIC INFLUENCE

Over the last year, tabletop D&D fans have been playing through the prequel to Baldur’s Gate III, Descent into Avernus. They’ve already participated in the Blood War, a perpetual struggle that rages between demons and devils, a Warhammerlike vision of infinite conflict. Now we’ll step between the battle lines ourselves, both in the intro of Larian’s Early Access build in late September, and during a much longer sequence of the finished game.