This article contains spoilers for Baldur's Gate 3.
After hours ꦜstruggling in t🦄he darkness of the Shadow-Cursed Lands, I finally emerged into the sunlight of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3's third act. For a few hours now, I've been poking around in Rivington, the village along the outskirts of the title city. Maybe it's just because I spent so long hacking away at one long🍸, diღfficult objective as I worked my way up to fighting Ketheric Thorm, but Act 3 feels almost overwhelming. The possibilities are endless, less like a traditional RPG and more like a Hitman level.
If you've played any of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:IO Interactive's Hitman games (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:especially t𒐪ꦆhe three released since 2016), there's a good chance that you've had the experience I'm about to describe. You get to a new level with a simple objective: kill your target. But as you begin making your way to the mark, you pass by a cornucopia of opportunities that might lead to a creative execution if you pursue them further. Oh, there's an automated gun that will shoot anyone whose picture it has been shown? Interesting, maybe I can find a photo of my target. Oh, there's a bag of concrete precariously perched over a path? Cool, maybe I can entice my target to leave their normal route and walk underneath. Hmm, I found rat poison in the kitchen and the target left their drink unattended? Wonder if I can distract them and slip it in.
Hitman levels are structured like ant colonies, and each ant is a potential opportunity to pass poison along to the queen. There are locked doors, side paths, shortcuts waiting to be opened, ladders to climb, and rafters to slink through. Along the way, there are employees whose outfits you can steal, and important people whose identities you can assume. There are cannons to fire, racecars to blow up, and exposed wires to dump water on. It's a game of set-ups and it's your job to figure out how to deliver the punchline.
Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't feel exactly like that — though you can always use Disguise Self if you want to get up to some sartorial antics — but Act 3 delivers that same sense that possibilities are lurking behind every locked door. During Act 2, I felt like I was banging my head against the wall, slogging through tough fight after tough fight with the promise that story threads would pay off once I got to Baldur's Gate. Like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, it was the dark middle chapter, divorced from the bright possibility of the first act and the triumphant payoff of the third. Now that I've reached the city outskirts, I feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of directions I can take the story as it winds its way to that inevitable conclusion.
I found a circus where a clown had been replaced by an Absolute-controlled imitator. I killed the imposter, and now the ringmaster has asked that I track down the real clown somewhere out there. There's a murder mystery afoot at a monastery, that I'm most of the way through solving. I need to go to a bookstore to advance Gale's story, track down Cazador for Astarion, and figure out how to help Orpheus for Lae'zel. More new quests can open up just from eavesdropping on a conversation. And that’s before you even consider that the fate of the world remains at stake.
And, to reiterate, I have only seen a very small amount of the outskirts of the city. But as I found shortcuts that opened doors from the monastery to the circus, and a hatch in the monastery kitchen that led to a cellar populated with criminals below, I felt that Hitman feeling stirring. Baldur's Gate is a land of opportunities, and I've only scratched the surface.
