168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Baldur's Gate 3 has antagonists and they're the most despicable in all of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons: the mind flayers, or ghaik. The Cthulhu-like villains use mind control powers to turn all other creatures into their slaves, completely obedient to them. They are, by def🌜inition, bad.
But Baldur's Gate 3 is much less focused on these big bads than it is on the little bads inside your head. As the game begins, your character is a prisoner on a mind flayer airship, and one of the ghaik places a wriggling tadpole on your character's eye. It squirms past the eyeball and into your brain. On the ship and in the area surrounding it, you meet several other characters who have also been primed for a hostile takeover by the mind flayers. Together, you team up to work together to remove the tadpoles before they can transform you into ghaik thralls.
As a result, the real obstacle of the game is the thing inside of you, rather than any external threat. It's like a zombie game, but if you had a longer window between bite and transformation, a period during which you could go out and search for someone to cure you. Zombie stories tend to make that transformation happen extremely quickly or focus on characters who don't change at all. We have the undead and we have the survivors, but zombie mythologies rarely make room in their timelines for the characters caught in the middle. That's part of the juice of the trope — a character you love is doomed to be irreversibly changed and there's nothing they can do to stop it, short of death. There's an inherent finality to it. By saddling the protagonist of Baldur's Gate 3 with a condition that is similar to zombification, but by giving them time to reverse the effects, Larian finds a neat little pocket that is rarely explored.
The decision to make all of the party members (at least all the party members I've discovered so far) survivors of the mind flayer ship, each with a parasite in their brain, is another smart twist. It ties external conflicts between characters to the internal conflict that each is dealing with. Each has secrets they're hiding and a goal they're trying to achieve, but they also have to deal with the fact that they'll become a mindless slave to the mind flayers unless they can manage to subordinate those desires. Given that they're all varying degrees of self-interested, it gives the whole party a will they or won't they energy that goes beyond the sexual tension you may have with a given companion. Will they or won't they work together long enough to pull this off?
The parasite also works well as a metaphor. Being alive now, in the era of omnipresent online disinformation and outright conspiracy theories, means constantly realizing that seemingly normal people you know are afflicted by their own set of hyper-specific brainworms. They may be actually damaging, but a lot of the time they just make people annoyingly fixated on inconsequential things. That's the cost of spending a lot of time online. Maintaining community sometimes means subordinating our weird, hyper-specific opinions for the greater good; learning to distance ourselves from the minor beliefs we let take up major residence in our minds. The characters in Baldur's Gate 3 are doing the same thing. They just happen to be actual brainworms.