04/06/2026
So, Baldur's Gate 3, despite its success and the enjoyment factor, has some serious writing problems. I could go on and on about some of them, like Gale.
Gale's entire backstory and the way he is handled, down to some of his lines is absolutely insane IF we are to take the fact he was the archmage of one of the largest, most powerful cities in the world, to be factual.
I can make a separate post about that, but honestly, the most egregious lore violation is how the game handles using Bhaal — again. This was a solved issue. That was the first two games and the Throne of Bhaal. It's insanity, and it was emotionally completed and straight up solved. All I'm going to say about it is "Somehow, Bhaal returned." ☠️ That, and the old characters from previous games. ESPECIALLY the characters from the old games.
Jaheira? Roflmao. When I saw Jaheira in this game, I was dumbfounded. I was like "Okay, well the day is saved. I don't even need to be here anymore. Why is she here?"
Because here's the thing. Jaheira is not just a quirky Harper half-elf lady. Her joining your party and being compressed to your level is honestly... It's f***ing diabolical ☠️ Her and Minsc just become a part of the playable toybox, when in reality, the narrative would immediately warp around them. Larian merely wanted to connect BG3 to the previous games more strongly, despite being over a century later.
It would be like Gandalf coming back as Gandalf the White, and him telling the Fellowship "Yeah, I can help with goblins and orcs now, but only if you gear me up." Except debateably WORSE.
You see, Jaheira and Minsc both took part in insane battles. If you scale the party in 5E to older editions, they are getting *smoked* by the kinds of people Jaheira fought. Once you hit level 17-20 in D&D, even in 5E, you become a walking geopolitical weapon. Except both of them are beyond that. 5E does not have epic levels, but Jaheira should be notably more powerful than that. She's an Archdruid. In 3rd Edition, she'd have Epic Spellcasting, which even as a druid means "I am a god in every way but name only."
In the base game, they beat Jon Irenicus, who, in 2nd Edition, is a level 30 wizard. 5E literally cannot scale him correctly. He's that ridiculously powerful. And in that battle, he has four powerful demons helping him, including two Balors. If you take a party of level 12's, which is the ridiculous forced level cap in BG3 into that in 3rd Edition or 2nd Edition, you're not in a "heroic underdog" scenario. You're getting packed up in one turn and sent home in a bag. Unless the DM is giving you 100 free gimmies, or makes the opposition incompetent beyond all plausible deniability, no standard party of level 12's is even beating someone with 9th-level spellcasting, let alone ALL of that.
But Jaheira does exactly that, and more. So when you see her, what should actually happen is Tav saying "Oh good! The Shadow-Cursed Lands are solved!" ☠️ With a sigh of relief. Honestly? If she's even around, it should have probably been solved already. There is nothing there that can meaningfully challenge her. She would show up and dogwalk literally everything there in one afternoon by herself.
Honestly? Every cultist, vampire, hag, Zhentarim, and goblin in a 10 mile radius of where she's headed would pack their bags in sudden remembrance of an appointment they had with an apothecary two time-zones away. Her résumé is THAT ridiculous.
Because she doesn't just help beat Irenicus, who could give Elminster odds. She keeps getting more powerful, and you see numerous incredibly powerful characters she helped take down later in the game in the form of some weird bloodied echoes of their former selves. Namely:
Sendai. A drow godling (Bhaalspawn) who had 20 levels in cleric AND wizard. Fighting her was a grueling boss gauntlet which left little room for mistakes. Again, 5E cannot meaningfully scale a character like this. Now, you might say "But Bushido Doge, just give her everything those classes have and a huge health pool!" Well, if you did that, and gave Sendai all of the absolute highest stats, AC, a ton of bonus spells of every level, and all kinds of other ridiculous things, that would *be a start*. And she's not even the most powerful thing the old characters defeat.
Abazigal. An Ancient (though should be Wyrm) Blue Dragon (Bhaalspawn) with 30 levels in Kensai, which is basically a weaboo fighting magic Fighter. Horrifically powerful.
And honestly, a character that is so ridiculous, even the characters in BG2 kind of had plot gimme to defeat, which is Melissan, or Amelyssan the Blackhearted. Level 60, split between cleric and wizard. Who devoured the essences of other Bhaalspawn to empower herself, teetered on godhood (higher level than most gods, but without the powers of divinity), and sought to usurp Bhaal and just become the god of murder herself. Utterly, utterly ridiculously powerful character that you could probably put every 5E character you've ever played together, and that cosmic amalgamation would get *bodied* by Melissan.
And those are the kinds of people that Funny Hamster Man (aka Minsc) and Jaheira managed to beat. They had help, yes, but they exist at a power level that makes the problems in Baldur's Gate 3 a joke. And they're not the only characters from the old games still wandering around. Some of them, like the player character and Imoen were unceremoniously killed off, because if they weren't, they would once again be solving the Bhaal problem, proactively and easily. They did it once against demigods, who were apocalyptic threats. They would very easily do it again.
However, heroes dying isn't the problem. That should be possible. Villains returning isn't automatically a bad thing either. But a multi-game saga already concluded the Bhaal question. Bhaal tried to return through his many children, the Bhaalspawn. They fought, died, ascended, rejected, or were consumed by that legacy. The player character overcame the blood, and the saga ended with the player deciding what that divine inheritance meant and what to do with it.
Then BG3 basically says "Anyways, Bhaal is back, the Slayer is back, Sarevok is back-ish, and the murder cult is doing murder cult things again."
It basically just delayed the Bhaalspawn saga for 100 years and kind of... Half-ass makes what you did in previous games irrelevant. Not completely irrelevant, but partially. And in my honest opinion, it was completely unnecessary to re-open that can of worms. The Bhaal stuff and Slayer stuff should have stayed buried. The game already has plenty of interesting premises, such as the Githyanki and Vlaakith. The mindflayer threat, the Absolute, Raphael, the Netherese leftover magic and artifacts, the political collapse in Baldur's Gate, the tadpole body horror... I mean, the game has plenty to stand on.
And having mythic-powered, walking historical events and legends like Minsc and Jaheira joining up with you is cool from a gameplay perspective, but from a continuity perspective, it's completely heinous. They, at absolute most, should be background NPCs in the midst of doing something else, or showing up for one fight and aura farming whatever Larian put in front of you. Even if we steel-man every other writing decision made, them being bounded to your strength and level is preposterous when they offed would-be gods like Irenicus and Melissan.
Baldur's Gate 3 is a good game, and a fun game, but it would have been far better staying its own thing, standing on its own merits, with less tie-ins to the older games. Even if it kept the name. If you weigh it like a sequel, honestly, it is a VERY poorly written game. Like extraordinarily bad, worse than the Sequel Trilogy by orders of magnitude bad.
It gets away with it because it's a pretty game, and there was a whopping 23 years inbetween the release of Baldur's Gate 2 and 3, and 3 entire editions of D&D itself. If you played BG2 back in the day, you were basically a loser and a social pariah. Now 5E is quite literally normie's edition of choice, and there are practically no social consequences to playing it. If BG3 was released in like 2002-2005; but still isometric (or even not), for the above reasons alone, it would have been heralded as an abysmal failure.
I don't strictly dislike the game, but it is in the unfortunate liminal space where I can no longer take it seriously because of how it handles legacy characters and stories. Like my disbelief is simply unable to be suspended, because in the second act of the game, I get what amounts to a walking demigod in my party. And... she's just a low level druid mook whose struggles and efforts defeating many apocalyptic-level threats was only halfway substantiated, and has NOTHING to show for it.
