| Hi everyone. Today we're diving into the exciting new role-playing game Baldur's Gate 3, but first... This week's top gaming news: Early in the new role-playing game Baldur's Gate 3, you'll discover a small town called the Emerald Grove. Inside, a clan of arrogant druids are reluctantly harboring a group of demonic refugees called tieflings. To the west, a cult of goblins is hunting for the enclave and plans to kill them all. Over the next few hours, you can choose how you'd like to handle this conflict. You can assassinate the goblin leaders to prevent them from invading. You can release a goblin that the tieflings have imprisoned, let her bring you to her camp and convince her brethren that you're on their side — then betray them. Or you can pretend to fight for the town, but then, in the heat of battle, open up the gate and let the goblins in. You can also choose how to deal with a faction of druids who are trying to drive the tieflings out — with murder, subterfuge, charisma or whatever other options you have at your disposal based on one of the dozen Dungeons & Dragons character classes you've picked, from paladin to sorcerer. These choices will have repercussions as you keep playing. If you save the tieflings, they'll appear a few hours later and play a role in some of the major quests that follow. But if you choose not to help them — or if they all get unlucky rolls of the dice and are killed during combat — you'll miss out on a fair number of important scenes. Perhaps the goblins also come back later if you choose to side with them. I wouldn't know, because there's no possible way for any single person to discover everything there is to do in this game. I've spent about 20 hours with Baldur's Gate 3, the latest RPG from the Ghent, Belgium-based developer Larian Studios. From what I've seen so far, the game is a stunning accomplishment, giving players a seemingly endless number of ways to approach each quest and combat encounter. Playing the game feels like jumping into a particularly well-crafted Dungeons & Dragons campaign, in conversation with designers who have put six years of work into their craft. The stories are full of twists and turns, the combat is satisfying and the number of potential quest-branches is mindboggling. For decades, one of the major appeals of role-playing games has been to let players choose their own adventures: where to go, who to befriend and what to steal. But those kinds of choices are expensive. If a game wants to give you the option to, say, side with the druids or side with the goblins, that means twice as much writing, programming, design, art, sound and QA testing — work that can tally into the millions of dollars. The more possibilities, the tougher it is to pull off. As a result, players will usually brush up against the limits of what a game can offer. Maybe you can choose between good or evil options without a middle ground; or maybe a certain character can't be killed because they're essential to this plot, even if you really want to see what might happen if you slit their throat. You might want to believe that people in Skyrim are paying attention to which side of the civil war you're helping, but they're just not programmed that way. And once you start to think like that and you start to see a role-playing game's narrative restrictions, it loses some of its magic — like when you catch a magician slipping a card into their sleeve. Baldur's Gate 3 rarely presents you with those kind of limitations. At one point, I was given a quest to protect a young priest from a group of nasty demons that were trying to knock her out and kidnap her. A few unlucky rolls later, she was incapacitated, and I was shocked to see that the game continued. But the priest had been responsible for a spell that kept the entire area safe, so suddenly every single villager and salesperson that I had previously been talking to turned into a demon and attacked. All the quests they had given me disappeared. Of course, I reloaded an old save file — I didn't want to lose those quests — but I was stunned that the game would find a way to let me continue regardless. Baldur's Gate 3 undoubtedly has its boundaries, as all games do, but so far I haven't found many of them. On a micro level, the game is also full of tools that let you experiment in fascinating ways. Say you want to get into a building with a locked door. If you have a rogue character, you might be able to pick the lock, or if one of your heroes is particularly charismatic, you could talk the inhabitants into letting you inside. Or you could painstakingly stack up a tower of crates and then use a teleporting arrow to transport yourself to the roof. The inevitable downside to this complexity of choice is that the game has some bugs — nothing that broke the game for me, but enough little annoyances to add up over time, like camera glitches and AI quirks. I've had to restart a couple of times because my characters wouldn't move or an enemy couldn't be targeted. Still, Baldur's Gate 3 feels like a special type of game, a monumental achievement that I'm looking forward to spending many more hours playing. In several ways, it feels very similar to one of this year's other blockbusters, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom — I'm not sure how it exists, but I sure am glad it does. See above! Vietnam is becoming a mobile gaming powerhouse. Teen gamers swiped $24 million in crypto, then turned on each other. | 
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