Pushing Buttons: Will Baldur’s Gate 3 be the game where we can truly be whoever we want?

In this week's newsletter: the D&D-inspired RPG is an almost bottomless sandbox, and represents a new frontier for the genre

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This week brings a preposterously generous gift for lovers of timesink role-playing games: Larian Studios's Baldur's Gate 3. Depending on your level of engagement with Dungeon and Dragons-inspired RPGs, you will know it either as the unlikely and long-awaited follow-up to 2000's Baldur's Gate 2 - one of the great computer RPGs of its era - or as the game where you can have sex with a bear.

Look, technically it's not a bear - it's a shapeshifting druid in bear form. But still, the scene inevitably went viral when Larian showed it off during a livestream last month. It is the tip of the iceberg: you can romance pretty much any available character in this role-playing game, or several of them at once. You can try to steal almost anything, or throw it at an enemy as a makeshift weapon. You can be good, or creatively, grotesquely evil. It is indicative of Larian's approach to the genre, which is that if the player can imagine it and it can be determined by a dice roll, you should be able to do it. The studio wants to capture some of the unpredictable, anarchic spirit that players of real-life D&D adore about their hobby.