Whatever the third game's quality ends up being, the first two games are well worth it. And honestly, the third is Baldur's Gate in name only. The series has always been the story of the Bhaalspawn, and that was definitively concluded with the Throne of Bhaal expansion. Baldur's Gate 3 is just taking the name for brand recognition, is about a whole other story and hero entirely, and plays more like Divinity: Original Sin with a D&D skin.
They should have called it Baldur's Gate: <title>, like they did with Dark Alliance. That would have at least been acceptable.
Unless you can literally import a BG2 character this game has nothing to do with BG1-2. There's a canon Bhaalspawn protag with a canon ending that literally any FR game can reference. He also happens to die 100 years later, i.e. when this game is set, in Baldur's Gate, in a fight with the other only living Bhaalspawn (the one that teleports randomly, I don't remember his name), which causes Bhaal to finally resurrect. I'll be absolutely shocked if their "tie-in" that makes it "worth" being called BG3 isn't that event, which isn't even a tie-in at all.
I just want to point out that the whole Abdel/died-in-Baldur's-Gate thing is not really canon to the games.
Yeah I guess you could say it represents one permutation of the Bhaalspawn protagonist, but that canon FR protag is clearly designed to be minimally important to the FR setting and take a path that almost no actual player of the games would take.
Most people would assume the mantel of god-hood in their playthrough of ToB; or if they didn't, be so fantastically powerful that no upstart would ever, ever present a challenge to them personally. Good luck killing me asshole, I'm behind Timestop and 20 layers of contingency.
It's a classical "we wrote a cool story involving the most powerful stuff in the setting... then ret-conned it all into being a perfect loop that ends up back at square 1" canon setting solution. If your canon story completely negates the whole point of the storyline in the first place (i.e Bhaal is back to what/who he was before the Time of Troubles) then you just retconned your whole story in effect.
Of course it's not canon to the games. It's just canon for the general setting, so other games can have an outcome of it. Pretty much every FR game or tabletop setting is minimally important. And even this minimally important protagonist has a Schrodinger's cat death. Did he die to the other Bhaalspawn, or did he die to an adventurer party after going ravager on everyone? It's all stupid either way.
But yeah, I agree. That's why I said unless you can import a character, BG3 has no connection to BG1-2, and why I predict that one of these events will be referenced in the game as some kind of "See? They're connected!!" moment, as if it's not some kind of cheap cop-out.
Anyway, Bhaal isn't completely back to how he was; he reclaimed his pantheon, but came back mortal. Maybe we'll kill him (again) in BG3, since there's currently no events after that. That would be the perfect terrible woke writer ending to the entire saga; everyone involved died and nothing mattered.
Whatever the third game's quality ends up being, the first two games are well worth it. And honestly, the third is Baldur's Gate in name only. The series has always been the story of the Bhaalspawn, and that was definitively concluded with the Throne of Bhaal expansion. Baldur's Gate 3 is just taking the name for brand recognition, is about a whole other story and hero entirely, and plays more like Divinity: Original Sin with a D&D skin.
They should have called it Baldur's Gate: <title>, like they did with Dark Alliance. That would have at least been acceptable.
Unless you can literally import a BG2 character this game has nothing to do with BG1-2. There's a canon Bhaalspawn protag with a canon ending that literally any FR game can reference. He also happens to die 100 years later, i.e. when this game is set, in Baldur's Gate, in a fight with the other only living Bhaalspawn (the one that teleports randomly, I don't remember his name), which causes Bhaal to finally resurrect. I'll be absolutely shocked if their "tie-in" that makes it "worth" being called BG3 isn't that event, which isn't even a tie-in at all.
I just want to point out that the whole Abdel/died-in-Baldur's-Gate thing is not really canon to the games.
Yeah I guess you could say it represents one permutation of the Bhaalspawn protagonist, but that canon FR protag is clearly designed to be minimally important to the FR setting and take a path that almost no actual player of the games would take.
Most people would assume the mantel of god-hood in their playthrough of ToB; or if they didn't, be so fantastically powerful that no upstart would ever, ever present a challenge to them personally. Good luck killing me asshole, I'm behind Timestop and 20 layers of contingency.
It's a classical "we wrote a cool story involving the most powerful stuff in the setting... then ret-conned it all into being a perfect loop that ends up back at square 1" canon setting solution. If your canon story completely negates the whole point of the storyline in the first place (i.e Bhaal is back to what/who he was before the Time of Troubles) then you just retconned your whole story in effect.
Of course it's not canon to the games. It's just canon for the general setting, so other games can have an outcome of it. Pretty much every FR game or tabletop setting is minimally important. And even this minimally important protagonist has a Schrodinger's cat death. Did he die to the other Bhaalspawn, or did he die to an adventurer party after going ravager on everyone? It's all stupid either way.
But yeah, I agree. That's why I said unless you can import a character, BG3 has no connection to BG1-2, and why I predict that one of these events will be referenced in the game as some kind of "See? They're connected!!" moment, as if it's not some kind of cheap cop-out.
Anyway, Bhaal isn't completely back to how he was; he reclaimed his pantheon, but came back mortal. Maybe we'll kill him (again) in BG3, since there's currently no events after that. That would be the perfect terrible woke writer ending to the entire saga; everyone involved died and nothing mattered.