This article contains some spoilers for Baldur’s Gate 3.
So, HBO is turning Baldur’s Gate into a TV show. On its own, that’s quite an exciting proposition: a big-budget, live-action series set in Dungeons & Dragons’ most iconic city? Yes please. But the project’s announcement, which came courtesy of Deadline, contains a line that immediately had me burying my head in my hands.
“The Baldur’s Gate TV series will be a continuation to the games,” says the report, “telling a story that takes place immediately after the events of Baldur’s Gate 3, as the characters — old and new — are dealing with the ramifications of the events in the third game.”
The ramifications of what events, exactly? The defeat of the Netherbrain? Or perhaps the enslavement of it in the name of the Absolute? Or Gale’s choice to turn into a magical nuclear bomb, sacrificing himself to save the city? These are just three of the many ways Baldur’s Gate 3 can end, and that’s before we consider the dozens and dozens of choices that you make on the way to that conclusion. There are approximately 17,000 variations of the game’s final cutscene. How could a TV show possibly “deal with the ramifications of the events of the third game” when every single player has their own version of events?
The answer, of course, is that showrunner Craig Mazin must decide what choices are “canon.” One half of the duo behind The Last of Us’ HBO adaptation must now set certain events in stone in order to create a baseline to build his story upon. But to decide upon a canon series of events for Baldur’s Gate 3 is not the same as, for instance, determining which of Mass Effect 3’s trio of concluding options would be the starting point for what comes next. It’s not a simple case of how the story ends, but everything that happened on the 100-hour journey up until that point, too.
The entire picture of Baldur’s Gate 3, the story any one player lived, is the result of hundreds of decisions, ranging from the tactical to the emotional to the completely unaware. For some, Minsc and his miniature space hamster, Boo, are vital parts of the story. Yet many won’t even know who he is, having passed by and never recruited him to their party. There are those for whom Shadowheart’s escape from the Church of Shar is a defining moment, yet others will have found an equally defining pathway in encouraging her to embrace the dark goddess. And for those players of a more chaotic leaning, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the tale of an unstoppable serial killer that greedily succumbs to their own Dark Urge, tearing limbs off wizards and letting goblins slaughter refugees. The game is less a single story with a handful of different outcomes, and more like hundreds of character threads that are entwined like rope. A rope that grows thicker and longer with every romance (steady now), argument, betrayal, and surprise you experience. To unravel all that and find a single golden thread for television seems at best foolhardy, at worst impossible.
Anyone who wants a sequel to Baldur's Gate 3 wants a follow-up to their own experience, not Craig Mazin’s.None of this is to say that the show is guaranteed to be bad, or of poor quality. Considering Mazin’s prior work – in particular, Chernobyl – and HBO’s track record with fantasy programming, there’s every chance that Baldur’s Gate will be a fantastic show, at least when viewed in isolation. But it’s difficult to create that isolation when the project is explicitly a continuation of the journey so many of us undertook for hundreds, sometimes even thousands of hours. And because of Baldur's Gate 3's unrivalled branching RPG design, we have all become deeply attached to our own versions of this world and its characters.
It should be said that details of how the show will be structured are still incredibly thin. It will feature a group of new protagonists, so we don’t know to what extent the now-famous party of heroes and antiheroes that make up Baldur’s Gate 3 cast will feature. By being a “continuation to the games”, could it merely exist in a world where the Netherbrain once existed, and tales of heroes’ journeys to defeat it are muttered in the city's streets like mythical tales? Or will meetings with the likes of Wyll, Astarion, Lae'zel be little more than fleeting encounters, kept somewhat shapeless in an effort to remain relevant to most players’ memories of them? It creates a dilemma: purposefully keep things vague and potentially undercook the history of this world, or pick a defined canon that could alienate large portions of your viewership?
Television adaptations are, of course, designed with more than one eye on wider markets. HBO wants people who have never played Baldur’s Gate 3 to become invested in its world. But that begs the question: why a direct sequel? Why take place immediately after a story that a portion of your audience has no investment in? If half your audience has no attachment to those events, and the other half will almost certainly have experienced a different version of the events you’re building upon, who is winning here? Anyone who does want a sequel wants a follow-up to their own experience, not Craig Mazin’s.
Baldur’s Gate won’t be the first show to tackle this problem. Just this year, the second season of Fallout told a story set after the events of Fallout: New Vegas, an RPG that also concludes with a number of very different, world-defining options. But Fallout has made a number of smart choices. Firstly, it’s not a sequel to the game; it’s just set in the same universe, and thus isn’t trying to continue the plot of New Vegas. Secondly, it’s set over a decade later, and purposefully leaves the events during that time a complete mystery. And so the show’s depiction of the game’s characters and factions doesn’t have to join the dots. Did you hand the Vegas Strip to the Legion in your playthrough? Well, in the 15 years since, they’ve succumbed to infighting and have fallen from their mighty position. You don’t need to know how it happened, it just did.
Using this method, Fallout (sort of) successfully ensures no one New Vegas ending is cemented as canon. Every outcome could have happened, but the result of your choices may not have endured for the 15 years between the game and the show. Larian Studios, the developer of Baldur’s Gate 3, understood the benefit of this kind of time gap; its gargantuan RPG is set more than a century after the events of its predecessor, ensuring it’s not restricted by the conclusion of Baldur’s Gate 2 and has space to create its own story. By starting immediately after the events of BG3, the show won’t have this luxury. It has to make a choice. It has to invalidate thousands of playthroughs. It can’t be the sequel to your experience of Baldur’s Gate 3.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The real lesson to learn from Fallout is that video game adaptations thrive best when they are decoupled from existing stories. So the big question is, why is this not just a Dungeons & Dragons show? You can set a D&D show in Baldur’s Gate. You can call a D&D show “Baldur’s Gate”. You can even include characters and reference (certain) events from Baldur’s Gate 3. But to purposefully shackle yourself to continuing the story of that game, rather than freely exploring its world, feels like purposefully rolling a critical fail on the first round of combat.
Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.
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