Out of everyone in my circles, I feel like the only person left who hasn’t beaten Baldur’s Gate 3. The FOMO of missing out on everyone’s new favorite toy isn’t something that typically compels me, but god — it’s like I don’t make a dent in exploring Faerûn. I know why; I don’t want to admit this, but at some point, I’ve got to stop picking up every bone, rotten basket, and fork I find.
Okay, in my defense, it’s not that bad anymore. I stopped picking up hoards of goblin garbage at the end of Act I, though not of my own volition. After approaching the 80 to 90-hour mark — that’s shaving off a generous Early Access estimate — a friend watching me stream over Discord gently prodded me in the right direction: “Christ, Andrea, you know you don’t need an inventory of broken lutes?”
But what if I do? What if I get deep into Act II, and some wayward Bard asks if I have a dozen spare broken instruments? I could be one short, miss some weird Karlach-related lore, and spend another hundred hours agonizing over my decisions.
Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t really do that, though. It’s far better about the item situation than I gave it credit for. It wasn’t until I hit that Act I conclusion that I really began accepting my trash-collecting anxiety wasn’t really rational. I say it tongue-in-cheek, but also completely serious: I’m definitely neurotic in the way that impacts how I interact with some games (a lot of games), but hot damn does it ever come out in RPGs.
For context, I’m the type to fuss over talking to that lone NPC hidden upstairs in the back of a dark inn, refusing to move on until I know what they say before, during, and after my battle against god. It’s led me to a lot of cool experiences that aren’t exactly useful day-to-day life skills, but knowing stupid facts about my favorite worlds does bring me some joy.
But the BG3 item thing? I swear it was killing me. Not only was I picking everything up, but I was organizing them all by value of the trash, type of trash, if I fancied the trash, so on, so on. I never really once asked, “Should I be doing this?” and let my habits spiral into disaster.
While my desire to be thorough, put in the nicest way possible, led me to some neat finds, I’ve gotta wonder how many hours I wasted picking abandoned cellars clean and sorting the junk neatly into boxes. I reckon it was tickling the same part of the brain tadpole that likes PowerWash Simulator or collecting everything in Final Fantasy XIV, but I highly recommend not playing BG3 like that.
What I will rationalize as fine, though, is combing for the neat stuff and keeping it. I’ve got every pair of undies I could ever want to drop Karlach and my Tav in, and my growing BG3 library is a lore-laden treasure trove of goofy in-universe fan fics, letters, and books on Mindflayer anatomy.
It’s been months now since most of my friends finished up their first playthroughs, and while I’ve got maybe one or two quests left, I’m still not done. I have no idea what my real timer is at anymore, thanks to a few extended periods of leaving the game running, and maybe that’s for the better. I’ve abandoned my worst habit of picking up anything and everything, but I still dig through every single container in some strange man’s attic, looking for actual goodies. And then I go back and double-check, you know, just in case I missed one.
I still organize my inventory just so, too, while limiting myself to a select few containers. By some standards, I’d like to think my BG3 inventory is incredibly tame after selling off all the junk. I will, however, still spend an hour or so of my time after a session carefully moving and tossing items. There’s the incredibly handy Better Inventory UI mod, which is surprisingly one of the few I’ve neglected, but my friends swear by it, so I’ll get it going eventually.
Until then, give me a pat on the back for making it to Act III and dropping the chests of rotten cheese. I’m excited to finally beat this behemoth of a game myself before looping back to do it all over as Dark Urge. I swear this time, I won’t spend a decade rearranging my chest of scrolls, either.
