Eyes-sometric view.
Baldur’s Gate 3 has, in spirit, carried on the tradition of mainstream isometric RPGs. Sure, there’ve been the Pillars of Eternity games—solid CRPGS in their own right—but even Obsidian’s doing a pseudo-Skyrim, now, no matter how much it’s saying otherwise. Meanwhile, Dragon Age has been getting more and more action RPG with each entry. The top-down flame has been held aloft by Larian & Co alone.
But what if the studio had erred? What if Larian had seen Skyrim and said: “Bet we could do that better”? What if, in some alternate universe, Baldur’s Gate 3 was first-person? That’s exactly the kind of question asked and answered by Proxy Gate Tactician, a harebrained challenge runner who strapped over six mods together to produce a first-person Baldur’s Gate 3 (thanks, Gamesradar).
Given the fact that controlling companions is difficult with this appropriately mindflayer-tier abomination of stitched-together code, Proxy goes for a solo run—where they play different classes every level. I can only assume that this is because they’re still high on a fit of inventor madness, like Frankenstein losing his gourd after creating his monster.
The most impressive thing about the whole ordeal is how well it holds up. As Proxy notes, “While searching the toll house. [I] had nostalgic feelings of a younger me exploring Skyrim for the first time.” That really is the feeling—turns out, Larian’s texture work and environment design doesn’t completely crumple under close scrutiny. But because it’s all a little lower-res than you might get from a first-person RPG (since it’s viewed from afar) those 2011 RPG vibes are strong. “God, I miss when Bethesda cared,” Proxy adds. Oof, brutal.
That’s not to say everything works well. When Proxy hits Moonrise Towers, the roof becomes a “jumbled-up pile of assets”, and almost every machine with a rope in it is a trick of view distance—none of the ropes actually move. One’s immersion weeps. But it’s just as surprising how many facades don’t crumble. The underdark looks lovely, and Act 1’s druid grove really gives off a proper sense of scale, with a fully-modelled cavern ceiling put together, best I can tell, to inform lighting for the environment artists and little else.
The effort even surprised Larian co-founder and game director Swen Vincke, who took to X to praise it: “Now I want to play this—just look at it,” writes a man who—pound for pound—has probably looked at this game more than any of us. That’s an impressive gold star for your modding efforts.
The actual mod, Proxy explains, is assembled from the basic ones you’d expect—a script extender and a mod loader—as well as other ones, like that WASD mod I covered last year, giving us PC players a taste of console analogue stick movement, or Gycicada’s “remove camera move”, which stops Proxy getting motion sick every time he fires an arrow, which would usually prompt the camera to zip across the battlefield. Guilty7 also gave him some size-changing underwear so he could see over his own head. There’s also a ton of native camera tweaks. If you want to give it a try, you can find the full list of instructions in the description of the video itself—enjoy the semi-Skyrim kind of life, baby, because Bethesda won’t be done with Elder Scrolls 6 for a while.
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