Game Theory: So, why did Baldur's Gate III beat Spider-Man 2?

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving in to the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

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Earlier this week, a thread went viral in response to the most recent installment of The Game Awards, that perpetual engine of trailers, jokes about inappropriate “wrap it up” gestures, and endless gamer irritation. The question posed by the thread—which, in the way of such things, was swiftly amplified both by people in sincere agreement with its original intent, and people who sincerely wanted to dunk on it—was to ask how Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate III had managed to beat Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 for Game Of The Year. It’s the kind of question designed to foment some really annoying discourse, since, for a certain subset of players, the answers to it are immediately obvious—in immediately contradictory directions.

The instant reaction from the moderate set, then—which, as someone who deeply enjoyed both games, I count myself amongst—was to mostly roll eyes at the whole idea of the comparisons in the first place. The fact is, Spider-Man 2 and Baldur’s Gate III are so clearly meant to serve such radically different needs in the game-playing psyche that comparing them feels, at least at first, like an exercise in absurdity, imposed only by their proximity on the release calendar. Spider-Man is a near-perfect satisfaction machine: An incredibly slick action game that gets in, does its web-slinging job, and gets out with a minimum of fuss. (And, for some reason, at least one Garden State needle drop.) Baldur’s Gate, meanwhile, is a sprawling, gorgeous, bizarre mess of a game, where a single wrong decision can wreck whole game-spanning questlines—to say nothing of 20 minutes of trial and error in its chaotic recreation of turn-based Dungeons & Dragons combat. What could they possibly have to say about each other?

And yet, as the week has gone on, the thought has continually tickled the back of my brain. Because, like it or not, these two games did end up in conversation with each other this year—and, even as someone who seemed to like Spider-Man 2 quite a bit more than the average, I also can’t help coming back to the conclusion that it’s the weaker of the two products. The difference has nothing to do with the differences between an action game and an RPG—for all that people have been disingenuously passing around “comparative” video clips of the two games, contrasting Spidey’s high-flying fights with the far less kinetic Baldur’s Gate III—and everything to do with their attitudes toward risk.

By which I don’t just mean BGIII’s compulsive, heart-in-your-throat dice rolls—although that willingness to let players really screw things up when the dice don’t fall their way is part of it. Everything about Baldur’s Gate’s design is risky: Its willingness to let players get lost; its indifference to whether they’re actually prepared for any of its fights; its sometimes unrelenting horniness. Developed, essentially, in public (thanks to a very long Early Access period), it’s a game that features pretty much every idea that Larian could cook up for it, with very little sense that any of them ever got focus tested; it’s the kind of game where you can get eyes ripped out in dialogue choices, or be presented with the option to pass a “sleight of hand” roll to suck a toe ring off a goblin bully who’s making you kiss his foot, or a thousand other flavors of deliberate weirdness, and the game expects you to just roll with it, because that’s adventure, baby.

Spider-Man 2, by contrast, feels committee-designed unto death. In telling very solid stories centered on gently, deftly handled Marvel heroes like Peter Parker, Miles Morales, and their various extended families, it strives to be appropriate and thoughtful at all times. It is a game almost entirely devoid of rough edges—except, presumably, when the designers turned the difficulty up for a few fights, to give a necessary feel of friction, before turning it right back down, because the algorithm says that contrast is good game design. When you’re in the middle of a fight, it’s intuitive, joyful, responsive, and safe. It is exceptionally made, in ways that make it impossible not to notice, constantly, how exceptionally made it was. At no point does it make you think “Shit, the game broke because the devs got too ambitious.”

And that’s why it lost.

This is not a new story, critics (like, for instance, the voters at the TGAs) gravitating to an artistically satisfying oddball over the safer, more competently crafted pick. (Also, I don’t want to imply Baldur’s Gate III is some bug-ridden or busted mess at this point; the PS5 version of the game was pretty rocky when it launched back in September, but has been improving by leaps and bounds over the last few months.) But the fact is, Baldur’s Gate III is exciting in ways that the far more steadily deployed Spidey 2 has no way of matching. Every time I boot up Larian’s game, it’s in the firm expectation that I’ll see something I genuinely wasn’t expecting—undead bartenders who can be talked into exploding themselves; belligerent, sentient cows; the latest inane ramblings to dribble out of the mouth of party wizard/magical item garbage disposal Gale. (Okay, I did actually expect that one; I loathe Gale.) Whereas, every minute spent with Spider-Man 2 was one where I knew exactly what was coming next: An incredibly competent and satisfying Spider-Man game.

(In fact, I’d go so far as to argue that the real “action game vs. turn-based” comparison worth making here, if we’re forced to do one, isn’t between Baldur’s Gate and Spider-Man, but between Larian’s game and Nintendo’s Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom. Both games have a deep interest in giving the player a set of tools and then seeing how transcendently inventive/stupid they can get with them, a shared philosophy that unites two very dissimilar styles of game, whether it involves making underground monster trucks to tool around the depths of Hyrule with, or chucking a giant, murderous eyebeast into the midst of a chaotic melee as a sort of improvised grenade.)

Every award like this is, duh, subjective, and if you’re a player for whom the uncomplicated, profoundly well-made thrills of Spider-Man represent your ideal game, then that’s completely fair. (Ditto if one look at Baldur’s Gate III’s horrifically convoluted menus and inventory screens sent you swinging for the hills.) But for anyone who found themselves just a tad turned off by the way Insomniac’s game smoothly funneled them from beginning to end, it’s not all that hard to understand why the more unpredictable and wilder title ultimately won out.