The Night We Finished Baldur's Gate 3

We had been playing Baldur's Gate 3 as a relay. One person plays, the others watch and shout suggestions. The save file had been passed between three households over six months. We each controlled it for a few hours a week, made decisions the others had to live with, left notes in the group chat about what we'd done and why.

By Act 3 we had all separately decided that Karlach was the heart of the game. Nobody said it out loud until the end.

The final session was on a Friday night. Someone made pasta. The TV was bigger than the one we usually used, which felt appropriate. We watched the ending unfold — the one we'd collectively built through hundreds of choices we'd each made alone — and at a specific moment that I won't spoil, all three of us went quiet at the same time.

That silence lasted about four seconds. Then someone said "oh no." Then someone started crying. Then we all did, a little.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a remarkable game. But what I'll remember is how a relay format turned it into something collaborative. The save file became a shared object — something we'd all touched, shaped, and handed forward. The ending didn't belong to any one of us. It belonged to the file.

We stayed up until 2am talking about characters like they were people we'd known. In a way, we had.