Towards the end of last year, Baldur's Gate 3 took over my life. It's fair to say that it became a personal hyperfixation, and the more time I spent with it, the more I understood its systems and began to really appreciate the depth and breadth of Larian's RPG. From uncovering more in the Sword Coast, to role-playing as fresh characters and classes, every run I got stuck into offered me something different. So much of it spoke to me, with romance, engrossing storytelling, and companions with fantastic character development. But on multiple occasions, I kept thinking about why it was clicking with me so much in a way that nothing had for a long time, and I always came to the same conclusion. All of the reasons I love Baldur's Gate 3 can be traced back to my time with a game that's responsible for kickstarting my love for RPGs in the first place: Dragon Age: Origins.
In many ways, Baldur's Gate 3 has a lot in common with the 14-year-old RPG. You could say that isn't so surprising when you consider BioWare worked on the first two Baldur's Gate games prior to creating the adventure in Thedas. But as one of my favorite games of all-time, and the first RPG that wholly consumed me, Dragon Age: Origins is the blueprint I've measured all other games in the genre against since. Each time I got lost in Faerun in Larian's adventure, I was reminded of Origins in some way, and the desire to once again revisit it would only grow. So, now having stepped away from Baldur's Gate 3 at long last, I decided to return to the 2009 RPG that never really left me.
