Every now and then, a video game comes along that pulls me in a little deeper. I first encountered the Baldur’s Gate series in 1999, when I was 15 years old. I still remember meeting Khalid and Jaheira at the Friendly Arm Inn, venturing forth onto the Sword Coast, with places to explore, monsters to fight and a whole fantasy world to lose myself in. I thought it was amazing.

So when I started playing the new Baldur’s Gate III, more than 25 years after I first played the original, I knew I was going to be in for a treat. What I didn’t expect was quite how much of my life it would occupy. And I loved it. Not just playing it, but thinking about it. There were mornings when I woke up already pondering what I was going to do that evening. A quest I hadn’t finished. A conversation I needed to have. A decision I wasn’t sure about. A character whose reaction I was worried about.

That last bit is what really surprised me. Because Baldur’s Gate III is, well, a video game. You create a character, explore a fantasy world, fight monsters, collect magical items, gain experience and complete quests. The combat is based on Dungeons & Dragons, with dice rolls, spells, abilities and turn-based battles. But none of that mattered to me. The “people” did.

Larian Studios, the team who made the game, created an enormous fantasy world, but populated it with characters who feel much less like game mechanics and much more like people you happen to have met. My character was Elaris, an elven ranger. I recruited lots of characters along the way, but my regular party was Shadowheart, Gale and Karlach. I got to know them.

Shadowheart was dealing with faith, memory and identity. Gale was wrestling with ambition, pride and Mystra. Karlach was facing the terrifying possibility that the life she had escaped Hell to enjoy might be painfully short. These aren’t simply backstories that you read in a character menu. Their problems emerge gradually through conversations, quests and choices. You talk to them at camp. They comment on what you have done. They disagree with you. They reveal things. They change. And eventually, you care.

I found myself checking in on them like a good ol’ Tamagotchi. How are they doing? What are they thinking? Do they agree with what I’m about to do? Have I upset them? Should I really be doing this? And then there is romance. Elaris romanced Shadowheart from beginning to end, and this changed the game for me. Suddenly, her opinions carried even more weight. A difficult decision wasn’t simply about what Elaris thought was right. Elaris, or, well, I, was also wondering what Shadowheart would think. That is an extraordinary achievement in game design.

At Talking Beautiful Stuff, we write about the human impulse to create. People making stuff, why, how, when, where and what it means to us when we experience it. So what did the folks at Larian actually make? They made a video game, obviously. But they also made something else.

Google tells me that more than 400 people worked on the game for more than six years. There are more than 2,000 characters, around two million words in the script and more than 174 hours of cinematic content. And 248 actors provided not just voices, but motion capture for their characters too. Their gestures, expressions and movements became part of the performances.

Larian built the stage, wrote the script, designed the sets, created the music and lighting, and assembled an extraordinary ensemble of actors. And then they invited me on stage. I wasn’t simply controlling the main character. I was playing the main character. The other actors responded to me. They remembered things. They had their own motivations. Relationships developed. Stories changed. Sometimes I made choices I regretted. Sometimes the dice made them for me.

The result felt strangely close to real life. Not because I confused the game with reality. I didn’t. But because it captured something that most games don’t. The final battle wasn’t particularly interesting to me. The ending I cared about was the closing cinematics and conversations at the party we organised at camp to celebrate our victory and, more importantly, our friendship.

There they all were. The people Elaris had met, helped, argued with, fought alongside and loved. The characters who had started as random encounters and dialogue options had somehow become the company I had kept for nearly 200 hours of gameplay. And then they went their separate ways.

Elaris and Shadowheart got their cottage by the lake. Karlach and Wyll returned to Avernus. Gale made peace with Mystra. Minsc and Boo carried on being Minsc and Boo. Jaheira and Halsin went off to do their groovy druid thing. Astarion continued his blood sucking business. Volo, presumably, continued getting himself into trouble.

Today, I closed the game. For now, at least, I’m done. Maybe I’ll return in a few years as somebody else, making different choices, joining a completely different ensemble and discovering an entirely different outcome to the game. Or maybe not.

What I’ll remember most about Baldur’s Gate III isn’t the battles, the quests or even the enormous world Larian created. It will be the people I spent all those hours with. The strange thing about a game like this is that, for all the technology and craftsmanship involved, what ultimately makes it memorable is something very old fashioned. Spending time with other people and caring about what happens to them. Except, of course, these aren’t real people. They’re people in a video game.

Congratulations, Larian. Legendary stuff.