Good news! I found something for you to do in September. Yes, everything. The whole month. What is it? Did you already have plans? That’s a shame. You’ll just have to abandon them. After all, you have over 650 hours of RPG to play.
You will do this if you take current actions Beamdog and Owlcat: RPG Masters Pack on Humble anyway. For $35 (£27) you can get eight meaty RPGs and a ton of DLC in a bundle consisting of:
- Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (and Season Passes)
- Pathfinder: Kingmaker Enhanced Plus edition (and season pass)
- Neverwinter Nights Enhanced Edition: Complete Adventures
- Baldur’s Gate 2 Enhanced Edition
- Baldur’s Gate 1 Enhanced Edition
- Planescape: Torment Enhanced Edition
- Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition
For $15 (£11.60) you can get all of this without the Rogue Trader, which could be a good move. The game has its defenders, but our own Jody Macgregor gave it a 59% rating in his Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader review , criticizing its bugs and cluttered rules. It has had a fair few tweaks since then, though, and currently has a 77% “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating on CoupleSo it’s up to you whether you give him a chance.
For How long to beatplaying through these games with “main story + expansions” — not including DLC — will take about 650 hours of your time, or 27 days. And what a 27 days that would be, people. Three of these games — Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, plus Planescape — are true, timeless classics, and if you’re one of the many, many people who recently got into the series via BG3, you owe it to yourself to go back and experience the original games.
They are different, yes, and seniorbut they’re still my favorite games ever made: a single, epic RPG story spanning two games (and two expansions), in which you go from a pint-sized level 1 dwarf running from a herd of gibberish beings to a titan stalking the planes, battling gods and devils.
Planescape, meanwhile, is Disco Elysium before Disco Elysium: a deeply strange journey into the center of the self in which you play a man with no memory, cursed to live as the undead. It’s a game that’s often copied but rarely surpassed, and yet 25 years after its release, it still tells one of the best stories in the medium.
The rest aren’t pantheon-level classics, but they all have their devoted fans. Ted Litchfield from PCG might have reported me to HR if I hadn’t mentioned how vital Neverwinter Nights is to his own RPG-loving life journey, while I still have to play Wrath of the Righteous like I’ve been promising him for years.
