This article contains spoilers for The Counting House quest in Baldur’s Gate 3.
Last week,I wrote that I feared I would never finish Baldur’s Gate 3 after taking a nearly four-month break from the game.Larian Studios' masterpiece was so big, so long, and so dense with RPG systems that I feared I would have a hard time finding the will to dive back in. I imagined it would be an uphill battle to reverse the inertia that had set in after so long away. It turns out I was worried about nothing.
Yesterday, on a whim, I threw it on. Each morning, I play games for an hour before I start work. I’ve been going hard onJudgment, the 2018 Yakuza spin-off, but it’s tough to justify spending too much time on a six-year-old game that doesn’t have a giant, reverent player base likeRed Dead Redemption 2, which is the same age. I’ve been playingFinal Fantasy 7 Rebirth, too, but I just finished the Costa del Sol section and wasn’t in the mood to mess around in the open world just yet. And, of course, I’ve got my ongoing quest to finishBloodborne, but I’m at a point in that game where I’m not sure what to do and I wasn’t in the mood to be stumped.
Returning To Baldur’s Gate 3 With The Counting House
So,Baldur’s Gate 3it was. Part of my hesitation to return stemmed from the fact that I stopped playing in the middle of an attempt to disable the Steel Watch Foundry. I was feeling under-leveled but had put a few hours into the attempt and didn’t want to throw that time down the drain. A quarter of a year away makes a few hours seem irrelevant, so I loaded an earlier save, searched through the other quests I had available, and decided to head over to The Counting House instead.
The city bank turned out to be the perfect on-ramp back into Faerun, essentially retutorializing me on the game’s crucial mechanics. It gave me an opportunity to roll some skill checks, do a puzzle, and fight a battle, all without raising my blood pressure.
It turned out The Counting House was having some kind of problem, and the queues were completely stagnant when I arrived. As I poked around, I found out that the bank boss had taken a large man down into the basement, where the really important people keep their vaults. The tellers suspected something troubling was going on, but didn’t know what. There weredoors leading down to the vaults, but I couldn’t enter without a pass.
Banking On An Easy Quest
This was such a great reintroduction to Baldur’s Gate 3 because I started out in a completely safe area where the biggest danger I was facing was a low-stakes persuasion check in conversation with a bank teller. In what felt like Larian accommodating my lengthy hiatus, I passed multiple persuasion checks with flying colors and got the key I needed to enter the bank.
It would be great if this was just an option for when you’ve been away from a game for a long time. Haven’t played in six months? Here’s an easy quest to retutorialize everything you need to know.
Once I reached the basement, I was confronted by a locked vault that I needed to figure out how to get past to find the bank man. This was, fortunately, another easy task. There were nine pressure plates in front of the door and I simply needed to step on four of them in the right order. By splitting my party and using a bit of trial and error, I was able to crack the vault in about five minutes. And, once I got into the vault, the battle I was faced with was one of the easiest I’ve fought in the game. I finished it on the first try and none of my companions needed to be revived. That was largely thanks to my party being joined by several of the characters who were already in the vault. We outnumbered the enemies and quickly wrapped it up.
I’m still a little rusty on what buttons to press to make which menus appear, but that’s always been a weird issue when you play this game with a controller. Overall, I’m shocked at how easy it was to get back into Baldur’s Gate 3. If I’d known, I would have done this months ago.
