Elijah Wood and Sean Astin, actors behind Frodo and Sam in the critically acclaimed The Lord of the Rings movies, have teamed up with Larian CEO Swen Vincke for a Baldur’s Gate 3 special.
Wood and Astin, named by Swen as “the world’s foremost experts on fantasy,” tried out BG3 and gave their two cents on the game’s design. The short special Dec. 24 episode, “Baldur’s Gate 3: An Unexpected Journey,” shows Vicke, Wood, and Astin playing Baldur’s Gate 3, commenting as they go. The video’s title is a callback to Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit series, the first of which is called An Unexpected Journey.
Their gameplay begins as any BG3 playthrough usually would: the character creator. Frodo—ah, sorry, I mean Wood—is immediately excited, saying that BG3 has “the most detailed character creation [he’s] ever seen.” He also goes on to more-or-less recreate Frodo in the game by picking a Dark Urge Halfling character who faces inner corruption and a dark power “whispering to him,” all of which is reminiscent of Frodo’s relationship with the One Ring and Sauron.
After fighting the Spider Matriarch, a notoriously difficult fight, Sam’s actor Sean Astin boasts about dealing the final blow to the big, mean Spider—again. His character notoriously defeats Shelob, the giant Spider in The Return of the King. Seems like BG3 has more in common with The Lord of the Rings than one would have thought.
Vincke masterfully shows the brilliance of Baldur’s Gate 3‘s game design by urging one of the pair to jump into the giant gloomy pit below the Spider Matriarch’s layer. Wood, being the braver of the two (which is uncanonical to LotR, by the way), volunteers to jump and, after a flashy cutscene, meets his untimely end at the bottom of the pit. Vincke then explains that if the party were to cast Feather Fall, they could have landed on the bottom safely instead of, well, ending up splattered on the floor. The two were surprised, but it wasn’t long before Astin tried looting Wood’s corpse to take the Ancient Tome off him, much like their characters would have quarreled over the Ring.
The party then sets off to find a Wizard to help them out, but being overpowered by the Dark Urge, Wood slices off Gale’s hand. From all we can see, the real-life Frodo appears less spiritually strong than his LotR counterpart, succumbing several times to the pressure of the Dark Urge. He also kicked the hell out of that one squirrel that jumps you. Yeah, not the paragon of virtue we’ve grown to love.
At the end of the special, Astin and Wood congratulated Vincke on BG3‘s recent sweep at the 2023 Game Awards and promised to recommend the game to their friends. I see this as one of the best displays of a game’s quality that a studio has ever made, and so much of it shines in the hands of the two iconic actors whose roles many of us grew up with. Here’s hoping for an official LotR game made by the legends at Larian Studios.
