Baldur's Gate may dazzle but it's not the tabletop...

SMASH HIT: Baldur's Gate 3 was released this summer

THE recent launch of Baldur's Gate 3 has led to debate about whether this is in fact the closest video games have come to recreating the experience of traditional tabletop games.

It definitely feels like a landmark release - think Final Fantasy VII or Skyrim - reminding publishers that using the arcane arts to air-fry goblinfolk is in fact very popular actually. 

And it will certainly set a new benchmark for what is expected from the very best RPGs on home console and PC. 

But has it attained the holy grail of perfectly recreating dice and paper gaming? Will that ever be possible with pixels? Should developers even attempt to?

Interestingly the efforts are about as old as gaming itself. I've recently been reading a history of the British video game industry and how early Dungeons and Dragons players were using machines likened to giant blue filing cabinets to create the late 70s equivalent of Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs.

Obviously in an era of exceptionally primitive hardware their efforts were purely text-based; no images, no audio and with the imagination doing almost all of the heavy-lifting.

Even when we moved into the land of colourful pictures, it would be hard to argue that arcade favourites like Dungeons and Dragons: The Tower of Doom were really a match for the depth of their less flashy dice and paper counterparts. 

Within a couple of decades of course graphics had already advanced to a point where the potential for fully immersive worlds was obvious. And at the same time the warlocks and barbarians were being able to draw on a far greater array of tactics and skills - rather than just bashing the action button until the big scary dragon dropped dead.

Yet there was always more of a question about whether computers could match the creativity - and flexibility - which is such a crucial component of the tabletop.

Both systems are governed by a set of rules which in theory place limits on what players can and cannot do.

In reality of course paper manuals can be overruled or ignored altogether as quickly as a dungeon master can say "I'll allow this." Whereas while computer code can be rewritten, given enough time from those with the skill to do so, there is no instantaneous negotiation about what is or isn't possible.

And crucially it's not just about the core mechanics of the game but the world that events unfold in.

Many traditional RPGs are played in worlds almost entirely unrecognisable from the standard campaign settings, tailored to the tastes of the creators and infinitely malleable.

If videogaming brings with it the joy of shared experiences across a great swathe of players - most people can swap stories of their frenetic first encounter with a frostbite spider - tabletop games can offer encounters unique to a handful of people who happen to be in the room at the time.

To this day I think the abiding appeal of my teenage D&D adventures was that I knew, even at the time, they were one-off and inimitable. No-one else in the world spent one specific Sunday afternoon 20 years ago locked in a do-or-die battle against a phantom coach carrying the heart of a soon to be reconstituted vampire menace. 

And if they did, it wasn't in a garden shed in Solihull.

Of course gaming has got increasingly better at giving the illusion of freedom, with some clever tools intended to imitate the vast variety of tabletop systems. 

It's well over 25 years since Diablo delivered randomly-generated dungeons (with a new layout each time you played) and a couple of decades since other titles, like Neverwinter Nights, offered gamers the chance to build their own levels.

Games like Dragon Age meanwhile have lent heavily on the notion that players' decisions - and moral judgements - shape the course of the story. 

Elsewhere "modding" - which first took root in the 1990s - has meant the very look of games can be overhauled with a simple download. Want to explore Elder Scrolls' frozen north done up as an 80s glam rock star? There's probably a patch somewhere out there for you.

And yet all of these innovations tend to demonstrate that games always recognise that whatever hyper-realistic visuals they offer players, they're yet to match the sheer versatility of people moving little metal men (and women) across 2D titles and putting on silly West Country accents to trade insults with an obstinate innkeeper.

This is why tabletop games are still doing decent business decades after digital alternatives became available and will almost certainly continue to do so. 

Radio has continued to co-exist along TV, cinema didn't do for live theatre and even the likes of vinyl records have enjoyed revivals in the age of online streaming. Simply put old forms of entertainment prove incredibly enduring.

Yes it's true that they themselves might evolve. Options such as 3D-printed custom-designed miniatures or playing surfaces with moving visuals were entirely alien to my generation of teenage D&D players - who co-opted Lord of the Rings figures for their characters and a job-load of second-hand boardgame pieces to decorate dungeons.

But at its core the idea of mates getting together in the same place at the same time and rolling dice to do battle with a troll has endured. Baldur's Gate can match the mechanics and overawe with its graphics but there's just some things no amount of technology can recreate.