Good news! I’ve found something for you to do this September. Like, all of it. The entire month. What’s that? You already had plans? That’s a shame. You’ll just have to drop them. After all, you’ve got 650+ hours of RPG to play.
You will if you pick up the ongoing Beamdog and Owlcat: RPG Masters Bundle over at Humble, anyway. For $35 (£27), you can pick up eight meaty RPGs and a bunch of DLC in a bundle consisting of:
- Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader
- Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (plus its season passes)
- Pathfinder: Kingmaker Enhanced Plus edition (plus its 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 that without Rogue Trader, which might be the move. The game has its defenders, but our own Jody Macgregor scored it 59% in his Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader review, critiquing its bugginess and messy rules. Still, it’s had a fair few patches since then and currently sits at a 77% “Mostly positive” rating on Steam, so it’s up to you whether to give it a chance.
Per How Long To Beat, a “Main story + extras” playthrough of those games—sans DLC—comes in at about 650 hours of your time, or 27 days. And what a 27 days it would be, folks. Three of those games—Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 plus Planescape—are bonafide, all-timer classics, and if you’re one of the many, many people who have recently gotten into the series via BG3, you owe it to yourself to go back and experience the original games.
They’re different, yes, and old, but they’re still some of my favourite games ever made: A single, epic RPG story spanning two games (and two expansions), where you go from a puny level 1 runt fleeing packs of gibberlings to a plane-striding titan doing battle with gods and devils.
Planescape, meanwhile, is Disco Elysium before Disco Elysium: A profoundly weird journey to the centre of the self where you play a man with no memory cursed to a life of undeath. It’s a game that’s often copied but rarely surpassed, and it still tells one of the best stories in the medium 25 years after its release.
The rest aren’t quite pantheon-level classics, but they all have their stalwart fans. PCG’s Ted Litchfield might report me to HR if I didn’t mention how important Neverwinter Nights is to his own RPG-loving life journey, while I still need to get round to playing Wrath of the Righteous like I’ve been promising him for actual years at this point.