To answer that question, our resident RPG-enthusiast Ram Iyer put together a set of five general questions about Baldur's Gate, which we ran against xAI and the three major models in a kind of quasi-benchmark that I've decided to call BaldurBench. In the interest of journalistic transparency, I've made all the chat transcripts public, so you can see them here: Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
I wish this was a one-off blip in my regimented friendship schedule, but all through 2025 I played the world's slowest game of message tennis. I'd invite a pal for dinner, only for the world to turn, the seasons pass, grey hairs gather at my temples, before a date was finally locked in. This sentiment seems to be common among my circle.
The launch of Highguard this week has reignited a debate around good manners. Over a hundred people worked for several years on a project they were passionate about. Instead of everyone giving it a fair shake and casually talking about what they did or didn't like about it, the conversation around the new multiplayer shooter was quickly subsumed by a torrent of knee-jerk negativity. Social media is full of people dunking on the game for clout
