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Cleanse Your Year-End Timeline With Samwise and Frodo Playing ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’

3 Minute Read
Dec 27 2023
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The year is coming to an end, and we could all use a little bit of a palette cleanse. So here’s Elijah Wood and Sean Astin playing BG3.

Sometimes you get exactly what you need to close out the year and leave you feeling ready for whatever fresh horrors the next year has in store. But in this timeless week between the time when the oceans drank Christmas, and the rise of January 2nd, in this age of cheese and baked goods, where time has no meaning and traffic is surprisingly light, there’s still a little treat to be had.

And today that comes in the form of one last gift from Larian Studios: a video of Elijah Wood & Sean Astin, everyone’s 2nd and 4th favorite hobbits—look we all know number 1 is Everard Proudfood (aka scowling hobbit), and whether you consider Merry, Pippin, or Bilbo number 3 says basically everything about you as a person and where you’ll end up in life—playing everyone’s favorite new cRPG, Baldur’s Gate 3.

Apparently Swen Vincke “ran into” Elijah Wood and Sean Astin at The Game Awards, and whether it was random chance or carefully arranged PR, the end result is the same: eight minutes and 25 seconds that will cleanse away the grime of 2023, so you’ll feel fresh when the shadows of 2024 fall upon you.

Elijah Wood & Sean Astin Play Baldur’s Gate 3

Fresh off The Game Awards Swen met with some familiar faces to play some Baldur’s Gate 3 👀

Elijah Wood and Sean Astin join Swen Vincke in a totally normal game session, where absolutely no evil powers were awakened and no squirrels were harmed.

As the pair play through some choice moments of Act 1, there are some things that happen which may, in fact, feel familiar if you’ve recently watched the Lord of the Rings trilogy. For instance, here’s Frodo’s character getting corrupted by a magical, evil artifact:

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Of course this time, it ends a little differently. Starting with the phrase: “don’t loot me.”

Spoiler alert, he does, in fact, loot him. And Sam’s character once again kills a giant spider to save everyone. History has a way of repeating itself. Especially when they realize “we’re going to have to do it without the Wizard.”

Now unpacking the careful editing and stepping into real-life stuff, there is no way they played through everything they did in eight minutes. This means there’s a longer, uncut version out there somewhere that Larian Studios is purposefully withholding. Even on the easiest setting, it’s three hours, easily, to get through all of this stuff.

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At any rate, it all ends up in the fires of “Mount Doom” and the whole thing is absolutely worth a watch.

Cleanse your palette, brace yourself for the coming year, and go out and eat more cheese.

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Author: J.R. Zambrano
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