Well here we are after five weeks and 127 hours: Baldur’s Gate 3. I don’t have an intro other than a promise there won’t be any real spoilers and I will be occasionally and perhaps unfairly picking on other developers like Bioware and Bethesda in here.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a CRPG which, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, is a turn-based RPG generally viewed from an isometric or top-down perspective, though if you’re using a controller in Baldur’s Gate 3 you’ll have a more Bioware-style third person camera. You play as one of several preset characters or a custom one (with the preset characters coming along as party members) in the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons & Dragons. Regardless of your character choices you’ll end up captured by a marauding mind flayer (squid-faced psionic monsters) airship and infected with a parasite that threatens to turn you into a mind flayer yourself at any moment. You escape the ship with one or more other infected and slowly begin to realize that the worm in your head isn’t transforming you as quickly as it should be, and that if you get your hands on other worms you can use them to give yourself powerful mind flayer abilities. Thus begins a story that is both about how much of yourself you’re willing to sacrifice to gain power and trying to save yourself from becoming a squid monster… if you want.
Choice is a big part of Baldur’s Gate 3‘s story, with the results of many of your actions not fully playing out until several hours or even acts after the fact. Something as simple as not picking up a certain magical item may prevent you from getting a powerful spell in a later act, while helping a child can save you from a lot of trouble when you might least expect it. There’s still the usual “good path” and “bad path” in the story, and according to people complaining online the bad path isn’t anywhere near as fulfilling or interesting as the good one, but like so many other RPGs the game is less about which ending you’re going for and more about the decisions you make on the way to get there. Some of these options may even lead to companions leaving your party forever or trying to kill you, which for my money is always a welcome feature in games that try to tell you that your choices matter. This isn’t a game like the first Mass Effect where a character only turns on you or dies in a scripted event, this is full on “if you do enough things I don’t like I’m going to stab you.” The game generally warns you well in advance of these moments happening (typically with a character in your party saying “if you do this I will stab you”) but you can usually work your way through such things with a classic D&D persuasion roll if what you’ve done isn’t literally the worst thing in the world to that character.
It’s not a perfect system, of course. The story suffers from being so focused on the tadpoles in your heads that it sort of drags the plot around by the nose for the first forty hours or so, which leads to a lot of repetitive quests. In Divinity: Original Sin 2 (the developer Larian’s previous CRPG) you had a lot of quests that could lead you to the same plot advancing activity, but in Baldur’s Gate 3 typically the quests feel more like a checklist to fulfill rather than events that move the plot along. That makes the quests sound worse than they are but it’s the most that I can say without spoilers, and you’ll probably know what I mean after you finish the second or third part of your main quest in the first act. The brain worms also act as a rather hollow “yadda yadda” to bring your party together, as they possess the telepathic powers of the mind flayers and as such let you and any potential party members immediately resolve your differences by linking your minds. There’s a few interactions in the first act that could lead to some momentary tension (assuming you hadn’t seen pictures of all your potential party members) but then the brain slugs go “hey let’s all link minds” and immediately the problem fixes itself without player input, and I was honestly rather put off by the whole thing. It almost became a running joke how every new party member you came across had a brain worm, even people that seemingly had no connection to the alien ship that by this point you probably hadn’t even thought about for ten hours.
While the companions are all great, especially since the game uses the Knights of the Old Republic/Dragon Age influence system to help flesh them out even more, not all of your party members are created equal from a story perspective. Shadowheart clearly has a lot of focus on her, with far more dialogue options than almost any other character and even some built in characterization from her “fear of wolves” on her character sheet, but she’s more of the exception than the rule. Outside of Shadowheart’s excess most every other companion still has their own lengthy story arc that you can explore during the game, either with them as a party member or playing as that character yourself, and almost all of them involve some level of gray morality or hidden secrets that are generally lacking in other games like this. Garrus, Legion, and Thane are all great characters in Mass Effect but I’m also not staying up at night wondering what dark secrets they’re hiding from me, or worse yet wondering what my party will think of me when they find out my own dark secrets (if you’re playing as a character that has some). I absolutely love this underlying level of tension as it reminds me a little of Knights of the Old Republic 2 where half of your squadmates were assassins and soldiers that would have shot you without question if you had met them a few years earlier. Granted they never get to that point in KOTOR but they CAN get to that point in Baldur’s Gate 3, which might make you want to play your cards close to your chest… just in case.
As another comparison to Original Sin 2 I found the combat and class system in Baldur’s Gate 3 much easier to approach. OS2‘s skill system was less of a system and more like a buffet, where you could combine any skills with any other skills to make a class that was only limited by your imagination, where as while D&D does have multiclassing and the like it feels a lot more grounded. This comparison does come from a place from personal bias, of course. When I first started OS2 I was paralyzed by choice as I hadn’t the faintest idea if I wanted to invest in X, Y, or Z affinities and had no idea how skill acquisition even worked, whereas I’ve played or at least read about some version of D&D for the last twenty years. I know what a tiefling is, I know there’s far too many versions of elves, and I know the difference between a reaction, a bonus action, and a regular action. All that being said, most anyone who has played an RPG before has seen some variation of D&D’s attribute system (STR, DEX, etc) and picking a class helps narrow the lens a lot more when compared to OS2, at least when it comes to skill selection.
This isn’t to say that going straight into Baldur’s Gate 3 after you’ve played a full session of D&D means you’ll know all the rules right away. Larian has done a few things that tweaked the D&D mechanics to be a little more “video gamey” while also combining their previous mechanics from Original Sin as well, and it can take a little getting used to. For example, bonus actions are now defined as basically any personal physical act you can do besides dashing, so you can jump, shove enemies, or drink potions as a bonus action when most of those would be regular actions in the tabletop game. This means jumping is ridiculously overpowered on characters that are good at it, but also gives Larian the ability to add great verticality to their arenas and you’ll typically see enemies on multiple height tiers throughout fights. Which of course Larian loves because then they can add their Original Sin “bonus to ranged attacks when you’re elevated” buff to even more characters than they would otherwise, along with special weapon attacks that can pin, stun, or knock over enemies.
That being said not everything meshes as well as I would like. Outside of jumping being overpowered on strength-based characters (you’ll think your barbarians are part kangaroo) those special attacks I mentioned clash pretty heavily with D&D’s mechanics of short and long rests. As functionally interesting and powerful as so many of Larian’s CRPG special attacks are (from hilt strikes that stun targets to trip attacks to arrow shots that pin enemies to the ground), D&D is not balanced around such things and as such these abilities are not cool, tactical attacks that you can use every round and are instead only available to you once per short rest. For the uninitiated D&D balances its most powerful abilities with “short rests” or “long rests,” where short rests are characters taking a breather for an hour and long rests have them going to bed for the night. Since Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t want to slow down the gameplay that much a “short rest” is just a button press that heals your party for 50% HP and resets your “short rest” abilities, but this just means that many cool mechanical attacks that are a staple in other CRPGs are relegated to “something you can do every two-three fights” which doesn’t feel great. Maybe you WANT to do two sweep attacks in a mob fight rather than just one. What a crazy idea!
And Baldur’s Gate 3‘s combat and exploration is all about crazy ideas, though maybe less so than Original Sin 2 was. In OS2 many early fights were all about using environmental factors to your advantage and strategically splitting your party before battles began. You sneak your archer up a scaffolding overlooking some goblins you’re expecting to fight and start your first round of combat throwing oil on their cooking pit to set the whole camp ablaze. The archer shoots a charging enemy which makes them bleed and then the spellcaster zaps the ground around them with an electric spell, dealing extra damage because they’re standing in liquid. Strategic depth was all over the place in OS2 and BG3 certainly has moments like that, but it also can just as easily be about “click sword on man,” assuming the dice roll in your favor (this isn’t a metaphor, everything in the game is based on dice rolls). Frequently positioning is just as key as what you do when you get to that position, especially being careful about charging into fights rather than being patient and letting melee enemies waste their turns coming to you. And if all else fails you can load your barbarian up with random crates or explosive barrels that you can just throw at enemies that are out of melee range, or open locked chests by dropping them from extreme heights on their unsuspecting heads.
I had a good segue here to move into a discussion about the game’s technical shortcomings but then I rewrote half of the review and now I’ve got nothing to help transition properly. Baldur’s Gate 3 follows in the trend of so many games of this size (and so many games recently) by being cascaded by glitches and bugs from beginning to end. People who have read my other reviews know that I go hard on games over their glitches and I’m going to do so here as well, but I will give Larian credit in so far that the game has gotten sizable patches basically every week since release. I’m willing to bet in another month or three most of the glitches that can be fixed will be fixed, compared to other games that just sit in their own mess for half a year or more (apparently Jedi Survivor just fixed its frame rate!), but if you’re going to pick up the game tomorrow you might still encounter some problems that dampen your experience.
The problems vary from technical to gameplay to plot. On the technical side you have clothing glitches that both clip through your character or block other characters in dialogue (such as large shoulder armor taking up the entire screen when there’s a close up on someone next to you), invisible characters, washed out characters, floating facial hair, character voice lines never triggering, or dialogue starting/ending before it’s supposed to. These are frustrating at times but all told don’t come up as often as the game’s complete inability to run properly in the third act when you finally reach the city of Baldur’s Gate and are constantly surrounded by people moving in every direction. I was playing the game on rather high settings (which is totally worth it because the game looks amazing) up until that point but then I had to start cutting textures and lighting effects to save the game from running at 5-10 FPS, only to quickly change a few settings back because it doesn’t take many turns of the dial at all to make all of the plants look like they’re all made of Legos. In the end I managed to find a reasonable balance but during the most cinematic gameplay moments the game still chugged, to the point that I’m very worried for people with older rigs who might want to try the game after seeing the reviews, only to not be able to get past the first act and a half with the unexpected performance swing that comes afterwards.
On the technical side of gameplay there’s irregular issues with targeting, which may just be the fault of the game’s mechanics rather than any actual glitch or bug. You will, at least once during your 100+ hours, attack thin air or the ground rather than your target, or heal someone in melee other than your intended ally. More than once the game would tell me a spell was “out of range” because they were classifying it as a melee attack for no good reason, though this mainly only happened with Shadowheart so it may just be certain cleric spells causing the problem, and apparently certain items or abilities don’t do what they say they do. Long rest items not showing that limitation, for example, which I never encountered but saw a number of people online passionately talking about it. Outside of combat and abilities some NPCs will have their AI just break and they will run around like maniacs after a fight is over, which is a real problem if you need to talk to them, and certain quest items may never work if you get them outside of what the game decides is the exact order you’re supposed to. Some of these things can be fixed with a reloaded save, but for that quest one in particular some side quests are spread across a dozen or more hours that you may not want to undo just because you didn’t pick up the right book.
The story side has the most predictable kinds of glitches due to the sheer amount of content and overlapping choices you’ll find in Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s also the kind that pisses me off the most as characters say things or know things that they shouldn’t given the decisions you made. Such examples include characters knowing about the “power” that the tadpoles in your brain can give you before you were ever told about it yourself, NPCs knowing about items you’re carrying when you specifically passed a difficult skill check to avoid them learning about it, and party members yelling at you for things you didn’t do or your character saying romantic voice lines to characters you’re specifically not romancing. Many of these instances have been fixed already to the point that they were specifically called out in patch notes, but others remain and really started upsetting me by the end. It was rarely anything major, as your influence/relationship with these characters was never tainted by these strange conversations or side comments that you shouldn’t be having, but it still pulled me out of the game every time they happened and makes the writing feel much lazier than it is.
You might have noticed that I’d said the game looks great, and I just need to repeat it: the game looks GREAT. Hell it sounds great too, with fantastic music and voice acting to boot. The biggest (and best) difference between BG3 and OS2 is BG3 has Witcher 3/Bioware style “face to face” cutscenes for dialogue compared to OS2 never changing from the isometric camera angle when talking to NPCs, and this changes adds a lot to the visual style and connection with the characters. Suddenly things like facial animations, small hand gestures, and everything else that you can see when you’re actually talking to someone are a factor that never came up in OS2, and fortunately Larian blazed into this new frontier with fantastic character animations to back up their voice acting, unlike other triple A studios I could mention. Shadowheart’s little smiles, Karlach’s sad eyes, Astarion’s… everything make these great characters even better, and it’s incredible to see a studio push into these unfamiliar domains and absolutely nail it.
I haven’t even talked about the narrator! As probably the biggest initial shock for people that are used to RPGs like Dragon Age or Skryim there’s a narrator in Baldur’s Gate 3 that talks you through your character’s internal dialogue and observations. The narration doesn’t make Baldur’s Gate 3 better or worse than these other games, but given how so much of the game takes place in your characters head with psionic powers, worm reactions, and insight checks, I struggle to think how the game would go ahead without a narrator. And the voice actress absolutely kills the part. Every line she delivers is somehow mysterious, alluring, and threatening all at the same time, which helps sow the seeds of suspicion and uncertainty around the most questionable decisions your party may have to make in the game. Sure, you might feel confident with your choice to let a given character get away with some shady things, but then the narrator shows up and points out that this could come back to bite you later. An absolutely fantastic feature as both a necessary narrative device and a way to add flavor to the world around you that otherwise you’d have to fill in yourself.
There are very few games that I play, complete, and then immediately want to play again. That scenario gets even rarer when the game is a 100+ hour monstrosity like Baldur’s Gate 3, but the only thing that I’ve been thinking about while writing this is how I need to get through this review and the next six games on my docket so I can get back to playing Baldur’s Gate 3 again. Part of that is probably that I’ve been trapped as a Forever DM for much of my D&D career and I finally have an “official” outlet to try to plug in all of my player character ideas, but for the most part it’s just damn good RPG with a lot of tactical depth and options for you to explore. I want to see how Astarion is haunted by his past but can sneak around to take advantage of his current circumstances, I want to play co-op with my wife, I want to recruit the bonus companion that you only get on an “evil” run to see if she’s as well-rounded as so many people say she is, and I want to play as the freaking Dark Urge and experience all that entails. But most of all I want you to play this game, if you have a computer that can run it or a Playstation 5 (it’s coming to Xbox too but with some trepidations). If you love RPGs, if you love turn based combat, if you love D&D, or just want a game that will give you your money’s worth, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the game for you.
