To call Baldur's Gate 3 ground-breaking would be an understatement. Its success was like a wildfire overwhelming the gaming industry. Everyone was playing it and loving it to bits. It swept up game awards all over the place, sparking anxiety among other developers. And more than a year later, it's still averaging tens of thousands of players every single day. With 24-hour averages regularly touching 100k players on Steam alone.
This level of excitement would be astounding for any game. Let alone for a classic RPG that is a belated sequel to a PC-exclusive from decades ago. To see it be embraced by old fans and newcomers alike... that's amazing. So while it's a tad late—as always with me—let's see what this game did that got people so fired up.
So do you remember how the original Baldur's Gate started? Where you get tutorialized in a cozy little village and then the big adventure starts off because you get attacked by thugs on your way to the inn? Yeah, Baldur's Gate 3 is nothing like that.
The game kicks off on an alien spaceship launching an assault against a city. Buildings collapse, people get abducted, fear and panic, it's total mayhem. Then suddenly the spaceship is itself attacked by fucking dragons, who chase it down as it desperately attempts to teleport away. Including a detour through literal hell where a bunch of demons get in on the fun. By the time you take control of your character, the ship is falling apart and fighting has broken out all over the place. Now that's how you start a game.
Once the chaos simmers down a notch, the gravity of your situation begins to sink in. That ship belonged to a race of creatures known as Mindflayers. They are Cthulhu-like beings with powerful, psionic abilities, who reproduce by way of infecting people with parasites. You've just received that exact treatment and so now find yourself living on borrowed time. When the transformation begins, it'll overwrite everything. Your free will, your personality. You'll become just another Mindflayer, acting your part in whatever grand scheme they got brewing.
Your desperate search for a healer is soon complicated, as every lead you find spirals out into new plot threads. There is much afoot in the Sword Coast and the more you dig, the more it all seems to connect with each other.
Baldur's Gate 3 is an isometric, party-based RPG. You control up to 4 characters. One of which is likely to be of your own making, through the extensive character creation process. The others are party members who you meet over the course of the story, most of whom are similarly infected with the Mindflayer parasites. Each of them has a rich personality and history in the world that you learn more about through your shared adventures or conversations. As well as personal quests that you can get involved in.
Post tutorial you'll find yourself in a wilderness ready for you to explore. There is a main quest to follow and a limited selection of locales & NPC's to find that will advance it, but you are otherwise free to go as you please. Each map is sizable and full of discoveries to be made. You can burn dozens of hours just pursuing side-quests, finding treasure, hunting monsters, or just exploring aimlessly.
What sets Baldur's Gate 3 apart here is just how rich in content it all feels. Other RPGs can have hours of exploration as well, but that tends to mean pointless treks through empty lands. Interspersed with the occasional pack of wolves or horribly-outmatched bandits. Here the distances feel small, because there's well-designed content just all over the place. Every building has something special to it. Every combat encounter feels designed to be significant. Even when it's just "empty" terrain, you might notice hidden paths you could reach if you made a tricky jump or cast a specific spell.
This can sometimes get a little too much even. At one point I freed up an entire Sunday with the aim of clearing the current stage of the main quest I was on, yet ended up not even starting on that. Damn near every building in the village I had to get through had a storyline in it that involved elaborate battles and boss-fights. I found a graveyard with a small mausoleum I could enter, which then opened up to reveal a massive puzzle-dungeon. You don't have to do it all, of course. But this is a story-driven RPG that loves to tie consequences to your actions. Anything you leave unfinished may bite you in the ass later.
That did get exhausting at times. Especially anytime I loaded into a subzone, only to notice it was another multi-floor maze that would require platforming and hours of effort to map out. At least you're sure as hell getting your money's worth out of this game. 60 bucks for an adventure that took me 106 hours. I even felt tempted to jump right back in with a new character after I beat it the first time.
A pleasant surprise stepping into Baldur's Gate 3 was just how accessible it was. Based on my experienced with Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, I expected to be once again overwhelmed by a litany of inscrutable rules. Sure, there is still a learning curve to it—figuring out an isometric RPG does not come easy for everyone—but Baldur's Gate 3 is well-tutorialized and its mechanics sensible. You got your turn, you can move and do one action, and then perform a bonus action on top of that. Actions can be attacking or casting a spell, whereas bonus actions can be shoving an opponent, jumping, or drinking a potion.
There is still a lot you can do and it won't take long before the UI fills up with more options than it can fit. Dozens of spells, numerous different abilities based on what weapons you have equipped, items. Later on you unlock a mechanic whereby you can consume additional tadpoles to gain Mindflayer powers. Adding yet another slew of skills to your interface.
That can be overwhelming, but I will give the game praise for the descriptions of all these. Pathfinder was dense. Each spell and ability having entire paragraphs just to explain what they do and all the conditions that apply to it. By comparison, Baldur's Gate 3 just has a short, to-the-point description and a damage range. So even if there's a lot you can do, it's never a puzzle to find out what any of it does or how to use it properly.
Combat is also challenging enough to warrant having that much choice. Enemies are tough and the encounters with them crafted to be especially devious. They work together well, make clever use of their skills and the environment, and even utilize items. It wasn't unusual to bumble into a combat encounter and have my ass handed to me. That was also inspiring, in a sense. Seeing the enemies get so much mileage out of certain items and abilities helped me realize the potential they held. It got me experimenting myself and that led to a playstyle very different from how I usually tackle RPGs like this.
Even so, I did feel very weak throughout much of the game. The enemies are very strong and the encounters, as I just described, are oppressive in their difficulty. When you finally get your turn and all you can do is make 1 attack or cast 1 spell—which can miss—it sure feels like you're underpowered. You have some amazing spells, but these are limited by spell slots that only get restored at the end of the day. Similarly, a lot of your combat skills are also one-time moves. The demonic barbarian Karlach can do one cleave per day before she needs a little nap. Then you run into an enemy who does 5 things in a turn that instantly kills Karlach in the first round of combat.
Fortunately, you can fine-tune the game's difficulty from the options menu if you want to. Including options to make it even harder should you savor that challenge. Personally, I kept the enemies as-is, but did opt for the options to make my party beefier, allow free first strikes, and see the difficulty of rolls before I commit to making them. The flexibility here is much appreciated.
Another downside of a game this big and open-ended is that bugs become unavoidable. From characters getting stuck and refusing to move to dialogue looping and quest progression getting mixed up. This becomes most notable once you get to the city of Baldur's Gate proper, where the density of the urban environment stresses some of the less-robust mechanics. Like some quests required I trespass into areas, which would have NPC's spot me through solid walls or from entirely different elevations. I'd be on the third floor of a building, only to be arrested by a guard on the street behind said building.
There's also some jank to the mechanics that caused the occasional frustration. Like not being able to pass off skill checks in dialogue to a character proficient in them, without leaving dialogue, switching to that character, and redoing the whole conversation. Or combat getting mixed up if you degroup your party. I'd degroup so I could sneak someone up to an enemy at a vantage point and push them down to the rest of my party, but then only the degrouped member would be part of the combat. Then the enemies all get to move before I can fix that and now my entire ambush is ruined.
While that caused frustration from time to time, these moments were short-lived and spaced far apart. There were hours of perfectly good adventuring during which notable problems were remarkably rare for a game of this scope. Most issues were also easily resolved by quicksaving and then loading that save.
And during those hours of adventuring, Baldur's Gate 3 is enthralling like nothing else. I've heard people liken it to actually playing the tabletop game, but I disagree. No collection of friends around a table can pull off a story of this caliber. A story that is so open-ended with this much content, yet remains carefully balanced. With acting on this level for hundreds of characters, down to even the animals. Or with players that act out their characters with such conviction and whose personal backstories are tied so perfectly into the GM's overarching plot.
The further I got into Baldur's Gate 3, the more absorbed in the story I became. It has mystery, suspense, and plenty of thrilling action. I was regularly surprised by the twists and genuinely intimidated by the odds me and my party faced off against. A party that I became deeply invested in as their personal stories played out and we shared tales around the campfire. All building up to a phenomenal ending with great emotional pay-offs. Which also had me realize how much different that moment could be, if I had made different choices throughout the game.
Yet despite being so much more polished and planned than any tabletop, Baldur's Gate 3 still manages to fit in some amazing humor. The kind of silly nonsense that does feel exactly like the kind of BS that could happen once the friends around the table have had a few too many drinks.
There were moments where Baldur's Gate 3 irked me, but those feel insignificant when compared against its achievements. When contrasted against everything it does so very right. It's an astounding RPG in every respect. Fleshed out mechanics that offer plenty of freedom, a rich story full of branches and choice, and challenging encounters for players to engage with. Or talk their way out of, if they prefer. Or circumvent entirely, if stealth is their forté.
It's a game I could talk about for hours more because there's so much to say about it. So whether you're a fan of the original or a newcomer. Whether you're just looking for a deep RPG or want to give the middle finger to the modern games industry. Baldur's Gate 3 lives up to its hype and so much more. You just need to see the occasional bug or jank through the fingers.
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