Baldurs Gate 3 Review – Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder

Baldurs Gate 3 had been in early access for close on 3 years and I eagerly jumped on the chance to get in on the fun when it was released. While the initial release was rough, you could see that this was going to be a sequel worth the wait. And why wouldn’t it be good coming from the team of the excellent Divinity Original Sin series. Larian knew what made a classic turn based CRPG, butt taking on the beloved games that put Bioware on the map was certainly a challenge and a risk.

D&D can be dense, complicated and seen by some in the TTRPG community as more of a spreadsheet simulator than a rule set that allows players to truly roleplay. Baldurs Gate 3 embraces the dice rolls and modifiers but gives the player ample, ample room to do what the best run campaigns do, follow your heart, play a character and follow the consequences of the choices that character makes. Baldurs Gate 3 is at its best when it plays out like a well run TTRPG campaign with an engaging, talented DM who knows when the rules have to be followed and when the story demands that the rules be bent and sometimes broken.

Baldurs Gate 3 takes place some time after the adventures of the Bhaal Spawn as well as the subsequent canon novels and modules that pretty much undid everything in those games. You role play as character kidnapped by a group of Mind Flayers and whisked onto their Nautiloid to be used as an incubator for the next generation of Illithids. Illithids being magically created creatures (I think, my D&D lore is hazy at best these days) do not procreate normally.

Instead, they implant these larvae like creatures into other creatures and after a short incubation period they transform their host into a new Illithid. Alien meets high fantasy. However, as we soon find out these worms are different, magically altered to do… something. And so begins the adventure as you escape your captors, with some help, and seek to find a cure while touring the Sword Coast, meeting new people and making friends and slaughtering others.

Starting with the character creator Larian offers you a decent selection of races and classes to start with. Ranging from the vanilla in humans and elves and dwarves to Dragonborn (shoutout to my introduction to D&D in the Dragonlance Chronicles), Tieflings and even the Underdark races like Drow. Classes are suitably high fantasy staples but with modern sub-classes present and developed since third edition. My first playthrough I decided to play a Tiefling, devil spawned/descended race, as an Oath of Vengeance paladin. Why a paladin, a class I never played in any TTRPG I will never know, but I am insanely glad I did.

Playing as a paladin gave me plenty of chances to role play as not your traditionally Lawful Good knight in shining armour, but as a warrior of conviction and strength. In fact, I did not even see the much maligned and restricting chart of alignments during character creation and I honestly just realised that while writing this section. I was so used to having to choose an alignment that while I expected it, I completely missed it wasn’t even there, that’s how good Larian is.

During conversations both with quest givers, potential allies, enemies and just normal NPCs, the dialogue choices play off your class, background and attributes allowing you to persuade, intimidate or just empathise with someone. But the role play opportunities go beyond dialogue choices. Each situation presents you with, well the situation. You don’t know whether to attack or talk to someone, whether they are on the up and up and whether helping or hindering or even ignoring them lines up with your goals.

In some ways quest structure reminds me of the path The Witcher 3 started us down with quests being grey and the outcomes of doing or not doing having unintended and unforeseen consequences. The freedom to play your way, but within the confines of the game is freeing in ways I don’t think anyone, even Larian thought was possible.

As free as the game designed is, it is still comforting to know that it is a D&D game and comes with the familiarity of that rule set and the Forgotten Realms setting. However, the Larian have taken the rules and adapted it to the video gaming world. Sometimes the rules get in the way of a good story and a good DM will bend the rules, listen to any good real play podcast to see how a good DM reacts to his players inventiveness and allows them to tell the story.

And that’s what happens here, for instance a spell that everyone knows and every spellcaster has in their arsenal is Dispel Magic and Larian tried their damndest to include it. Unfortunately, the spell can be so OP that it made the game too large and unwieldy. Another rule I am happy they didn’t include is the exhaustion rules, you only know they considered it if you talk too a bird early in the game and you notice that it is often exhausted.

Combat in the game follows the typical rule set, when you enter a battle, everyone rolls for initiative too see who acts when. Unlike its predecessors, Larian saw the beauty and strategic possibilities inherent in turn-based combat. Instead of seeing it as an old-fashioned mechanic created out of necessity on limited resource systems, they saw it as an opportunity to challenge themselves and their players.

The system requires players to think their way through each encounter, where they position each character in the party and how best to use the environment to their advantage. Environmental elements make a welcome introduction to a D&D game, something Larian brought over from the Divinity games. But even there the obvious is never the only solution. Should you light the oil on fire to do some fire damage for a few turns or should you leave it so that as enemies come at you, they have a chance of falling over making them prone dice rolls as disadvantage?

I used this to great effect early on in a battle where I was outnumbered and facing an orc in the enemies. A grease spell slowed him and some minions as they rushed towards my party making it easier to deal with him.

Initially I actually had to unlearn decades of video game playing, I rushed in guns ablazing and I experienced total party kill. Once I started playing this like XCom instead of an ARPG things became far less frustrating and more interesting. Tactics my friend, that’s what you need to succeed.

Playing this game on my desktop PC, being a Ryzen 9 5900X paired with 32GB of RAM and an RTX 4090, was a dream as it should be. The maps are beautiful, reminiscent of the hand painted BG1 & BG2 maps. These maps are gigantic in comparison but just as detailed with numerous points of interest. FPS wise, eh this isn’t important, but year anything less than 150FPS would be a travesty on my system. The desktop performance though is not the real story. Steam lists the game as verified on the SteamDeck.

I tested Baldurs Gate 3 on my Windows 11 handheld, the AOKZOE A1. This is a more powerful system being a Rysen 7 7800U with 16 GBs of DDR5 RAM. However it is a Windows 11 system and that comes with all the caveats of a Win11 handheld – being that windows is more of a resource hog and is definitely not optimised for gaming the way the SteamDeck and Steam OS is. However, for at least two thirds of the game it runs like a dream on the handheld. 40 to 60 FPS depending on your power and graphical settings.

However, even after patch 2, performance in Act 3 suffers on handheld. Larian haven’t directly addressed it, but while DLC may be off the table continued support is not and I am sure they will fix it.

Control scheme wise, Larian have adapted to the limitations of a controller almost perfectly. Radial menus are mapped to the shoulder buttons and work very well. The fine movements you may recall when using a mouse and keyboard are missing, analogue sticks never quite cut it, but they are adequate.

Baldurs Gate 3 is one heckuva way for Larian to burst out into the mainstream consciousness and the time and care put into the development of the game shows in every pixel, on every map and in every interaction. Baldurs Gate 3 should herald a new Gold Box age of D&D games (you’re a gamer of certain age if you get that reference) and with cross play coming soon this game’s audience will continue to grow.