Baldur’s Gate 3 Review — A Milestone in RPG History
I’m late to the party, but Baldur’s Gate 3 is an instant classic.
In the video game sphere, you’d struggle to find someone less suited to Baldur’s Gate 3 than me. I don’t love turn-based combat, for one, let alone a system as multi-faceted as the one Larian included. I’ve barely played a CRPG in the past, aside from 2019’s excellent Disco Elysium. I have near-zero knowledge or experience with Dungeons and Dragons, the table-top game that Baldur’s Gate is based on. I have a shockingly short attention span for open world games, especially those that break the 50 hour mark.
If we’re being honest, I didn’t expect to enjoy Baldur’s Gate 3. I just knew I should try it, because a game rarely gets the kind of wholesale applause that Larian’s effort got in 2023. Breath of The Wild, God of War 2018, Super Mario Odyssey, these are the games that come to mind — the ones that recontextualised what games within these genres could be at their absolute best. It felt like an event, a chance to participate in a true milestone of video game history. Not to mention the opportunity to celebrate the rare scenario where an independent studio makes a game that competes against the publisher overlords.
Well, I’m fast approaching 100 hours in Baldur’s Gate 3 and yeah. It truly belongs in the same conversation as that calibre of game, as it stands amongst the absolute pinnacle of modern RPGs.
It’s not that it’s just a good RPG, though it most certainly is. Good RPGs aren’t rare, and RPG systems have been making their way into more action-oriented games for years. Cyberpunk 2077 is essentially a first person shooter, but is also an incredibly immersive RPG in its own right. Mass Effect games are third-person cover shooters, but with that signature Bioware choice-driven dialogue to give it a snazzy dose of player agency.
The RPG formula has become diluted over the years by other genres, to the point where I’d argue actual ‘role playing’ is fairly rare, with players often placed into the shoes of characters with a set canon, for lack of a better term. You might be able to influence the way a story progresses, but the end result is often going to the same/ similar regardless, with differences only made clear through cutscenes or rolling text.
Baldur’s Gate 3 exposes this weakness, and laughs at it. From minute one, as your meticulously crafted character escapes a Mindflayer ship, there are decisions that can resolutely affect the rest of your playthrough. Decide to fight and kill Lae’Zel on the ship, instead of teaming up? She’s dead, no feisty Githyanki to help navigate conversations and situations with her people in the future. Of course, Larian still offer a number of ways to fix these shenanigans, but they’re always within the rules of the game… which you might not always know, at least not until you’ve played for a while.
Consequences to your actions, both positive and negative, are both immediate and affecting to the rest of your playthrough. Classic examples like saving/ killing someone early on, and having them show up/ not show up later on the down the line are obvious. Standard fare for RPGs of a certain scope. But I followed a companion’s questline that seemed to be seperate to the main story, only to find a person at the end of it that would help in an upcoming main story boss fight. On another occasion, I opted not to kill a random group of Goblins, and they were the main characters of a scene later in the game.
Chances are some of these scenes would just feature different, less important people. But there’s still a palpable sense that you, the main character, are shaping the world around you with every decision, regardless of whether they’re major or minor. With that comes a certain degree of investment in every skill check that comes your way, every dice roll, and every impulse to stab someone who mildly annoys you.
The systems all support a mind boggling amount of options as well, designed to make the player feel empowered from the get go. In my efforts to take over a Goblin Camp (the main goal of the early hours in Baldur’s Gate 3), I stumbled into a spider’s nest. Creepy fuckers too, all big and spindly. Well, I was able to pass a skill check that would mimic their language and get them on my side. But wait, how do I unlock the gate between them and the Goblins? It’s wrought iron… of course it’s weak to acid.
To make matters even more interesting, only the Goblin guarding the gate knew I’d freed the spiders. So the other Goblins in the area were more concerned with the giant Arachnids now attacking them, and wanted nothing to do with me… leaving me free to take out stragglers who were out of sight. This completely different to my first playthough where I failed a simple 2 dice roll, and had to fight the entire camp straight up.
This is just one isolated example of hundreds within Baldur’s Gate 3. While not everything is possible at all times (it takes some dedication to prevent Shadowheart from joining your party, for example), the game goes to extreme lengths to enable most of the accursed decisions you might make at any given moment. Most importantly, the seams holding these choices together are rarely made obvious to you, aside from some sequence breaking causing repeated dialogue/ dialogue that doesn’t make much sense.
In combat, lightning spells can be cast onto water to turn them into an electrifying AoE. At a basic level, perhaps your environment is partially submerged — hit someone with a Lightning Bolt and watch their nearby pals join in the fun. But what if there’s no water? Well, you can learn the ‘Create Water’ spell to generate it. Or you can throw a water bottle at them. Same goes for fire and any number of combining items like oil, grease, or explosive barrels.
In one area that basically existed as a puzzle in the world, I had to navigate some proximity-based flora that would ignite a nearby torch when triggered. The solution? To douse the torch with an ice spell from afar, so that setting these plants off would have no major adverse affects. Solutions like this exist everywhere in Baldur’s Gate 3, repeatedly rewarding the player for their ingenuity, or their abstract problem solving.
Obviously the vast amount of choices and interlaced systems encourage that raw roleplaying that I mentioned earlier. Here you aren’t stepping into the shoes of V or Shepard, you’re creating someone from scratch who honestly hasn’t got much of a pre-determined backstory, leaving the slate almost entirely clear for you to imprint your own personality on. The sheer amount of class options are overwhelming for a newbie like myself, but also empowering in a way.
Each class can be broadly slotted into the spellcaster, brawler, support, and rogue classes, but there’s too many sub-classifications to sit and list here. Want to be a caster based on DPS instead of area control? Warlock might be your best bet. Want to be able to summon minions and transform? Pick Druid class. Want to punch things as often as possible? Monk is the way to go. Fancy a combination of the above? Baldur’s Gate 3 supports full multiclassing with no restrictions.
Your race, sub-class, origin, starting stats, proficiencies, all of them are picked from the get go and change the context of your specific class, for better or for worse. It’s entirely possible to cock your class up beyond all saving, especially if you somehow think multiclassing Wizard and Barbarian is going to end well, but the regular difficulty is pretty welcoming to all varieties of build. At least, so long as you don’t want to be uber efficient. There’s even an incredibly affordable respec option available to you… assuming you find the NPC responsible for it.
There’s still a handful of options that are far and away better than the others, of course, but those are better left for second or third playthroughs in my opinion. Part of the joy of Baldur’s Gate 3 is making choices and seeing where it goes, instead of frantically Googling ‘OP BG3 Builds’ and picking the top result. Thankfully, Baldur’s Gate 3 embraces this with a slew of class and character specific conversation options, skill-checks, and traits that host an incredibly diverse replayability experience.
My first playthrough, with two friends? Well, I started as a Wizard, then swapped to a Warlock/ Sorcerer multiclass, with combat and social abilities that honestly feel pretty fucking powerful. My solo? I’m an unarmed Monk, intent on punching and kicking things to death. But I’m also stupid, and thus incapable of having an intelligent conversation. It’s funny stuff in and of itself, but stands as a testament to how differently Baldur’s Gate 3 can play when you pick different paths through it.
Those paths matter as well. While there is a (largely peripheral) major quest that’s outlined pretty early on, you’ll play through hundreds of smaller quests of varying importance. Some can seem entirely casual, only to deftly loop back into the main quest down the line, while others will take you away from the main quest entirely, introducing new characters and areas that might have otherwise been ignored.
Companion questlines weave in and out of the limelight incredibly well, especially with people like Gale, Wyll, or Shadowheart. You might forget about their quest, only to then find yourself knee deep in the next step almost by accident. The quest design (as with all the design in Baldur’s Gate 3) is impeccable. Everything feels important, because you don’t know what’s important, so you’re willing and able to chase down every little optional bit in the hopes it’ll mean something later.
The payoff for this is regularly huge, but also not necessary, making for an incredibly approachable non-linear narrative. There’s no existential fear that you’re missing something crucial, because things are laid out in a way that make it hard to miss the things that truly matter, and hey, there’s always another playthrough right?
I suppose that’s what it comes around to. I — someone who prefers real time combat, has never played DnD, and has zero experience with CRPGs — has enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3 to the point where future playthroughs aren’t just a possibility, they’re damn near a certainty. If Larian studios have made something so good that it’s hooked me in this way, then there’s no limit on how much you can enjoy it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t just a great RPG. It’s a genre milestone, a cultural touchstone for an industry that occasionally feels bereft of creativity, and a giant middle finger to the idea that complex game design only exists within the niche corners of video games. Rumour is that Baldur’s Gate 3 might actually make a billion dollars.
Well deserved I reckon.
