Baldur's Gate III (2023)

I replayed this, and the game already blew me away, but it is even better the second time around.

Context for choices and NPC interactions really makes the early game more exciting.

I can see the work the studio put to strengthening the core gameplay as well as class balance which is really cool.

Overall, if you played BG3, do yourself a favor and play a second time.

I played all three games in this year.

I can say BG2 was my favourite. Just slightly better at everything beside graphics of course.

But BG3 has a well deserved GOTY award I can say that.

What a game. brilliant.

I just don't like turn based combat. Not my thing. Played amazing games using it as a combat system but nope. I prefer real time with stop time action anyday.

Still. Great game tho.

After 2 years of Monday night gaming, my co-op cohort and I may see credits roll within the next few play sessions.

We started after another 1-2 year co-op playthrough of Divinity OS: 2. At this point, I'm taxed.

I've enjoyed it but have missed a considerable amount of content due to party divide. I've also been a tag-along at times, and the co-op nature adds a sense of rush.

BG3 is clearly a masterpiece but I'm ready to move on.

Finally getting back to my evil route playthrough! Remembering what makes this game fun; there is so much that changes about the world between runs. This game has a lot of problems but I am not at risk of running out of things to try, and that is saying something since I'm getting close to 500 hours in this game.

Photo mode is also a brilliant and beautiful addition since I last played properly. This is my PC, Sarina. She is responsible for many many deaths. What a cutie!

Not much to do now before the final confrontation, and then my third run will be close to wrapping up. Will I be starting another run immediately afterwards? Yes, of course (why else would I be picking up a save file mid act three?)

I'm just... Not enjoying it

I put more than 30 hours into the game, got to the shar tower and then got distracted by smtvv, which I somehow managed to dump more time into in less days

It's unfortunate that I dropped 2023's goty, and what is supposedly one of the best games of all time but I was just reaaaaally not having fun, I wasn't willing to waste another 30 hours on the part of the game that people considered "less good" than the start, really unfortunate honestly, I was hoping I'd find a wrpg I can enjoy...

A Love Letter to Baldur's Gate 3

I am someone who loves role-playing characters, and I've always wanted to play tabletop RPGs with friends. However, I never had anyone to play with in person, and I often preferred to stay out rather than play virtually while my friends played together in person. I always searched for ways to play tabletop RPGs alone, but I never found it as fun or interesting until Baldur's Gate 3 was released.

From the moment I saw the trailer, I knew I would love this game. After eight months since its release, I finally bought Baldur's Gate 3, and it has been the best experience I've ever had playing video games. All the characters have amazing voice acting and performances, the story is excellent, and the turn-based combat gameplay is very complex but becomes very enjoyable once you understand it.

There are some bug issues and occasional FPS drops, but apart from that, the game is wonderful. Baldur's Gate 3 offers everything and more for those who love RPGs. Technically speaking, it's an almost perfect game, but deep down, I consider Baldur's Gate 3 a perfect game, a masterpiece of video games.

~140 total hours, balanced difficulty. Played in a variety of ways (PC, steam deck, streamed to deck, streamed to deck on a large tv).

SPOILER WARNINGS

Alright, this one’s going to be different. I’m not going to spend time on the Pros because this game gets covered pretty positively all the time. We are going to focus heavily on the negatives, but before I do:

1. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great game.
2. It earned all of that praise you’ve heard about.
3. It’s good value and I can totally get why it was game of the year (decade) for a lot of people.

Alright, let’s talk all the negatives that cost this game a star and maybe even a little more.

• Bugs, bugs, bugs, bugs. But nothing game breaking for me so this is minor. Using a controller, I couldn’t pick up gold off the ground. That was pretty frustrating for a hot second.
• Until I realized, there’s really nothing to do with all that gold that I’ve been slaving a way to obtain by hauling shit across the 9 hells.
• NPC AI leaves a lot to be desired.
  • I’m a hag, here are my thralls! I cast hold person, thrall you stand there, and I’ll free you from the hag! Hag Defeated! This guy cast hold person on me, GET HIM! Really? I spared you and you want to die because I prevented you from being an idiot in combat?
  • Got some ally’s in the area, lets launch AOE arrows at them.
  • Occasionally for no reason at all friendlys would just fight me.
  • I had a number of times where NPCs would just throw themselves at enemies to be slaughtered. Whatever, I’m bored now of trying to reload to save you anyways.
• Not being able to cast revivify on npcs AND not giving them death saves is dumb. Even if it was just limited to the current combat. I had an NPC I wanted to save get one shot at full health at the end of a 45-minute battle. Wasn’t reloading for that nonsense.
• Initiative is done poorly, please just use the 5e ruleset. There’s no need to make Alert an ungodly feat.
• Crit fails/successes on ability checks are also dumb. I never rolled an ability check where when I got a 20 and I wouldn’t have succeeded without the critical. On the other hand, I failed a skill check dc of 5 with 10 – 15 bonuses just because I rolled a 1. I know it’s a popular house rule, at least let us have the option to turn it off.
• Compelled dual turning your character into a braindead npc is way more powerful than it should be. Also, I noticed that the game skirts compelled dual and charmed effects by using AOE spells anyways, but when its on your character they go full send on fucking you not only for that fight, but any subsequent fight. For instance, I had Shadowheart pop a fourth level spirit guardians, she got compelled, so she broke concentration, popped a higher-level spirit guardians and then did nothing. Just unfuck that spell please.
• Let us turn off the damn auto linking for dual wielding weapons. I never want to force my bonus action to be an automatic attack. Also, if you’re running dual crossbows and dual swords and you switch between them, they’ll occasionally re-link themselves. FFS.
• Vendors need more meaningful icons.
• Dyes are monotonous and the system for it just sucks. I gave up on glam.
• This game takes too long. It needs a fat trim for sure. I get people want options and compelling quests, but some of the fat was not compelling. Also your character moves too damn slow adding unneeded time just running. I can see how playing through additional times might be fun, but honestly, investing as many hours I have is quite enough.
• Act II was sooooo good. MMM loved it. Made Paladin go braaap. The ending fights were energetic, the angel was amazing, the theme was light v dark, good v evil and it oozed. That being said, the main story did not grip me like it should have. That’s just personal opinion though.
• Act three felt rushed, unfinished, and worst of all, the ending didn’t make me feel like “wow look how far we came”. It felt more like “oh everyone still talks to me like I couldn’t open a can of whoop ass on them.”
• I hit level 12 early in act III. Progression just stops. Huge let down, some kind of post max level progression would have been nice. It literally could have been just giving a couple of skill points where additional levels would have been. I don’t think it would have unbalanced the game that much at all given how much xp is required for a level at that point.
• Inventory management is awful and it needs a junk identifier and a clear indicator of quest items so I can determine which book/notes I really should be keeping. I know the border color exists, but I also know there’s like a .5% chance that, that specific item might not have been colored appropriately so keep everything on you all the time.
• Camp wasn’t useful enough. I would have made camp growable, investable (something to do with all that cash). Lastly, I would have used it to ease inventory management. Let me explain with this camp additions I think would have made inventory management even fun:
  • I’m the armorer, when you send equipment and accessories to camp, I collect them. I can convert equipment to gold if you’d like, but also, when equipping your party, anything I store will be available when equipping any character in camp. I also can setup a couple of loadouts if you wish. WOW!
  • I’m the librarian, when you have books and notes sent to camp, I collect them. I archive them all the first time they come in and then I sell for gold any extras! You can read anything you discovered and sent to me throughout the game!
  • I’m the alchemist. When you send ingredients back I hold them and when you convert things to potions I can hold potion stock and make it an easy way to distribute throughout the party. Oh, I also hold onto extra scrolls for safe keeping!
  • I’m the chef. When you send back things that have a camp supplies value I hold onto them.
  • I’m the artists. When you send me art, I hold onto it. I can convert art to cash or allow you to fill out art slots that are then displayed around your camp.
• I’d make camp upgradable too, but that’s just me. If you ignore everything else, having a better way to manage equipment would have saved me a ton of time. I liked to use as many characters as possible.
• On the character note, I want more confined story arcs like a lot of games have and less of the characters being tied to the main quest. This gives me a better indicator of who I need to bring on a specific dungeon making me even more likely to use more characters. Also, I really think the party size should have been just 1 more.
• Loot was kinda meh, I really thought we’d get all this sweet legendary shit in ACT III. Truth is most of my best in class gear came from ACT I.

Alright, I’m done shitting on a great game. Even with everything above, you couldn’t find a better 5e game if you wanted to. I applaud Larian for their entry in the series, however, I’m looking forward to what someone else will do with the IP (assuming Hasbro doesn’t fuck us). As someone who’s not a fan of the Act story structure Larian uses, I do hope someone can deliver with a more true open world concept. I’d like to sit here and say that I wish Larian was going to put out true DLC such as going with Karlach and Wyll to the hells to fight for a forge or helping Lae’zel defeat the lich (I’m bitter I didn’t actually get to fight her), but even if they did I’m not sure I’d pick this one back up after all that time.

I don't have to tell you this is one of the greatest games ever made. we've all heard it. the potential and the depth to this game, the wealth of content, is unimaginable. You can play this game nearly any way you want, and every way you go there will be a new experience catered to you. I have never seen a game take the risk of making oceans of content that some or even most players will never encounter. You can miss entire characters, entire arcs, entire story lines, very easily. Every character, every story you can tell, contains divergent potential. that's what this game is, a set of tools to tell your story, to make your experience. It doesn't have a specific route planned.

With the beauty of that comes the problem with that. The more options you have, the more tools at your disposal, the more you don't have any guidance. If you don't know what you should do. If you don't know what any of this is, you're going to feel lost. You're going to struggle with the combat, with the mechanics. The game tries to ease you into it but in the end it doesn't hold your hand, it doesn't recommend anything, it just let's you go. If you're familiar with 5th edition DnD or just PNP RPGs in general, you have some idea what to do. But that was a skill you learned. The difficulty settings help mitigate the problem some. the lowest setting only requires the barest strategic ability from you. But you still might get frustrated. If you're familiar with forgotten realms lore, this story and it's smaller parts will feel at home. If you're not, you might be lost. There's a lot to take in. This might not be a story you enjoy, despite the loveable cast.

My own experience with DnD is that I was in it for the improv. Playing around with my acting skills with my friends, making up excuses to kiss each other (this is the G rated version of what we were often making excuses to do, in fact) We were always loose on the rules with combat. So, the parts of BG3 that appeal to my experience is the character interaction, the lore, the interpersonal stories you can make, the funny dialogue you can provoke. and it's worth it. anything is worth just this part of the game. but the combat is a little bit of a chore. exploring is too. it's slow. I don't suggest either thing be different, this game is doing what it's supposed to. I'm just reporting my own personal hangups with it. It doesn't deserve any less praise.

Play this game. obviously. it's a must. but be prepared to have patience with it. It contains a worthwhile experience, whatever that may be for you.

After seeing everyone talking about Baldur’s Gate 3 on here and most of my friends playing it, I gave into peer pressure and picked it up for myself. Granted it wasn’t a hard sell. I enjoy a good isometric RPG and this one looked fun.

I will say upfront that I did use mods during my playthrough. Most were just visual mods that added new clothing options and a few UI improvements. Of the gameplay mods, I used the Expanded 5e Spells and the Artificer class. I feel confident they weren’t game breaking and most missions were still appropriately challenging.

One mod that did probably make the game easier for me was the No Party Limit mod, coming from my last isometric RPG being Wasteland 3, the 4-member party size felt small. I was used to having a 6-man team. I also liked the idea of having a big D&D style adventuring party full of all the different classes and their contrasting personalities.

Baldur’s Gate takes place within the D&D universe using a lot of the D&D gameplay mechanics. I will give Larian Studios credit for getting pert near close to recreating the feeling of an actual D&D session. There are plenty of games with D&D inspirations or fantasy trappings, but Baldur’s Gate 3 goes a step above. This is the closest I’ve got to a game that lets you do about anything. You can go chat with the bad guys and even join them, you can use unconventional methods to solve puzzles or win fights. As someone accustomed to the Bethesda version of “do anything”, I was surprised how much variety this game gave me in approaching situations.

There’s a good amount of dice rolling, but the game doesn’t go full tabletop simulator and handles the more mundane dice rolls for you, like hit chances and passive perception. Throughout the game you are guided by an omniscient narrator, though her involvement does trail off as the game progresses. Usually, narrators are used as a lazy way to deliver exposition, but here it adds to that D&D session feel with the narrator acting as a GM. She appears just enough to not overstay her welcome.

My one bugbear with this game is the combat. 99% of the isometric RPGs I play are of the tactical, XCOM style, variety. My mind is wired to look for half cover or full cover, setting up overwatch, and using the action points system. I would try to move my artificer gunner to line up a clearer shot, but that didn’t affect my hit chance like it would in an XCOM like. Especially coming off of Wasteland 3, it took me a while to get into Baldur’s Gate’s combat system. I hardly used my spellcaster’s spells at first, because I was treating them like grenades or other consumables in that they were for emergencies only. I’m also used to the ‘Tab’ key cycling through your characters during combat, but that’s the inventory key in BG3. I often tried to click on a character to select them, only to have my current character attack them. I finally found the F1-F4 keys were for switching characters.

There’s also no level recommendations on quests. I don’t know if that means the quests scale to your level or if you just have to fuck around and find out you’re underleveled. Halfway through Act 1 I had to switch the game from normal to easy because the combat was that disagreeable with me. I had two fights that took me 2 hours each because I kept getting one shotted by enemies I could barely dent. I spent one weekday evening on just those two fights and I wasn’t having fun constantly reloading saves, so I knocked it down to easy. Removing the party limit also made fights feel better because the odds weren’t so stacked against me. Some of the Act 3 fights I can’t imagine winning with only 4 heroes, because you are fighting 15+ enemies. Those large battles exacerbate another problem, this game moves slow. There’s no way to speed up combat so you don’t have to sit through every enemy’s turn. And I never found a sprint button for when I had to backtrack across the large open world levels. Overall, I much prefer the tactical, range centric combat of other isometric RPGs over BG3’s D&D style combat systems.

The world you traverse is beautifully detailed. It’s typical fantasy fare: woodlands, swamps, caverns, and battlefields. Each act of the game has a large hub world you explore, with dungeons that shoot off it. Every corner of the map is packed with something, even if it’s just an interesting NPC. There’re quests scattered all about that are easily missed, because they rely only on you exploring the world to find them. I was a little put off that there wasn’t what I’d consider the typical ‘starter town’. You come across a druidic circle with some wayward travelers early on that sorta fills the role, but you never get that Megaton or White Orchard to visit.

And it donned on me half-way through Act 1 that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a road trip story. You were taken from your home and doing all you can to get back. The main plot is that you have a mind flayer parasite in your head and you are trying to find a way to get it out before you sprout tentacles. Most of Act 1 is dedicated to you asking every quack, healer, and mystic if they can get the tadpole out of your head. They all try and fail. Then as you go into Act 2, you learn there’s a cult of the dead gods that are using magic to create an army of mind flayer infested people. This is one of those moments games often have issues with, determining how much time has passed since our adventure started. We saw a few people get abducted by mind flayers in the opening cutscene, but by Act 2 there’s a whole army of flayer infected people. I was under the impression maybe a week passed, if so, the dead gods have been busy. Now, that I think of it, the initial mind flayer attack that starts the game seems unrelated to the rest of the plot, unless those mind flayers were already working for the cult of the dead gods.

A lot of fans online give Act 3 some guff, mentioning that they often lose interest in the story after the big fight that ends Act 2. The story does stumble a bit, but I didn’t quite have that issue. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn this game was rushed. Act 2 sees you taking down the leader of the necromancer branch of the cult, Khetric Throm, and he’s set up as a BBEG. He’s immortal and the whole act revolves around discovering his backstory and making him killable again. He’s also voiced by JK Simmons, a voice I didn’t expect to hear in this game, and the only big-name actor I recognized. You do meet the other two cult leaders at the end of Act 2 in a very Assassin’s Creed “Here’s the bad guys you’ll be killing later” way. After the big fight with JK Simmons, you start Act 3 in Baldur’s Gate. The other two cult leaders don’t have as plot-relevant a backstory and their boss battles are nowhere near as impressive. I was still intent on finishing all the side missions I’d started in Act 1 & 2 that were on hold until I reached the city. I was also ready to explore an actual city in this game, instead of little pockets of survivors.

For me, I lost interest at the final fight. We do get a great “Here comes the cavalry” moment where all the friends you’ve helped join in the fight, but not being a fan of the combat, the slog of fighting through the Elder Brain’s forces didn’t appeal to me. I sat the game down for about a week or two before coming back to finish it. The ending is pretty spectacular and the reunion party that uses the map for the first campsite was a nice wrap-up.

If I may armchair quarterback it, I think they could’ve swapped Act 2 & 3 around. It gets you to Baldur’s Gate earlier in a game bearing its name & you could frame it as, “While you were dealing with the threats inside the city, Throm has amassed an army on the outside.” You go fight him and his BBEG energy and then transition into the fight against the final boss.

Of course, the big stars of this game are you & your companions. I do find it a little annoying that your player character isn’t voiced, outside little barks during combat, when everyone else is. He mostly just makes weird expressions while crossing his arms. Regardless of what was being discussed, my character always looked a bit disgusted & constipated. I do give Larian props, I played as a dwarf and every NPC properly looked down at me while talking or knelt down, or in the romance case, picked me up.

I did romance Karlach for the irony. A dwarven artificer, who would be accustomed to working in a forge, gets with the tall, fiery girl. I thought I was being clever. She’s the group’s resident tomboy, who is wholesome and chill. She’s making the most of the little time she has left, and boy, there’s no happy ending to her story. And making the most means some pretty graphic sex scenes. I'm no prude, but I'll say that BG3's sex scenes put Witcher 3's to shame. There are no secrets between you and your characters.

If I do a 2nd run through, I’d probably pursue Shadowheart. She’s basically a goth kid. Her side mission is pretty involved and even plays into the main quest. She’s devoted to her goth goddess, but also develops a bit of snark. Though her snark pales in comparison to Astarion’s. He’s very much the “catty gay guy” & a fan favorite. I did find his personality a bit inconsistent. He spent centuries as a vampire’s slave and is very against slavery, but during a scene in Act 1 where we had a choice to save some Gnomish slaves from their Dwarven masters, he basically said “fuck’em”, which felt out of character. Gale & Lae’zel both grew on me as the game progressed. Gale is a roguish academic type & he felt the most like my close friend, my number 1, by game’s end. He’s a nerd who makes Fraiser type jokes, but he’s not a sniveling dweeb. Lae’zel starts off as the asshole of the group, but as she starts to respect the rest of the team, she loosens up. Jaheria, who is a character from the older BG games, is your group’s fun grandma. I didn’t use Halsin or Minsc much, so I can’t comment on them as characters. Wyll…

Characters are one thing Baldur’s Gate has in spades over Wasteland 3. You can see how your team of strangers grow closer together and become friends through the adventure. They comment on things in the world, which I often missed by talking to an NPC too quickly. Your rangers in Wasteland were practically mute. Back at camp you have Withers who is a fun, mysterious ancient one. One thing that surprised me is every character is voice acted in BG3, and they get a little camera close-up. I’ve played plenty of iso-RPGs where your regular civilian while just have a little text bubble float over their head in the overworld map when you speak to them, but in BG3, even the most inconsequential NPC with only one line of dialogue gets the same kind of treatment only given to major characters in other iso-RPGs.

All in all, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a fun time that captures the D&D experience. It has that same wild energy of a tabletop campaign. You can’t help but be endeared by your companions after spending 100+ hours with them. I do think Wasteland 3 is still higher in my personal ranking. I prefer the grounded post-apocalyptic story & tactical combat over a fantasy story where you’re hobnobbing with gods, but I can still respect how Baldur’s Gate 3 innovated on the iso-RPG genre.

After spending 100 hours on my first campaign and finally defeating the terror of the elder brain, I watched the credits fall, did my nice little epilogue, saved the game and then...

Immediately started a new character to do it all over again. It's not a perfect game. The acts are very inconsistent, both in terms of story quality and Act 3 is at all times on the verge of a complete technical breakdown, but it is just such an incredibly fun game to be in. I love messing with my action bars. I love walking around poking at stuff. I love the texture of the game and just thinking about all the different options. I love hearing the voices of these characters (not Gale), I love the sound of a level up, I love thinking about how to cheese an encounter that took me 2 hours the first time.

The game may be completely broken in spots and likely always will be. The ending might be some pretty complete Mass Effect 3 level bullshit. It doesn't matter though because playing this game with a friend or even by yourself feels like such a complete and utterly fulfilling experience, and it really is hard to stop just clicking the buttons in it.

This game is art beyond technical comprehension, words cannot describe all the feelings and good moments this game gave me, 100+ hours to complete my first run trying to do all side-quests, and even trying to I couldn't manage to see 50% of what the game can offer.

Beautiful.

Pd: Please Larian make Alfira a playable character, we don't have a Bard in the group and its already full of weirdos.

10/10

Well, it doesn't get much better than that.

This is probably one of the most powerful RPGs I've ever played. One of the best games I have played, for sure.

And, to be honest, I don't even enjoy Larian games. I didn't like Divinity 1 and the 2nd one was so boring that I just dropped it. I was worried they'd ruin Baldur's Gate. The second game is a favorite of mine. But they didn't. They knocked it outta the park!

The level of freedom in BG3 is insane. Not only freedom in combat and exploration, but narrative freedom. The ways you can tackle the story, respond to conversations, branching paths, different interactions and events you can stumble upon or create it yourself is just... it's absurd! It all goes farther than it needs and excels at it. Even romance scenes!

This wide range of possibilites transforms this already astonishing story into one of the best fantasy tales I've ever experienced. The writing is incredible, the music is beautiful, the characters absorb you into their backstories and things just keep escalating to major proportions. Hell, even the siquests are enthralling. I can't go into too many details due to spoilers, but trust me, it'll be hard for an RPG to top the storylines and cast you'll encounter here.

In addition to impeccable writing, the other reason why the main plot and its side plots are so captivating has to be the voice acting. There is simply no bad acting here. Hardly any bad characters at all, honestly! And it's not only the main cast. The witty vampire Astarion, the complicated Shadowheart or old companions like Jaheira and Minsc. It's the fucking creepy talking ox you meet in act 1, the weird cultists you meet in act 2's tower or even the annoying villains in act 3. It compels you to investigate, understand and finish everything. It's just that convincing and immersive.

If that wasn't enough, BG3 throws one of the best strategy combats at you. A brutal one, due to all the intricate D&D rules, in my opinion, but a fun and rewarding ride. You can tackle each encounter however you like as long as you know what you're doing. It took me a while to get into it, but grasping its possibilites opened up a plethora of opportunities for my party. I completely obliterated, trivialized or even avoided certain fights with the amount of autonomy given to me. But I've made a few battles way harder than they should be, as well. I failed quite a lot, but I learned from trying different things.

There are some amazing encounters and boss fights in this game. There's also an immense amount of bullshit objectives and gimmicks in others. But you'll fight through it in your own way.

Difficulty was one of the things that I found quite annoying at times. It never felt unbalanced since the game gives you myriad ways to complete an objective or defeat an enemy. But some of the conditions imposed, depending on the blind choices of build and paths you choose throughout the game's 3 acts can turn some very fun set pieces into very cruel moments. One thing I disliked is the amount of mobs you have to fight. My favorite combats were bosses/enemies with three or four strong goons aiding it, not 10 characters coming at you nonstop at the same time.

Being overwhelming might be BG3's biggest triumph, but it can also turn into its biggest flaw. It asks much of you. The good thing, though, is that it always rewards and surprises accordingly.

The main story, although fantasitc, can have its downsides as well. Small ones, and I might be nitpicking here, but act 3 was, by far, the weakest one. Some major decisions and consequences around the final moments of the game felt too sudden. There's a type of "ultimatum" given to you around the ending that felt sort of off character and the final scenes after the final boss were a bit shallow. It wasn't bad, just not as well put together as act 1 and 2, I think. I also missed more interaction with the party. While some huge things were happening, all my characters had to say about it were "well met" or "speak".

And last, but definitely not least: this is the buggiest game I've played in a long time.

I've encountered MANY different bugs and experienced a few crashes. It can even break some quests or saves, if you don't save often. And BG3's auto-save feature doesn't show up a lot. I even considered lowering the score due to how many bugs I've seen, but I couldn't. I guess it's a "good outweights the bad" situation. For me, at least.

Baldur's Gate 3 is impressive from the moment you boot it up. From character creation, to the thrilling prologue, clean challenging battle system and the friends and enemies you encounter on your journey. Even the main menu is beautiful, they didn't need to go at it that hard.

But they did. And in doing so, they designed the best game I have played in 2023.

"Role-playing game" is a term that gets slapped onto an insane spectrum of games, from Paper Mario to Final Fantasy and Pokémon to Borderlands. At its heart, the concept of "role playing" is something that can apply almost universally to any game that puts you in control of a character. You are "playing a role" after all! Fewer games actually drill down into the particulars of the tabletop extravaganza that popularized the "RPG" descriptor to begin with: Dungeons & Dragons.

Tabletop RPGs such as D&D were obviously hugely influential to many video games in ways that I don't need to get into. One hugely influential crop of games were the titles produced by BioWare that were directly based on the lore of D&D's Forgotten Realms, such as Baldur's Gate. Back then, I was always more partial to the action and multiplayer-focused Neverwinter Nights, but the influence of Baldur's Gate on modern RPGs is undeniable.

Baldur's Gate was an early attempt to replicate the emergent storytelling experience that is unique to the tabletop: a story that organically morphs based on the decisions made by the player. Unlike with video games, the collective imagination of your friends can make D&D campaign stories go in almost infinite directions, reigned in only by your Dungeon Master. Video games may never reach that ideal, but skipping forward to the modern day, the developer that has always most approximated it has been Larian Studios with their Divinity: Original Sin series. When it was announced that they would be taking the helm for a brand new entry in this long-dormant series, it made way too much sense.

Baldur's Gate 3 plays like an evolution of Divinity: Original Sin 2, which itself was heavily inspired by D&D. The ruleset now more closely matches D&D 5th Edition rules, and it is also more conscious about making you aware of and participate in the randomness of dice-rolling. Divinity was more video game-y in hiding these things from the player, having random chance be generated in the background and requiring simple stat thresholds in order to activate important dialogue choices, for instance. Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't only maximize the role of chance in its gameplay, but revels in it.

When you step out into this game's slice of the world of Faerûn, you are pretty free to go in any direction you wish, but Baldur's Gate 3 is still a largely linear experience. The freedom provided in this game lies in the variety of outcomes that you can experience in its many stories, and how these stories interact with the gameplay. One early section of the game has you encountering a grove of druids who have taken in a group of tiefling refugees. Even in this rather basic early RPG scenario, you will have many fascinating interactions with reverberations that literally last until the very end of the game. One big flaw of many RPGs is that it reduces the process of interacting with NPCs into a formulaic affair. Not going to point any fingers, but most RPGs I've played this year have featured barely interactive NPC dialogues that simply serve as vehicles for the tired cycle of quest, objective and reward that many RPGs have beaten to death at this point.

But in Baldur's Gate 3, there is no such formula. Interacting NPCs was a thrill from beginning to end, not just because you can almost never identify if your dialogue options will trigger a death, a combat encounter, a funny situation, or even the recruitment of a new companion, but because your success is usually determined by good old chance. Do you want to intimidate an enemy into avoiding a combat encounter? Roll a d20. Want to examine a potentially powerful magical artifact? Roll a d20. Did your grubby thieving self get caught by the guards? Roll a d20.

The depth of this system then comes from the many ways that you can influence this chance. Characters with high charisma will naturally have numerical bonuses that make them better at things like deception and persuasion. But even in those scenarios, failure is usually still possible, and the game requires you to go with the flow of the utter chaos that often is triggered when your dialogue choice has an unintended consequence. I have to admit that this lack of control was off-putting at first. But over time, I found myself with a smile on my face over and over again, as the game seemingly always had a prepared response for each situation that I got myself into.

When there is no other option than to fight, Baldur's Gate 3 turns into an extremely fun tactical game. Combat is turn based, with each character performing an action and a bonus action in their turn. Actions include obvious things such as spells and physical attacks, but there are also a myriad of other fun options such as jumping, throwing and shoving. This opens the door for a lot of wild contextual situations, such as luring enemies and shoving them into a chasm, or using your super-strong Barbarian to pick up and toss your enemies into a fiery pit.

But, as Baldur's Gate 3 is the gift that keeps on giving, we're not done yet. The entire game is playable with co-op, with your friends having the ability to take command of a spot in your four-person party. I'm still in the middle of my multiplayer campaign with my friends, and it's an absolute blast. If you think a single-player playthrough of this game has potential for chaos, then you should see the game played by four friends, each of whom is either tipsy or sleep-deprived. It can be absolute mayhem, and I loved to see how the game's story would go in directions that I would have never expected (Or desired, sometimes!).

Baldur's Gate 3 is a mind blowing game, but it's also not one without faults. While the game is definitely much more polished than it was when I first played its Early Access, it's clear that the back-half of the game is buggier and prone to both graphical and gameplay glitches. The most jarring variety of which is when the game finds itself unable to adapt to certain scenarios. For example, I recently had an instance where I reached a hidden room in a way the game wasn't prepared for, so as I was leaving, the characters were talking as though I had not yet found the room.

Still, these are just small gaps that are caused by one of the most ambitious scopes I've ever seen in a video game. Baldur's Gate 3 is a game that doesn't just pay lip service to the term "role-playing game," like so many other video games with that label nowadays. It's a game that represents role-playing in its true form. It's the most intricate video game playground I've yet seen that lets you play out the role of whichever character you can cook up, and like magic, the game organically responds in kind to your choice with a new alternative story branch or situation. With Baldur's Gate 3, Larian has cemented their place as one of my favorite game studios at the moment.

Baldur's Gate 3 nails RPG problem-solving from just about every angle—the problems themselves are interesting, the tools at your disposal are varied and work together in cool ways, and the game is more than willing to just let you experiment and figure it out. In combat, exploration, and dialogue, I regularly hit various walls of challenge, came up with plans, and was very satisfied at how often they worked or led into another engaging situation. The systems at play in this game and the overall pacing are solid enough that it would still be an enjoyable time even if other things about the game were much worse.

Luckily, most of what this game has to offer around its core ideas is at least pretty decent. The story and world is fine, not super appealing to me necessarily, but it has moments in individual quests and areas where it shines. Your companions feel like they actually have their own stuff going on, including secrets, aims and goals that may differ from your own, and moments where they get to feel like the main character. Honestly, I didn’t really care for almost any of these characters as far as wanting to spend more time with them, but their stories are intertwined interestingly with the overall narrative and world.

I enjoyed the combat in this a lot more than I expected. Its heavy emphasis on positioning, target priority, status effects, and resource management gave it a challenging, strategic feel. Combat encounters are relatively limited in number and feel very "authored" to fit their environments and story situations, giving pretty focused challenges that can get tough to deal with. The fun does dissolve into tedium in some encounters where there’s just too many enemies for the turn-by-turn flow to stay fun. Most of the time, though, it felt really satisfying just barely making it out of the game's more grueling encounters, or finding clever ways to solve what initially appears very challenging.

Technically speaking, the game is not perfect, particularly in its less polished final act. Here, the game frequently ran into performance issues and weird hitches in combat that I didn’t experience elsewhere in the game. There were also definitely some small bugs here and there, and AI behaviors that didn’t feel quite right, but I expect it’s nothing that won’t be fixed soon at the rate they’re currently patching the game. I would suggest playing with a mouse and keyboard, but I tried a bit with a controller, and while somewhat clunkier it was definitely playable.

Though I can’t say I love everything about it, Baldur’s Gate 3 successfully got me into a kind of game that I’ve largely bounced off of pretty hard in the past. It really has this ability to create one memorable moment after another through its different systems. Those systems are mostly clear and fun to engage with, and it feels like there’s something interesting just about everywhere you look that could play out pretty differently on another playthrough. For now I am satisfied having scraped my way through its tough campaign once, made some interesting choices, and come to a mostly nice conclusion. Know that you're getting in for a challenge, but even if you aren't into CRPGs, I do think this is worth a try over almost anything else that came out so far this year.

Being a turn based game, people might be hesitant to try it and finish the 70+ hour story. especially for the first few hours where your party is at level one and weak. But with the gameplay being flexible, violence isn't always the answer.

• Guard caught you trespassing? you could Persuade them through money or a skill check with a corresponding dice roll.
• An enemy about to blow an explosive barrel in a cutscene? Change to another character in the party who's not talking to the enemy and steal the barrel and watch them react. BG3 makes it fun to experiment different approaches and rewards styles that are not typically possible in other games in the same genre.

Story is good and well paced. (Some might argue that a later act might be rushed which is valid). You know a game has good writing when you have a hard time picking a dialogue option that you know will cause a direct effect in the story and sometimes allegiance to different parties.

Graphics/Sounds: Great. Level design is varied and memorable.