RPG fans are reminded of their passion for Baldur’s Gate 3.
Being The Dark Urge is difficult. I dream of death every night; I pull my intestines out of a soft stomach like a clown’s handkerchief, using my victims as squishy easels for my gory artwork. It’s not simply a dream, though. My party members are asking questions that the mutilated corpse at my feet has already answered when I wake up with my arms covered in blood up to my elbows.
After twenty hours, every single person in my party has passed away. Dead-dead, that is. forever gone. Two of them are in bits, and one has lost its head. Nothing magical in the world can make that lot better.
They don’t like that I tore our vampire friend to pieces while he was sleeping, but they did believe me when I said I wasn’t in control when I killed the bard. Only Shadowheart was still with me at the start of Act 2, but even she had moved on from me a while ago after my co-op partner started dating her before I could free my dragon D.
Your experience with Baldur’s Gate 3 will differ from mine. Every time you play through this 100-hour role-playing game, you’ll encounter a fresh experience because to the large array of pre-made characters available, each with their own motivations, backstories, and religion. You may even create bespoke characters that you can customise to your exact specifications.
You can see how far this rabbit hole goes by looking at the fact that it took me 100 hours despite having ended the lives of at least ten individuals, each of whom had multiple side quests. One of the best role-playing games ever created is Baldur’s Gate 3, which serves as a reminder of the good old days before market research dumbed everything down.
I’m at the stage of life where it scares me to think about playing a game again, especially one as complex as this one. The number of hours in a day is limited. However, this particular game is unique. Every life I destroy and every poor choice I make will only improve my subsequent playthrough. The next character I have in mind is a smart monk who indulges in alcohol and becomes a drunken martial arts expert. This initial playtime is all about spiralling without consequence, if games are a form of power fantasy.
My cooperative partner says that I’ve (gently) wrecked their game, and I’m not sure why. I understand what they’re saying. Karlach, a ferocious tiefling barbarian with a mechanical heart that makes her skin scorching than a rotisserie chicken, is the person I miss the most. There is Wyl, a monster hunter who serves a demon queen as his master. Lae’zel is present. She is real. One of the most hilariously dysfunctional sets of characters you will ever meet is the party in Baldur’s Gate 3. They are all dead, and their stories are all loaded with exquisite irony.
Then there was the occasion when we set out on a mission to pilfer an egg. I received payment in advance, took the egg, delivered it to the person who gave us the money, and threw it off a cliff. And there was a dialogue choice here! I could have simply thrown the egg off a cliff without having to engage in conversation because the game’s mechanics are designed to let you do the most insane things.
And then there was the day we went on a quest to steal an egg. I took the egg, gave it to the person who gave us the money, accepted payment in advance, and flung it off a cliff. Here was also a dialogue option! The game’s mechanics allow you to do the most ridiculous things, so I could have just thrown the egg off a cliff without having to talk to anyone.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is the closest thing we’ve yet found in digital form to the spontaneous humour and drama of Dungeons & Dragons.
This is an incredible thing that Larian has done. If you have any Animal Speaking potions on hand, almost every animal in the game—from rats to squirrels and oxen—is a legitimate character. If you possess the Animal Handling skill, you may be able to deduce them even if you don’t. You can frequently use a Speak to the Dead spell to speak with a deceased character to learn additional details from them after they pass away. Your head spins from all the things to do, people to see, and conversations to have.
There are an overwhelming number of people to contact with and objectives to complete when you finally arrive in Baldur’s Gate. I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve gone to investigate a side room just to find myself in a completely different area with dozens of NPCs, missions, puzzles, and stories to solve. It feels like I’m being shook around inside a snow globe, like a single-celled organism.
Furthermore, nearly everything is emulated. If you believe something should work, it most likely will—for example, using the Silence spell to prevent sentries from calling for assistance while you’re destroying them. Elements work together, doors can be chosen, opened, or demolished, you can fly and teleport to reach previously unreachable locations, bridges may be knocked down, and the list goes on.
It creates one of the most insane battle sandboxes ever built by expanding upon Divinity: Original Sin 2’s turn-based fighting system. Baldur’s Gate 3 depicts magic as uncontrolled energy, in contrast to most games that turn magical abilities into different coloured bullets. It doesn’t know who is an ally or an enemy, and casting spells carelessly can backfire. After a fight, towns and buildings turn into smouldering graveyards.
But this leads us back to the amazing writing and narrative design team, who really make combat shine. There’s usually a reason behind a fight, and you rarely find yourself in one just by accident. Nearly every monster and character in the game has a backstory, which increases your interest in even the most seemingly unimportant encounters. It’s very clever. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the greatest game of 2023 thus far and just what we’ve been lacking.
- Rating: 10 out of 10.
- Narrative: 10 out of 10.
- Graphics: 9 out of 10.
- Sound quality: 9 out of 10.
- Playability: 10/10
With a powerful PC, Baldur’s Gate 3 plays easily, though at first I had frame rate problems because my hard drive was full; this was fixed when I switched to an SSD. Enemies can lag during difficult fights, and there are sometimes little graphic issues during conversations. Slow loading in rural areas is another effect of long-distance travel. These problems didn’t stop me from enjoying the game, though.