[Review] Baldurs Gate 3

[R e i]

Baldurs Gate 3 Game Information
Developer:Larian Studios
Publisher:Larian Studios
Release:6 October 2020 
Genre:Role-playing

 

From the roughly 20 hours of adventuring in Baldur’s Gate 3 at its Early Access launch, I can already tell you that this is probably the closest a story-focused RPG of this kind has come to emulating the experience of tabletop Dungeons & Dragons. The systems here allow me to do exactly the kind of clever but ridiculous things I would ask a human Dungeon Master if I can do. Rather than the simple “no” you would get from most RPGs when you ask if you can skip an entire quest by climbing around the backside of a mountain and sneaking into the bad guy’s lair, Baldur’s Gate 3 will tell you to roll for it. It’s an impressive start, but it’s definitely a very early early access game. There are just enough frustrating bugs and exposed areas of missing polish that a lot of people are going to be better off waiting until it’s finished before jumping in.The flexible interactions between character abilities and the world allow each class the chance to shine in ways they normally wouldn’t. My elven wizard always had a spell prepared that triples a target’s jump distance. While this would be a very situational ability in most games, not really worth spending a spell slot on, in BG3 it can allow you to reach hidden treasure, gain a vantage point to rain down destruction with advantage, or even bypass obstacles entirely by taking to the rooftops. I ended up having to remind myself to take a few combat spells because I was so excited about all the interesting ways I could use the utility ones in combination. I like to play my wizards as sort of mystical Swiss army knives on the tabletop, not the glass artillery pieces they are in most digital RPGs, and I’m so thrilled to be able to do that here. Larian treats level design and environmental interaction as part of how you win battles and solve puzzles, and it works brilliantly in their envisioning of Baldur’s Gate 3 certainly doesn’t accomplish both, at least not at the moment. It’s glitchy and overcomplicated, and it takes a lot of very patient work to get into the rhythm of playing the game. Once I got there, though, I was able to appreciate it and, even better, to consider what heights it might achieve in its final release.And it’s a beautiful envisioning at that. The environments and characters look amazing, rendered in a saturated but realistic style that definitely evokes the 5th Edition D&D books. It made me think of what Dragon Age might have looked like today if it had stayed a bit more grounded like Origins instead of bringing in the more stylized, graphic novel-esque look of Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition.

 

 

As it stands in the early access version of the game, Baldur’s Gate 3 has very little to do with the narrative of the previous entries in the franchise. Rather than continue the story of the Bhaalspawn, their dead god of a father, and the magical burden of being born to be taken over by said dead god father, the player in BG3 has been abducted by telepathic mind flayers and infected with a “tadpole” in their noggin. If you don’t get the thing out of your head, the tadpole will take over your body and turn you into a tentacle-faced creature. Along with some fellow travelers with a similar problem, the player character sets out on an adventure to empty their mind. They’re dropped into a big, free-form world. Chaos ensues.Baldur’s Gate 3 pays clear homage to its predecessors through design choices that you can feel moment to moment as you play the game. It understands that, as someone living in a fantasy world, you’ll have to make constrained choices, and that you should be held to some of those choices, even if the long-term outcome isn’t great. If you choose to attack a fortress of goblins, they all know that, and you’ve got a lot of fighting ahead of you. Opposite to that, if you choose to be friendly and avoid conflict at all costs, you’re going to piss off the various people who are imprisoned by those goblins and want to make a violent escape. It is not simply the old saw that “choices matter” in the game. It’s that there are choices, and you make them, and you have to live with them. If you let a hag pluck out your eye and plop it back in, then you’re just going to have to live with that shit from now on. This really happens. If you let her take the eye, you can’t ever make critical hits again. Deal with it.The early access version of the game also has a few classic Baldur’s Gate quests that can best be described as “who’s lying?” These are quests wherein Person A tells you something about Person B, and when you talk to the latter, they tell you that Person A was lying the whole time. There’s no way to know who is truly correct, and in the end, you’ve gotta make a choice. Are the religious devotees telling the truth about the tricky tiefling leading the gnolls, or are they actually devils in disguise who are getting you to do their dirty work? You have to make a choice, and you’re not going to feel good about it. That’s classic Baldur’s Gate.There’s also nothing I could find to stop me from heading back to camp and resting after every single fight, though, which tilts the scales too far in the opposite direction.

 

 

The game also fleshes out the Forgotten Realms, the world in which the previous games took place and the “default” setting for D&D right now. It now feels like a coherent and real place with religions and landmarks and governments and shared history. Baldur’s Gate 3 accomplishes this largely through environmental design and character conversations. The buildings and landscapes of this section of the game’s map are full of religious iconography, and the people you meet come from somewhere and have opinions about that place. It all feels like you’re seeing the smallest part of a bigger world.All of these successes when it comes to making something that carries the core of Baldur’s Gate are what makes the rest of Baldur’s Gate 3 feel off, especially the adaptation of 5th-edition Dungeons & Dragons. If you’ve never played D&D before, the best summary that I can give is that it is both comprehensive and based on many assumptions. By the former, I mean that D&D gives you rules for adjudicating nearly everything that could come up in a free-flowing tabletop role-playing game session. There might not be a specific rule for every single physics particle in your fantasy game, but all of the actions and interactions you could have in-game are at least covered somewhere by generalizable rules. But those rules are also based on assumptions about how certain classes, roles, and creatures in the world should interact with each other.One of those assumptions, for example, is that there is a divide between melee characters and spell casters. This dictates how many actions they can do, which skills they have access to, and how powerful they are in relation to monsters and each other. A cleric throwing their most powerful spells is always going to be more spectacular to play than a fighter swinging a sword every round. This also dictates how fighting mechanics like saving throws or hit points work. These assumptions are what ground the world, and when player desires begin creating friction with those assumptions, it can be a little annoying.I find D&D unplayable if you don’t throw out some of those rules and assumptions. “By the book” D&D is a hard pill to swallow due to the sheer amount of time it takes to do anything in combat or otherwise, and the game’s manuals make it pretty explicit that you should think of them as useful guidelines for adjudication and not the sole arbiter of how you play with tabletop products. As the Dungeon Master’s Guide says, “The rules aren’t in charge.This adventure, on the other hand, is compelling from the first minute, and is so rich with exciting characters, locations, and plot developments along the way that I never got bored. The cast is dynamic and complex, with excellent voice acting and dialogue writing even for minor players.

 

Baldur's Gate 3 Minimum Requirements 
CPU: Intel i5-4690 / AMD FX 4350
RAM: 8 GB
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
VIDEO CARD: Nvidia GTX 780 / AMD Radeon R9 280X
PIXEL SHADER: 5.0
VERTEX SHADER: 5.0
FREE DISK SPACE: 150 GB
DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 3072 MB
Baldur's Gate 3 Recommended Requirements
CPU: Intel i7 4770k / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
RAM: 16 GB
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
VIDEO CARD: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB / AMD RX580
PIXEL SHADER: 5.1
VERTEX SHADER: 5.1
FREE DISK SPACE: 150 GB
DEDICATED VIDEO RAM: 3072 MB