Written By Existential Magazine
Baldur’s Gate 3 has taken the gaming industry by storm since its release last year, a creation by Larian Studios who are well known for their crafting of the game series Divinity: Original Sin, and now find themselves given Game of The Year across the board for Baldur’s Gate 3. With a gaming experience that has exceeded expectations and quite literally risen the bar for every RPG to come, we can’t understate the way it may impact gaming forever moving forwards.
If you’re unfamiliar with the series beforehand, Baldur’s Gate originated as part of BioWare, a studio renowned for working on narrative-heavy titles like Mass Effect and Dragon Age. Though highly adored alongside their other games, Baldur’s Gate was later passed on after a long-standing dispute between Interplay and Atari, later trusting Larian with this much-loved franchise given their work on Divinity - and they certainly superseded the bar for what anyone could’ve expected them to create. With the original games set in the Forgotten Realms Dungeons & Dragons campaign, Baldur’s Gate brings to life its world in ways that give the player an otherwise unseen amount of agency and exploration at all turns, bringing the role-playing freedoms to a new reality through a world you can truly see.
With past Baldur’s Gate games exploring the politics of the city of Baldur's Gate; the aftermath of the Time of Troubles and the machinations of a powerful and sinister mage known as Jon Irenicus, Baldur’s Gate 3 rather than continuing from their previous protagonist works instead as a standalone title in the series. With links back to the already established lore, historical events and distinct locations, this new offering delivers a tale that’s fresh and individual from its predecessors.
The story of Baldur’s Gate 3 is thrust onto you right from beginning, perhaps sounding a little complicated from the get-go, but paired with the game’s detailed narrative and visuals it’s made easy to keep up with for a beginner learning the ropes. Delivered both through a cut-scene and gameplay, you find yourself starting your story held captive by illithid (mind-flayer) creatures, with your character awaking on their unknown flying vessel and forced to allow a parasitic tadpole to be implanted inside of them. This tadpole is known as the first step in transforming into this illithid species, losing your identity and becoming one with the illithid masses that wish only to serve. Before you can truly let that sink in though, the ship swiftly comes crashing down while under attack from Githyanki warriors, allowing yourself and a handful of scattered soon-to-be companions the opportunity to escape.
This might sound like a lot to immediately take on, especially for those unfamiliar with the lore or even D&D as a whole (we’re right there with you), but Baldur’s Gate 3 never once felt overwhelming or too much. Cleverly stripped of your character’s memory, it’s always expected for you to ask questions, engaging with the world in a way that feels natural as the inquisitive player as well as your clueless character. The small snippets you do learn from these opening scenes only make you more curious too, left with just enough information to understand, but unable to quite put it down as you strive to know more. So many intricate world-building pieces only add to this, littered not just around the opening Nautiloid ship and subsequent character conversations, but through the entire game. The companions are the perfect complementary asset to that too, delivering back-stories of their own, snippets of the world’s history, and insights into each of the differing species you’ll uncover through your travels.
Left stranded and miles out from the city of Baldur’s Gate, yourself and yourself and your various soon-to-be allies find themselves trekking across the vast open lands of the wilderness in Act 1, attempting to unravel the complexities of your newfound situation and together attempting to change your seemingly guaranteed fate. You don’t quite begin as a team though. instead left searching far and wide across the padded-out landscapes to bring back these characters to your camp, and potentially also as one of the three selections for your travels. Some of the most popular you may meet are of course Astarion, the vampire-spawn rogue, Shadowheart, the Shar-worshipping Cleric, and Gale, the wizard of Waterdeep. With friendship and relationship approvals too, you’re able to grow closer to those you like best, learning more of their secrets, enjoying their individual dialogues depending on who you spend the most time with, and perhaps even become something more.
Each act also comes with an accompanying large map to explore, not quite mass open-world (as it’s nowhere near as big as a map like GTA or Horizon Zero Dawn), but there are no limitations on where you can go in the bounds of the Act. Whether you want to lock-pick your way into the hundreds of buildings; pick a fight with anybody and everybody; jump across sketchy chasms; explore underground basem*nts and more, Baldur’s Gate 3 finds itself defining a new standard of open-world that’s significantly more built-up but at a semi-smaller scale - perhaps somewhat like a large, open ‘hub’. We can’t help but feel these limitations are everything that made Baldur’s Gate 3 quite so successful though, cutting out the empty open-areas that are often filler in larger open-worlds, the lifeless buildings and non-interactive NPCs, and instead giving you genuine, unmatched control within the boundaries of a still rather large area that’s not just surface level, either. Whether you’re overhearing random conversations; chatting with a solid portion of the locals; uncovering secrets; using knowledge found within notes to discover hidden details and more, there’s never been a game that ever felt so alive up until now.
Tying into the Dungeons & Dragons world, the combat is of course equally in-tune to the tabletop role-playing title. If D&D on the whole is new to you, it generally means creating your own character with a set-back story, picking a class to specialise in, deciding on numeric scores for your abilities (like strength or intelligence) and playing out a story through dice-rolls that decide your fate with a large group to accompany you. When translated into a game, Baldur’s Gate 3 includes these numerical values and classes, with some decisions and conversational options only being possible if you’re a certain class or roll above a certain score. This equally works within the combat, as the damage of your attacks are decided through dice rolls and other details, as well as certain spells and other options being limited to your character’s rest-state. If this all sounds a bit complicated, just take pleasure in knowing you don’t have to really care too much, as all you really need to do is roll a dice a few times or make an attack that the game will decide a value on your behalf for. The minor details are things you’ll pick up incredibly quickly, and even if turn-based combat sounds super boring or uninteresting to you, it’s genuinely more than worth allowing the time to explore. As someone who’s played a handful of turn-based games and hated them all, I expected that I’d love the story of Baldur’s Gate 3 but absolutely hate the fighting, and frankly I couldn’t have been more wrong. It’s much easier to pick up the game’s strategies, mechanics and more while taking it slow, and I’d be surprised if most people didn’t grow to love it just as much.
Visually, Baldur’s Gate 3 mixes in gorgeous cut-scenes and close up conversations with a primary focus on a zoomed-out, third-person camera angle. Guiding your group by clicking where you’d like them to run to on PC (or simply using joysticks on controller), you can scroll in and out to zoom, as well as pan around the map to peek at things to explore. It’s almost like you’re watching from above, not top-down (though it is an option), but instead sat back from a distance and watching them wander through the differing wide-open scenes. Everything still looks rather realistic, tinted with a fantasy and more medieval edge, but wrapping everything in immensely well-thought out detail. Stunning lighting and shadows, particle effects, weather conditions and more sweep across the landscapes too, bringing this world even more to life. It really doesn’t convey quite the same when you’re watching it play out in images or videos online, as the experience of genuinely being within this world makes its art style feel incredibly fitting, rather than the distant sense it can evoke when watching through the lens of a creator’s footage. The musical score matches just as well with the vivid world-building, delivering a soundtrack that’s orchestral and oh so fitting for the older setting the game plays out through, delivering haunting pieces that’ll leave you with goosebumps through some of the more emotional scenes and adrenaline in the most epic of battles.
Though not all of your new friends will be human, one thing that Baldur’s Gate 3 does best is humanising all of those you will grow to love, allowing them not just loveable personality aspects but all-too-real flaws too. Karlach for example is quick-tempered, Astarion is cold and closed-off, Gale is power-hungry above all else, and that’s just the baseline of their personalities. That’s not to say this is any kind of criticism, in fact, what makes Baldur’s Gate 3 so wonderful is how recognisably real all of these people feel. While you learn more of their stories, their traumas, their mistakes, it’s impossible not to feel even more connected than you would if they’d began the perfect heroes.
For a game of this caliber, it’s pretty much impossible to find any real faults to share. Though we could nit-pick and say occasionally combat lagged a little, or a dice-roll didn’t seem to register and needed to be redone, there really wasn’t anything glaringly wrong aside from a handful of very easily forgettable bugs. There’s really never going to be a game that doesn’t have those either, and considering quite the extent of the moving parts Baldur’s Gate 3 has with so much to interact with and do, we’re surprised the only ones we found were so small. It’s also worth commending the Larian team for being so incredibly on it with bug fixes too, keeping people in the loop through social media when they’re working on fixes and swiftly implementing them too.
While we have the opportunity though, we thought we’d also address some of the criticisms online that seem to be widely misrepresenting the game as a whole. With many misconceptions about what Baldur’s Gate 3 truly is spread across social media, it seems to believe that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a title focused inherently on nudity and intimate relationships, as though those are the core features the game has to offer. While it’s without a doubt that a game of this nature isn’t for children, the true extent of sexuality explored in Baldur’s Gate 3 is likely to take up at most a mere few minutes of your over 100+ hour save file, and if you’re eager to avoid romance whatsoever you can disable nudity or reject any flirtatious comments from companions. To be diminished down by falsely claiming the game’s entire plot is purely based on romance and sex is disheartening, given it has so much more to offer.
After many, many hours and quite a few tears, we have to say that we now understand the reason that Baldur’s Gate 3 has been considered unanimously the Game of The Year for so many, and that’s because it’s what might be the best game made in the last decade. Though there are some incredible offerings out there nowadays, what makes Baldur’s Gate 3 so special is just how much depth there is packed into this one story. With easily over a hundred hours if not much longer to explore every hidden detail, we guarantee you won’t be able to put it down. There’s always just one more thing to explore, one more place to look at, one more conversation to have, one extra fight, and before you know it you’re a few hours deeper. Though we can’t say for a fact that an RPG will be everyone’s cup of tea in terms of gameplay, we can say wholeheartedly that if you’re even remotely on the fence, it’s worth checking out and experiencing - and don’t forget that Steam have an incredible policy that allows you to refund within the first 2 weeks and with under 2 hours worth of playtime, which we’d say is a solid amount of time to get to grips with how to play and if it’s your thing. As a player that couldn’t have been less interested in D&D, mythical worlds, or turn-based combat, I should’ve hated Baldur’s Gate 3, and yet this has become by far my favourite game of all time. We can’t prompt you enough to give it a chance.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is available to play on Microsoft Windows, Playstation and Xbox purchasable here. Existential was very kindly provided with a Steam code for this review.
Written by:Tatiana Whybrow
Photo Credits: Screenshotted on PC.
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Existential Magazine
