By virtue of me starting an RPG review website, it’s pretty safe to say that I’m a pretty nerdy individual who likely grew up as a nerdy individual. I grew up around friends who played JRPGs and CRPGs. I had friends in college who obsessed over things like The Elder Scrolls and The Lord of the Rings, even some who even dabbled in LARPing, but I never came across anyone in my formative years who played tabletop role-playing games. As I’ve gotten older, I spend next to no time socializing outside of work and family activities, so the idea of playing a TTRPG is out the window unless I decided to play some kind of solo campaign.
There’s always been some appeal in trying it because of how open-ended and nimble the experience can be. It’s hard for video games to achieve the same results, as we’ve seen so many games advertised as expansive role-playing games with big decisions that ultimately funnel you back to where the game wants you to go. It’s always been something that I can give a little grace for if everything else around the decision-making is good, but it always generates some flack from the community.
However, for large scale RPGs I am going to have a harder time providing some of that grace as Larian Studios has crafted what is likely one of the single most nimble, flexible role-playing video games ever created in Baldur’s Gate 3.
The game takes place more than a century after Baldur’s Gate 2. If you are unfamiliar with the game’s world and story, it is still perfectly approachable. You play as an adventurer who gets abducted by Mindflayers. These are evil, tentacle-faced creatures that can manipulate minds. They infect you with a Mindflayer Tadpole, a horrific parasite that will gradually turn you into one of them. The quest is simple: find a cure before it’s too late.
Along the way, you’ll encounter many dangers, mysteries, and allies. You’ll also discover that your Tadpole gives you some strange abilities that can be useful or harmful. And you’ll have to make choices that will shape your destiny and the fate of the world. The game is set primarily in the Sword Coast, a region in western Faerûn.
Thanks to its foundation in Dungeons & Dragons lore and rules, the world of Baldur’s Gate 3 is alive in every sense of the word. Not only are villages, camps, trails, dungeons, and so forth populated, but nearly every NPC you come across is a character with their own story going on that is fully voice-acted. They may not amount to much in your story, but you get a small glimpse into the kind of person they are in the brief moment you spend talking to them. In most games, a lot of these characters in the periphery would just have text dialogue, a generic throwaway line, or have no option to speak to them at all. But in Baldur’s Gate 3, every encounter with another person or creature is treated with the same level of care in presentation that the main story gets.
There are plenty of games that have great writing, but this game absolutely inundates you with it from beginning to end. Typically, if a game is a story-heavy RPG, you see some type of corner cutting in relation to presentation simply because of its scale, but this game retains all of the branching story options, all of the side content, all of the cinematic flair you would want in a AAA-level game and maintains it throughout. It’s a staggering accomplishment.
The high-quality writing is front and center from the stellar narration to the dialogue, and the character arcs of your primary companions. Each of the main characters has the tadpole to reckon with, of course, but they are also juggling a personal struggle that you are able to help them get through over the dozens of hours you spend playing this game. The vocal performances in this game are incredibly strong across the board. In conjunction with the excellent facial animations in the in-game cutscenes during dialogue, the performances elevate what’s going on and make you genuinely feel for these characters. With this game and others that have released in recent years, I believe that we are entering a golden age of video game vocal performances.
The game uses a turn-based battle system. It allows you to plan your moves more strategically and also gives you more opportunities to interact with the environment and use your abilities creatively.
The combat in Baldur’s Gate 3 is challenging but also rewarding. You have to consider factors such as positioning, initiative, action economy, status effects, and environmental hazards. You also have to deal with dice rolls, which add an element of randomness and unpredictability to the battles. The skills that help you in battle are also useful outside of combat as well. These are situations where you can use your persuasion, deception, intimidation, insight, or other skills to influence the outcome of a dialogue or event. Each encounter feels thoughtful, unique and challenging, keeping you on your toes throughout.
If I were to come up with some kind of complaint about the game, it would be that sometimes the combat encounters can be too challenging, but usually if I step away from the game for a few hours or days, I can come back to it and get through it relatively quickly. Sounds like a “me” problem, huh? The only drawback I can think of is that the game had some minor technical glitches. Other than that, I have no complaints at all. I know a review should offer some criticism, but I honestly don’t have anything significant to point out.
Of course, in my first playthrough, I was determined to find the cure for the tadpole, find who was responsible, and deal with them so that the rest of the world wouldn’t have to confront this problem. I put the work into building strong bonds with my party and tried to resolve each of their stories before heading into the game’s conclusion. At around the 65-hour mark, I rolled credits on the game. Once that was finished, though, I did something that I never do. I immediately went to “new game” and created a new character to play through the game with. Usually, when I finish a game, I am ready to walk away from it indefinitely, but this game is something special. I decided to test the game’s darker paths with the creation of a character archetype known as the Dark Urge, a special option for people who want to be an absolute bastard.
This run changed so many things about my experience with the game. A lot of your initial party members will likely end up dead in one of your many genocidal moments that lead to dozens and dozens of people dead by your hand or decisions. Some of your party will flat out decide that you aren’t the right company for them and leave. Of course, doing this opens the door for you to bond with other characters that you would have no chance at connecting with being “good.” Huge chunks of the game that took hours to get through previously can be done in minutes, as the bad guys welcome you in with open arms. It’s a blast seeing the game through different eyes and seeing that this content got the same amount of love as the more “traditional” routes.
I know there are still so many things I have yet to come across, but the reality is that I will likely be playing this game on and off for years. Recency bias is definitely a thing, but I feel pretty confident in saying that Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to be remembered as one of the greatest role-playing games ever created. As I said in the beginning of this review, I never have been able to experience the joy of a good tabletop game session, but I feel like BG3 is as close as a video game has been to that.
5 Stars: Incredible. A masterpiece that blows me away.
Overlevel 
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