Finally, Baldur’s Gate 3 is here… sort of. The latest entry into the titular Dungeons & Dragons–based series has been a long time coming. With Larian Studios not only plucking up the courage to tackle this long-awaited game, but also braving the early access space in the process.
Early Doors
Baldur’s Gate 3 is going to be in early access for the foreseeable future with one year being the official estimate from Larian.
It does make sense to enter early access with such a complex game. A title that has such high demands and hype from its audience. Despite the developers wanting to create a small community of hardcore fans willing to give feedback, the £49.99/€59.99 price tag didn’t seem to put anyone off, with the game breaking Steam with its release.
Fifty quid may still be off-putting to many who are interested in diving into what is not even half a game yet, not even mentioning the plethora of bugs and technical issues. So, let’s explore what is there now and whether it’s worth parting with your gold now, or waiting until later.
Set the Campaign
Baldur’s Gate 3 follows a party brought together by a mutual parasitic infection in their brains. This infection was given to them aboard a mind flayer ship which crashes on the Sword Coast after an encounter in one of the rings of hell. You will then have to explore the lands around you, which will see you enter many different locations and meet many interesting individuals.
The story is told brilliantly. Every single line is voice acted, including the narration, which is often seen as text in similar RPGs such as Pillars of Eternity and Pathfinder: Kingmaker. Cinematic moments of our early access playthrough can sometimes lose their impact, due to missing audio and raw animations.
Although act one is the only part available right now, with other paths within also locked, it’s a promising start for the opening portion of the game’s story.
Choose Your Fighter
First and foremost, Baldur’s Gate 3 uses the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset from the off. Character creation, whilst lacking in many ways for the moment, still offers that familiar structure behind crafting your hero. The backgrounds, classes and perks from your choices are all taken straight from the “Dungeon Master’s Guide” which means knowledge of the source material can make your life easier straight away.
If you are a newbie to D&D or tabletop roleplaying games, then fear not, as Larian have done a good job of streamlining the often overbearing information fed to you in games of similar ilk, when creating your character. This isn’t necessarily a good thing for those of us who love to read paragraphs of information about every little character choice, however the incredible visual detail that your character will receive from those choices helps balance things out.
Baldur’s Gate 3 stands above and beyond its other CRPG counterparts in terms of its custom character visuals, allowing you to craft every fine detail and not leave it to the theatre of the mind like so many other games of the genre.
Roll of the Dice
Starting in a more scripted section, Baldur’s Gate 3 will quickly show you that it is a Dungeons & Dragons game. You will discover that your character is constantly making passive ability checks around them, revealing hidden objects or traps if successful. Similarly, with dialogue sections you will be given a myriad of options which sometimes require you to make a corresponding ability check.
The passive perception or investigation checks can make or break your game, especially during the early stages. At first you want to explore and loot as much as you can, but booby-trapped sarcophagi and undead lurking in the shadows, will quickly dispatch of your low-level HP, forcing you to think again.
Roll of the Tongue?
These in-conversation ability checks will require you to literally roll a D20, showing you the target DC before rolling the virtual dice. It appears your proficiency bonuses are automatically added to the dice number, as your deciding roll never gets amended.
Unfortunately, there is currently no way of allowing your party to intervene in conversation, even if they are particularly proficient in a certain thing. For example, I could speak to somebody with no idea that an arcana question may pop up, yet my wizard companion standing next to me isn’t allowed to input anything.
As it is in the tabletop counterpart, these unique and often luck-based moments are always exciting and can really turn the game on its head, depending how you play it.
You will always be second guessing yourself and wondering if this may have gone better had you taken a different route or chosen a different option, or simply had better luck with your roll. Either way, you will be likely reloading quick saves because of terrible decisions or sudden bad luck. Fortunately, this means that if you must reload a save due to a game breaking bug or crash, then the frustration is slightly nullified by the excitement of giving that part another attempt.
Meet the Family
Throughout the first few hours, you will come across your party members and in classic D&D fashion you will all tag along with each other, through a shared goal. Each character in your party are fantastically animated, expertly voice acted and genuinely interesting.
Although some technical problems can cause their faces to freeze or their bodies to spasm from time to time, I was not only blown away by their facial animations and performances, but also by every single NPC I came across.
No matter where you are if there is a character around, you can talk to them. Even if it’s a novice goblin warrior who has one line of dialogue, they will deliver that dialogue with top cinematic quality (if there are no technical hiccups) and unique character.
Even with the dodgy animation issues sometimes cropping up, the attention to detail and quality in each and every character, really helps sell the locations you are in and acts as a mouthpiece for the wonderful D&D lore to come through.
Drawn Swords and Drawn Out
Of course, when you aren’t exploring, looting, or trying to intimidate an NPC into giving you money; you are probably fighting. Combat is a huge part of D&D and Baldur’s Gate 3 delivers a combat system that exactly resembles the tabletop version.
Each character within view of the combat will act in turns, dictated by a dexterity-based initiative order. From there, each turn will allow that character to take an action, a bonus action and move. At level 1, you can’t do much else outside of this, but as you begin levelling up and unlocking new abilities, these turns can become so much more.
Probably due to its complexity, the combat system attracts many unwanted issues and bugs that can cause long waits or the need to reload a save. I found that large scale confrontations with lots of characters involved can be unnecessarily long, with AI sometimes taking up to 3 minutes to act. You may also find your characters not ending their turns or doing anything, again forcing a save reload. When there are up to 20 characters involved in one encounter, it can take 10-15 minutes just to get through one round of combat.
Help, Please?
Making combat and general game management a little finicky at times is the game’s confusing UI and lack of coherent or working tutorials.
I have spent a lot of time scouring menus for things that don’t exist but should; as well as finally finding things which end up being tiny and out of place buttons. This may be an issue with me expecting certain D&D elements to be there, but most of the time it’s me trying to find things that the game has already told me exists.
This doesn’t pair well with the tutorials in place being completely broken or missing. Most things you can find with prior knowledge of D&D and its systems. Other things you may work out on your own, before being greeted with a now unneeded tutorial many hours later.
Fast Travellers
With a poor UI and lack of help being something of a rarity in this genre, Baldur’s Gate 3 continues with this trendsetting by making the general game quite accessible and even easy at times.
Whilst combat is hard and requires tactical skill and of course patience for the bugs, you can easily quicksave and reload before or during fights. This allows you to quickly go back if you have a few unlucky turns.
When you finish an encounter, you can simply return to your camp and rest, before being teleported back to exactly where you just were. I don’t mean the magical kind of teleport either. This can sometimes break immersion slightly, but also removes a big aspect of D&D which is having to organise and plan your rests.
Camp to Continue
Choosing to end your day and return to camp is always an event. You will be greeted with unique and interesting moments with your party. Plus, some minor main story advancements which will grant you further insight into the overarching story and even sometimes gain you new abilities.
You soon learn many things about your party, which seem to have possible detrimental effects on your game which will likely show up later.
Here you can also swap out party members and speak to other NPC’s that have joined your camp, creating a nice pitstop to relax and catch up on some new developments with the characters around you.
Should you Wait or Buy?
I have spent around 20 hours with Baldur’s Gate 3 and honestly quite a large fraction of that has been full of bugs, crashes and other early access caveats that are to be expected. The rest of the playthrough has been a delight though and when the game works, it works wonderfully.
That being said, if you aren’t big on D&D then you should probably avoid this game for now. It’s UI and general systems are not friendly enough to those without a general understanding of the ruleset in place. These things just lack that final polish but should be worked out with more player experience.
For those who enjoy D&D however and can understand the context of early access, I can’t recommend Baldur’s Gate 3 enough. From what we know of the game, it has a compelling narrative. Its characters are believable and above all else, it gives you a proper D&D experience on your PC.
