TL;DR – A stunningly beautiful game full of wonder and bugs

Disclosure – I paid for this game.

Baldur’s Gate 3 Review –

Well, 2023 is the year that Dungeons and Dragons [or D&D] continues to build on its growing success brought on by the Critical Role/Stranger Things pandemic boost. After seeing the genuinely remarkable Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves that gets better on each re-watch, I was musing that there is one pop-culture realm it seems to be absent in: video games. Back in my day, before my beard went grey, there were classics like Neverwinter and Baldur’s Gate, but it has been 23 years since the last game. Has it been worth the wait?

So to set the scene, [insert your character here] was going about their day in the grand city of Baldur’s Gate along the Sword Coast of Faerun when an enormous nautiloid ship appears overhead. It dives across the city, snapping up citizens as they run, teleporting them and you inside into the lair of the Illithids. These tentacle-bearded creatures reproduce by putting one of their parasites behind a victim’s eye and waiting a week or so for them to transform the victim into another Illithid. This is your fate, or at least this is what should have happened. But destiny had different plans as your ship gets attacked by Githyanki flying on the back of dragons. Your ship crashes, and you survive, escaping a painful death. However, your fate may now be linked to the survival of the entire Sword Coast.

When I first heard that they were finally going to do another Baldur’s Gate, I was intrigued. But when I heard that it would be Larian Studios behind the helm of the project, well, a more perfect combination could not have been found. Their work in their previous Divinity games was the ideal blend of solid gameplay and exciting narrative you needed for a world like this. I got lost in their Divinity: Original Sin II on several occasions, and me and my friends still talk about parts of that game with its lasting impact. I had heard good things about the open beta they ran last year, so I was a bit confident walking in, but I was not ready.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a mammoth game. As I sit here writing, I have just finished Act Two and have spent about 60 hours in the game, and even then, I have seen from my friends’ playthroughs that I have missed sections of the game. There are whole characters that I have yet to engage with and probably won’t until I start a new playthrough, which I find fascinating. There is a depth to this story and world that builds upon every facet of this universe. There are references across this game back to previous Baldur’s Gate games and the wider DnD universe. However, these never overwhelm the player, and if you have ever dabbled in High Fantasy in your life, you should be able to navigate your way through here.  

While it might be the world that draws you in, the characters will make you want to explore it more. There is the Wizard Gale (Tim Downie), whose love of magic is killing him. Karlach (Samantha Béart) has an engine where her heart should be. Shadowheart (Jennifer English), who had her memories removed on purpose to serve her god, Wyll (Theo Solomon), the noble warlock, and Astarion (Neil Newbon), who we all pretended not to notice the two bite marks on the side of his neck on our first encounter out of politeness. These are not even all the potential companions, let alone the possible characters you will meet in your story. Your travelling companions could be completely different from the ones I use. I was talking to a friend who accidentally killed in their first encounter a character that I consider my ride and die in the game. I rarely met someone who was uninteresting in my time in the game. Though I will say there was a character that so mercilessly burnt me, I am still reeling from that literary wound as I write this.  

Mechanically, this might be one of the best interpretations of D&D in the video game space. The spells, the rests, the rolls, and the checks are all there but tweaked and manoeuvred to work in the video game space and how the Larian Studios’ engine works. There were the joys of getting some obscenely high number roll in a pivotal moment where I had used up all my inspiration and the lows of watching double snake eyes pop up when I had advantage that would not have felt meaningful without the mechanical framework being as robust as it is. A level of polish here shows just how much work has gone into making this world work.

However, this is not a perfect game by any stretch of the imagination. If you have played a Larian Studios game before, you have a bit of a leg up because you already know how to wrangle the camera into doing what you want it to do most of the time. But I feel this will be a sharp learning curve for many. I was playing this on my PC, and it is a decent but not new rig, but there was a lot of pop-in that you had to wait on when you loaded into an area for the first time. Adding to this, there were a lot of bugs that just popped up from time to time. Thankfully, I only had one hard Windows crash, but you must constantly save.

One notable example was when I was fighting in a significant battle with many enemies and allies. When the match ended, there was a lag as the conversation section started, where I could do nothing. However, all the allies could still run to their prescripted marks through my wall of fire, and I watched as they all died in the flames. This meant I was then tagged as a murderer by the game when the conversation was over, and I had to restart the fight again from the start. While these issues never removed my enjoyment of the game, they were a persistent, nagging frustration that stopped it from reaching the heights it was so close to obtaining.   

In the end, do we recommend Baldur’s Gate 3? Well, there is a reason that it broke the record on Steam for the most people simultaneously playing the same game. The narrative and world are impeccable, the characters are a delight, and the battles are engaging. I loved taking my bard through every cave, cellar, and calamity. However, be prepared that you need to save all the time, you will need to play this on a decent rig, and that there are bugs aplenty.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you played Baldur’s Gate 3?, let us know what you thought in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day. 

Credits – All images were created by the staff of Baldur’s Gate 3
Game Direction – Swen Vincke
Animation Director – Thierry van Gyseghem
Art Director – Joachim Vleminckx
Audio Director – Stefan Randelshofer
Cinematic Director – Jason Latino
Composer – Borislav Slavov
Performance Director – Greg Lidstone
UI Director – Imre Fulop
VFX Director – Micha Noordegraaf
Lead Writers – Adam Smith, Chrystal Ding, Lawrence Schick, Jan van Dosselaer & Sarah Baylus
Voice Acting – Amelia Tyler, Neil Newbon, Jennifer English, Devora Wilde, Theo Solomon, Tim Downie, Samantha Béart, Matthew Mercer & Tracy Wiles with Dave Jones, Emma Gregory, Josh Wichard, Emerald O’Hanrahan, Ken Nwosu, Tina Barnes, Lynsey Murrell, Pieter Lawman, Neil Roberts, Muki Zubis, J.K. Simmons, Jason Isaacs, Maggie Robertson, Rebecca Hanssen, Stephen Hogan, Scott Joseph, Doug Cockle, Jane Perry, Cissy Jones, Bethan Dixon Bate, Graham Hoadly, Redd Pepper, Mia Foo, Richard Cotton, Andrew Wincott, Brian Bowles, Chris Jarman, Helen Keeley, Jess Nesling, Clare Corbett, Tamaryn Payne, Diana Bermudez, Ethan Reid & Ben ‘cohhcarnage’  Cassell
Developer – Larian Studios
Publisher – Larian Studios