After a long 3-year stint in Early Access, Baldur’s Gate 3 is finally ready to hit the shelves. The buzz surrounding this game has been palpable: not only is it a new epic RPG made by Larian Studios, but it’s got the power of Dungeons & Dragons’ 5th Edition mechanics and lore behind it. It’s simply a match made in heaven. A stream of steady updates has kept community interest in the game high, and everyone is champing at the bit to start their Faerûn adventure. And that includes me! After spending over 100 hours in this game, I can safely call Baldur’s Gate 3 an incredible accomplishment for both Larian Studios and the RPG genre at large and a strong Game of the Year contender.

The game is a hefty download at over 100GB, which is painful but somewhat expected from a game this huge. You’ll want to keep even more hard drive space at the ready to account for the numerous patches this game is sure to receive. Despite the Larian Studio launcher prompting you to create an account, it’s thankfully not compulsory (though cross-saves and cross-play are annoyingly locked behind it).

The beginning cutscenes and opening gameplay, which show your player character escaping a Mind Flayer vessel after being infected with a parasite, are incredibly engaging as an opening setpiece. What is happening to you? What is the Mind Flayer’s goal? Why have you and your ragtag party been chosen as hosts for these illithid parasites? You don’t need any pre-existing knowledge about the world of Faerûn to care about these questions. It really shows off the game’s outstanding graphical power and voice acting.

The origin characters come with their own personalities and tragic backstories that are interwoven into the story at large. Choosing to play as them will unlock special narration, choices, and dialogue during scenes that relate to them. It boggles the mind to think about just how much narrative content is changed depending on who you’re currently playing. The fan favourite of the origin characters has proven to be Astarion, the flamboyant yet tortured vampire spawn voiced delightfully by Neil Newborn, who can deliver both comedy and drama in equal measure. 

Baldur’s Gate 3 is being called a “horny” game all across the internet, and it’s easy to see why. Your party members can be quick to throw themselves at you, even without having to try. It’s novel at first, but their advances can feel unearned, and even awkward when it happens with characters you’re uninterested in romancing. It can start to feel like you have to keep your unwanted suitors back with a stick; which is ironically similar to the feeling of being the only girl in your D&D group. It’s not just your party members; a few NPCs you come across will even proposition you. While it strains credulity, it’s fun to feel desired, and the romance scenes themselves are exciting and titillating whenever they happen.

A perfect gateway to D&D

All you need is a glance to recognise BG3 as a Larian creation. This new epic shares a lot of gameplay similarities with the studio’s previous strategy RPG series, Divinity: Original Sin, which is not at all surprising given that the Divinity series has been inspired by tabletop adventures like Dungeons & Dragons. If you’ve played Divinity, you’ll be familiar with the UI and you’ll know where to find the initiative tracker, character sheet, and inventory. Other aspects that seem borrowed from Divinity are the trading and looting system, reputation, and narration style.

It’s a tried-and-true RPG system, and it’s been married seamlessly with 5E’s mechanics to create something incredible. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a perfect gateway for anyone who might be willing to try D&D but who has found themselves put off by any of its complexities; either the rules, lore, or the crippling indecision that can come with being told: “you can do anything!”. The game automatically rolls your dice and adds up all your modifiers so that you can focus on the important — and fun — parts of D&D, like strategising during your fight or exploring the vast areas open to you in Faerûn. And while it’s far more open-ended than its RPG contemporaries, it is still a video game, so the possibilities aren’t limitless. While that might sound like a bad thing, there’s a level of comfort in knowing what your options are and aren’t. 

The only thing that drags down this otherwise phenomenal game is the consistent poor performance and the litany of gameplay bugs that can crop up. The game chews up a massive amount of CPU and GPU, and even that is seemingly not enough to keep its performance issues at bay. It took its toll on my hardware once I moved on to Act 2 and 3, which feature heavy atmospheric effects and high numbers of NPCs. I started experiencing lag, frame drops, crashes, characters and objects popping in, and loading screens upwards of three minutes long. Decreasing the graphical quality helped, but the negative effect it had on this otherwise stunningly beautiful game was quite a tough trade. At worst, close-up shots of characters can be completely ruined by low-quality textures that I can only describe as crunchy. A quick glance at the game forums will reveal many players experiencing similar issues. 

It’s a testament to just how good this game is that these performance issues weren’t enough to diminish my experience too much; I remained utterly entranced right until the end. Larian Studios has already released its first major patch to fix a lot of crashes and bugs, as well as gameplay balancing, so I have confidence that these issues are going to wane over time.