An Honest Review of Baldur's Gate 3

I saved you and I'm here to save you again on August 3rd 2023 after nearly 3 years of Early Access and six years of development balers Gate 3 developed by laran Studios grabbed the Gaming Community by the neck and said you're mine now and they meant it with 875,000 players at its peak and a still incredibly impressive average of 272,000 the next month balers gate has changed the face of RPGs and launched expectations to all-time highs there are still 126,000 people playing at the very moment I'm reading this script so is the hype really worth it is this game as good as ratings in player count would lead one to believe let's talk about that I know this review is quite late to the game but I really wanted to fully experience everything this game had to offer before making this video and honestly despite the 100 hours I've put into it I haven't balers Gate 3 has been so immeasurably laed by The Gaming Community developers and Dungeons and Dragons fans it's hard to find anyone giving any reasonable critiques I'll save you some time and let you know right off the bat I don't blame them this is an incredible game and certainly my favorite of 2023 perhaps my favorite new release in years but that isn't to say there aren't reasonable critiques to be made I'm going to start with the iconic three pillars of gameplay in D and D 5e then add a few extra categories because it's a video game at the end of the video I'll give a final score for each category then average them up for a final honest rating so let's get started with an honest review of balers Gate 3 to begin this review we're going to talk about combat I've been playing Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition for years and this game is DND D 5e which is built for a combat heavy tabletop experience the rules of the game have been adapted for a fully confined video game experience but it's mostly there I really like the way they've handled combat in general as a D and D player I was really quickly able to pick up the mechanics of the game and adapt to the slight changes which are mostly just making the bonus action way more useful by making a bunch of things that would normally be actions into bonus actions they've also changed the names of some of the spells to frankly make more sense and they've messed with stat blocks of monsters and creatures you'll come across but that hardly counts as changing mechanics given the fluid nature of running a tabletop game they've also gamified stats and abilities and equipment and bonuses quite a bit more than what you'll see in your run-of-the-mill 5e game there are a multitude of low tier items that would normally be game changers in 5e a basic leather helmet that's not even a magic item giving a plus one to deck saves yeah that's not a thing in 5D but honestly I enjoy it if you care to take the time to divy out gear and stack bonuses on the characters in your party you can really become a force to be reckoned with taking on terrifying foes that would normally decimate a level three or four party in 5e that is if you care to this part of the game frankly isn't for every one I love this stuff but even I find it a bit tedious and almost a bit of a chore sometimes to constantly be optimizing loadouts and gear and magic items and potions and elixir and there's a lot even for me along that same line it can also be pretty intimidating controlling four entirely different characters at any given time during combat keeping in mind that your wizard emits a fog Cloud when he uses the disengage action because of this magic item he has equipped which will make it easier for your Rogue to deal higher damage with their sneak attack that they get once per turn which will enable your fighter to deal additional damage with the magic sword they have and it can be a lot you don't have to play This Way frankly on standard difficulty you can probably skip a lot of the gear optimization and tactical choices and combat and still do all right with how forgiving the game is I mean if one of your characters dies you can resurrect them at camp that night for am measly 200 gold and that's if you don't get them first with one of your eight revivify Scrolls you have handy overall the combat in balers Gate 3 does a good job of staying true to 5e it rewards tactical decisions and optimization of gear and optimization of a diverse party but you don't particularly need all of that but if you don't do all that some combat encounters may turn out fairly frustrating for someone playing casually with friends to peer through every smile question every look eventually you find what it is you fear whether it is there or not moving on to roleplay because this is a roleplaying game after all the dialogue choices and narrative functions of balers Gate 3 are good honestly that's the most concise I can get about it they're good not amazing not terrible just good the choices you'll be given in dialogue are good the additional choices you unlock mid dialogue with various abilities and information you may or may not have at your disposal are good the number of unique NPCs you can actually have a conversation with is good here's the kicker though they're good for a Dungeons and Dragons game which is of course the lens I'm using with which to observe balers Gate 3 for a video game you can replace half the times I use the word good just now with fantastic but this isn't just a video game it's balers Gate 3 D and D 5 the video game overall I think the roleplay situation in this game is done quite well most of the voice acting is fantastic the variety of personalities you come across is refreshing and the ability for each important conversation you have to go anywhere from two to 20 different ways is amazing but because this game has reached so high my expectations remain at an equally High constant and sometimes the game lets you down a little bit because of that because it's still a rigid video game a massive and really wellth thought out rigid video game but a video game all the same with finite options and finite outcomes as opposed to the infinite possibilities in a real game of 5e there have been a few times I've done something in the game and thought well obviously the next logical thing to do would be to warn slin SL tell X about this and I go back to them and there are no new dialogue options there have been several times where because of the specific path of dialogue choices I've made in a conversation I'm left with only one or two options to continue both of which absolutely leading in a direction I don't intend to go forcing me to either miss out out on an important moment in a quest I'm pursuing or reload my last save from 20 minutes ago so I can try that conversation again and say what I wanted to say like yes I wanted to tell this person about that thing but I didn't pick that dialogue option right away cuz the flow just didn't feel right I figured I'd do it later in the conversation so now it's not an option at all and all I'm left with is an inescapable go yourself really in general you'll be able to find dialogue options at any given point that you're at least okay with often times the spread of options is plenty for any play style but sometimes well sometimes you run into pretty frustrating situations I made it back I'm here thank the gods the last pillar of Dungeons and Dragons gameplay exploration is perhaps the one that balers Gate 3 has the most advantage in when pitting it against 5e Direct corly especially because in 5e in practice exploration is usually and ironically the least explored pillar at most tables while many great dungeon Masters will describe scenes and settings in great detail it's hard to beat actually having an interactable visual environment exploration in balers Gate 3 is also an interesting one because the game doesn't super encourage you to do it but there are plenty of rewards for doing so there are four regions or maps to explore not including the na aloid in the intro which isn't really a spoiler cuz it's literally in the intro cinematic in reality the total playable area of balers Gate 3 so far as I've seen isn't actually that impressive it's maybe two times larger than that of Skyrim but each region is filled with tons of explorable buildings sections of the underd dark secret caves and passages alcoves beaches nooks and crannies and all of them have something to do someone to talk to something to see so despite not actually having a ton to explore by modern gaming standards there is a ton to explore the world is just so alive there's so much going on just about everywhere you go so in terms of exploration in that regard balers Gate 3 scores very high really one of my only critiques here is that there's almost too much going on if you're like me and you need to talk to every person complete every side quest find every hidden chest it can get pretty overwhelming at times especially when you have six quests in your Journal alluding to the next part of the quest not being touchable until you travel to the next region which leads me to my only other criticism here there's a lot of that don't get me wrong I love the depth of some of these quests but as a completionist it can be a little annoying when half of the quests in my journal are basically telling me progress to next stage to keep doing this this makes balers Gate 3 sometimes feel a lot more linear than I think it intends to be or to feel like despite being a multi-stage open world game nothing's stopping you from ignoring most of the side quests and less important objectives in fact the narrative often compels you to do just that but boy are you missing a lot of the content the game has to offer if you do fate spins along as it should balers Gate 3 like most tabletop role playing games is a story-driven experience the story doesn't stop when you enter combat combat is part of the story as is dialogue and exploration and looting and optimizing and pretty much everything in the game The Narrative does suffer a little bit from what I'll call the cyberpunk effect meaning there's a really important thing you need to take care of ASAP and you are reminded constantly that that thing needs to be taken care of immediately or else but your character keeps going off doing unrelated things because well they can the narrative does make a lot of those side quests at least kind of relevant to that big pressing matter the plot revolves around though so kudos for that now this is an interesting and possibly contentious part of my comparison to Dungeons and Dragons because there isn't really a dungeon master there is a narrator and a fantastic one at that that certainly feels like they're supposed to be the dungeon master usually describing the smells and feelings of a scene adding a little witty twist to the narration of an action you took in dialogue describing to you what you see or read on plaques but the narrator isn't a dungeon master as one might expect she does have hilarious outakes on Tik Tok though that could be the tagline for the entire game frantic by energy well I'm exuding it so well cast I'm a B I can my way through any problem I seduced the door done it I've got splinters places you do not want to know about BL I'm through so we sort of have the dungeon master elements of Dungeons and Dragons kind of I think they handled this fairly well and I don't really have any complaints but what I really want to talk about in terms of narrative is how well it's executed but how polarizing the actual plot of the campaign might be the good news is that they nailed the illusion of choice this is a classic problem in game design and development because you're making a video game you can't anticipate every move the player's going to make you can hire play testers and track the most common play Styles where they go how they interact with the world and you can do your utmost to account for all that but in the end most video games with a story are largely Linear by Nature because they have to be you simply can't anticipate everything well laran Studios almost did now I know I've already mention that the game sometimes feels a lot more linear than it is because of the structure of the maps and the execution of dialogue is almost amazing mostly held back by a few outlier frustrating moments I've run into but that's mostly it they nailed the illusion of Choice by actually accounting for most choices laran has said that there are a ridiculous 17,000 possible endings based on the decisions you make now I'm sure the vast majority of those are A variation of a far smaller number but I have to stress that I have friends who have been playing this game and have described very different stories based on choices they've made and important moments that differed from my own companions they keep in their party people they decided to kill or work with and so on aside from very key plot points it really does seem to me at the moment that this game just has that much depth which is absolutely wild to me frankly this is one of the reasons I think this game is changing the scene I mean seriously without spoiling anything early in my first single player run I ended up killing someone I really needed information from I felt a bit like I just ruined a quest but then realized I had an amulet that allowed me to cast speak with dead so I did that but the NPC I killed recognized that I was the one that killed them and wouldn't tell me what I wanted to know so I disguised my character with a spell and then cast speak with dead again and I got the information I needed to progress that Quest never in my life have I felt so clever or so impressed with the agency I truly felt in a video game your choices really really feel like they matter in this game and I love it so much much for that even if it's not entirely true now the bad news maybe sort of we'll see if I were a player in this Dungeons and Dragons campaign that took place at my friend's table pushed into her living room every Sunday I'd give the plot a seven out of 10 a lot of the twists and hooks are kind of obvious a lot of the tropes are pretty tropy for Dungeons and Dragons It's a textbook D and D plot really a really well- written and executed one but a textbook one nonetheless that being said I'm not really all that upset with this for somebody not super into Dungeons and Dragons lore and whatnot or someone that's not played a hell of a lot of Dungeons and Dragons that focused on plot I could see it being a really fantastic story you can forget just how much color there is in the world now I know a lot of people would argue this last little section isn't really necessary but I really think it's worth mentioning for a couple of specific reasons first off the graphics as a whole aren't really that impressive the game looks good with higher graphic settings but most of the time you're playing you'll be in a high third person view so they're frankly not super important one of the reasons I really wanted to bring Graphics up though is that I just love the depictions of 5e spells I've been using and imagining in my head for years honestly balers gate 3's idea of what an eldrich blast can trip looks like is way cooler than I could have imagined if you've been playing playing D and D it's really fun to see all the spell visuals the last thing I wanted to mention in this little section is Hardware requirements mostly because as PC games become more and more capable it's becoming more and more important for the most optimization possible in order to allow for the most people to even be able to play in terms of minimum requirements balers Gate 3 is fairly forgiving for what it is the barrier for entry isn't very high most gaming computers built within the last 5 years or so with at least 16 GB of RAM should be able to play at no problem but the recommended specs for the game are a bit more mid-tier in terms of modern PC gaming I have a pretty respectable upper mid-tier system by current standards I'll leave the specs in the description in case anybody's curious and I keep my graphic settings cranked pretty high game runs smooth never had a single issue in that regard actually now that I'm here I should also add an extra little praise for that stability is fantastic never a single crash it does make my computer sound a little bit like a jet engine sometimes but other than that it's fairly well optimized and I think that's contributed more than some might think toward its really impressive retention I've been working on an assignment c a research project of sorts I knew my conclusions were sound but this I never expected this okay so I said at the beginning of the video that I'd be giving each of the categories a final score taking into consideration all the things I've brought up here's what I landed on in the category of combat I give balers Gate 3 a supremely impressive 9.6 out of 10 part of me wanted to give it a clean 10 because I think they've done an amazing job of taking D and D 5e combat and shoving it into a video game I even like most of the changes they've made mechanically but I had to take something off because it at times feels a bit cumbersome even for someone like me who typically enjoys a big clunky system like that and yes for all of you D and D OG nerds out there I know 5e is watered down compared to older versions that's not what we're here to talk about for the role-play category we land on a very respectable 8.8 out of 10 the companions you can recruit and their stories are really well done most dialogue is very engaging overall the roleplay element of balers Gate 3 is pretty great regardless of your preference for immersion this category really only loses points because of the predictable nature of a lot of big moments and because the few times I've had something not work as probably intended it's really taken me out of it exploration took me a lot longer to try and quantify there are a lot of things going for this game but a few glaring points that I wasn't at first sure how to weigh in the end I gave it a straight 9 out of 10 very well done exploration is usually rewarding and there aren't many directions you can turn that don't lead to something interesting I think if the regions were maybe a little bit larger and equally filled with content this could easily jump to a 9.5 but then that it make the overwhelming feeling of having 20 active quests probably worse there's a balance to be found somewhere I don't know where that line is but I think they came pretty close to it narrative was another tricky one for me because in a vacuum this game's narrative is fantastic but because I'm looking at it in comparison to the tabletop Colossus that is Dungeons and Dragons I've been going back and forth a lot you could argue that it's unfair to compare any video game to a tabletop game with infinite possibilities and you'd be right but the thing is balers Gate 3 is Dungeons and Dragons It's 5e the video game so I think this lens is an appropriate one all that being said I'm going to go with an 8.9 out of 10 here most of my criticisms of the plot and narrative Direction I can't really expand upon without getting into deep spoiler territory but what I can say is that most of those criticisms are pretty lofty and in a scope of a video game almost turn into compliments and finally the black sheep of the group graphics and Hardware requirements I've considered cutting this from the review entirely but something in me really want wants to leave it in and it's my video so what are you going to do about it Punk anyway given the relatively low barrier to entry hardware-wise the Fantastic stability of such a complex game and the visual interpretations I mentioned I Loved Before I'm going to give this a very solid 9.1 out of 10 N9 just felt too low to me but it's certainly not a 9.5 right I mean visually in general the game is rarely stunning so we're going to leave it at that so when we tally our final scores and calculate an average my honest review puts balers Gate 3 at a genuinely impressive and deserved 9.1 out of 10 it really is that good it's not a perfect 10 like many reviews would lead you to believe it certainly has its flaws but boy is it a step in a direction I'm really loving to see it's a really faithful articulation of actual play D and D and I don't regret the vast majority of the 100 plus hours I've put in so far that being said I do feel the need to emphasize that this game really isn't for everyone if you're looking for a casual experience you can play the game that way but you might miss a lot and have a much harder time in general it's cumbersome and tinkery and tactical all of the most Ral heavy elements of Dungeons and Dragons and then some but I sure love it thank you very much for joining me for this honest review hopefully at least a couple people were helped in making up their mind if they were on the fence about taking the plunge into Boulder's Gate and hopefully if that's not why you're here you enjoyed the video all the same I'm sure most people who watch this who spent any significant amount of time in the game will have things to say and whether you agree with me or not I'd love to hear about it in the comments so until next time thanks for [Music] [Music] watching

Channel: Holdiniful

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Id: vfAYp0bpmr8

Length: 22min 3sec (1323 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 04 2023