Baldur's Gate 3 Review

every once in a long while a game comes along that is so memorable exciting fresh and well written that it sets a new high water mark for an entire genre that that can't be Baldur's Gate 3 is such an achievement for the tabletop role-playing inspired swords and sorcery adventuring that it's bioware-made predecessors helped popularize decades ago larian Studios has turned this corner of Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms into a beautiful detailed World stocked with too many fully realized powerfully written and skillfully voiced characters to count the answer was to try the outcome was to fail there are heart-wrenching choices to be made alliances to be forged Bears to be romanced and a vast diversity of interesting challenging turn-based combat encounters I didn't merely enjoy my 130 Plus hours on this journey I fell in love [Music] foreign [Music] video games have often run into when trying to adapt the experience of playing Dungeons and Dragons on the tabletop is that it's almost impossible to achieve the freedom and Imagination you get to express in overcoming problems using real world logic it's doubtful that any video game will ever that level of flexibility Baldur's Gate 3 is a big step forward from what we've been able to do in the likes of Skyrim or Dragon Age if something looks flammable you can probably light it up with a fire spell if you want to save on lockpicks most doors can be hacked down with a big enough ax you can get to a lot of secret areas that other games would have blocked off with invisible Walls by jumping and climbing I was able to skip a huge boss fight by challenging this big zombie guy to a drinking contest score to goad him into drinking himself to death while I was still roaring for more this is a world that will rarely tell you no if you wonder if something is possible now you want to play or is there a bit of chicken in you or no and you can even bring up to three friends along with their own custom characters and Co-op I was impressed with how smooth and seamless this experience was it only gets better and funnier when you realize that you could have one person distract a guard by talking to them while the other steals everything that's not nailed down behind their back there is a huge amount of freedom in who you can be in this world as well the Character Creator is one of the best I've seen in a long time featuring 29 different sub-races with unique abilities and models if you count all the different colors of Dragonborn at least each of the 12 classes have at least three specializations that play quite differently with Wizards and clerics getting even more to choose from I just love the art Direction on every humanoid enemy and even the outfits look how pretty I am just look at me it's not just the static model either the variety of expressive faces everyone can make and the shockingly good performance capture for a game of this type helps everyone come alive even more she's a tiefling not a monster lyrion's incredible attention to detail extends to the area design and writing as well that's exemplified by the city of Baldur's Gate itself a hub full of life and Adventure that came around to All Me Anu even though it took me 90 hours to reach it almost every citizen has something to say about the unfolding events Lord gotash has to make some tough decisions to keep this city safe and nosy exploration is consistently rewarded with new lore new loot and new quests it's downright astounding how much voice acting lyrien has crammed into these streets and how good nearly all all of it is get back to lurking in Alleyways where you belong there are dozens of random gossipers on street corners who are just as enthusiastically and professionally portrayed as the main cast and rarely sound too similar to each other the more the people like you the more you can get away with I assume many of the actors involved must be responsible for more than one of these bit Parts but I can't tell just by listening like I can with some of the more familiar voices in Skyrim you're either an excellent storyteller or you've experienced something quite exceptional first among this delightful cast are your companions a Motley Crew of multi-layered interestingly flawed characters who both grow and sometimes regress over the course of the campaign I think I'm a different person owing to you the cheerful eager tiefling karlak who has basically a demonic bomb instead of a heart quickly became my best friend ugh to feel so Invincible again I had flings with the dower cleric Shadow Hearts the Arrogant wizard Gail and yes the stoic halson who can turn into a grizzly bear among other creatures there were plenty more where they came from and they all have elaborate background stories and the capacity to significantly change the main villains about whom I will spoil as little as possible are just as richly written with complex motives and their own individual brands of malice that inject new and greater threats into the last third of this epic length Adventure when it was time to roll for initiative Baldur's Gate 3 really never failed to impress me with the care and thoughtfulness with which its encounter design was set up to torture me it's like each battle is carefully crafted to make me want to scream at the dungeon master you bastard and I mean that in the best possible way [Music] one fight involves teleporting imp creatures who growth my party members before carting them off to separate locations preventing spell casting and forcing everyone to fend for themselves the next might be against some terrifying insectoids who leave everyone literally petrified with fear so I have to find a way to win without being able to move at no point have I been able to fall back on a repetitive grinding routine you think on your feet or you die and reload your last quick save the combat does take some time to get going and the first four levels or so can feel unnecessarily brutal due to how fragile your characters are when they start out that's mostly a product of adapting 5th edition DND so closely and larian's designers didn't take it upon themselves to correct this long-running problem from the tabletop though they do often give you ways to even the odds or avoid combat altogether if you're clever party got beefed beef dive levels worth of upgrades and some magic items I was happily blasting slashing and shooting my way through fights using all of the versatile abilities and environmental options at my disposal the story spans over three acts that each took me around 40 hours to complete playing like an obsessive completionist and finishing as many side objectives as I could each has a very distinct Vibe and look with act one being pastoral Wilderness Act 2 being the spooky part and act three treating us to dense Urban adventuring it can feel a bit slow at times since the First Act had me chasing down several different leads to solve the same problem and act two presents more questions than it answers right up until the final set of confrontations hello Isabel but discovering exciting new areas strong side quest writing and fun combat encounters meant I never lost motivation the really amazing thing is not how big Baldur's Gate 3 is though much has been made of its scope but I would honestly not have minded if it were around half as long as it is no the magic is in how almost none of it feels like filler no matter how far from the main quest you stray gentlemen contain yourself every Random House I wandered into or side quest I picked up rewarded me with a memorable unique hand-crafted role-playing experience even a random note found on the body of a bandit might tell a heartbreaking story about their past which gives weight to every decision to fight and kill don't judge me I have nothing and while the first two acts have plenty of difficult choices the big ones I had to make before committing to a final plan of action in act three are a work of devilish genius without spoiling anything realizing that my enemies were so many steps ahead of me by the time I reached the city was heartbreaking but I still felt empowered by the opportunities that remained to alter my own destiny and assemble a truly impressive Coalition of allies but you have something he doesn't allies worth having even more gratifyingly the last stretch often called back to things I did and characters I saved like 80 hours ago which tied the whole tale together and made the world feel even more cohesive and authentic this is not a story that takes for granted that you are a hero it's one that truly stares you down and demands that you prove it if that's what you're really made of the lead up to the finale backed me into a corner with a dozen ways out but each one would require me to compromise on what I believe in in one way or another this elevates the tension and the storytelling to new heights which is impressive given how strong it had been up to that point your treachery will be punished the requests that made me cry quests that made me yell what out loud and quests that genuinely creeped me out and the variations in not only the ending but also so many other smaller stories have me eager to play it all over again and that's really saying something when Baldur's Gate 3 has been my full-time job for basically the last three weeks followed not food friend it does need to be called out for some mild to moderate bugs here and there nothing that stopped me in my tracks of course but enough to be annoying come with me and you can hear all about it from ketherick himself [Music] there were also performance issues in act three that required me to turn my settings down even with an RTX 3080 but we've already seen many of the worst offenders addressed with the four hot fixes that have come out since launch and what remains feels almost trivial next to the greatness of everything else the game this complex will always have its share of bugs especially at launch and what I experienced was a more than acceptable trade-off never thought I'd lived before the greatest audience in the Realms the entirety of Baldur's Gate I don't want to say every crpg going forward should aspire to be like Baldur's Gate 3. not everything needs to be nearly this big and ambitious or even this dense but it is a landmark moment in the genre and if I had to point to one Paragon that I would like everyone else making these to take inspiration from this is absolutely it I waited 14 years for the stars to align again so that we could get the ideal mix of crunchy tactical old-school RPG combat an epic and well-written story with complex characters and lots of meaningful choices and a level of Polish and cinematic presentation that let me see the sweat and the sorrow on characters faces in their Darkest Hours plenty of other games have partially completed that list in the meantime but the last time they all came together was Dragon Age Origins in 2009 me and I can finally say that game and its Infinity engine predecessors have a worthy successor that not just matched their RPG greatness but surpassed it Baldur's Gate 3 is just about everything I could have asked for for more check out our reviews of Shadow Gambit the cursed crew and Jagged Alliance 3. and for everything else stick with IGN

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Id: dIynuCeLOoc

Length: 13min 42sec (822 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 18 2023