Baldur's Gate III is a crowning achievement in gaming and immediately places itself in the pantheons of gaming's greatest games. In fact, it's a fantastic piece of media top to bottom with some stellar acting and engaging quest design. There are plenty of bits that fall a little flat but ultimately seem like nitpicks and niggles for a game that is grander in design, scope and execution than few others.
It's just not going to be possible for me to review this in any comprehensive way that would be shorter than a dissertation chapter. And god knows I can't finish one of those. So I'm going to potshot around at my thoughts of different elements of the game. We'll start with the general aesthetic, look, feel and design.
BG3 is absolutely fun and whimsical and feels just like a D&D campaign. It is a faithful interpretation of the 5e ruleset and in plenty of ways resembles a very finely crafted, high quality Critical Role-esque sort of experience. It's not likely to feel like your D&D games at home around the table, though there will be moments, but it certainly feels like the sort of high polished narrative D&D gaming experience you find in longform content like Critical Role. And that does feel like D&D. The way it centers dice rolls and skill checks and passive checks and combat and flexible ways of interaction all set within this high fantasy xanadu feels fantabulously Dungeons & Dragons.
Bright colored villages, dim-dank dungeons, bustling cities and markets, ethereal astral planes, decrepit tombs. It's all here. You will encounter a faithfully reconstructed and satisfyingly immersive gallery of tabletop-trope settings. Each one packed with missions and things to explore. Few games capture the variety of fantasy like BG3, only the best of the best like the Witcher 3 manage to do so, so well.
This combined with the absolute menagerie of races, monsters, species, ghouls, demons, spirits just bring the game into a fully living, breathing, palpitating lore-chonky experience. Everywhere you turn the game is dripping with some new lore nugget or questline or little finely brushed touch of exposition and set piece design. It makes the entire experience so wonderfully immersive, with such attention to detail that absolutely lays bare the lifelessness in the modern procedurally generated open-world RPG. Just every last drop of BG3 is overflowing with character and charm.
These finely crafted backgrounds and worlds are accompanied by a tremendous cast of characters. Every companion is played wonderfully, with some skillful video game acting that is rarely seen in any game let alone a game with 10 possible companions. Each one deep, thoughtful and intertwined with each other character and storyline throughout the experience. Is every companion a slam dunk? No. But even then each of them would be near the top of most other games' best character lists. The quality is impressive. Lae'zel, Astarion and Shadowheart have absolutely tremendous stories, with Astarion's being a genuine revelation in video game storytelling. Even Wyll, Karlach and Gale deliver competent-to-good, if-not-generic fantasy stories that would still put other video game plotlines to shame.
The game allows you as much freedom as any game ever in how you wish to approach combat scenarios. Being able to avoid them entirely with a few rolls and checks, being able to gain yourself advantages or disadvantages by making various dialogue or interactive choices. The game showers you with a variety of interesting weapon choices and skill selections, consumable items and the ability to reclass any one of your companions or yourself at any time. With an easily accessible turn-based combat system, the freedom in how to prosecute combat, or avoid it entirely, is much more engaging than 90% of games out there. And like any good single-player game, while there is an attempt at balance, the game doesn't care if you manage to concoct some sort of crazy scheme to entirely break combat encounters. It lets you experiment. It lets you play.
The game is a goliath. Doing everything, or attempting so, could easily run you a 300 hour playthrough on the first go-round. It's intense. It's gargantuan. And for the vast majority of this time, the game's quality never yields under its immense quantity. Not only is it a rarity for a game to be this good for that long and this big but it does so without any fetch quests or proc gen or open world contrivances. It does it entirely in elaborately constructed dioramas that you can play in. The highest quality dollhouse in video gaming. And that handcrafted nature makes the game such an absolute joy when compared to its open-world competitors. This RPG managed to handcraft a game that feels so much larger than Skyrim, Starfield, Fallout, Cyberpunk, Death Stranding, Horizon or any of the new open-world style Assassin's Creeds. And it does so with every nook and cranny being made intentionally.
Baldur's Gate 3 deserves all the praise any game could ever possibly get. And maybe even moreso. It's a great game at any point in gaming history but maybe even greater today when compared to the standard RPG that is mass produced. But I can't give it a full five stars for a few reasons, the biggest of which is performance related.
The game is gorgeous, and runs fantastic most of the time. That should be pointed out and praised. Act 3 didn't run great at release but after a few patches it runs pretty great as does the rest of the game. In Ultra settings, it is as pretty as any modern game and runs an impressive number of calculations under the hood. But game performance otherwise can get quite buggy and janked out. Very messy and over the course of 300 hours it just rears its head way too many times to not mention.
There is often a substantial amount of lag between the choice of an action and the animation of that action. You'll select an attack, you may even hear the sound and see the damage but it can take upwards of seven seconds at times to actually complete the animation of the attack and movement. Seven real life seconds. Multiply that by the number of attacks in a fight and we're talking game-long hours of just sitting and waiting for attacks to be had. Characters and textures will suddenly desync or pop in abruptly both in live play and cinematics. Players will gloss over with a black texture model before their clothes and weapons begin to pop in to reality, or sometimes the entire ground will disappear. At worst it's not even just a visual bug but your characters are actually clipped deep below game geography.
Quests will become bugged and will either be unable to be completed for unknown reasons, or they will complete but the journal entries won't update. Worse still is the occasions in which the fact that the journal wouldn't update seems to preclude the advancement of a quest despite the actual characters in-game responding as though the quest has indeed been completed (because it has). The worst bit is a bug with Wyll that if not rectified completely prevents the player from a romance option with Karlach and leaves Wyll with a permanent exclamation point above his head.
When trying to long rest, if you split stacks of camp supplies the entire stack may disappear forever. Lost in some inventory ether. They may, but do not always, show back up after a rest or two. Bags can become nested within bags automatically for some silly reason and if you go deep enough in the bags of bags to find your items within the recesses of this bag hell, the game will crash. If you have the misfortune of trying to open your character sheet at the same time as the prompt for a 'reaction' appears in combat you'll be stuck in a soft-lock where you can interact with both yet neither of the menus; unable to free yourself from your UI prison.
There are more bugs than I could ever truly enumerate, and that's without even touching on bugs related to certain spells or skills not performing or interacting as they're supposed to. I'm only focused on the technical ones which include game crashes, save corruptions, soft locks and more. In the game's early days a certain bug in the tomb where you encounter Withers resulted in players becoming permanently silenced for the rest of the game unless they reloaded to a save before the encounter.
Act 3 in particular is a minefield of buggy behaviors. The entirety of the Steel Watch Foundry is almost unplayable as there are doors that do not open correctly, bits of terrain that you constantly slip through, invisible walls that stop player movement. Just getting into the damn place is a bug filled slop with odd behaviors regarding Volo and the exploding barrels, some inconsistency with distances and heightmapping when trying to hope into the Foundry from behind by the SeaMaiden Temple and then basically a billion bugs with the freight elevator on the train tracks to the Foundry's side entrance. This is just one part of one area in Act 3 that I've decided to illustrate but there are other issues with other locations in the same Act such as Wyrm's Rock Fortress or the Circus.
The game does perform at a very stable 4k, 60FPS on Ultra settings. You won't often run into graphical performances itches or substantial game crashes. But you will run into any large number of annoying and obtrusive bugs, glitches and hiccups. The worst of these very well can be game ruining, and they do indeed happen in common play. They are not the result of odd outlier behaviors. The game just buckles under its weight at times.
Remember the game is massive. Some of these things are inevitable, as much as we wish they weren't. And I can forgive some of it. But across 300 hours per playthrough you're going to smash headlong into several of them too often to simply ignore them entirely. The game is buggy and the experience is worse off for it.
Additionally, the story has some ups and downs. The macro plot is fine and tells an interesting enough tale, but to accommodate so many branches and paths and endings and possibilities the game is a little meandering at times, paining to tell its story within nebulous constraints. Sometimes characters won't react as they should to changed circumstances or new information. Sometimes characters won't have dialogue in places they should. Sometimes obvious solutions just won't be availed to you for various problems. The game struggles with such a gigantic open ended tale and can have a tough time emulating the freeflowing nature of a tabletop session.
As the game starts to come to a close you can feel the rush job on the story's end. BG3 was in like 18 months of early access and still had to delay its release several times. The game was supposed to feature five acts and an entire upper city of Baldur's Gate but was chopped down to three with an ending in the Lower City. You can really feel the clipped wings as you roll down to the finish line. Karlach gets a pretty shortchanged ending without a whole lot of interesting development, and you can tell her story was meant to be broader with two different types of Infernal Iron that you can find in the game's third act. All of which are useless since the Infernal Iron has no more purpose after Act 2.
The forced contrivance of someone having to become a mindflayer to beat the netherbrain is never really illustrated or expanded upon. It feels sudden and random and forces you to make an unfair decision deep into the game that gives you no chance to decide who that choice should befall. Also not clear how Prince Orpheus becomes one since he wasn't infected with a tadpole, he just sort of wills himself into one if you choose him. Shadowheart gets a pretty flat ending with nothing very interesting coming for her unless she's your romance. Jaheira, Halsin, Minsc and Astarion all end up with absolutely nothing interesting for their end game credits. Gale gets two interesting endings should you decide to let him wrest control of the crown but if you decide otherwise nothing really happens and he sort of just goes about his business with the netherese orb still embedded in his chest. The ending for most characters is sort of flat and for many of them it doesn't seem as though much has changed for them on their journey. Their stakes are largely the same. Astarion and Shadowheart have new leases on life and Wyll may have less of one but their general trajectories are not too different once you hit end game credits from when you saw the title screen.
There are just so many interesting angles that get left to nothing, really. If you destroy the netherbrain, the crown just falls into the river. It's not really destroyed, it can be reforged. It's one of the absolute most powerful objects in the BG3 world, so why is everyone content to let it sit at the bottom of the river? Go get it! Why does The Emperor suddenly side with the netherbrain if you side with Orpheus? Orpheus is so clearly the right answer it doesn't make any sense. Karlach offering to become the mindflayer makes sense but why wouldn't Lae'zel offer to save her Prince? Orpheus is pissed we didn't let his guard free him but the guard couldn't free him as they didn't have the Orphic Hammer. The Baludran revelation while you search for Ansur is such an insane revelation to be hidden behind an optional and easily missable questline and it never gets expanded on or talked about. You can non-lethal KO Duke Ravengaard but the game will treat him as dead no matter what. Even more silly, Wyll never reacted to his dad being dead until I finally went back to Mizora and handled the questline from there. The order of the Gortash & Orrin fights has very little substantive effect on the game or the narrative. Honestly, whether you side with the cultists or the Tieflings or you save Last Light or not all kind of end up not mattering anyway either. The game winds up kind of railroading you into the same two or three ending choices anyway.
There's an entire lack of cutscene or clarity about major outcomes like Zevlor, Last Light, Isobel/Aylin, Minsc, Jaheira and her kids, your choice for leaders of the thieves guild, your choice for what to do with the thralls, your actions in the Underdark, what happens with the murder tribunal if you let them live. Just so many plot threads get left to hang. The ending is ultimately pretty damn rough.
But. The game is still an insane achievement. The final two hours of the game do dampen the experience but they can't taint a may hundred hour experience that precedes it too badly. If you can trooper through the technical guffaws the ending isn't enough to tank the game on its own and it doesn't deserve the sort of slanderous complaints hurled at a game like Mass Effect 3.
In the end, Baldur's Gate is an ambitious, audacious, once in a decade gaming experience. It is a marvel and a success. Even with a few warts it deserves more plaudits than you can possibly heap on it EVEN WHEN considering its shortcomings. A fantastic journey, a fantastic game and I cannot wait to see whatever Larian plans next.
It's just not going to be possible for me to review this in any comprehensive way that would be shorter than a dissertation chapter. And god knows I can't finish one of those. So I'm going to potshot around at my thoughts of different elements of the game. We'll start with the general aesthetic, look, feel and design.
BG3 is absolutely fun and whimsical and feels just like a D&D campaign. It is a faithful interpretation of the 5e ruleset and in plenty of ways resembles a very finely crafted, high quality Critical Role-esque sort of experience. It's not likely to feel like your D&D games at home around the table, though there will be moments, but it certainly feels like the sort of high polished narrative D&D gaming experience you find in longform content like Critical Role. And that does feel like D&D. The way it centers dice rolls and skill checks and passive checks and combat and flexible ways of interaction all set within this high fantasy xanadu feels fantabulously Dungeons & Dragons.
Bright colored villages, dim-dank dungeons, bustling cities and markets, ethereal astral planes, decrepit tombs. It's all here. You will encounter a faithfully reconstructed and satisfyingly immersive gallery of tabletop-trope settings. Each one packed with missions and things to explore. Few games capture the variety of fantasy like BG3, only the best of the best like the Witcher 3 manage to do so, so well.
This combined with the absolute menagerie of races, monsters, species, ghouls, demons, spirits just bring the game into a fully living, breathing, palpitating lore-chonky experience. Everywhere you turn the game is dripping with some new lore nugget or questline or little finely brushed touch of exposition and set piece design. It makes the entire experience so wonderfully immersive, with such attention to detail that absolutely lays bare the lifelessness in the modern procedurally generated open-world RPG. Just every last drop of BG3 is overflowing with character and charm.
These finely crafted backgrounds and worlds are accompanied by a tremendous cast of characters. Every companion is played wonderfully, with some skillful video game acting that is rarely seen in any game let alone a game with 10 possible companions. Each one deep, thoughtful and intertwined with each other character and storyline throughout the experience. Is every companion a slam dunk? No. But even then each of them would be near the top of most other games' best character lists. The quality is impressive. Lae'zel, Astarion and Shadowheart have absolutely tremendous stories, with Astarion's being a genuine revelation in video game storytelling. Even Wyll, Karlach and Gale deliver competent-to-good, if-not-generic fantasy stories that would still put other video game plotlines to shame.
The game allows you as much freedom as any game ever in how you wish to approach combat scenarios. Being able to avoid them entirely with a few rolls and checks, being able to gain yourself advantages or disadvantages by making various dialogue or interactive choices. The game showers you with a variety of interesting weapon choices and skill selections, consumable items and the ability to reclass any one of your companions or yourself at any time. With an easily accessible turn-based combat system, the freedom in how to prosecute combat, or avoid it entirely, is much more engaging than 90% of games out there. And like any good single-player game, while there is an attempt at balance, the game doesn't care if you manage to concoct some sort of crazy scheme to entirely break combat encounters. It lets you experiment. It lets you play.
The game is a goliath. Doing everything, or attempting so, could easily run you a 300 hour playthrough on the first go-round. It's intense. It's gargantuan. And for the vast majority of this time, the game's quality never yields under its immense quantity. Not only is it a rarity for a game to be this good for that long and this big but it does so without any fetch quests or proc gen or open world contrivances. It does it entirely in elaborately constructed dioramas that you can play in. The highest quality dollhouse in video gaming. And that handcrafted nature makes the game such an absolute joy when compared to its open-world competitors. This RPG managed to handcraft a game that feels so much larger than Skyrim, Starfield, Fallout, Cyberpunk, Death Stranding, Horizon or any of the new open-world style Assassin's Creeds. And it does so with every nook and cranny being made intentionally.
Baldur's Gate 3 deserves all the praise any game could ever possibly get. And maybe even moreso. It's a great game at any point in gaming history but maybe even greater today when compared to the standard RPG that is mass produced. But I can't give it a full five stars for a few reasons, the biggest of which is performance related.
The game is gorgeous, and runs fantastic most of the time. That should be pointed out and praised. Act 3 didn't run great at release but after a few patches it runs pretty great as does the rest of the game. In Ultra settings, it is as pretty as any modern game and runs an impressive number of calculations under the hood. But game performance otherwise can get quite buggy and janked out. Very messy and over the course of 300 hours it just rears its head way too many times to not mention.
There is often a substantial amount of lag between the choice of an action and the animation of that action. You'll select an attack, you may even hear the sound and see the damage but it can take upwards of seven seconds at times to actually complete the animation of the attack and movement. Seven real life seconds. Multiply that by the number of attacks in a fight and we're talking game-long hours of just sitting and waiting for attacks to be had. Characters and textures will suddenly desync or pop in abruptly both in live play and cinematics. Players will gloss over with a black texture model before their clothes and weapons begin to pop in to reality, or sometimes the entire ground will disappear. At worst it's not even just a visual bug but your characters are actually clipped deep below game geography.
Quests will become bugged and will either be unable to be completed for unknown reasons, or they will complete but the journal entries won't update. Worse still is the occasions in which the fact that the journal wouldn't update seems to preclude the advancement of a quest despite the actual characters in-game responding as though the quest has indeed been completed (because it has). The worst bit is a bug with Wyll that if not rectified completely prevents the player from a romance option with Karlach and leaves Wyll with a permanent exclamation point above his head.
When trying to long rest, if you split stacks of camp supplies the entire stack may disappear forever. Lost in some inventory ether. They may, but do not always, show back up after a rest or two. Bags can become nested within bags automatically for some silly reason and if you go deep enough in the bags of bags to find your items within the recesses of this bag hell, the game will crash. If you have the misfortune of trying to open your character sheet at the same time as the prompt for a 'reaction' appears in combat you'll be stuck in a soft-lock where you can interact with both yet neither of the menus; unable to free yourself from your UI prison.
There are more bugs than I could ever truly enumerate, and that's without even touching on bugs related to certain spells or skills not performing or interacting as they're supposed to. I'm only focused on the technical ones which include game crashes, save corruptions, soft locks and more. In the game's early days a certain bug in the tomb where you encounter Withers resulted in players becoming permanently silenced for the rest of the game unless they reloaded to a save before the encounter.
Act 3 in particular is a minefield of buggy behaviors. The entirety of the Steel Watch Foundry is almost unplayable as there are doors that do not open correctly, bits of terrain that you constantly slip through, invisible walls that stop player movement. Just getting into the damn place is a bug filled slop with odd behaviors regarding Volo and the exploding barrels, some inconsistency with distances and heightmapping when trying to hope into the Foundry from behind by the SeaMaiden Temple and then basically a billion bugs with the freight elevator on the train tracks to the Foundry's side entrance. This is just one part of one area in Act 3 that I've decided to illustrate but there are other issues with other locations in the same Act such as Wyrm's Rock Fortress or the Circus.
The game does perform at a very stable 4k, 60FPS on Ultra settings. You won't often run into graphical performances itches or substantial game crashes. But you will run into any large number of annoying and obtrusive bugs, glitches and hiccups. The worst of these very well can be game ruining, and they do indeed happen in common play. They are not the result of odd outlier behaviors. The game just buckles under its weight at times.
Remember the game is massive. Some of these things are inevitable, as much as we wish they weren't. And I can forgive some of it. But across 300 hours per playthrough you're going to smash headlong into several of them too often to simply ignore them entirely. The game is buggy and the experience is worse off for it.
Additionally, the story has some ups and downs. The macro plot is fine and tells an interesting enough tale, but to accommodate so many branches and paths and endings and possibilities the game is a little meandering at times, paining to tell its story within nebulous constraints. Sometimes characters won't react as they should to changed circumstances or new information. Sometimes characters won't have dialogue in places they should. Sometimes obvious solutions just won't be availed to you for various problems. The game struggles with such a gigantic open ended tale and can have a tough time emulating the freeflowing nature of a tabletop session.
As the game starts to come to a close you can feel the rush job on the story's end. BG3 was in like 18 months of early access and still had to delay its release several times. The game was supposed to feature five acts and an entire upper city of Baldur's Gate but was chopped down to three with an ending in the Lower City. You can really feel the clipped wings as you roll down to the finish line. Karlach gets a pretty shortchanged ending without a whole lot of interesting development, and you can tell her story was meant to be broader with two different types of Infernal Iron that you can find in the game's third act. All of which are useless since the Infernal Iron has no more purpose after Act 2.
The forced contrivance of someone having to become a mindflayer to beat the netherbrain is never really illustrated or expanded upon. It feels sudden and random and forces you to make an unfair decision deep into the game that gives you no chance to decide who that choice should befall. Also not clear how Prince Orpheus becomes one since he wasn't infected with a tadpole, he just sort of wills himself into one if you choose him. Shadowheart gets a pretty flat ending with nothing very interesting coming for her unless she's your romance. Jaheira, Halsin, Minsc and Astarion all end up with absolutely nothing interesting for their end game credits. Gale gets two interesting endings should you decide to let him wrest control of the crown but if you decide otherwise nothing really happens and he sort of just goes about his business with the netherese orb still embedded in his chest. The ending for most characters is sort of flat and for many of them it doesn't seem as though much has changed for them on their journey. Their stakes are largely the same. Astarion and Shadowheart have new leases on life and Wyll may have less of one but their general trajectories are not too different once you hit end game credits from when you saw the title screen.
There are just so many interesting angles that get left to nothing, really. If you destroy the netherbrain, the crown just falls into the river. It's not really destroyed, it can be reforged. It's one of the absolute most powerful objects in the BG3 world, so why is everyone content to let it sit at the bottom of the river? Go get it! Why does The Emperor suddenly side with the netherbrain if you side with Orpheus? Orpheus is so clearly the right answer it doesn't make any sense. Karlach offering to become the mindflayer makes sense but why wouldn't Lae'zel offer to save her Prince? Orpheus is pissed we didn't let his guard free him but the guard couldn't free him as they didn't have the Orphic Hammer. The Baludran revelation while you search for Ansur is such an insane revelation to be hidden behind an optional and easily missable questline and it never gets expanded on or talked about. You can non-lethal KO Duke Ravengaard but the game will treat him as dead no matter what. Even more silly, Wyll never reacted to his dad being dead until I finally went back to Mizora and handled the questline from there. The order of the Gortash & Orrin fights has very little substantive effect on the game or the narrative. Honestly, whether you side with the cultists or the Tieflings or you save Last Light or not all kind of end up not mattering anyway either. The game winds up kind of railroading you into the same two or three ending choices anyway.
There's an entire lack of cutscene or clarity about major outcomes like Zevlor, Last Light, Isobel/Aylin, Minsc, Jaheira and her kids, your choice for leaders of the thieves guild, your choice for what to do with the thralls, your actions in the Underdark, what happens with the murder tribunal if you let them live. Just so many plot threads get left to hang. The ending is ultimately pretty damn rough.
But. The game is still an insane achievement. The final two hours of the game do dampen the experience but they can't taint a may hundred hour experience that precedes it too badly. If you can trooper through the technical guffaws the ending isn't enough to tank the game on its own and it doesn't deserve the sort of slanderous complaints hurled at a game like Mass Effect 3.
In the end, Baldur's Gate is an ambitious, audacious, once in a decade gaming experience. It is a marvel and a success. Even with a few warts it deserves more plaudits than you can possibly heap on it EVEN WHEN considering its shortcomings. A fantastic journey, a fantastic game and I cannot wait to see whatever Larian plans next.