Baldur’s Gate 3 review – second impressions count

GameCentral gives its final verdict on Larian’s epic new role-playing game, but it’s not quite the flawless experience it first seems.

A developer not sending review copies until the last minute is almost always an indication that something is wrong; sometimes it’s just bugs and other times it’s a more intractable problem. There were performance issues when we started our review in progress of Baldur’s Gate 3, but nothing too serious. And yet playing through the game in its entirety has revealed unexpected issues. It’s still one of the best computer role-players ever made but its flaws are more complicated than just a few visual glitches.

Since the first act of Baldur’s Gate 3 has been in early access for several years, all any reviewer had time to play before launch was what had already been available for some time, even if the final version was more refined and had additional content. Which means it’s taken a long time for anyone to come to any definitive conclusion on the game, considering it will take most people more than 100 hours to complete.

Although Baldur’s Gate 3 is an official Dungeons & Dragons product, and a sequel to two 20-year-old PC games, neither of those things interfere with the game’s accessibility. We do have some misgivings about the game using such a strict interpretation of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop rules, but if you don’t know or care about any of that it doesn’t matter; in terms of story Baldur’s Gate 3 is very easy to pick up and play, with no prior knowledge required.

Baldur’s Gate is a large city in the Forgotten Realms setting, which is not the most Tolkien-esque of the Dungeons & Dragons worlds but still pretty close, with lots of elves and dwarves and dragons, but also many other less familiar creatures layered on top. The main enemies of the game are the Mind Flayers: multiversal, mind-controlling mini-Cthulhus who start things off by launching an invasion that sees you and the nucleus of your role-playing party captured and infected with parasitic tadpoles.

As overly simplistic as that might sound, that’s the absolute only time you could describe Baldur’s Gate 3 that way, in what is an extraordinarily complex and nuanced game in almost every respect. It’s not an experience for the attention deficient but apart from some issues with the inventory and party management it’s as accessible as its various systems allow it to be, and you don’t need to be familiar with the genre to understand how to play it.

Despite the name, this is just as much a sequel to Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin 2 as it is the existing two Baldur’s Gates and that’s no more obvious than with the combat, which completely ignores how the originals work. Instead, it goes with the turn-based battles of Original Sin 2, which are like a sort of melee and magic-based version of XCOM, but with a fully realised physics system where you can shove people off cliffs, set them on fire, and pick up one enemy and fling it at another.

You can freeze opponents or the ground beneath them or damage the scenery enough to have it collapse on your foes – anything that should be possible in either reality or the world of Dungeons & Dragons can be done at any time, to the point where just slicing a bad guy up with a sword makes you feel guilty at your own lack of imagination.

There are a few mechanical foibles, which we’ll get into in a moment, but not only are these minor but they’re completely overshadowed by the freedom the game grants you and the level of detail into which it goes. This is just as much a simulation as it is a role-playing game, if not of the Forgotten Realms than the whole process of playing a tabletop game.

Whether they follow official rules or not computer role-playing games have nowhere near the freedom of playing a tabletop adventure, where a good Dungeon Master can react to any request or idea from the players. It’s replicating this in a video game which Larian has always been most interested in, with Badlur’s Gate 3 embracing all sorts of weird spells and abilities, from turning into a cloud of gas to talking to animals and dead people.

However, Larian do seem unwilling to recognise that replicating a human Dungeon Master is impossible with current technology. Maybe it will be possible with some super advanced AI but rather than reacting to your every idea Baldur’s Gate 3 instead tries to anticipate it ahead of time, which creates inevitable exceptions and inconsistencies.

A good Dungeon Master will know when to fudge the rules or ignore the dice rolls, just to keep the story flowing, but a game is never going to do that. No doubt it’s a novelty for fans that this uses the tabletop rules but it’s often hard to see what benefit that offers the game, especially as it means it takes forever to level up and the level cap is just 12. Not only does this lessen the reward for any victory but it’s already been used as a reason why there probably won’t be any DLC expansion.

Nevertheless, the amount of spoken dialogue in Baldur’s Gate 3, that is used to react to all these myriad possibilities, is almost impossible to believe. Larian must’ve locked the voice actors in the studio for months on end to record everything, with seemingly every character – from a lowly peasant to key bad guys – offering their opinion on almost everything you ask them.

Modern role-playing games have included moral choices and romance options for decades now but rather than straightforward choices between good and evil, the ones in Baldur’s Gate 3 are agonisingly complex, where the best you can ever hope to do is make the least worst decision. It surpasses The Witcher 3 in terms of its finely gradated sense of morality – while at the same time avoiding tipping over into any kind of edgelord attitude where good deeds are made impossible.

Almost everything in the game is open to manipulation and exploitation, from buying the local newspaper, to change how it reports on your group, to conning gullible pub patrons. Abilities can be used in or out of combat, so encounters can be bypassed simply by talking your way out of them, sneaking past them, or causing a distraction. Or, once you begin to gain more advanced abilities, mind-controlling people or scaring them out of their wits.

You don’t have to just make your own fun though, with the game’s stock of side quests seeming as endless as its dialogue, with unexpected stories and characters waiting to be discovered in almost every corner, and almost no repeated or generic plot points or objectives. There are few direct comparisons with Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom and yet Baldur’s Gate 3 offers that same guarantee that exploration will always be rewarded and that if something seems physically (or magically) possible it almost certainly is.

Romance is also a major part of Baldur’s Gate 3, not just for you but for almost everyone in the game, from animals to monsters to ordinary people. Violence is mandatory in almost every video game, but love and sex are almost never even mentioned, let alone portrayed in any kind of realistic fashion.

Although there is still the sense that, as in BioWare games such as Mass Effect, personality traits and backstories are ignored simply to appease fans who want to romance everyone, with companions like Shadowheart and Astarion only remaining aggressively antisocial so long as you’re not trying to woo them.

In terms of bugs, we didn’t come across anything game destroying but there are plenty of performance issues, visual glitches, and – most frustratingly – perks or abilities that don’t work properly in combat. The game also sometimes exhibits a goldfish style memory, forgetting which characters you’re romancing and even having non-player characters that clearly died appear alive later on, as if nothing happened.

No doubt these issues will be fixed in time, but the most unexpected problem is how inconsistent the different acts are. It’s good that the plot is always moving forward, and the locations keep changing so radically, but as the story reaches its conclusion the breadth of your options narrows and the sandbox style feel of the opening act becomes an ever more distant memory.

Instead of the clever tactical battles of the first 50 or so hours, by the end of the game they’ve devolved into mass car park brawls, where there’s no room for subtlety or strategy. That’s realistic in its way but it’s not as interesting and, in general, throughout the second half of the game, you get the sense that Larian don’t appreciate that distinction as much as you would’ve expected.

Some of this seems to be dependent on choices you make early on, which limit your options further down the line, but this isn’t a game where you can quickly go back and unpick key decisions – especially as many don’t seem all that important at the time.

This, together with the bugs, gives the impression that everything could’ve used a few more months development and that if the whole of the game had been like Act 1 it would’ve pushed it to an even higher plane of excellence.

This is evident in almost every aspect of the late game, with the UI evolving from merely busy to a bewildering array of multi-coloured icons, representing every possible skill and ability. Because they’re slowly added to over the course of the game you do have time to get used to them, but you inevitability end up relying on only a select few favourites. On the other hand, the inventory is a nightmare from the start, especially when you have to start dealing with all the party members too.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great game, one of the best computer role-players of all time, but it’s far from perfect, and not just because of its numerous and varied bugs. The first act is truly magical and one of the most engrossing video game experiences we’ve ever been a part of, but the rest doesn’t quite live up to that early promise, even if it is still highly entertaining in its own way.

Flawed as it might be, Baldur’s Gate 3 sets new standards for not just the genre but gaming as a whole and it’s hugely exciting to think of subsequent games trying to live up to its example. The gate has been opened and it’s now up to Larian and others to see how far they can go beyond it.

Formats: PC (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PlayStation 5
Price: £49.99
Publisher: Larian Studios
Developer: Larian Studios
Release Date: 3rd August 2023*
Age Rating: 18

*PlayStation 5 on September 6, Xbox Series X/S is TBA

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