Baldur's Gate III review in progress

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of Dungeons & Dragons to the gaming world. It has served as inspiration for countless RPGs, movies, video games, and has seen a major resurgence of late thanks to the likes of Stranger Things and, oddly enough, COVID. It’s been just over 20 years since the last installment in the Baldur’s Gate series, and impossibly, that ends today. Brought to life by RPG masters Larian Studios after a lengthy 3 year stint in Early Access, we are happy to once again return to the Forgotten Realms. Welcome to our review of Baldur’s Gate III.

If you’ve not played Baldur’s Gate or Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn, rest assured it isn’t necessary to enjoy this third installment. For a short refresher on the second title, a man named Jon Irenicus (and easily one of the best antagonists in CRPG history) drives the player to hell and back (rather literally) to foil his grand bid to gain immortality. The titular city serves as the backdrop for intrigue, political infighting, and even a fight with a literal god. Heroes like Jaheira, Imoen, Aerie, Minsc (and his pet hamster Boo), Cernd, Korgan, Mazzy, and more came together to save the world. While not a direct sequel, Baldur’s Gate III takes place roughly 100 years after the events of Shadows of Amn, directly following the events of the Descent into Avernus. Once again the city of Baldur’s Gate is under attack, this time by the mysterious and malevolent mind-controlling Illithid. Dubbed “mind flayers”, these monsters have kidnapped the residents of Baldur’s Gate. You are one of those residents, and unfortunately for you, your situation only gets worse from here…

With a mind-controlling tadpole burrowing into your brain, your primary mission is to get it out, but that’s going to prove to be more of a challenge than you might expect.

Our review will attempt to be somewhat spoiler free, though some functions and moments will require a bit more discussion to set the tone or conditions to talk about them effectively. As such, we’ll be mindful of spoilers wherever possible, and marking them clearly when they are not. With that said, let’s build a character.

You’ve got a wealth of options to choose from to create your own custom character. Frankly, you’ll be spoiled for choice with 12 major classes, and 46 subsclasses. These can be attached to the 11 races, and 28 subraces. Asmodeus Tiefling? Check. Lightfoot Halfling? Yep. Black Dragonborn? Exciting! Better still, you’ll find this to be not only a cosmetic choice, but one that’ll have direct and immediate reactions from the literal thousands of characters you’ll encounter. To say that the character creator is robust is like saying Arizona is kinda warm in the summer. Take a look!

First and foremost, Baldur’s Gate III has one of the most impressive and inclusive character creation systems in any game, regardless of genre. Frankly, it puts Chinese and Korean MMOs to shame. Brace yourself for numbers – here we go! There are four body types from slim to absolutely yoked for most races, male, female, or non-binary/other for identity, nearly a dozen voice options for every race, eight facial presets, and sixty or so skin colors with the option to unlock all 145 skin colors if you want to go off-brand for your chosen race. There are ten scar options, a slider for maturity from young to old, freckle density, freckle intensity, vitiligo pigmentation, and more than a few genital options. 44 facial tattoos, 15 piercings, 32 eye colors (again with the option to unlock the full list of 145 of them, including heterochromia), and 17 eye makeup styles, 77 lip tints with sliders for intensity, metallic tint, and glossiness. 87 hairstyles, 125 hair colors, with highlights and graying options for accents, and 19 facial hairstyles round out that list.

Moving onto backgrounds, there are 11 of them – Acolyte, Charlatan, Criminal, Entertainer, Folk Hero, Guild Artisan, Noble, Outlander, Sage, Soldier, and Urchin. These give your character a bit of flavor for their upbringing, but also give skills in things like insight, religion, athletics, survival, acrobatics, performance, and more. These come up frequently in all sorts of ways you can’t predict, but this is a choice you’ll want to role play as there’s simply no way to game the system.

If you want to tinker with your initial stats, you are welcome to do so, but your character is somewhat pre-allocated to start. Based on your class, it’ll automatically try to assign the stats that will serve you best. You are welcome to change these as you wish, including your selected proficiencies. If you ever wanted a super smart Barbarian with a focus on Arcana and Stealth, well Baldur’s Gate III isn’t here to stop you.

For a more guided experience, you can also play as one of the Origin characters. These allow you to select one of your party members as the main character rather than creating one yourself. You’ll control them through the adventure, with their personal quests becoming part of the main quest. One of these origins is not like the others, however. The Dark Urge allows you to create a custom character and choose their class, but unlike “Tav” comes with a dark, unknown backstory. This isn’t for the faint of heart, as you’ll need to fight your inner demons to avoid committing atrocities… or encourage these urges, if that’s your thing.

One of the biggest changes in the move to a modern (arguably next-gen!) engine is that the team can push in on faces for conversations. And boy do they, frequently. As every character in the game (including animals, hello “Speak with Animals” spell) is voiced, the Larian team moves the camera in to take advantage of the fantastic visual fidelity present on the characters themselves. I’ll use a brief but hilarious interaction with a young Tiefling in camp as an example. Walking up with my wizard, the little guy offered to sell me a magical ring that gives me a boost to my luck. He demonstrates this with a coin toss that happens to land on whatever selection I’ve made. Suspicious to be sure. My rogue having this same conversation immediately noticed the grift. I could roll against my dexterity stat and manipulate the ring to make it disappear, signaling the little hustler that I was onto his game. All of this is done at a closeness we’ve never seen in a Baldur’s Gate game, evoking games like Dragon Age: Inquisition instead. It makes you care about these interactions more, and it makes them far more satisfying. The vocap on each character is also very well done, and combined with the excellent visual fidelity, breathes life into even the most otherwise-insignificant characters in the game.

It’s hard to overstate the sheer magnitude of options available to you in Baldur’s Gate for nearly every interaction. Racial traits, class, previous interactions with associates, upbringing, where you once lived, stats, religious preference, knowledge of history, medical training, if you happened to have picked up book, sheer dumb luck, and much more can be used to tilt the odds in your favor, and that doesn’t even count forcing the lever with the parasite hitchhiker in your head. Dice rolls rule the day so you’ll still need to nail the numbers to make it all come together, but it makes every single interaction emulate the tabletop game in the best way. You feel the dice rolls, you celebrate the critical hits, you flinch at the critical failures, and you wince at those “skin of your teeth” rolls where you make it, but only just, thanks to some combination of equipment, stat bonuses, and other advantages. It creates tension in a way we’ve never seen in a CRPG before, other than the ones Larian has made in the past.

Speaking of tension, this is a massive game: hence why this is a review in progress and not our final piece. In fact, both of us are still in Act 1 even after 14 hours of gameplay – there’s just that much to do. It seems like Larian is coming in hot with this one, as while the full release is much more polished than early access, it’s not quite there yet. We experienced a few visual hiccups from small texture glitches to my Druid’s humanoid model stretching out on top of her wild shape spider form, and the first romance scene with Shadowheart happened twice for some reason. Even in only three or so days with the game, it’s been patched at least four or five times. Hopefully the team isn’t crunching to get everything done, but it’s clear that the release date moving up has affected the game’s stability and level of polish. We won’t know how much until later in the game, but for now it’s a fully featured experience with some weird quirks.

The Sword Coast is absolutely gorgeous as well. Partnering up with NVIDIA, Baldur’s Gate III ships with full DLSS 2 and DLAA support. On a GeForce RTX 40 series card, there is an average uptick of upwards of 93% increase in framerate. A quick test on a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti gave me reliable 4K resolution with an average framerate hovering around 70fps – pretty quick for an entry level card. Popping down to a 2080 Super on a laptop I was getting 1080p at 60fps, and between 65 and 77% GPU utilization – this game is very well optimized. Framerate cap and lock, model quality, detail distance, instance distance, texture quality, texture filtering, animation level of detail, dynamic crowd density, shadow quality, cloud quality, fog quality, anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, depth of field options and quality, God rays, bloom, and subsurface scattering are all possible tweaks to get precisely the framerate you want, so tweak as you see fit. If your preferences run to the AMD side it’s a lot lighter on options – AMD FSR 1.0 and FidelityFX Sharpening can help you with those cards. If you plan on playing on Steam Deck, you may find it looks and runs a bit worse than in Early Access. We’re not sure why this is, but it probably has something to do with drivers and such. Prior to launch, it’ll either look very blurry or very aliased with the sharpening options unavailable

I’m very happy to see that Baldur’s Gate III continues the Larian tradition of offering cross-platform play, cloud saves, LAN support, Direct Connection, as well as standard Steam options for multiplayer connectivity. With up to four players able to join in the fun, it’s surprising just how frictionless the multiplayer functionality really is. Better still, if one of your party isn’t available to “venture forth”, the folks remaining can take control of the party member and direct them until that human player is able to once again join the party. We haven’t had the opportunity to test out local multiplayer yet, with up to two players on a single device, but if it’s anything like online connectivity it should be seamless and drop-in drop-out as well.

If you are the kind of person who likes to share their experiences with an audience, you’ll be happy to know that there is a Twitch extension built directly into the game. Enabling it will allow your audience to vote on your interactions and choices. While they can’t directly impact those outcomes, they can certainly weigh in and share in the experience – a cool option for those who enjoy that sort of thing. Your audience won’t be able to affect combat (aside from chat roasting you over strategies), and those familiar with D&D will need a bit of time to get to grips with battles here.

There are some liberties taken with the D&D 5E rules, but thankfully they are battle-tested and tilted to ensuring the player is having fun. As such, things like bonus actions like shove, drinking a potion, or scroll usage that would otherwise be bound to a specific character class can be used by all characters. Similarly, metamagic options are tweaked and balanced to function in the game. There are plenty more that I could detail out, but thankfully I’ve not run into any that feel like a cheat rather than a simple tilt in the player’s favor.

When you eventually end up in combat, and there’s plenty of opportunities for that, you’ll need to understand the delicate balance of the Action system. Every character has a number of direct actions for things like attacking, casting spells, chugging potions, and similar things. They can also move a certain distance based on their attributes and traits, executing those actions anywhere inside that movement. In addition, there is a bonus action and reaction system. Bonus Actions can be things like unleashing a Ki-fueled empty-hand attack as a monk, or cantrips. Reactions are exactly what the name suggests — an optional reaction to an incoming stimulus. For example, a Warlock can react with a Hellish Rebuke spell when struck, unleashing 1D10 of fire damage on the attacker — an often fatal reaction. While Actions regenerate between rounds, Bonus Actions and Reactions do not — a short rest (an hour of in-game time) is needed to do this. Spells and abilities will regenerate in that time, but eventually you’ll reach the end of the day — it’s time for a long rest.

Long rests are not only a chance to recover all skills, health, abilities, and the like, but a chance to interact with and get to know the various members of your party. Learning how they tick, what fears they harbor, and their deeper stories can be key to unlocking additional traits, knowledge, and even romantic options. This longer rest requires camp supplies, so you’ll want to make sure you bring provisions with you at all times lest your otherwise-restful rack time be somewhat less so.

Frankly, even with dozens upon dozens of hours of Early Access, and now even more time with the full version of the game under our belt, it’s just not possible to render a final verdict quite yet. There are still a few minor hitches with graphics, some animation oddities, and the occasional bug where a quest either won’t trigger properly, or doesn’t complete the way it’s supposed to, but the Larian team is patching like mad right now. Pulling the release date in by a month to avoid direct competition with another RPG is giving us an excellent game with a few last minute details to iron out. All that said, it’s also absolutely magnificent. There is simply nothing like Baldur’s Gate III anywhere. Not even the likes of Fallout, Skyrim, or any other massive RPG can compete with what’s on offer here. Even super powered choices-matter-titles like The Witcher III: Wild Hunt don’t offer the interactivity and flexibility of this title. While there may be a few last minute things to tighten up, I’m quite confident in saying that Baldur’s Gate III is a must-have RPG. They simply don’t make ‘em like this, and I can’t wait to experience all this game has to offer. That’s going to take time, so stay tuned for our final review at GamingTrend.com.

Ron Burke is the Editor in Chief for Gaming Trend. Currently living in Fort Worth, Texas, Ron is an old-school gamer who enjoys CRPGs, action/adventure, platformers, music games, and has recently gotten into tabletop gaming.

Ron is also a fourth degree black belt, with a Master's rank in Matsumura Seito Shōrin-ryū, Moo Duk Kwan Tang Soo Do, Universal Tang Soo Do Alliance, and International Tang Soo Do Federation. He also holds ranks in several other styles in his search to be a well-rounded fighter.

Ron has been married to Gaming Trend Editor, Laura Burke, for 27 years. They have three dogs - Pazuzu (Irish Terrier), Atë, and Calliope (both Australian Kelpie/Pit Bull mixes).

David is the kind of person to wear his heart on his sleeve. He can find positives in anything, like this is a person who loved Star Fox Zero to death. You’ll see him playing all kinds of games: AAAs, Indies, game jam games, games of all genres, and writing about them! Here. On this website. When not writing or playing games, you can find David making music, games, or enjoying a good book.David’s favorite games include NieR: Automata, Mother 3, and Gravity Rush.

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