larian – Trekking with Dennis

Baldur’s Gate 3: Spoiler-free review

Here’s an unanswerable question to kick things off: does a critic or reviewer need to play through the entire game before publishing their review? The reason I ask is that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a massive game, and a lot of reviews that were published on release day or shortly after state up-front that they’re based on an incomplete experience.

That could be the topic of an entire article one day – and perhaps it should be! But for now, suffice to say that the reason my review is being published a month after Baldur’s Gate 3 launched on PC is because I took the time to complete the main campaign. As a result, I have a few things to say that I feel some early reviews glossed over or didn’t make mention of. The middle and latter parts of the game are a little different – and in some ways may feel slightly less polished than its opening act.

But let’s take a step back! I recently completed a single playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3 – and there’s a case to be made that even a playthrough that lasted more than 85 hours and took in as much exploration and as many side-quests as possible still isn’t thorough. I definitely haven’t seen or experienced everything the game has to offer! That’s a great thing, in my opinion, as any game that offers that kind of replayability is fantastic.

As things stand right now, in early September, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the best game I’ve played this year – and there’s no competition. This game hadn’t even been on my radar until a few weeks ago, so from my perspective it basically came out of nowhere! As someone who’s been playing games for well over three decades, getting that kind of experience is an increasingly rare phenomenon. I’m in love with Baldur’s Gate 3, and even at its most frustrating or difficult moments, I found myself inexorably drawn to the game. Finishing the story and seeing the credits roll was bittersweet! Coming to the end of such an amazing adventure left me feeling simultaneously thrilled at what I’d experienced and devastated that I couldn’t experience more of it!

In the ’90s, I missed out on the original Baldur’s Gate games. I wasn’t into Dungeons and Dragons, and I felt that turn-based CRPGs were less exciting and less fun than “Doom clones” (as we used to call first-person shooters), action-adventures, and even real-time strategy games like Command and Conquer or Age of Empires. So while I was dimly aware of Baldur’s Gate and its sequel, they were never titles that I felt any interest in trying for myself at the time.

I came to Baldur’s Gate 3 with basically no expectations. Sure, there had been some good reviews, and developer Larian Studios had received praise for Divinity: Original Sin and its sequel, but I really didn’t know what I was getting into. I don’t know the first thing about Dungeons and Dragons or its lore, and having never played the original Baldur’s Gate I was completely unfamiliar with the world I was about to experience.

The original *Baldur’s Gate* looked like this…

Baldur’s Gate 3 catapulted me right into the story! The game’s introduction was dense and heavy, with a huge array of options in the character creator and an explosive opening chapter to the story to contend with. For someone brand-new to this world, it was a lot to take in all at once. I felt overwhelmed more than once in those first moments – and that feeling came back multiple times during the first few hours. Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t hold my hand – and while it may feel much more accessible than CRPGs did in the ’90s, players coming to the game having played modern action/RPGs like Cyberpunk 2077 or Skyrim might find the sheer density and wall of content to be offputting.

That’s not to say that Baldur’s Gate 3 is “too hard,” not by any means. Some combat encounters are challenging, and at higher difficulty levels you’re in for a tough fight! But figuring out how to effectively use the right combination of spells and weapons, as well as how to solve puzzles and complete quests was, for me at least, all part of the fun. There were some frustrating moments where I felt I’d come up against an impossible challenge – but I soon found that I could usually figure out where I was going wrong and, at the second or perhaps third time of asking, make progress.

Baldur’s Gate 3 has been praised for its polish – and rightly so, for the most part. But I would be remiss not to mention that I encountered a few bugs and glitches during my playthrough, as well as some dodgy enemy and ally AI that could be frustrating. Although most of these were occasional or one-off issues, here are the ones that spring to mind:

Being able to pick up “null items” that didn’t exist,
Enemies repeatedly trying to open locked doors over and over,

Subtitles not showing during dialogue,
Characters getting stuck or being unable to navigate an open doorway,
Parts of a character’s skin/costume going missing,

Enemies and allies both charging head-first into fire or other environmental hazards,
Characters seeming to “freeze” and take no actions in combat when it was their turn,
The camera pointing in the wrong direction (or at nothing at all) during cut-scenes,

A quest marker that pointed to the wrong place on the map,
A mission-critical character in the latter part of the game who was randomly dead during a quest.

While I didn’t encounter any hard crashes – not a single one in over eighty-five hours of playing – nor any bugged or broken quests, I’m treating Baldur’s Gate 3 a bit more harshly on the bug front than I otherwise would, and that’s for one primary reason: this is a game that spent more than three years in early access. There was ample time to polish the experience and to take on board feedback from players. Some of these bugs occurred during the first part of the game, which is the part that was available to play during early access, so I really don’t give Larian a lot of leeway here when it comes to bugs.

Are bugs inevitable in games? Sure. Is Baldur’s Gate 3 one of the least-buggy titles so far this year? Absolutely… but that’s a low bar. Given how long the game has been in development, and especially given how long it spent in early access, the fact that basic things like subtitles or character models could be problematic isn’t great. While there are some mitigating circumstances – such as the game’s launch being pushed forward by over a month – I still think more could have been done to mitigate these issues.

This isn’t an item you’re supposed to be able to collect!

While we’re on this subject, let’s talk a little more about AI. Some of the characters in the game – and I’m including allies, companions, enemies, and occasionally the player character in this – could behave absolutely stupidly on occasion. Pathfinding when in turn-based mode could be particularly poor, and this is significant because character movement is strictly limited in combat and turn-based mode. Taking an unnecessarily long or winding route to a spot on the map or an objective can be the difference between being able to do something that turn or having to wait. Perhaps some of this could be explained by “user error” – but not all of it!

Then there were occasions where characters would damage their own allies, either by firing a weapon or casting a spell that impacted everyone around them. If I, as the player, chose to do something like that because I weighed that the benefits outweighed the cost, that’s my decision. But for the AI to make a move that crippled or killed some of its own characters… it just didn’t make a lot of sense to me, not when there were clearly other options available.

Promo screenshot featuring a combat encounter.

There were also a few let-downs when it came to the choices I made, and this is something that I definitely felt more of as the game progressed. Despite an impressive character creator offering backgrounds, races, classes, and more… I didn’t really feel that much beyond the class actually mattered. The way other characters in the world reacted to my character generally didn’t take my character’s race or background into account, and class primarily affected combat and stealth encounters. Considering the game’s lofty promises… only seeing a few lines of unique dialogue across eighty-five hours wasn’t as impressive as it could’ve been.

I chose to play as a dark elf/drow druid. And there were a few places where, as a druid, I got a line or two about nature… but the conversation would immediately return to other matters. As a drow, I didn’t feel that the way anyone in the world reacted to me was any different or would have been any different if I’d chosen to play as a human or a halfling. More could have been made of this, in my opinion, to really make these custom characters feel unique and part of the world.

The same was true of character relationships. Without giving too much away, none of them felt particularly reactive – either to the character I chose to play as or to my actions. Occasionally a pop-up would display informing me that so-and-so “approved” or “disapproved” of a certain action or dialogue choice. But at no point did any of this approval or disapproval matter. You might get a different line of dialogue when next interacting with them, but after that they’d again go right back to the way they were.

We’ll have to get into more detail about some of these decisions later – I’ll be writing a second part of this review in the days ahead in which I’ll talk more about specific character moments and story beats and get into spoiler territory. But for now, I think I’ve made my point about the lack of reaction from some of the characters and the overall generic feel to the player-created custom character. Maybe choosing to play as one of the pre-made characters would negate this feeling, but for me – and I’d wager, for a lot of other folks too – part of the fun of a role-playing game is creating a character, either to represent ourselves or as an opportunity to become someone completely different.

But I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a truly compelling game that sucked me in and kept me in suspense practically the entire time. No sooner had I finished one complex mission than another would present itself, and the incredible thing was just how natural and organic the whole adventure and story felt. Exploring an area away from where the main quest seemed to be leading would see me encounter an interesting character who would have an entire hour-long mission of their own to send me on. Or diving into a dungeon would lead to uncovering a secret item that would have a massive impact on one of the characters in the group, again kicking off a quest or even a whole line of quests. Baldur’s Gate 3 certainly found a way to make exploring its beautifully-crafted world feel rewarding.

Levels and regions in Baldur’s Gate 3 feel balanced – not too big and not too small. There are just the right amount of items and loot to make exploring feel worthwhile without being unnecessarily time-consuming. And there’s a beautiful diversity of environments – from dark, rat-infested dungeons to beautiful beaches and hills. Unlike some open-world games, which can feel too big, directionless, or bland, everything about the world of Baldur’s Gate 3 was fantastic; a masterclass in level design.

How many games have you played where enemy types would soon feel repetitive and boring? I can practically guarantee you that won’t be the case in Baldur’s Gate 3! The sheer diversity of enemy types was fantastic, with practically every combat encounter offering something different. There are many named enemies and mini-bosses to go along with the bigger, badder bosses, too – and again, each of these feels unique and different from one another. There are factions that oppose you along your quest – but even when fighting the same group, the sheer array of characters, and the differing combinations in which enemy groups can be deployed, really worked to make each fight feel different from the last.

This diversity extends to friendly and neutral NPCs, too. There are so many different characters to meet, and practically all of them feel like they have a place in the fantasy world of Faerûn. Even background characters, like nameless villagers or soldiers, still manage to feel like they have a role to play – and perhaps a story all their own that we just didn’t see. These characters go a long way to building up a world that feels lived-in and real – and one in which the player character’s decisions do genuinely matter.

One of the game’s many non-player characters.

There’s also a decent amount of variety in terms of loot and items. Maybe this says more about the way I play these games – your mileage may vary – but I found I’d amassed a huge collection of everything from random junk to potions and scrolls by the time the campaign was into its final stretch. The ability to send items to camp instantaneously instead of having to sell them or leave them behind when over-encumbered is a life-saver – and a feature more games should take advantage of!

There are a couple of downsides here, though. Inventory management isn’t great, and when storing items in a chest at camp there’s no way to sort by category, meaning it can be a pain to find a specific item. Secondly, while there’s a huge number of individual items to find in the game, there wasn’t such a broad variety of cosmetic items to choose from, particularly in the armour department. Being able to recolour items with dye certainly helped, but a bit more cosmetic variety wouldn’t go amiss in a game like this – and I’d happily sacrifice a dozen or more of the random pieces of junk to get even one or two additional pairs of boots or suits of armour.

Inventory management could be easier sometimes.

I chose to play Baldur’s Gate 3 using a control pad, not mouse and keyboard. That’s my preferred way to play, and I found the game’s “radial menus” to be a little cumbersome, but ultimately perfectly usable. The fact that combat is turn-based means you aren’t having to panic trying to hit buttons in short order, and there’s time to open each menu and find exactly the right spell, attack, or action that you need!

When the game launches on PlayStation 5 later this week, I would imagine the controls will be similar. Controller support on PC was good, and everything from moving and exploring the world to those turn-based actions worked well. I doubt PlayStation players, or PC players like myself using a control pad, will have any major issues.

Let’s briefly talk about dice and randomness! Many events in Baldur’s Gate 3, from conversations to lockpicking and exploration to combat, rely on rolls of the digital dice. Some of these rolls are obvious and interactive – others are passive and happen in the background, though you’ll be informed of the outcome. A lot of games use “random number generation” to determine the outcome of all manner of things, but it’s obvious and even in-your-face in Baldur’s Gate 3. You can, of course “save-scum” to get around this – Baldur’s Gate 3 practically encourages save-scumming by implementing a free save system that allows you to save while in combat, right before a dice roll, and basically at any point.

Save-scumming will have to be the subject of an article of its own one day, but suffice to say I support the practice. It’s your game, and you should play it the way you want! If you get a once-in-a-single-playthrough encounter, with a positive or negative outcome literally hanging on the roll of a dice… why not go back and redo it if you want to get the “right” outcome? There were relatively few points where I felt I absolutely needed to get a specific outcome, and the game is incredibly adaptable in that regard. But it also definitely allows for easy re-dos thanks to the aforementioned free save system – and some generous in-game dice modifiers and boosters!

I picked up Baldur’s Gate 3 almost on a whim – I was looking for something to play while waiting for Starfield. I really didn’t know what to expect beyond a game that had been picking up some positive buzz, but I’m absolutely blown away by how much fun I had. It’s been an amazing ride, and in a way the fact that it was so unexpected only adds to that! Baldur’s Gate 3 hadn’t been on my radar at all in 2023, but it’s now a serious candidate for my “game of the year.” Check back in December, by the way, to see if it makes the cut!

I think I’ve said all I can without getting into the story too deeply. But I do have some thoughts on the details of the plot, so I hope you’ll join me in the days ahead for that. Or just swing by after you’ve beaten the game! Going in blind, as I did, is definitely recommended the first time around! The experience was much more enjoyable for me as I toddled and blundered my way through those opening hours of the game!

I don’t like to put a number score or a star rating on games when I review them. Check Metacritic if you want to get a mark out of ten! But if you want to know if I recommend Baldur’s Gate 3, the answer is an emphatic “yes.” This is the best game I’ve played in 2023 so far, and it’s not even close. There are some deep and complex systems that may seem offputting, and it’s a long game that requires a significant time commitment to make it all the way through. But even with those caveats – or rather, because of those selling-points – I can’t recommend it highly enough! You don’t need to be a Dungeons and Dragons player and you don’t need to have played a lot of CRPGs to get stuck into this game and have a fun time.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is out now for PC, will be released on PlayStation 5 on the 6th of September, and will be released on Xbox Series consoles in 2024. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the copyright of Larian Studios, and is based on Dungeons and Dragons which is owned by Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro. Some screenshots and promo art used above courtesy of Larian Studios and/or IGDB. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Baldur’s Gate 3 has set a high bar… Starfield, take note!

Thu 17.08.23Dennis

Spoiler Warning: Minor spoilers may be present for Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield.

I’ll get into this in more detail in my review of Baldur’s Gate 3 – which is currently a work in progress – but I came to Larian’s Dungeons and Dragons CRPG with basically no expectations at all. The game wasn’t one that had been on my radar, I don’t know the first thing about Dungeons and Dragons, and the primary reason I picked it up is because it happened to be well-timed, releasing just as the hype train for Starfield has been building. I was looking for a new game to play, and Baldur’s Gate 3 reared its head, backed up by plenty of positive reviews. It felt like the right game at the right time – but little more than a way to kill some time while waiting for the real prize: Starfield.

Suffice to say, I undervalued Baldur’s Gate 3 in a pretty big way! The game is fantastic, as you’ve no doubt heard from other reviewers, and although I can’t call it “perfect,” it’s certainly the best game I’ve played in 2023 so far. It will absolutely rival Starfield for the coveted “Trekking with Dennis Award” come December, and if Starfield should falter… well, maybe it’ll even pip it to the post and scoop the prize. I wouldn’t have expected that even just a couple of weeks ago.

A promo screenshot of *Baldur’s Gate 3*.

There are two things that Baldur’s Gate 3 has done well that Bethesda needs to consider when it comes to Starfield. The first is microtransactions. There aren’t any in Baldur’s Gate 3, and that’s in spite of comparable titles like Diablo IV positively drowning in them. As I’ve noted more than once, we haven’t yet had confirmation from Bethesda that Starfield will be free from microtransactions, season passes, lootboxes, premium currencies, and other shit-smeared trappings of the modern video games industry.

Secondly, while I have encountered a few glitches and bugs in my thirty-plus hours with Baldur’s Gate 3, the game is complete and pretty polished. The main quest is complete, side missions and character quests are all unique and interesting, and the state of the game overall is pretty darn good. The main mechanics and systems it employs, from magic and spellcasting to combat and exploration, all work well, and there are plenty of choices that genuinely have an impact on the game world.

A relatively minor visual bug that I encountered in *Baldur’s Gate 3*.

Bethesda has acquired a reputation over the years, and it’s well-deserved. Major Bethesda releases, from Oblivion to Fallout 76, have all arrived with bugs and glitches to varying degrees. Bethesda’s publishing arm is also responsible for the likes of Redfall, a title ridiculed for its broken state earlier this year. While Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t entirely bug-free, it’s on a completely different scale from any of Bethesda’s launches.

The microtransaction issue is already one that I’ve been sceptical about when it comes to Starfield. Well before the game has even launched, Bethesda has already been touting the first piece of story DLC, an expensive £25 add-on. Expansion packs are no bad thing, don’t get me wrong, but it’s disappointing to see Bethesda leaning into add-ons and DLC so early in Starfield’s life. In contrast, Baldur’s Gate 3 may not have any DLC at all, with Larian potentially moving on to their next project instead, regarding the game and its story as complete.

*Diablo IV* has an awful and aggressive in-game monetisation scheme. Let’s hope *Starfield* follows the *Baldur’s Gate 3* model…

The games are very different from one another. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a CRPG – a throwback, in many ways, to a style of game that has fallen out of fashion over the past twenty years or so. It employs turn-based combat, a third-person or isometric camera, and a game world broken up into several large regions (or levels) to accompany its three-act narrative.

Starfield, in contrast, is very much an action-RPG or even an RPG/shooter, with real-time combat inspired by the likes of id Software’s recent Doom and Doom Eternal titles. Although a third-person view is available, Bethesda has stated that the game is intended to primarily be played from a first-person perspective, and the game’s “open galaxy” map, while broken up into star systems and planets, isn’t split into sections or levels in the way that the map is in Baldur’s Gate 3. Starfield is also a sci-fi title to Baldur’s Gate 3′s fantasy setting.

*Starfield* will be a different kind of game – but with comparable features.

But there are plenty of similarities, too. Both games are role-playing experiences, both have skills to unlock, character progression, and both aim to tell expansive single-player stories complete with engaging characters, main and secondary quests to follow, and more. Though the comparison is not a direct one between two games with identical styles… it’s close enough that many Baldur’s Gate 3 players may be intending to play Starfield. In fact, Larian Studios deliberately moved up the release date of Baldur’s Gate 3 by more than a month to avoid a clash with Starfield.

So when I say that Baldur’s Gate 3 has set a high bar, I mean it. Coming just a few weeks apart, comparisons between the two games will be inevitable – and if Starfield should suffer a bumpy launch for any reason, those comparisons may not be favourable. Baldur’s Gate 3 will also be launching on PlayStation 5 the same week as Starfield arrives on PC and Xbox, so there’ll be a flood of new players joining the party. PlayStation fans may feel less bad at missing out on Starfield if Baldur’s Gate 3 is being heralded as the “better” title.

*Baldur’s Gate 3* promo screenshot featuring a dragonborn warrior.

But we mustn’t get too far ahead of ourselves! It’s perfectly reasonable to suggest that players can enjoy one or both games on their own merit, without needing to “pick a side” or say which one is somehow “objectively better.” I want Starfield to be a fun experience – at least as much fun as Baldur’s Gate 3 has been for me over the past couple of weeks. But I recognise that, with the games releasing so close to one another, my impressions of Starfield – particularly insofar as how complete and polished it feels – will be coloured by my experience of Baldur’s Gate 3.

So… here’s the difficult part. In 2022, I praised Xbox and Bethesda for delaying Starfield. If the game needed more attention, more work, and more time to squash bugs and polish the experience, then a delay was unquestionably the right call. With a scant two weeks to go before Starfield’s pre-order exclusive early release, and with reviewers and publications eagerly awaiting their review copies… well, this is basically the last possible opportunity to delay the game. If Starfield should release with a level of bugs and glitches comparable in any way to the likes of Redfall or Fallout 76, not only will we lament this missed opportunity, but we’ll have those comparisons with Baldur’s Gate 3 to chew on.

*Starfield* was originally targeting a November 2022 release.

Whether you’ve played and enjoyed Baldur’s Gate 3 or not, and regardless of whether it’s “your thing” or not, it’s undeniable that the game has raised the stakes for Starfield, and has set a high bar indeed for other single-player role-playing games to strive for. I hope Starfield can hit it. Heck, I hope Starfield smashes through it and sets a new, even higher bar! It’s rare to get a title as fun and as consumer-friendly as Baldur’s Gate 3, so to get two in a row would be beyond fantastic. You know what they say: you wait ages for something and then two come along at once!

Where I see the biggest potential comparison is with one of my biggest concerns about Starfield: monetisation. We’re so close to Starfield’s launch, and yet Bethesda and Xbox have still failed to clarify what kind of monetisation we can expect to see in the game. Unless the answer is “none at all,” as Larian repeatedly assured players in the run-up to the launch of Baldur’s Gate 3, that will already be a disappointment. Should that monetisation extend beyond large-scale expansion packs to include things like premium currencies or lootboxes… that could spell disaster.

Bethesda and Xbox have yet to comment on microtransactions in *Starfield*.

What Larian has done with Baldur’s Gate 3 is something that other AAA studios should strive for. Of course it’s true that not every game can be as expansive and feature-rich as Baldur’s Gate 3… but every game should be able to take inspiration from it in different areas. Single-player games shouldn’t need in-game monetisation to turn a profit. AAA studios should be launching complete games, not broken, “release now, fix later” messes, nor games with incomplete stories and promises of “roadmaps” to more content. Larian has also shown a willingness to listen to feedback from players through an extensive early access period, and while I’m generally sceptical about big studios using early access, and of long early access periods in general, in this case it seems to have worked as intended for once.

The fact is that Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t anything new, nor even particularly innovative. In many ways it’s actually a throwback to an older style of game that was prominent in the 1990s and early 2000s. As that kind of gameplay has fallen by the wayside in the push to open worlds, always-online experiences, and microtransactions… it feels different in 2023.

But that’s just a really sad commentary on the sorry state of the video games industry. A consumer-friendly game, one that doesn’t chase every trend going nor try to extort its players for extra cash, finds itself becoming headline news.

When I looked ahead to the games I was most interested to play in 2023, titles like Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, Lord of the Rings: Gollum, Redfall, Forspoken, and of course Starfield were all contenders. After several of those proved to be disappointing or underwhelming, it’s been a genuinely cathartic experience to pick up a new game and just… really enjoy playing it. That Baldur’s Gate 3 wasn’t on my radar and was thus an unexpected surprise just adds to that.

There has been chatter online and on social media about Baldur’s Gate 3 being a unique project that shouldn’t become the “industry standard” that players expect to see going forward. And there’s an element of truth to that: most games won’t be old-school CRPGs with hundreds of hours of content. But in terms of adopting consumer-friendly practices, abandoning trends when they don’t fit with the story a game is telling, and focusing on delivering a quality product… those are things that players can and should expect. Some of us never stopped asking the video games industry and its biggest corporations to deliver those things. Maybe the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 – coupled with some spectacular failures over the past few years – will finally be the catalyst that makes these corporations sit up and listen.

And as for Starfield… the bar has been well and truly raised. I can only hope that Xbox and Bethesda have done enough to reach it.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is out now for PC, will be released on PlayStation 5 on the 6th of September, and will be released on Xbox Series consoles in 2024. Starfield will be released on PC and Xbox Series consoles on the 6th of September. Baldur’s Gate 3 is the copyright of Larian Studios, and is based on Dungeons and Dragons which is owned by Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro. Starfield is the copyright of Bethesda Softworks, Xbox Game Studios, and/or Microsoft. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.