Raising the Bar: Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game that defines a generation. On August 3rd, 2023 Larian Studios released this titan of a game that swept the world by storm. The game is set in the world of Dungeons and Dragons, a beloved tabletop game known for the freedom it gives its players. Larian sought to design this game around that same concept of freedom. They aimed to give their players the ability to steer the plot in whatever direction they desired and to do so in whatever way they could imagine. Were they able to achieve this lofty goal? 

Well, yes. In Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian gives the players the frame and lets them fill it however they want from beginning to end. Let’s start with character creation: there are 11 races, 31 subraces, 12 classes, and a whopping 46 subclasses to choose from in character creation alone. Players can choose to set off on their adventures as a stealthy and cunning rogue, picking pockets and cutting throats along the way; a paladin bound to an oath, wielding the divine power to smite their foes as long as they don’t break their oath; a bookish wizard, who uses their massive intellect to rain hellfire down from above; and even a mighty barbarian, who use the power of big muscles and being really, really mad to cut people in half.

If making your own character seems too complex, or you just want to experience the game from a different perspective, there are also six preset origin characters to choose from. These characters each have their own unique stories to follow and mysteries to uncover that are tied in throughout the plot of the game. As for the origin characters you don’t choose, they become your companions in your adventures in and around the city of Baldur’s Gate.

(Two characters I’ve made)

But that’s just the character creation. Once you’re satisfied with your character’s looks and abilities and finally decided on how many freckles they should have after a long hour of inner debate (yes this is actually something I’ve done), you are launched straight into the world. Here’s what you know: you were captured by creepy evil squid people called mind flayers, they put a tadpole in your brain that will kill you in the most painful way possible before turning you into one of them, and you really want to get it out because… well, I shouldn’t have to explain that. And no, none of that is a spoiler because you literally learn it within the first five minutes of the game!

In your quest to get that nasty little wriggler out of your head you meet all sorts of people, ranging from goblins writing rather vulgar love poems to literal gods who can and will kill you if you say the wrong things, go all sorts of places, including Hell itself and a world made of shadows, and, of course, the grand city of Baldur’s Gate. What you do in these places and how you interact with these people is entirely up to you. You can be an evil little monster and run around killing anything that moves, you can be a saint with a heart of gold who helps everyone in need, or you can be anything in between.

Certain choices you make throughout the game irreversibly change the world, locking out content that would’ve potentially been available had you made a different choice. Your decisions in this game have weight and consequence. The environment and the people living in it respond to the decisions your character makes, resulting in an evolving world that feels real and full of life. You wanted that gnome and his buddies to help you out with a secret mission? Well too bad, he remembers that you left him tied to a spinning windmill a couple weeks ago. What goes around comes around.

Considering all of that and the fact that the game is separated into three acts, the average time to complete this game comes out to roughly 80 hours. The game takes roughly 60 hours playing just the main story and ignoring all side content, and roughly 150 hours to complete both the main story and all side quests. There are a total of 17,000 different endings. Some of these vary in minute details such as relationships with certain characters, but others have world-altering differences. When compared to other popular RPGs released in the last couple years such as Horizon Forbidden West and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which are both around 30 hour games, the size of Baldur's Gate 3 is truly mind-blowing.

Now that we’ve gotten the massive size and detail of the game out of the way, let’s talk more about the freedom Larian gives you. Picture anything you could possibly want to do in a video game. You can do that in this game. Blow up a wall with a massive fireball? Sure! Throw the puny goblin off a cliff? Sure! Stack a hundred boxes on top of each other to get to the top of a tower? I don’t know why you wouldn’t just use the stairs, but sure! While there obviously isn’t absolute freedom, it’s still a game after all, you and your party are able to do just about anything you can think of in Baldur’s Gate 3. Like I said before, Larian gives you the frame to fill but it’s entirely up to you what you fill it with.

So far I’ve only said positive things about the game, and I want to make it clear that there are still some areas of the game that could be improved on. The game is so big and open ended that there are bound to be some bugs. I haven’t encountered anything game breaking, but I have found a few: conversation markers over people with nothing to say, enemies that forget they’re dead and stand back up, and buildings where apparently the walls have eyes and it’s impossible to hide. The way that the multiplayer works can also be a bit frustrating at times like when you’re locked out of interacting with certain characters because your friend beat you to it, or cutscenes that are rudely interrupted by your friends skipping it or killing the person you’re talking to. That said, these are really rather insignificant issues that I did not mind too much while playing the game and in no way detract from its overall quality. 

What I would consider the biggest problem with the game, though, is the barrier to entry. Like I said earlier, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game based on Dungeons and Dragons. As someone who has known about and played D&D for years, that was perfect for me. I came into the game already knowing about the setting and the mechanics that the game followed. For someone else, though, I can see how learning about the game could be difficult at first. 

The most challenging part of that is understanding the mathematical nature of the game. Everything is decided by rolling dice which are then modified positively or negatively by each character’s stats and abilities. Rangers might be better at tasks that require dexterity, like stealth, while druids might be better at tasks that require wisdom, like medicine. Luckily the game has recommended settings for beginners and most die rolls happen behind the scenes, only telling you whether you succeeded or failed. While the game does a good job of teaching new players how the system and its many features work, it is something that players inexperienced with D&D or other similar games should be aware of before diving in.

Larian sought out to accomplish what had previously been considered impossible in the gaming community, and proved that it was possible. They succeeded in making a game that gave almost full control to the player, complete with a massive world and fleshed out characters that keeps their community coming back for second, third, fourth, God knows how many playthroughs. Personally I’ve played more hours of this game than I’d like to admit (well into the triple digits), and I still have yet to see everything that this game has to offer. I’m wildly impressed by Baldur’s Gate 3 as well as Larian’s active response to player feedback, and it is the only game I have ever played that I would give a perfect 10/10. There’s a reason it won game of the year.