Baldur’s Gate 3 Review – A Mindflaying amount of freedom

Baldur’s Gate 3 is the latest in a series of roleplaying adventure games set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. With the last title releasing 23 years ago, BG3 has had a lot of time for fans of the series to build expectations. Though this is my first Baldur’s Gate title, I think I can safely say this game will live up and even exceed the expectations of fans who have been waiting a long, long time for the third entry in this beloved series. By walking you through my experience with the game, I hope this review inspires you to give it a try yourself.

One of the hardest segments of Baldur’s Gate 3 to get through is character creation.

Facing a similar problem as Dungeons and Dragons, Baldur’s Gate 3 has character creation that can take a long time to get through, because the insane level of detail involved in choosing a character can easily give you option paralysis. I felt a bit rushed on my first character, not wanting to keep my friends waiting as we booted up our three player campaign. Because of this, I found myself going back later to make a second, more detailed character. Then a third. Then a fourth.

The most difficult boss in Baldur’s Gate 3, without a doubt, is your own indecision and curiosity when it comes to the many different class and race combinations available to you. As I hinted at earlier, this is a problem I have when making Dungeons & Dragons characters as well, so it’s very faithful to the original experience BG3 is imitating.

Baldur’s Gate 3 gives you the chance to choose between a list of origin characters, or create a completely original character of your own. It’s safe to say most players will choose the second option. Picking your race is the first hurdle you’ll have to get over, as Baldur’s Gate 3 currently includes all of the base Dungeons & Dragons races and most of their available subraces as well. Elves, Gnomes, Halflings, Dwarves, Half-orcs, and even Githyani and Dragonborn are available to play, and choosing between them was my biggest struggle in the game. I currently have a Dragonborn fighter, a High Elf Fighter, and a Half-Elf Ranger Knight in my saves.

Customization is easily the lengthier part of the character creation experience. There are two to four different body types to choose from all races, a ton of hair and makeup options, piercings, and more that i can’t really mention in keeping with our site’s PG-13 guidelines. The game has a set number of preset faces to choose from, which does greatly limit the amount of personalization you can put into your character. As a friend astutely pointed out, however, having limited pre-made faces allows Baldur’s Gate 3 to better animate your character’s face, which you’ll be seeing a lot of. A full customized face would not be able to pull off these animations in such detail. Don’t believe me? You should try playing Fallout 4 some time.

Something I don’t particularly like about Baldur’s Gate 3’s customization, however, is how realistic all of the faces look, very likely modeled off of face actors. It is part of the look the game is going for, I get it, but I want my fantasy characters to be fantastical. I want to make incredibly handsome Tieflings with angular jaws the like of which you’d only see in art (such as video games) and not quite possible in real life. After all, isn’t part of the joy of D&D impossible wish fulfilment and power fantasies? I like to think so.

Every major D&D class with their three base-rulebook subclasses are available to play. These classes are fully fleshed out and faithful to the tabletop game, with Druids being able to turn into animals and Barbarians having their iconic rage ability. You would think these would be difficult for me to choose between as well, and they were… but I tend to end up returning to fighter with all of my characters. I know that’s boring, but I just love greatswords with a passion. Besides, you can freely multiclass starting at level 2, which I used to make one of my favorite builds, sorc-fighter. I could have just held out for eldritch knight, but I didn’t.

The great thing about Baldur’s Gate 3 is that if you want to make a bunch of characters, there’s no reason you can’t. The game is incredibly replayable, with different skills and attributes unlocking different interactions, dialogue, secrets, and hidden paths or enemies you might not have encountered before. I must have played through the first act four times, and each time felt different than the last.

While there’s no feeling quite like making your own character, playing one of Baldur’s Gate 3’s origin characters is a unique experience you shouldn’t skip out on either. These are characters with stories and personalities already developed in the world, with backstories and opinions that come up during gameplay. Playing one of these characters offers you new perspective on the story, new dialogue options, hidden skills or knowledge that you can use to unlock secret interactions you missed your first playthrough, and a lot more voice acting. It is definitely a different experience, allowing you to take the role of another fully fledged out person rather than creating a new character of your own.

If you prefer creating your own character though, don’t worry. Any origin characters you don’t play as still appear in your playthrough as recruitable followers, allowing you to still get a feel for their personalities and stories. You also get to control your followers, which in single player allows you to play up to four characters at once. The one downside to multiplayer, unfortunately, is that a max party size of four limits the amount of these followers you can have based on how many human players you have with you.

“Statistically significant” is a phrase I have written down in my notes that kept bouncing around my head as I played. Every character, just like in D&D, has a set of 6 attributes to choose from, and just like in D&D these attributes significantly alter the way you interact with the world around you. Every single class and character, specializing in different ways, provides a unique way to tackle the story ahead and has strengths and weaknesses that compliment a well built party. Two of your characters will not experience the story the same way, as the outcomes of encounters are significantly different based on the tools you bring into them.

In particular, I can name one conversation, early into the game, that I experienced no less than three or four times, as me and my friends constantly created new multiplayer games to play together. Not a single time did that conversation play out the same way. Even the outcome of this encounter was different each time, we us sometimes being able to diffuse the situation and other times one of the two knocking the other out.

The story, with all of its replayability, is perhaps one of the most interesting tales I’ve seen told in the Dungeons & Dragons universe. While I’m a DM who has used 5E for more than the majority of my games, I typically avoid Faerun and Wizards of the Coast’s lore in favor of telling my own stories in my own worlds. After some time in Baldur’s Gate 3, however, I have an urge to run a game of my own in Faerun, particularly if it involves Mindflayers, one of Wizard’s most interesting original creations.

Spoilers ahead for Baldur’s Gate 3’s first act, which introduces our origin characters and presents their call to arms. I won’t be talking about anything else in Baldur’s Gate 3’s story, but I felt like sharing the first bit will give you a good idea of what to expect from BG3’s story.

The game opens up with a Mindflayer’s Nautilus-shaped ship, a great flying organic mass with living ‘wires’ that are subservient to their psychic masters. After attacking the city of Baldur’s Gate and abducting some new hosts, the Mindflayer’s ship is attacked by several Red Dragons and their Githyani riders. An epic battle ensues that causes the Mindflayer ship to skip across planes of existence in an attempt to flee her persurers.

For those unfamiliar with D&D lore, Mindflayers are a race of psychic squid people who implant parasites in unwilling hosts, which eventually turn them into Mindflayers themselves. They so called Mindflayers are named such for their nasty habit of flaying minds, using their psychic ability to manipulate emotions and control other races as thralls. The Githyani were once slaves to the Mindflayers, now free and waging a brutal war against their former captors — One that I believe they are winning.

You wake up on the Mindflayer’s ship during the attack, and quickly discover that you have a parasite in your brain that seeks to turn you into a Mindflayer yourself. In a desperate bid to escape the ship and cure yourself of this fatal illness, you encounter other infected heroes who want the same thing. Together you set out with the common cause of curing your Mindflayer parasites, figuring that strength in numbers is your best bet of surviving.

This is a really cool introduction to the story and one I certainly haven’t seen before. While I’ve DM’d plenty of D&D games, they usually start pretty generically. Writing an interesting opening to a campaign that also gives the entire party a reason to travel together is hard, and Baldur’s Gate 3 comes right out of the gate showing you its writing chops and giving you a solid expectation of the quality of the story to come.

Equally faithful to the Dungeons & Dragons experience is Baldur’s Gate 3’s combat. In D&D, if you didn’t know, combat is portrayed through an action economy where players and enemies expend movement, actions, and bonus actions to try and get the foe to 0 hp before they do the same to you. BG3 recreates the D&D system down to the letter, including initiative rolls and the action economy. The main difference is that you just don’t see the dice roll.

You can choose to play in classic turn based mode, but BG3 also improves upon turn based combat by allowing the entire party of players, assuming they’re close enough in initiative, to take their turn at the same time. This prevents a lot of waiting around if you have multiple human players in your party. Being able to take your turns more or less simultaneously makes the entire multiplayer experience a lot smoother, and makes you feel a lot less rushed if you prefer to take your time on turns.

These checks persist outside of combat, of course. The wealth of choice present in dialogue truly staggered me as I played through the game. Having access to various spells, backgrounds, certain classes, and even your character’s race will give you new options in dialogue. This further adds to the game’s replayability, because you never really have the full experience in one playthrough, with your experience in a sense limited by all of the same things that make character creation so free and expressive.

Multiplayer, really, is the way to play BG3. In no sense is the game unplayable alone, you are completely capable of running a solo adventure and partying up with the computer, but the experience of playing the game with a group of friends is unmatched. It’s hard to describe the fun I had exploring every nook and cranny of the world with my player party, and learning the ins and outs of the game as a team. This includes when I attacked my friend’s mage character with my greatsword at level one, nearly killing him on the spot.

To say I had fun with Baldur’s Gate 3 is an understatement. If I told you I was finished with the game, it would be a lie. The game presents a unique strength in open-world storytelling and player freedom that is only present thanks to the powerful roleplaying game it built its rules off of, presenting a D&D-like experience that can only be beat by playing D&D itself. BG3 is a game that I’ll probably be playing on and off for years, without ever really getting tired of it, and is one you can easily drop a hundred hours in, get bored, make a new character and do a hundred more.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a PC review copy of this game. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles in the Game Reviews section of our website! Baldur’s Gate 3 is available on Steam and GoG.