After Stranger Things, hit live game podcasts and this year’s Chris Pine movie, Dungeons & Dragons isn’t so much having a renaissance as bursting out into the mainstream. And that’s a big thing for Baldur’s Gate III. Arriving 23 years on from Baldur’s Gate II — widely reckoned as the best D&D video game ever — it’s a masterclass in modern role-playing game design, capturing the essence of playing the tabletop game, but in a sweeping, cinematic style.
The action starts with gruesome body horror and a bang, as your protagonist awakens to find themselves captured by one of D&D’s most iconic monsters, the fiendish, tentacle-faced mind flayer, and implanted with a parasite that will eventually kill them. Having engineered a crash landing on the Sword Coast of Faerun, your obvious goal is to rid yourself of your brain-munching stowaway, but that’s just the start. Others have been infected, the local goblins have united under a new leader, and many of the locals are worshipping a strange new god. It seems a greater menace threatens the city of Baldur’s Gate and the whole Sword Coast beyond, and you and your small gang of heroes are all that stands in their way.
The storytelling soars from the beginning. You can play as one of eight ready-made origin characters or create your own with a ludicrously detailed character designer, then steadily recruit the rest to join your band, each bringing their own skills to the party. Between initiates of dark cults, cursed wizards, vampire dandies, and bloodthirsty warriors, they’re a pretty rum bunch, prone to arguments, infighting, and even cold-blooded murder. But pick the right team and make the right decisions, and you can hone them into a powerful force for good. Alternatively, you could just mess with them and pull out the popcorn when it all kicks off.
This is a game with massive ongoing story arcs worthy of a binge-watch TV series, but also heaps of smaller missions where you can forge new alliances or add new enemies to the list. How you act and what you say is always being followed by your companions, and you’ll alienate some and abandon others, but also build friendships and even opportunities for romance (or at least cheap soft-porn sex). If you miss the melodrama of the old Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, Baldur’s Gate III has exactly what you hanker for.
Roll the dice
Yet behind the cinematics and beautifully detailed visuals lurk the actual D&D rules. That means you’ll spend a lot of time in turn-based combat, moving each hero in your current four-strong party one by one, selecting which spells or combat moves to use, and which villains and monsters to target with them. This might go against the grain of modern, action-oriented sword and sorcery games, but there’s a lot of satisfaction in thinking your way through each battle, looking for ways to tackle a swarm of trolls and goblins or defeat some massive, armoured beast. When it all clicks, each victory feels like a minor triumph.
This is a stone-cold classic RPG, looking back to the oldest traditions, with a Game of Thrones budget and state-of-the-art tech
What’s more, there are dice rolls everywhere, from spotting and disarming traps to persuading dimwitted cultists that you’re, actually, on their side and need to be let through into their heavily guarded HQ. You might think this would throw you out of the world, but in fact it only helps to build the authentic D&D atmosphere.
Yet what really sells that experience is the incredible level of freedom — a calling card of developer Larian Studios’ earlier Divinity games. There are always ways to use the environment in combat, using barrels of oil or a burning brazier to wreck havoc on bandits or goblins, or use your powers of persuasion to solve a problem without a fight. Do you go in, magic missiles blazing, or sneak around, pick locks, and take your foes unawares? Sometimes, this freedom literally blows up in your face, as a cataclysmic explosion wipes your heroes out on the cusp of victory. Still, that’s just part of the fun as long as you remember to save your game whenever you can.
As the action shifts through ruined temples and glowing mushroom forests underground to reach mysterious towers and the sprawling city of the title, Baldur’s Gate III only seems to grow in scope and scale. It has the sense of exploration and discovery of a classic RPG, and of being asked to play a role in crafting your own fantasy saga. It has you developing your heroes to take on tougher challenges, not least countless battles with monsters mythical and legendary. It’s an epic, not just in terms of its sheer size, but in the depths it goes to in creating a vast and compelling world full of surprises. Even a barn in a ravaged village or an innocuous door in a dungeon might hide some weird, wonderful, or downright disgusting moment.
That doesn’t mean it’s going to be everybody’s mug of foaming dwarven ale. There’s a lot of juggling different windows and menus, trying to remember where or what you need to click to set up camp, light a torch, or sell your loot to a local trader. The action is complex and — until you get used to it —occasionally frustrating, especially when you run into overpowered monsters early on or a well-laid plan goes wrong just through bad luck.
Yet a few dozen hours in, with plenty more to go, it’s clear that this is a stone-cold classic RPG, looking back to the oldest traditions, with a Game of Thrones budget and state-of-the-art tech. Saying it’s the closest thing yet to real D&D doesn’t do it justice; Baldur’s Gate III is the ultimate dungeon master.
