A dazzling new adventure begins - Baldur’s Gate 3 First Impressions

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Baldur’s Gate 3 has finally arrived in its full glory. That this turn-based RPG stands alongside heavy hitters like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and the upcoming Starfield as one of 2023’s most hotly anticipated games says a lot about both the legacy of the original Baldur’s Gate games and the reputation of Larian Studios. That developer proved its role-playing chops with the phenomenal Divinity: Original Sin games.

Baldur’s Gate 3 also arrives on a new crest of interest in Dungeons & Dragons thanks to the explosive popularity of the actual play streaming genre. More people are interested in role-playing games than ever before, and now that it’s finally here, can Baldur’s Gate 3 even hope to live up to the hype?

It’s a tall order to be sure, but early signs indicate that this is the real deal, a once-in-a-generation kind of game that somehow manages to feel fresh while simultaneously maintaining its connection both to its CRPG ancestors and to its Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roots.

I’m planning to share a complete review of Baldur’s Gate 3 later this month, but due to Larian’s decision to move the release date forward a month, I haven’t had nearly enough time to complete the game. In fact, I’m still only scratching the surface. This is a massive game that gives players a lot of freedom to explore its story as they wish, so I’m going to keep working my way through and provide updates along the way before finally posting a full-length review.

With anticipation running so high, though,  it seems worthwhile to provide some early impressions after my first eight or so hours with the complete game.

Baldur’s Gate 3 character creation

The character creator is the first stop on this journey, and it sets the bar high. Now that the full version is available, I could choose from a wide variety of fantasy races and then customize the look with a huge selection of skin tones, hair styles, body types, and decorations. I even got to pick my character’s gender identity, voice, and genitalia independently. There are loads of options for skin tones, and even an adjustable option for vitiligo that works with any base tone. It’s the most freedom I’ve ever had to design a character in an RPG, and it’s evidence that Larian has been listening to the marginalized voices in their community.

All these options combine to create characters that all look like they could have stepped off the front cover of a fantasy paperback novel. From the gorgeous costumes to the fine details in the hairstyles and soft lighting applied to each portrait and scene, Baldur’s Gate 3’s characters look phenomenal, whether I’m looking at them from overhead, zoomed in, or up close in inventory management screens and cutscenes.

Baldur’s Gate 3 story impressions

Baldur’s Gate 3 begins as an alien, dimension-hopping Nautiloid ship is going down in flames. The mind flayers aboard have captured a seemingly random assortment of people, and the story’s hero—whether you’ve picked one of the pre-built characters or rolled your own—is among them. As the ship crashes somewhere in the wilds outside the city of Baldur’s Gate, the hero makes their escape, but not before being infected with a disgusting, wriggling brain worm referred to as a “tadpole.” This unwanted guest in our skull will, it’s said, eventually turn us all into mind flayers ourselves, and so it’s paramount that we get it removed as quickly as possible.

As I picked myself up off the beach where the Nautiloid crashed, I encountered other survivors who joined my party. Each one—the Githyanki fighter Lae’zel, half-elf cleric Shadowheart, an aristocratic vampire spawn named Astarion—have their own backstories and secrets, and each of them can even be selected as the player character at the start of the game rather than creating a unique protagonist. Either way, their backgrounds and attitudes play important roles in the search for a cure for the mind flayers’ ominous parasites.

Baldur’s Gate 3 combat impressions

The decision to use Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition rules for Baldur’s Gate 3 was controversial, but I think it worked out very well. Eight hours into the campaign, I’ve fought a handful of battles that have all involved multiple party members and enemies. The 5th Edition’s two-phase turn system is reminiscent of Firaxis’s modern XCOM games, and it lends itself well to the video game format. The user interface is a bit daunting at first, but the buttons along the bottom edge of the screen make it easy to sort through common abilities, class abilities, and usable items at a touch.

I found moving characters around during battle to generally be intuitive: A glowing white thread extended from the feet of the active character and led to the mouse pointer, indicating the character’s range of movement during that turn. If I hovered the mouse over an enemy, I could see my odds of successfully making an attack, either ranged or melee. Pathfinding can sometimes be a little finicky, and I occasionally felt I had to click once too many times to confirm that I wanted a character to use a spell on themselves, but all things considered, it’s a fluid system that doesn’t get in its own way.

Better yet, Larian has built off of the already robust system in Divinity: Original Sin 2 to give Baldur’s Gate 3 a flexibility that calls to mind in-person tabletop gaming sessions. In an early battle, my characters were helping to fight off a goblin war party that was attacking a druid settlement. One of the goblin archers had posted up on a high cliff, giving her better range and advantage against her targets. Shadowheart was nearby, and when her turn came up, I had a thought: Maybe she could just give that goblin a shove and send it tumbling down to the ground below.

It’s the kind of situation that comes up all the time during tabletop roleplaying sessions: Someone asks, “Hey DM, can I do this,” and proceeds to outline their plan. Good dungeon masters will figure out a way to make the scheme work with the rules, or in some cases bend them just enough to keep things going. Sure enough, Baldur’s Gate 3 let me use Shadowheart to give the goblin archer a powerful shove, sending it falling to the ground below where it landed with a bone-crunching thump.

Currently, my party is exploring the goblins’ war camp, and looking for ways to eliminate their three leaders. Here again, Baldur’s Gate 3 is giving me a lot of freedom to approach the problem the way I see fit. It would be entirely possible for me to send the party in crossbows blazing and attempt to kill my way up the chain of command. There are other options, though: Sneaking in and rescuing a captured druid potentially puts an extremely angry werebear on our side, or I could sweet-talk my way past the guards and try to approach each fearsome leader when they’re at their most vulnerable and unguarded. Heck, I might even decide to help one of them out if they offer me a better deal than the druids did—it’s entirely possible that someone in the fortress knows what to do about brain worms.

Initial impressions, then, are that Baldur’s Gate 3 is everything it was cracked up to be, but these are admittedly early days. Stay tuned for more dispatches from Faerûn as I make my way through this massive and enchanting RPG.

💬 Are you also jumping into the epic adventure of Baldur’s Gate 3? Share your thoughts as you work through this massive RPG in the comments below.