Eurogamer’s review of Baldur’s Gate 3 – a meticulously crafted game that conjures an illusion of impossible freedom – u…
Baldur’s Gate 3’s initial story hook is simple: you have a mindflayer parasite in your brain, and you probably don’t want that (unless…?). Its gameplay hook is much more ephemeral though: the promise of not just adapting the Dungeons & Dragons system, as plenty of games have done before, but taking that wide improvisational space of playing at the table into the more rigidly coded world of a video game.
It’s an ambitious idea, particularly in the CRPG space, where there’s a general trend that very close adaptations of tabletop rulesets tend to feel hostile to their players – we rely on human moderation to fudge dice rolls, adapt encounters, and respond to their players, and a straight adaptation running on cold hard random numbers alone can feel like the person (computer) running the game is being cruel. But, at least for the first thirty hours, as it responds to the choices you’ve made through character creation, dialogue, and even tiny interactions with its world, developer Larian seems to pull off the unlikely, and make an RPG that feels truly collaborative.
This breadth of possibility in Baldur’s Gate 3 is really an illusion – but one that’s closer to excellent stagecraft than a distracting wizard spell, and it’s meticulously done. The magician Larian pulls a rabbit out of its hat, and instead of looking up the developer’s sleeve you think about casting Speak with Animals, or doing an animal handling check to try and pet it, or maybe seeing if it has unique responses to a wildshaped druid.
The trick, of course, is that when you’re surrounded by animals in a grove full of druids you feel invited to drink that elixir, or cast that spell, and spend that resource – and in turn, the animals in that grove full of druids all have fascinating things to say. You can still put the same effort into talking to animals in a dark dungeon with scurrying rats – but the rats have much less to say, and it isn’t as inviting as spending your resources on the unique challenges of the dungeon ahead. It isn’t limitless, but an exchange – much like how a good Dungeon Master at the table will craft encounters that play to your strengths and weaknesses, Baldur’s Gate 3 knows when you’re likely to have certain abilities, how to let you show them off, and when to take them away.
This is to say that Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t an immersive sandbox where you can do or say anything that your imagination can let you, even if it wants you to feel that way. Instead, it’s a series of artfully staged scenarios and encounters, where the magic works best when you play along with what the scene puts in front of you – letting the environment or characters invite you to say ‚yes and‘. Staggered cliffs invite you to climb or fly up them; conspicuous barrels of wine make you check if your wizard has fireball prepped, or your rogue a flammable arrow, while a room full of paper and books suggests quite the opposite. You can always engage with its systems how you like – there’s nothing stopping you trying to solve every problem by carrying boxes around to climb on – but you feel most seen by the game when you see it first.
So Baldur’s Gate 3, a video game, can’t be your DM at the table – but one of the ways it feels like it’s collaborating with you as a player and storyteller is that it lets go of a lot of the video game-y conceits that make the player feel more passive. If you hear a man cry out from a burning building, and you take a rest to recover your resources, he won’t still be there for you to rescue once you’ve packed up your camp. Reading books about lore doesn’t populate your dialogue options with politely tagged correct answers – you just know more, as the player. Valuable plot information can be held in notes and books vulnerable to your area of effect attacks. And, most of the time, quests and combat feel full of potential ways to respond.
When there’s so much more variety than a strictly stealth/speech/combat route, these choices become about roleplay. I could only play one character for this review, but I’ve played several over Early Access, because the different approaches are so rewarding. In a village overtaken by goblins, my noble-yet-blunt paladin walked straight up to the gates and demanded a surrender. My power hungry sorcerer also walked straight up to the gates, but mind-controlled the goblins into accepting her authority. On the other hand, my good-but-not-kind rogue successfully jumped over a broken wall, with the intention of sneaking through, but got tangled up in a gnome rescue.
You’ll have to accept the thumbnail versions of these character descriptions – their lengthy backstory headcanons are between me and a highly trusted discord server – but even from character creation alone it’s hard not to feel deeply motivated.
