Baldur’s Gate 3 early impressions: You’ll spend whole weeks in here and love it

There's a fortified encampment of druids you come across early in Baldur's Gate 3. Just outside the camp's gate, there are travelers, under attack from goblins, begging to be let in. There's a chance you could save the travelers, but there will be casualties. This latest attack pushes the current leader of the camp to expel all the refugee tieflings it had previously taken in, both to fortify the camp with an elaborate ritual and because many believe the nomads' presence is the cause of these latest attacks.

Your party is let through the gate. What you're there to do, technically, is find a healer. But what you can do inside is a remarkable amount of role-playing. Role-playing of the kind familiar to any player of Dungeons & Dragons. Role-playing like you might have done in the Baldur's Gate games of 20 years ago or the Divinity series that brought developer Larian into the D&D fold. It's the kind of crunchy, infinitely replayable, "Half-orc ranger with Gloom Stalker subclass" game that makes you feel like your choices matter, both to the world and how the gameplay unfolds. The wait has been long, the anticipation strong, but even from a short dive into the release version of the game, it all seems worth it.

Patch-y, but worth playing now

Baldur's Gate 3 is "a huge RPG designed to be played over many weeks," according to a statement sent to reviewers with early game codes. "Early" ended up being about four days, with a new patch arriving nearly every day. With other things to write about and the typical sleep, food, and middle-aged life tasks required of me, I'm not nearly as far as I'd like to be in the game. Technically, I could have been playing the true Early Access of the game since late 2020, having access to the first act and roughly 25 hours of the game, but I did not (and Early Access players' saves and progress will not transfer over to the full game). My impressions come from about six to seven hours of gameplay, including a lot of time spent in the character creation tool before deciding to run with the stock characters.

There's a patch arriving today and another outlined for shortly thereafter. The game has been playable on my Windows 11 desktop with an RTX 3070 graphics card, though not without some graphical hitches and stutters, which were far worse before I switched from the default DirectX 11 to the Vulkan version for the game, though your results will certainly vary. If you're capable of waiting a bit before diving in, many things will likely be smoother for you. But as-is, the game is playable, and my saves—local, on Steam, and on Larian's own cross-platform save system—seem intact.

As I've come to expect from Larian, everything about the map movement and the combat is tight, fluid, and visually intriguing enough without being too visually busy. The rendered cutscenes, especially the opening cinematic, have been impressive enough, but I've only seen a half-dozen or so. Dialogue scenes are far more frequent and involve tight shots on speakers and reactions. The lip-syncing is not quite there, but there's a lot of engaging dialogue to get through, so it's an easy thing to overlook. You'll probably be more focused on whether your paladin can make a persuasion check against a shopkeeper, anyways.

Today's launch is for the PC version only. Versions for Mac, PS5 (September 6), and, eventually, Xbox consoles are due to arrive in the coming months.

Interesting choices

Back to that fortified druid encampment. One of the tieflings is shot through with goblin arrows trying to open the gate. His enraged companion grabs a crossbow and runs to the makeshift jail, where she takes aim at a captured goblin. If you hit your dice roll, you can nudge her toward justice, mercy, revenge, or simply watch as things play out. Not only might this affect other tieflings' stance toward you, plus the fate of a little foul-mouthed goblin, but other members of your party will approve or disapprove of your choice and tell you about it.

Elsewhere, you can thwart a child fraudster seeking to foist fake magic rings onto travelers passing through. If you hit a perception check, you can also catch her pickpocket accomplice and then, through intuition, convince the ruffian that he's not made for a life of crime. Just around the corner, tiefling parents are reaching their boiling point with the guards who arrested their child. There's a child just outside who's entranced by a harpy song. And there's a druid who knows the camp's original leader would never push out the tieflings, were he not lost after venturing out on a quest recently.

It's the closest a game has come for me to feeling like an actual D&D campaign, albeit with a Game Master far, far more skilled than is typical. Baldur's Gate 3 has a story, with acts, maps it wants you to get through, and bosses to fight. But everything outside of that gentle, untimed corralling is seemingly up to you. You could refuse to take on the companions the game has on its cover art. You can kill nearly any character in the game (I haven't tried children, but you can let me know, I guess). You can break down a gate with weapons, set it on fire, find the opening mechanism with high perception, or use a character's race-inherent leaping boost skill and jump over it. When you start multiplying out the possibilities and think about debugging all of them, the mind boggles at how much work Baldur's Gate 3 must have been to make.

Divinity: Original Sin 2 with D&D trademarks

A whole bunch of Baldur's Gate 3 evokes Larian's critically lauded prior game, Divinity: Original Sin 2. The map exploration, object highlighting, combat positioning, party grouping, inventory—it's all there in BG3. Which is good because all of that worked really well, and it'd be a shame to see it not get used for Larian's big licensed outing. I greatly prefer the turn-based-but-timing-sensitive D:OS2 approach to combat used here over the "real-time with pause" system of the prior Baldur's Gate entries. That might be a personal thing, but I also think today's screens and graphic capabilities better suit a system where moving your archer just 0.3 meters to the left, into a tree shadow, gives them the stealth advantage they need for their next attack.

Like D:OS2, there's also a considerable learning curve to the systems and controls. I didn't attempt to play this game on the Steam Deck during my review, nor did I play with a controller. I didn't even really have time to dig into the keyboard shortcuts, which I'm sure are robust but could also cause a few mishaps when first learning. I stuck to my mouse and keyboard and pecked my way through the dozens of on-screen UI elements you can click.

BG3 has the typical tooltips and explainers when you first encounter new things, and it even color-codes some elements to help you understand things like "is this armor actually better?" But holding it all in your mental RAM is a commitment. Having a working knowledge of 5th Edition D&D will help you out a lot, but the game translation of it still has its own quirks. It will be a while before I understand exactly how grease can be deployed in combat.

I'm going to keep playing Baldur's Gate 3 and will likely report back on how it fares as a multi-week experience, as the developers intended. But in just the opening hours of the campaign, any lingering doubts about Larian's ability to bottle up and distribute the freedom of the role-playing experience have been overcome. Let me know what you think about the game, either from Early Access or your tentative first few hours, in the comments.