If you are a fan of classic tabletop RPGs like DnD, chances are that you know about Baldur’s Gate as well. Baldur’s Gate is an RPG franchise that started its virtual journey back in 1998 followed by a second title in 2000. After the original titles, we did receive some enhanced versions and titles set within the world of Baldur’s Gate but the real franchise was still missing. However, now after 20 years of the release of Baldur’s Gate 2, we finally have Baldur’s Gate 3 released in Early Access by Larian Studios and I can say that I am nothing short but thrilled to play it. This is our review of the Early Access version of Baldur’s Gate 3 on PC via Steam in which we get to explore this beautiful RPG and try not to get ourselves killed on every corner.
The story of Baldur’s Gate 3 is set in the land of Faerûn. The game starts with you being abducted by mind flayers in their giant nautiloid ship. The mind flayers infect your mind with a tadpole whose only goal is to turn you into a mind flayer as well however fate has other plans for you. Taking advantage of an attack on the mind flayers ship, you escape and survive a crash landing on the Sword Coast outlands. This is where your story begins, and you look for a cure for the parasite eating away your brain along by exploring the beautiful world crafted by Larian Studios.
Baldur’s Gate 3 starts with a very impressive character creator which offers many options for you to play around for your very first character. Even in the Early Access version, you have a large number of races, classes, and subclasses to choose from. Not every race has classes or further subclasses but most of them do and you will spend quite a lot of time creating your ideal character in the game. Apart from their visuals, you can also distribute skill points to give your character a certain edge is specific skills than others. The character creation comes amid the starting cutscene where you are being introduced to the premise of the game.
As soon as you get in control of your character in the game and combat kicks in, one thing you will notice is that the game feels a lot similar to the Divinity: Original Sins franchise but it certainly offers more depth and options in the combat. You have your basic attacks along with some advanced attacks however items play a vital role in these combat scenarios as well. Combat is played out in a turn-based fashion where it also brings back a unique feature that is only used in the tabletop RPGs and it is the dice roll. While your skills and abilities are dependent on your character’s stats, some of the features are locked behind a dice roll and it all boils down to luck with these features and actions.
When choosing the option for these dice-roll actions, whether they are combat-related or not, a dice appears on the screen and you must roll the dice to see whether you would succeed in the action or not. No matter how good your character gets in the game, some things are dependent on these dice rolls and you cannot change anything about them. Whether it is during combat, revival, or dialogue choices, the dice will often pop up and will decide your fate in those particular scenarios. This is the main feature of Baldur’s Gate 3 that makes it so close to the original tabletop RPGs where dice rolls play a vital role in-game decisions.
One of my favorite aspects of Baldur’s Gate 3 so far is the world itself. Not only the world feels pretty big, but it is also full of life and activity. You can interact with every NPC that you see on your journey. A large number of NPCs can join your party as well. This is further diversified based on a large number of races present in the game. No two faces are similar in the game which is a huge feature of the game. These interactions keep the game fresh and there is always something for you to do in the game. Apart from these random NPC interactions, the world of Baldur’s Gate 3 is extremely dangerous as you will be fighting with monsters for a major part of the game.
Monsters of every size and shape roam the lands and they will not hesitate to kill you. Some of these fights could pop up completely out of context and will totally take you by surprise. Death is something that you will have to get used to in the game but considering the high difficulty of combat, death is not too harsh on your characters. If you have some healing items with your characters such as the Scroll of Revival, these can be used to bring back the downed characters to life or you can simply use your healers for this job. Even if that fails, you can trust the dice roll mechanic of the game for a luck-based-chance to bring your characters back to life in three tries.
Visually, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a looker. The world of Baldur’s Gate 3 is extremely pretty to look at no matter where you are. The insides as well as the outsides are equally detailed with every last bit of the particle effects adding to the visual fidelity of the game. This means that Baldur’s Gate is a little bit on the demanding side as well. Right from the very first screen of the game, the visual details are evident. The characters look brilliant and while they might be missing a little bit of audio here and there, their facial expressions are just a treat to look at. This includes the cinematic cutscenes littered throughout the game.
The UI of the game is pretty good and while it may appear a little confusing at the start, as you continue to play the game and familiarize yourself with all the icons and buttons on the game screen, you start o appreciate every placement of the icons and buttons. The lower part of the screen has all the details that you need about your character including items in their inventory, moves, and attacks that you can perform during combat while the right side of the screen displays all of the other information and buttons that you need such as game settings, mini-map and much more. Nothing feels too cluttered and everything is right there in easy reach of your mouse. I’ve always played RPGs with keyboard and mouse so I did not try the game with a controller so I cannot really comment on how the game plays out on a controller or whether it supports a controller at this point or not.
Before I come to the technical aspect of the review, I think it is good to mention the specs of my review platform so that you can have an idea of the game’s performance on a fairly decent machine. For this Early Access review, I played the game on a system running AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with 32GB DDR4 Ram and AMD RX 5700xt. These are pretty decent specs for a review bench, so the game was running on 2K with everything turned to Ultra. Baldur’s Gate 3 offers two playing modes when you run the game. You can either use DX11 or Vulkan. For my initial playthrough, I went with the Vulkan.
While playing on Vulkan, I did experience some weird problems with the game. There were some notable stutters during videos but most of the game ran just fine for me. There were a few frame random frame dips in some smoke-heavy areas as far as I can remember but the most prominent stutters were during in-game cinematics. Some were really intense and froze the game for a good second or two. Switching to Directx11 removed the in-game frame drops completely however there were still some cinematic stutters but not as much as running the game on Vulkan. My suggestion? Run the Early Access on Directx11. It is just more stable at this point and offers a fluid experience.
I went in prepared for some glitches and bugs in the game, so these stutters did not really ruin my gameplay experience. Once I switch to Direct11, the game was silky smooth for me. Baldur’s Gate 3 is certainly a demanding game and you will need a pretty solid build if you want to play the game with its full visual fidelity. You can always reduce the visuals to play it on lower-spec machines as well however I am sure that with future optimizations, the final build will have much lower with its resource consumption. The game also weighs at a massive 80GB currently which means that you will need to empty quite a bit of space if you are running low on space at this point. Considering the fact that Larian has to add most of the game at this point, this size could eventually go up in the future.
Baldur’s Gate 3 might be in Early Access at this point, but it has blown me away with almost everything. While I will acknowledge that there are a lot of problems with the client at this point and chances are that your game will crash a lot but we can certainly look past these problems and glitches considering the fact that the Early Access version offers a gigantic world filled with activities, battles, NPCs to meet and greet and tons and tons of quests. I still have to explore a major part of the game at this point, but I am still very impressed with the direction that Larian Studios has gone with Baldur’s Gate 3. The full release might be pretty far at this point but the solid gameplay and plethora of content in the Early Access version are enough to keep you occupied for a long time. I am certainly looking forward to the full release of the title and if you are a fan of classic RPGs with tons of content, I will highly recommend that you jump in Baldur’s Gate 3 as well.
