Baldur’s Gate 3 is hands-down one of the best top down RPG video games to come out in a long time. Created by Larian Studios, the masterminds behind Divinity Original Sin 2, this game allows you to do pretty much anything that you can think of. The game seemingly has an unlimited number of ways to tackle situations and build characters; players are only limited by their own imagination.
Larian Studios’ take on the world of Dungeons and Dragons is truly breathtaking. From the very beginning, players are given the ultimate freedom on how to experience their adventure. With 12 classes and 46 subclasses to choose from, the world of D&D Baldur’s Gate 3 hands the player complete autonomy before the game even truly starts.
Player’s choice is what makes Baldur’s Gate 3 so compelling. Whether you decide to protect a druid grove from a horde of goblins or side with the goblins yourself and slaughtering the residents, the choice is almost always yours. These kinds of decisions carry weight as well. Each decision a player makes can result in gaining or losing companions, gaining permanent character buffs, and even changing the final outcome of the story.
But when it comes to video games, gameplay is the most important and the gameplay here carries the theme of players choice within it. There are essentially three elements of gameplay that are experienced here: exploration, story, and combat.
During exploration players are encouraged to check every nook and cranny of the game world. Not only can exploring lead to new treasures that may have been left unnoticed, but players can also find new paths to specific locations or even clues to solving puzzles and quests. But even then, exploration is truly open-ended with almost a million ways to tackle any situation.
Say, for example, your party of four needs to scale down a cliff, but simply jumping will kill your entire party. If you have a wizard, they could cast feather fall and your party could jump safely, or your druid could shapeshift into a spider and shoot a web for the rest of your party to jump onto, or each member of your party could cast misty step and could essentially teleport down the cliff face. Like in the tabletop game, the possibilities are essentially endless.
Player choice carries over into the story of the game as well. Many times, top-down turn-based rpg stories can be a bit lackluster, taking a backseat to the gameplay in favor of combat. But in Baldur’s Gate 3 the story is very well written. Players find themselves infected with a mind flayer tadpole and must do everything that they can to remove it before turning into a mindflayer themselves.
As the game progresses, the story unravels in ways that seem unpredictable with players uncovering a plot that threatens the entire world. In addition to the overarching main story, there are dozens and dozens of side quests for characters to complete that can have long-term consequences depending on their choices. Furthermore, each playthrough gives players the option to recruit 10 main companions who have their own quests as well as romance options.
The final piece of the puzzle is the combat, which is uniquely divine. Combat is essentially ripped straight out of Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition with a few tweaks here and there for balance reasons. But it works astoundingly well, bringing many of the classes, spells and feats from 5e.
Building a character with unique equipment, hundreds of spells, a handful of special story based buffs, and the four character party limit ensures that no two party compositions are entirely the same. The options for players are seemingly endless, and that is what makes the game so much fun.
The only thing that Baldur’s Gate 3 lacks is in the graphics department. While the graphics are passable they are certainly nothing to write home about. In addition, a few of the cutscenes within the game are janky, and facial animations are a bit stiff. These are two very minor issues in a game that I believe is nearly perfect.
Baldur’s Gate 3 spent two years in Early Access on Steam and developers at other studios were so impressed that they believed customers should not use the game as a new standard for rpgs going forward. The game just keeps on giving: it took me around 70 hours to complete my first playthrough, I did not even complete all the quests the game had to offer. As soon as I finished I started a new playthrough with a new character and a different set of companions.
I am not sure if any turn-based rpg could even touch the new standard that Larian Studios has set with their release of Baldur’s Gate 3. The game is so massive with so many choices that it feels like a gift that just keeps on giving. All hail Baldur’s Gate 3!
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