Baldur's Gate 3 Review (2024)

Baldur’s Gate 2 was hailed as one of the best RPGs of all time in 2000, and a superbly faithful adaptation of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition tabletop role-playing game. It’s still respected as a genre pinnacle more than two decades later. Larian Studios took up the monumental task of creating a sequel, and it has excelled beyond all expectations. Baldur’s Gate 3 ($59.99 for PC, $69.99 for PlayStation 5) is an incredible RPG experience (now based on Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition) that offers an astounding number of choices that wildly affect how each 60-plus-hour playthrough unfolds, with an engine that can handle almost everything you can try to do in D&D. In a year already dense with incredible games like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Street Fighter 6, Baldur’s Gate 3 stands out as one of the best, earning a rare five-star rating and our Editors’ Choice award.

(Credit: Larian Studios)

Roll Your Character

Like all great stories of myths and monsters, Baldur’s Gate 3 starts with your hero in danger beyond comprehension. Apprehended by Cthulhu-like creatures called Mind Flayers, you’re fitted with an illithid creature—lovingly nicknamed The Tadpole—that settles into your brain. Meant to transform you and the other infected into Mind Flayers, the mental time bomb is halted by dimension-hopping red dragons attacking your kidnappers' ship. The resulting destruction frees you from the Mind Flayers' grasp and sends you and your would-be party members hurtling onto the beaches of the Sword Coast, where your journey begins in earnest.

You must create a character before the story begins, and Baldur’s Gate 3’s character creator offers the first taste of the numerous choices you’ll make throughout the adventure. You can select from a handful of premade characters (who would otherwise show up early on as possible party members) or make your own. This involves choosing from one of 10 races (Dragonborn, Drow, Dwarf, Elf, Githyanki, Gnome, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, Halfling, or Tiefling) and 12 classes (Bard, Barbarian, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Warlock, or Wizard). Most races and classes have subclasses or other options, such as Seldarine Drow or Beast Tamer, respectively.

If you create a magic user, you select the starting spells from pools limited by your class, relevant domain, or school. 11 backgrounds (Acolyte, Charlatan, Criminal, Entertainer, Folk Hero, Guild Artisan, Noble, Outlander, Sage, Soldier, or Urchin) give your character two additional skills. You can even tweak your character’s ability points, but the game does a good job of automatically assigning the best stats for your class.

Of course, you can change your character’s appearance. There aren’t extensive sliders for every facial contour like in some games, but most races have a handful of preset faces and body types, with multiple options for eyes, hair, skin color, body art, hairstyles, makeup, and scars. In a nice touch, your creation can be male, female, or non-binary/other, with your choice of identity, voice, and genitals. Baldur's Gate 3 truly lets you shape the character you want to play over its long, wonderful adventure.

(Credit: Larian Studios)

A CRPG That Feels Like a Tabletop Campaign

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a classic-style CRPG, which means you won’t explore the world in either a first-person perspective (like Cyberpunk 2077) or a behind-the-back third-person perspective (like Skyrim or Witcher 3). You’ll mostly look at the world from above, so you can get a thorough view of your party and environment. You can zoom in and out, rotate the view, and pan over a limited area to get a better look at places at a distance from the party. You can also switch to a completely flat, zoomed-out tactical mode.

The click-and-go interface has wildly complex mechanics. Each character’s background, skills, and stats confer to them many potential actions in any situation. Our Tiefling fey touched warlock from the Baldur's Gate city-state had a criminal background, which meant we had a handful of cantrips to cast at any time; proficiency in arcana, deception, and sleight of hand; and contextual knowledge in Tiefling history and culture, the region's politics, and the criminal underworld.

These factors impacted our dialogue and puzzle options. For example, we used our character's criminal knowledge to call out a street hustler running a con, and leveraged our sleight-of-hand ability to detect his pickpocket partner. If we rolled a different character, like the Githyanki fighter Lae’zel, we wouldn’t have any of those approaches available. Instead, we could try to intimidate or use brute force to solve the problems.

(Credit: Larian Studios)

We say “try” because every significant action relies on a dice roll. True to Dungeons & Dragons, Baldur’s Gate 3 requires skill checks. They task you with rolling a virtual 20-sided die, and you must get a higher result than the check’s number to succeed. An incredibly easy action might need a 5 or above, a more difficult check could require a 10 or 15, and an almost impossible check could demand 20. And that’s where all of your character’s attributes come into play. Every skill check relies on a specific stat (strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, or charisma), and depending on that stat you might get a roll bonus or penalty. Your proficiencies, along with situational circ*mstances, can add bonuses. Some items and spells boost the chances in your favor.

Those factors are important when you’re directly interacting with someone or something, but more come into play based on what you did before that interaction. Your choices matter. For instance, who you befriend or alienate opens up or cuts off entire narrative paths. It can be as simple as using a Disguise Self spell to make sure you can speak to a merchant after you try to pickpocket them, or as complicated as negotiating whether Tiefling refugees can stay at a druid circle. Individual characters and entire factions treat you differently depending on what you’ve done, and that will decide whether you can enjoy a friendly parlay or get attacked on sight.

The options capture the spirit of tabletop role-playing games, and Baldur’s Gate 3’s ability to factor so many possibilities into account is technically impressive. Unless you want a character to do something absolutely absurd, the game will probably have a crafted response to most actions, complete with voice acting from even the most minor of NPCs.

(Credit: Larian Studios)

Flexible Combat

Combat is just as flexible and true to Dungeons & Dragons, though much more structured than just running around and interacting with things. When you enter battle, the game switches to a turn-based mode that features every character and creature involved in the scuffle rolling for turn order. Each turn, a participant can move a specific amount of space, make an action, or make a bonus action.

Actions cover making attacks, using skills, and casting spells. Magic-based classes use spells to facilitate fight versatility, but 5th edition D&D has enough systems to make sure physical-focused classes have lots of choices, too. For example, Barbarians and fighters can simply attack, but they can also perform special attacks or use other skills depending on their subclass and weapon (like a rushing strike that can push an opponent back or a targeted shot to make the target bleed). No class is reduced to just “move and hit” every turn.

Bonus actions are extra moves that you can perform even after you’ve made a full action. They can include casting certain minor spells, making certain follow-up attacks, drinking potions, and even jumping to get to a different part of the battlefield. They can ensure your party is in a good position to weather the next turn and any attacks that come with it.

Like Tactics Ogre and X-Com, Baldur's Gate 3 makes you consider distance, height, and angles of attack while moving. There are also many cool environmental interactions, like firing an arrow to break a rope and spill a brazier of burning coals onto enemies. Casting the right spell or even just throwing the right item can turn the tables during conflict.

Fights are challenging, as enemies can do anything your characters can do. Like in tabletop games, you won't win if you rush into battle. You must play thoughtfully and creatively if you want to make progress at the medium (or higher) difficulties.

(Credit: Larian Studios)

A Wide, Deep, Dense Campaign

The game is broken into three acts, each packed to the brim with side quests, characters, and unique areas that span the range of Dungeon & Dragons lore. Featuring missions that range from the ridiculous to the deadly serious, Baldur's Gate 3 made it difficult to say no to any encounter.

And just about every plotline is worth exploring. Saving a goblin trapped in the druid grove gave us easy access to the goblin camps (we would otherwise fight our way into it). Agreeing to solve a murder let us rent out the whole top floor of an inn. We convinced a demon that the only way to break a hex was to kill his followers, his beloved sphinx, and then himself. Like a real D&D game, storylines and their consequences ripple from the start of the campaign to its world-threatening finale.

That’s a testament to Baldur’s Gate 3's narrative scope. The threat of “174 hours of cutscenes” would spell the end for lesser RPGs, but in Baldur’s Gate 3, we craved the next interaction. Your party members, cagey at first, unravel attention-grabbing plotlines worthy of their own adventure. Oftentimes, you must choose to side with one over the other, drawing both the favor and ill will of various party members.

This leads to a realistic dynamic within the group of strangers. We eagerly awaited the next, long rest at camp to unravel another part of a party member's story—or the next chapter in our flash-in-the-pan romance.

The game is also unabashedly sexual in a way that we rarely see in video games. But thanks to the narrative’s excellent pacing, relationships naturally bloom, and the sex—graphic as it may be—never feels p*rnographic or voyeuristic. Oftentimes it’s funny, steamy, awkward, and even a little weird—just like the real thing.

Though the game is extremely worthy of praise, it’s not without faults. Due to its nature, Baldur's Gate 3 makes it easy to accidentally anger the wrong person, or lock yourself out of a potential plot line because you didn’t say the right thing. In addition, the start of Act 3 slams the breaks on the game’s brisk pace, even if it’s just temporary.

(Credit: Larian Studios)

Can Your PC Run Baldur's Gate 3?

To run Baldur’s Gate 3, your PC needs at least an AMD FX 8350 or Intel Core i5 4690 CPU, an AMD RX 480 or Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 GPU (with 4GB of VRAM), 4GB of RAM, and 150GB of SSD storage. We played it on three computers: a tower with an Intel Core i7 10700K CPU and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 GPU, a laptop with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HS CPU and Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 GPU, and a remote gaming PC using Shadow with an AMD Epyc 7543 CPU and Nvidia RTX A4500 (roughly equivalent to an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X and RTX 3070 Ti).

The game ran consistently well on all hardware, with a generally stable 60 frames per second at 1080p and 1440p resolutions (with graphics set to high and DLSS enabled). The frame rate occasionally dipped in dense and busy areas, but it was otherwise smooth.

Baldur’s Gate 3 looks great, too. Whenever you zoom into the action or watch conversations or cutscenes, you’ll see a rich, vivid, and varied scene that’s more detailed and visually interesting than Diablo IV or Hogwarts Legacy.

You can play with either a mouse or a gamepad, and each control method has an advantage. For example, a mouse makes it easier to scroll through radial menus. Meanwhile, a gamepad makes it much simpler to move characters.

Baldur's Gate 3 Lands a Critical Hit

Baldur’s Gate 3 represents a new peak for tabletop-inspired CRPGs. The game's extensive flexibility in the face of countless potential player choices makes it the truest adaptation of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign we’ve ever seen, and its gorgeous presentation brings Faerun to life. It’s the kind of game you can put 60 hours into, beat, and then play again with a different character and have an almost completely different experience. It’s a worthy successor to Baldur’s Gate 2, and an Editors’ Choice winner for RPGs.

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