First Impressions: BALDUR'S GATE III Has Great Potential

Baldur’s Gate III is now available in Early Access for fans to start playing the exciting experience. Google was kind enough to supply me with a copy through Stadia, and I thought I’d share my thoughts so far. What has your experience been like so far?

First things first, you do not need to have played the first two Baldur’s Gate games in order to know what’s going on in this one. So far, this has been a completely standalone experience. However, if you like the play style of those first two games, you’ll feel mostly at home. One thing to keep in mind is that the actual rules of the game have changed and been updated to use Dungeons & Dragons 5E instead of AD&D. This means that people who started playing D&D more recently will have a much better grasp of how the game works since it’s basically you controlling an entire party (or playing with friends online) with the game serving as the DM.

Next, let’s talk about character creation. Right now, there are still some limits as to what characters you can create (this is Early Access after all), but there are a bunch of options still. I honestly don’t have any real problems here. I did think the color samples didn’t really look representative, especially for the blues. I thought I found a nice deep blue for my character, but then it looked more purple than I wanted when applied to the skin. Other than that, when I went to design the one that I love, or whatever they say, the boobs on females were so ridiculously perky. They’re very unnatural. Finally, I was a little sad in the limited voice selection. There are two male voices (neither of them super deep) and two female voices. Other than that, I thought the character creator is in a great spot.

Now let’s talk about the actual game. The story so far is fairly intriguing. I will warn people that there are some pretty gruesome scenes in this game. This includes watching a worm climb past an eye into the eye socket of a character. You then basically move characters via point and click mechanics. I did run into the problem where after combat, my camera would freeze. I could still move my characters, but my camera wouldn’t follow them. Eventually it would unfreeze, but it was definitely annoying. This also happened once without a combat being involved, so I definitely hope that they go in and fix that.

Overall, the game doesn’t feel too impressive right now, but it does have a lot of potential. I haven’t experienced this yet, but I have seen others talk about how ridiculously high some DCs are for some actions. Also, the graphics look great, although there was a lot more clipping than I expected. If you don’t mind serving as a tester for Baldur’s Gate III and provide feedback, go ahead and grab it. If you’re wanting a nice polished product, you’ve gotta wait longer.