Review: There's Plenty To Enjoy in BALDUR'S GATE 3, But it Still Has Some Kinks to Work Out
Baldur’s Gate 3 has been the talk of the town since before it left Early Access on August 3, 2023. A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to try out the game on the now defunct Google Stadia as part of Early Access, and it showed a lot of promise. Larian Studios was then gracious enough to give me a PC code when the game left Early Access, and I was quick to download it. While I was given a code, all the thoughts below are my own. You can play Baldur’s Gate 3 now through Steam or on PS5 starting September 6 (sorry Xbox players).
Before I get too far into my review, I want to share my PC specs:
CPU: Ryzen 9 5900X
GPU: Radeon 6800 XT
RAM: 32GB DDR4 @ 3600MT/s
SSD: Samsung EVO 970 1TB NVMe
To put things bluntly, I’ve had a nightmare of a time with Baldur’s Gate 3. For the first several days trying to play, I could only play for about 20-30 minutes at a time before it would cause my system to hard crash. Looking online, I’m not the only one who ran into similar problems. After much experimentation and working with friends to try to troubleshoot it, I found that I had to cap the framerate to approximately 80fps and use DirectX 11. This was a very frustrating experience that really soured things. I saw so many friends and others on the internet talking about how much they loved the game, yet for some reason it took me several days to find a way to play the game.
Unfortunately, my frustrations didn’t stop with the frame cap fix. I finally got things sorted out and I was excited to try out the split screen multiplayer experience with my wife. At first, it seemed amazing. It was really easy to get her in the game and we had fun playing together. The problem occurred the next time that I went to play the game. I found out the hard way that once another player joins your adventuring party, they cannot be removed. WHAT THE HECK!? There was no way for me to dismiss my wife’s character so that I could add another NPC. This should not be how it works. Even if the game doesn’t automatically kick them, the game should provide an option to leave the player character at camp like NPCs. At the very least, the game should provide a warning that the player character will be permanent.
My final major critique of Baldur’s Gate 3 is the mostly silent player character. During the character creation process you are able to select a voice for your character which is great. Unfortunately, the character doesn’t get to speak a lot. During dialogue, you select from a list of options, but then like in an old RPG, the other characters just respond. I really wish that we could have gotten performances of the player characters actually speaking with the other characters. In my opinion, it reminds me of some of my favorite games from decades gone by, but in a bad way.
I’ll keep my minor complaints to a minimum. These are things that don’t really detract from the score, but they could have really helped push it over the top. First, I always wanted more fanfare from Critical Successes and Critical Misses. They really feel like any other roll just with the word “Critical” added on top. Second, if you use a controller, there have been a number of times where it felt clunky trying to move around the world. This could be just from general clunkiness or from not feeling clear on if I could climb some piece of terrain or something else. Finally, I wish that there was an official way to use WASD to move your character like an RPG instead of relying on clicking when using a mouse and keyboard.
Ok, that’s enough negativity. While I definitely have my complaints about the game, there’s plenty to enjoy. First, despite the fact that Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t using the most recent graphics technology, it looks really nice. The characters and environments look really nice if you can utilize the high graphical settings on your machine. The spells also look really nice too and the animations help you feel like something magical is happening. I know that the team is working on integrating FSR 2.0 (should’ve been a part of the launch build in my opinion) and that should be a great boon, but I hope that they continue to work on bringing more advanced technology to the game like ray tracing.
Next, the music and sound design has been immaculate so far. The background music is solid and while I wouldn’t say it’s something I’d blast in my car, it fits the game very well and adds to the experience. Likewise, the sounds of attacks, spells, and even movement all add to it as well. The voice acting is particularly solid as well although as I previously mentioned, I wish the player character had more of it. Having a word for the different spells was also a nice touch. I know that many spells in Dungeons & Dragons have vocal components, but rarely have my groups really done much with it. In Baldur’s Gate 3, the characters say something with it such as “Ignis!” for Fire Bolt. It does add a nice layer of detail.
The character creation process in Baldur’s Gate 3 is quite extensive and I like it. You have to select your race, class, appearance, background, etc. When you go to adjust your character’s appearance, there are so many options for some fields, but it also doesn’t feel overwhelming like other recent games in my opinion. I also like how some of the options change based on what race you choose. If you choose Dragonborn, it makes sense that you don’t have hair, but it lets you customize your scales and horns instead. It’s little things like that to solidify a positive experience. I was surprised to see that the Alchemist is not an option and not all subclasses are present as you reach those levels. I hope this is additional content that they bring to the game in the future.
What about minor praises? They definitely exist. First, I love that this game has split-screen multiplayer! That is very nice and now that I know that those characters are permanent, I think I’ll just start a new game with my wife from the beginning. Even though Baldur’s Gate 3 is literally a video game version of Dungeons & Dragons, it does implement every table’s favorite house rule: consuming potions is a bonus action! This really helps the game. You can also do area of effect heals by throwing a healing potion near a group of allies which is pretty fun, although that does require a full action. I also appreciate how you start the game with a couple of potions and a scroll of revivify.
At the end of the day, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a very solid game if you like Dungeons & Dragons and I wanted to score it higher. Unfortunately, the frustrations of trying to get the game to work for an extended period of time, the inability to remove player characters from your party in a multiplayer scenario, and the lack of the player character actually performing during dialogue do drag the game down for me. Granted, these are mostly things that Larian Studios could address in patches and updates. It still is a pretty game that sounds great and can provide hours upon hours of fun.
