Baldur’s Gate 3 is a Masterpiece

2023 has been a crazy good year for gaming. Hi-Fi Rush, Resident Evil 4 Remake, Street Fighter 6, Tears of the Kingdom, Pikmin 4, Armored Core VI, Lies of P, Payday 3, Dead Space Remake, Sea of Stars, Final Fantasy XVI, and the upcoming Spider-Man 2, it’s legitimately insane how many incredible games we’ve been getting! This is the best year we’ve had in ages, without a doubt!

Yet somehow, even with all that competition, Baldur’s Gate 3 managed to make the biggest splash of them all. But I guess it shouldn’t be surprising. This game is genuinely phenomenal!

The plot is simple. You and your party are abducted by Mind Flayers and infected with an Illithid parasite. Now you must adventure across the Sword Coast to the city of Baldur’s Gate in search of a cure before you’re transformed into a monster! But there are more to these parasites than meets the eye.

Reviewing the plot of this game is a tricky endeavor. Namely because the plot is going to change dramatically from playthrough to playthrough. Literally every decision you make matters, be it in small or major ways. For god’s sake, this game has over 17,000 ending variations!

Of course, none of that would matter if the writing wasn’t any good. Thankfully, Baldur’s Gate 3 has some truly phenomenal storytelling!

Its companions are easily its strongest part. Each one of them has an insane amount of depth and personality. They react naturally to your actions as a player. Go all-in on being a bad guy? Your morally pure party members might leave you or attack you! Cheat on your romantic partner? Some might be okay with it, others might not. They’re all so well-written that you can actually forego creating a character and play as them, which gives you unique cutscenes and dialogue you wouldn’t otherwise get!

There’s even a super-dark evil mode! Play as the Dark Urge, and you’ll be presented with grim options and story beats that aren’t present in a normal playthrough. Do you go all-in and embrace your Urge? Or do you fight it and try to be a hero? Once again, it’s entirely up to you. No matter what you choose, you’re in for a fun time.

It’s actually crazy how much freedom you have in the story. No two playthroughs of this game are going to look exactly the same. It’s all up to you.

Visually speaking, this game is gorgeous. All of the environments are *chef’s kiss* beautiful, from the Druid’s Grove to the Underdark to lively streets of Baldur’s Gate. Oh, and the conversations? Those aren’t all pre-canned animations; a good number of them are motion captured, and they add so much to the performances!

By the way, the voice actors are phenomenal. Especially Neil Newbon as Astarion. Oh, and did I mention that one of the main villains is voiced by the man, the myth, the legend himself: J.K. Simmons? This cast is a powerhouse!

And the music! Dear God, this OST is phenomenal! There’s a boss track that is sung by the boss himself like it’s a Disney musical and it’s incredible! Not only that, but the music will actually change depending on how a battle is going; when you kill a tough enemy, the OST swells in triumph, and when one of your party drops, it becomes more urgent!

Finally, we have the game itself. Which is really just 5e Dungeons and Dragons with a few minor changes and tweaks here and there. Seriously, it’s almost one to one with the tabletop game.

You have almost complete creative freedom in how you play this game. How you build your character, how you approach combat or exploration, it’s up to you. Do you build a silver-tongued Bard and talk your way out of everything? Do you build a walking tank of a Paladin that smites everything into oblivion? Do you place red barrels all over the place and blow everything sky high? Whatever you imagine, chances are you can do it!

Multiclassing is legitimately incredible in this game! There are so many fun and cool combinations you could create! If you wanted, you could multiclass into every single class in the game at once! There’s a god damn achievement for doing that!

Combat in this game is as addictive as crack! It’s a turn-based tactical game that offers just as much freedom in battle as it does everywhere else! People have already beaten the game at level one by getting super creative with spells and abilities. Some crazy bastards have beaten the game using SALAMI!!!

Fights aren’t always just ‘kill everything in sight’, either. Many encounters have unique mechanics that you need to work around and overcome. Goblin kids running away to get reinforcements to attack you? Gotta stop them! Hag lit the wooden cage on fire, threatening to kill the person you came there to save? Either kill the hag as fast as possible or find a way to extinguish the flames! From normal fights to bosses, there’s always something new in every fight!

Oh, and did I mention that there are a few bosses you can talk into killing themselves? Because that’s the funniest shit I’ve ever seen!

By the way: you can play the game in co-op. Not just online, either. This game’s got split-screen! If you want to burn the Sword Coast to the ground with a buddy or three, you can!

All of this combines to make Baldur’s Gate 3 one of the most free and addictive games I’ve ever played! It’s a sandbox that offers near complete freedom for the player! This is a masterpiece, through and through!

Until Act 3.

This is where the game’s issues start to make themselves known. Act 3 is noticeably less polished than the first two acts. Yes, Baldur’s Gate itself is amazing; this is one of the most lively and populated cities I’ve ever seen in a video game! But it’s hard to appreciate that when the glitches go rampant, the performance tanks, and the map takes ten minutes to load in.

Do I think Act 3 ruins the game? Absolutely not! I don’t even think it’s bad! It just needs more polish. And with how good Larian’s post-launch support for this game, and all their previous titles, has been, I have no doubt it will eventually be patched to meet its true potential.

Even with that, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a masterpiece. It deserves every last bit of the hype. In a world riddled with microtransactions, battle passes, and live-service games, it stands as a golden pillar, irrefutable proof that video games aren’t dead yet. As soon as I finished it, I wanted to go right back in and play it again, and that’s exactly what I did!

In fact, I think I’m gonna go play more of it right now! Bye, everyone!