Baldur's Gate Wows Despite its Edges

Okay, maybe it's passe to be writing about Baldur's Gate 3 a solid month after its release, but I wanted to beat the game before I settled on my thoughts as the game was sometimes extremely polarizing for me. I'll keep spoilers out of this one since it's still new.

For those living without the internet (but who are able to see this blog post over the shoulder of an unsuspecting coffee shop patron), Baldur's Gate is an isometric turn-based RPG in the style of a D&D campaign using most of the mechanics of D&D faithfully. The game comes complete with a player character; your choice of just under a dozen playable party members across the campaign that you can mix-and-match for your four-person team; and no shortage of romance options regardless of orientation. Or occasionally bestial proclivity...

Baldur's Gate has been hailed as a masterpiece of the modern era, but as someone who doesn't usually enjoy D&D, I wanted to see if it lived up to the hype from a design standpoint. To my surprise, it mostly did.

The good: There's lots of meat to talk about here. The overall plot is great. It's a fairly standard structure for a D&D adventure, but the story has enough curves, surprises, and mysteries that it remains captivating throughout. One of my biggest complaints with RPGs is that many have middling central stories that I don't feel invested in from the start, favoring all the side quests instead. Baldur's Gate managed to keep the central quest a pressing concern at almost all times in a way that felt satisfying mostly without taking away from the side quests.

The characters are excellent. Really top notch. There are so many games, shows, movies, and books where many of the characters are bland, uninspired, hard to differentiate, and/or hard to remember. Baldur's Gate's roster is full of interesting characters with truly unique voices that give me emotions (even if that emotion sometimes translates into the urge to punch Astarion).

The dialogue is juicy and realistic. It's a shame not to hear the player character voice their lines outside of normal exploration, but I realize the amount of voice acting in the game would have doubled from that choice. That said, what we got is still amazing. All of the characters feel like they have a strong sense of voice that's accurate to how one would expect given their respective personalities.

The gear is varied and generally robust, offering a number of pathways to build characters and play in interesting, diverse ways (some of which are absurdly cool).

The classes largely feel well-balanced and interesting. I often ran into enemies who used abilities I coveted, then found myself swapping classes and trying out all the options. There's even an NPC who lets you re-spec for a VERY cheap flat rate all game!

The sound design and music are crisp and enjoyable without being overbearing.

But more than anything else, the game FEELS fun. I couldn't put it down by the end of Act 1. I wanted to see what would happen- I wanted to get into fights- I wanted to find all the secrets. The game felt rewarding. That's a hard-to-quantify trait that MOST games never manage to display. I suspect it's a combination of juiciness from all the good qualities mixed with the addicting knowledge that anything could be around the next corner (and the confidence that it'll be satisfying).

That having been said, this game has some sore spots that I'd be remiss not to mention. Some of them being very sore.

The game doesn't accurately let you know how often you can (and should) use the long rest system, given the sense of urgency in the plot. (Hint: it's whenever you want with a few VERY limited exceptions) That's a problem since it's such a core mechanic to D&D.

The game is unforgiving in its obtuse nature. There's so much damn stuff to keep in mind and the game's UI doesn't really try very hard to remind you of it. The result is either meticulous record-keeping of your abilities and available items/buffs or else playing a very sub-optimal run. The mechanics are also often unintuitive or unclear in how they mesh together, specifically when it comes to exact damage calculations, feat interactions, and how certain attack types (like thrown weapons) work.

Speaking of the UI, it's hard to bear. It and the inventory management and the general UX itself are all cluttered with few ways to easily or conveniently customize elements. For inventory management, the stacking and sorting options are limited. You can't swap any items between characters outside of your party, which means you have to kick someone out of your party, put the other person in, move an item, and then do it again in reverse. It's unbearable. It sounds like this is a common Larian Studios problem, however.

There's a wide breadth of romance options at the cost of depth to all of them. You can romance anyone, and it feels like the flirty build-up is all just based on whether or not you did a couple things they liked while exploring/talking to people. Each option feels inauthentic thanks to the system's flexibility in catering to the player no matter what. My initial playthrough didn't have Halsin (the druid) in my party at all. I never once used him, so he never had a chance to approve or disapprove of anything I did. Despite that, he wants to chat with me one night and starts telling me about just how special I am and how he almost never feels like that about a person. Really takes away from the organic sense of romance.

The early game is rough. I mean really rough. The first three levels or so have all of your characters swinging their weapons with what's often a 50/50 chance to hit a given enemy. I've said this about D&D and it still holds true here: missing isn't fun. Missing a few times in a row can sometimes end in a cascade of injuries and deaths just because the game decided you whiffed a few coinflips. In a game where you're supposed to be taking whatever happens and dealing with it (rather than loading a previous save whenever anything goes wrong), this kind of inaccuracy feels hard to justify. Which brings us to our next point:

The game has so many moments that really encourage you to quicksave and reload. In no small part because it loudly tells you when you've missed something since everyone in your party has to fail the same check for, say, noticing a button on a wall. The fear that you might be missing something significant discourages a "play the hand you're dealt" run. Though I will give the game credit- its approach to death is refreshingly casual for a D&D campaign. You get dozens of revive scrolls and an NPC will always revive a character for a meager sum. This at least makes rough fights feel a little less frustrating. There's a character you can eventually recruit in Act 2, but the game really goes out of its way to encourage you to kill them, refusing to give any hints about that possibility at the time.

Despite the game's strong dialogue and focus on roleplay, the main character often has a shockingly limited number of dialogue options that are specific enough as to suck you out of the moment. I found myself wishing for additional dialogue options constantly. It doesn't help that many decisions result in consequences that feel totally divorced from other parts of the game. I can say something terribly offensive to Shadowheart, but because she otherwise liked me, she'll turn around and sweet talk me seconds later. So many of my early game decisions felt like they should have come back in some capacity to be mentioned or referenced, but very few of them actually did end up mattering in the long run outside of changing very specific character interactions.

There are a couple fights that are nigh impossible under certain circumstances in Act 1, which feels awful if you run into it. I spent an hour in my first playthrough thinking that I was supposed to be able to win a fight against some seven raiders with a party of two at the very beginning. I'd fallen into a tomb and tried forever to play the hand I was dealt, but even as a pretty hardcore gamer, I couldn't figure out a way to do more than kill a few of them each time before we were overrun. It turns out, you can easily miss three different companions prior to that event if you take a single wrong turn.

This is a design nitpick of mine too, but many of the game's feats, gear, and spells are underpowered or boring. There are feats that increase your damage output by 20-50% depending on class and weapon type, but there's also a feat that lets you heal more during a short rest, which is almost entirely useless. There's a ton of gear that falls into that trap of being both incredibly niche while also being underpowered. This compared to gear that is universally useful on top of being moderate to high value.

Lastly, there are good criticisms about the game's third act, which has all of the companion plotlines wrap up in a neat little package a little too conveniently all while the pacing feels fairly rushed compared to the first two acts. Additionally, the internet has some justified fervor over one of the companions not getting a satisfying ending. There are character choices that make no sense in context of their personality up to that point in service of hitting the ending and just getting the campaign over with.

I'd still call the game a remarkable project in size, scope, and ambition. One that even mostly succeeds in its goals! But it's definitely marred by some rough edges that feel prickly when you bump into them. Which is often. That won't stop me from enjoying the smooth edges though!