Review: Baldur's Gate 3
| Author: | Brian Powell Jr |
| Date: | January 14, 2024 11:34:00 pm EST |
| Last Updated: | June 3, 2024 11:27:01 pm EDT |
| Read Time: | 5 min read |
| Tags: |
Game Details
| Genre | Developer | Publisher | Release Date | Reviewer's Sentiments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RPG | Larian Studios | Larian Studios | 2023-08-03 | Recommended |
Summary
Baldur’s Gate 3 is the third installment in the Baldur’s Gate franchise from Larian Studios. The game is a video game rendition of an original Dungeons and Dragons adventure. I liked the deep RPG systems in the game, but there were a few game design issues that made me struggle with liking it at times. Overall, this game is worth playing if you are interested in Dungeons and Dragons and love playing RPGs. However, I am a little confused how this game won 2023 Game of the Year when it has some poor design choices with autosaving, multiplayer, the in-game camera, and character movement.
Gameplay
Baldur’s Gate 3 features a deep RPG system in that your character’s race, class, gear, and current situation all impact your success at certain events (Skill Checks). In traditional Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a Skill Check is an event where you roll a die (usually a 20-sided one) to determine if the action you want to perform is a success or a failure. Failure’s aren’t necessarily a bad thing in that it will physically harm you, but it will prevent you from learning more about a situation (i.e., conversation, traps/environment, etc.). For events that you have the proper stats for performing the task, it gives you a difficulty level of 10. For events that you’re less suited for, the difficulty level goes higher (increasing the odds of a failure).
The main gameplay loop can be played in two ways: turn-based mode or what I’m going to call hybrid mode. In “hybrid” mode, you can freely move your character when out of combat, but when combat begins it switches to turn-based mode with the order of moves determined by your initiation roll at the start. In combat, it’s your typical turn-based action game mechanics. I like to compare Baldur’s Gate 3 to games like XCOM. You have a finite amount of action points for each character that can be used during their turn. When the character attacks they have a chance of the attack landing or missing. As an added layer, from the D&D universe, when a effect is to being applied to your character there is a Saving Throw (automatic) event that determines if the status ailment is applied to you or is resisted.
Design Issues
Some issues I took with the design of Baldur’s Gate 3 are: the autosave feature, the implementation of co-op/multiplayer, the in-game camera perspective and the movement controls. My biggest issue with the autosave feature in the game is that it activates what felt like sporadically. While I was adventuring, I ended up in combat with some Phase Spiders and my entire party died. When presented with the option to load my previous autosave it showed it was from 40 minutes ago whereas the one before that was about 10 minutes prior. This really deflated me and more or less made me want to put the game down for the day. This was like a time I was playing Skyrim and after wandering around in the wilderness for about 2 hours I died and lost those 2 hours. I don’t really understand the point of having the autosave feature in it’s current implementation as it’s really just a checkpoint system.
The issue with co-op/multiplayer is two-fold. First, if a friend joins your game they are a permanent part of your 4-person party for the rest of the game. It wouldn’t be a big deal if I could remove them from the party and have my friends character sit at camp. Supposedly, Larian are working on a solution to this issue at the time of writing this review. The second issue with the multiplayer is that your friends can take items from your inventory without a confirmation dialogue. Luckily, when this happened I was playing with a long-time friend. Needless to say, we were both surprised that someone could just do that. What is more concerning is that your characters gold sits in their inventory so in theory someone could just take all of your money. Though, since the characters are isolated to that game instance it’s a moot point.
The camera controls in Baldur’s Gate 3 were rather annoying to use. They do give you several controls for altering the camera. Using the mouse wheel you can change it from an isometric view to a third-person view kind of like what you’d get in games like Mass Effect. Using the keyboard, you can rotate and pan (translate) the camera. All that being said, I find it hard to have a good camera angle and the camera controls are necessary with how cluttered the game world is.
Movement in Baldur’s Gate 3 felt very clunky. You click and hold with the mouse to move your character with how fast they move being dependent on how far away the cursor is from the character. This is a similar design implementation used in Diablo IV and player’s generally hated it. In this game it’s no different. I would have preferred a toggle key for if I wanted my character to run or walk. This is also made worse by the camera angles in that you are trying to move, but then your character walks up to a party member and decides to initiate a conversation with them.
Final Thoughts
I recommend Baldur’s Gate 3 for fans of RPGs, but it’s a very lukewarm recommendation. For me, the game tries so hard to provide a deep D&D experience that it makes me scratch my head about some of the issues I encountered while playing it. Some of the issues I have are fairly standard feature sets to a game, but here they seemed poorly implemented. Going into this I had high expectations with it winning Game of the Year in 2023, but I left thinking it’s just a typical RPG with a D&D twist. Baldur’s Gate 3 tries really hard to be a deep D&D video game experience, but leaves more to be desired with the game design.