After 90 hours of fighting, I finally ended my journey in the continent of Faerun.
I have climbed the peak of Baldur’s Gate and stepped into the seabed where the Iron Throne is buried. I have let my sword drink the blood of the red dragon and let my body enjoy the bliss in the ambiguous room.
The vast map, high degree of freedom, wonderful story, and nearly authentic DND rules make exploring the world of Baldur’s Gate 3 a pure enjoyment. And every battle scattered in the world brings a completely different experience.
It also re-established the highest standard of modern CRPG, making this ancient game type no longer too highbrow and accessible to more players. If you like epic stories, pursue a high degree of freedom in gameplay, and can accept turn-based combat, then Baldur’s Gate 3 will definitely be your favorite game this year.
Thousands of choices converge at Baldur’s Gate
You were an unknown adventurer until one day you were abducted by the Mind Flayer and brought to their flying ship.
These monsters, with tentacles all over their faces and resembling Cthulhu, implant mind-controlling bugs into your brain, trying to turn you into a mind flayer and make you their slave.
However, a sudden attack allowed you to escape successfully. You gathered other survivors and sought medical treatment to cure your brain, but you were involved in a conspiracy concerning the survival of the entire Baldur’s Gate… …
At the beginning of the game, the bugs in your brain are like time bombs, urging you to complete various tasks in a race against time like in Dragon Age: Origins. You may not dare to camp and rest because you are afraid that as time passes in the game, you will gradually approach death.
But in fact, you don’t have to worry about it, because a mysterious guardian is always protecting your brain and your companions from deterioration. You will gradually find that your time is not urgent, and you can often rest in the camp and chat with your companions.
However, this guardian is urging you to use the power of the bugs to absorb the Mind Flayer tadpoles in other people for your own use. This will evolve your brain, allowing you to gain a lot of powerful skills and become a being close to a god, but perhaps you will also doubt: Will I, who have been transformed by the bugs, one day become a monster like the Mind Flayer and lose myself?
Whether to embrace this dangerous power is just one of the hundreds of choices that Baldur’s Gate 3 offers you. As the epitome of CRPG, Baldur’s Gate 3 has incredible plot freedom. Regardless of the main line or the branch line, there are many completely different ways to complete it.
You can choose to be a good person and uphold justice, or you can turn to evil and turn the tables at any time. The game has no moral values and good and evil design, and it also downplays the concept of the nine camps in traditional DND. Unless you are a paladin who always needs to be on guard against breaking your oath, you can always sit on the fence between good and evil, just to pursue the greatest benefit.
When facing enemies, you can certainly fight them head-on, but you can also sneak up on them and defeat them one by one, or solve the problem by talking nonsense, or even by some unconventional and unorthodox means. The game will never limit your imagination, nor will it criticize your way of solving problems. You will never fail in the true sense. Even if you fail the test when rolling the dice, there must be other ways to go – perhaps a mechanism, or a deeply hidden code.
Although your main quests often have clear objectives, the specific methods of completion are confusing. You may know that you need to find the “Night Song” and go to the “Moonrise Tower”, but where to find it, how to find it, and how to break through the restrictions of the Shadow Curse on the map all require you to discover it yourself.
This makes the main and side quests of Baldur’s Gate 3 blend together almost seamlessly, weaving a large narrative web. Your choice is likely to cause ripples in the entire story web, changing the links in other quests, just like what happened in Fallout: New Vegas.
After you have spent many days and nights on the continent of Faerun, the unique charm of Baldur’s Gate will gradually reveal itself to you. You will witness the struggle between light and darkness between the two gods Selûne and Shar, and appreciate the turmoil and chaos spread in the world by the three gods of death, Baal, Bane, and Melkor. You may even meet some old acquaintances from the first two generations of Baldur’s Gate, and see that they have become living legends today.
Most of the people you helped and saved in the first chapter of the game will come back to Baldur’s Gate in the third chapter, allowing you to see the corresponding results of your choices in the game, and even lead to a completely different direction for the story.
Of course, the ones whose fates are most affected by you are the companions closest to you. They may have been legendary wizards, famous monster hunters, or vampire followers, but beneath their powerful appearances, they all have confused hearts. Your guidance will determine whether they are bewitched by power, fame, and fanaticism, or whether they can find their true selves and establish a strong bond with you, or become your lovers and loved ones.
Companions, friends, allies… …all will gather again in the city of Baldur’s Gate and become your fighting force to save the continent of Faerun. When you look back suddenly, you will find that your past has long been woven into a magnificent heroic epic, and together with many great names, it has become a part of the legend of the continent of Faerun.
Authentic yet uncomplicated role-playing
Although “Baldur’s Gate 3” is a CRPG based on DND rules, even if you don’t understand DND at all and have never played a CRPG, you can still get started easily.
This is all thanks to its efforts in the official version to accommodate more players: it does not try to instill a huge system under a heavy world view in you from the beginning, but helps you enter the game as simply and directly as possible. It also replaces the less intuitive text paragraphs in CRPG with a large number of animation scenes, and compresses the tutorial that opens on the spiral ship, allowing players to quickly enter the more essential part of the first chapter with a large map.
When exploring the big map, you can play it as The Witcher 3, and when entering the battle, you can treat it as a turn-based chess game similar to XCOM. It can be said that as long as you don’t reject the turn-based system, then Baldur’s Gate has almost no threshold for you, which is one of the reasons why it has become so popular and even broke the circle.
Of course, if you want to become more proficient in the game system, then in-depth study of the DND rules becomes a compulsory course for you.
Fortunately, the 5E rules adopted by Baldur’s Gate 3 are much simpler than the previously popular 3R rules, and the village rules formulated by Larian on this basis also allow players to not worry about some complicated rules (such as camp changes) and focus more on the content of the game itself.
Baldur’s Gate 3 provides players with many mechanisms that can enhance the immersion of role-playing. When you negotiate with others or perform attribute checks, a classic 20-sided die will appear on the screen, and you will manually roll it to determine the final result. When you choose a dialogue that matches your identity and background, it will be judged by the system as an excellent role-playing behavior, and you will be given incentive points and experience as a reward for re-rolling the dice.
What is even more commendable is that Baldur’s Gate 3 is working hard to further integrate interactive real-life logic into the game.
When we encounter an insurmountable cliff in other RPG games, we usually choose to take a detour, but this is not the case in Baldur’s Gate 3. You can try to jump to another cliff not far away, or let the mage cast the feather fall spell that is immune to falling damage and jump directly from the cliff.
Similarly, when you find a difficult treasure house password door, you can follow the game’s instructions and try to find the note with the password like other puzzle games and enter it honestly. But you can also get inspiration from other limited hints and use water + electricity spells to short-circuit the password door, so as to solve the puzzle with ingenuity.
Of course, you can also use rockets to ignite grease to cause a huge explosion on the enemy, or use freezing rays to turn water into ice to make the enemy fall, just like in Divinity: Original Sin 2 – although under the DND rules, the oil created by grease is not real oil – but Larian’s village rules do make the whole game more fun.
Deep and interesting combat
The combat part of Baldur’s Gate 3 is as good as its role-playing content. There are no random repetitive monsters, and each battle is carefully designed so that you will never feel bored or monotonous.
Many times, the game has already planted the seeds of the weak defeating the strong in the scene for you in advance. As long as you have a keen eye, you can successfully use them. They may be a barrel of fire wine that can explode, or a high ground that helps you gain a long-range attack advantage, or a terrible trap that provides terrain killing, or even a candlestick that allows you to dip in flames to enhance the damage of your weapon… …
Thanks to the stealth gameplay and the turn-based design that can be entered at any time, you can create unusual ways of playing in many plot battles. For example, you can have the whole team sneak on standby, and then use only one team member to enter the plot dialogue or battle with the BOSS, and then take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to let others buff each other and launch a round of fatal first attack bombing, or go deep behind enemy lines and secretly rescue the NPC held hostage by the enemy.
Unlike CRPGs like Pathfinder that focus on character building, Baldur’s Gate 3 does not have a dazzling upgrade page, and is also very friendly to novices. If you choose a simple and crude profession like a warrior or a barbarian, you only need to simply select a branch school and check a specialty to have a good character strength.
Of course, if you want to build a stronger character school, you can also choose to play multiple professions. Larian provides many designs to encourage players to play multiple professions, such as the damage of tricks, which is calculated according to the player’s total professional level, rather than a single main profession. This makes it possible to create a super powerful magic explosion machine of warlock + warlock + wanderer – a terrifying round of 9 magic explosions is enough to scare all enemies.
Studying the build combinations of different part-time professions also became an important source of fun for me in the later stages. I tried to upgrade Kalak to a combination of Berserker + Paladin + Warrior, creating a killing machine with blazing swords; I also tried to upgrade Shadowheart to a Paladin + Warlock, turning him into a powerful auxiliary with thick armor, high health, and the ability to perform magic explosion.
Unfortunately, Larian locked the level cap of all characters at only level 12. This not only restricted the depth of character construction to a certain extent, but also caused a lot of experience overflow in the late game.
Although limited by the world view of DND, Baldur’s Gate 3 may not allow adventurers to reach level 20 and become god-like beings, but in terms of gameplay, Larian can consider using other mechanisms to reuse the large amount of experience points wasted in the later stages, such as converting them into expertise points or spell slots, instead of the current situation. Whenever I see an enemy in the later stages, I feel a headache – because there is really no benefit worth mentioning from fighting such a difficult battle.
However, Larian’s caution with numbers has indeed kept the combat experience of the entire game at an excellent level.
The “Pathfinder” series is also a modern CRPG. Every time the player’s stats increase rapidly, the monsters’ combat power also increases rapidly. The extremely high AC (armor level) and immunity make some early spells quickly useless.
But Baldur’s Gate 3 is different. Early magic skills such as Tasha’s Laughter and Human Hold can still play a vital role in the later stages of the game. Larian does not try to blindly increase the difficulty of the enemy, but tries to find ways to help players fight happily and make all the spells in your hand come in handy. Many small monsters standing closely in the battle are just like “throw fireballs at my face”.
Of course, you will never lack challenges in your journey in Baldur’s Gate 3. Enemies often use strategies to make up for their lack of attributes. They will focus on attacking squishy characters, try every means to push your characters off cliffs, or use spells to accurately attack your weak spots (for example, using slow spells to directly destroy a warrior who can hit three people in one round). In some very difficult battles in the late game, if you force your way through without any strategy, even four characters of the highest level will be chopped into pieces by the enemy in a few seconds.
Sometimes, you even feel that the enemy is too smart – even the stupid goblins and the unintelligent golems use the same highly intelligent AI. Your heavy armored warriors with high AC are often ignored by the enemy, and the people who suffer the most damage in each battle are the mages. Even if they are shivering in a corner far away from the battlefield, they will still be chopped down by the enemy who comes from afar. This makes people feel a little unreasonable.
In addition, some performance issues of Baldur’s Gate 3 were also magnified during the battle. During my play, it was often the case that an enemy’s turn would freeze, or an NPC ally would be in a daze and not attack. Especially when the game was approaching the final battle, an abnormal bug caused my frame rate to drop to only about 10 frames, and even moving the camera was very difficult, which made a battle that should have been exciting, as stuck as a PPT and difficult to play.
Have some romance in your spare time
Finally, we have to mention the romance system that made Baldur’s Gate 3 famous before its release.
Although the character creation interface allows you to customize the settings of private parts, which makes me look forward to the romantic part of the game, in fact, the romantic relationship in the game is not so “free”. In most cases, you can only build a romantic relationship with your teammates, and only when you have carefully completed the personal story of a teammate and have a high degree of favorability with her/him, can you do some unspeakable things – and this is usually in the late stage of the game.
Of course, this will also vary depending on the openness of each teammate. For example, the relationship between you and the “chicken-raising girl” Laizell will progress very quickly, but as the priest’s shadow heart, you may have to spend more time before you can finally pursue her.
You can’t just start a harem, because the game only allows you to establish a true intimate relationship with one person. If you want to pursue someone else, you have to break up with the person you are dating first. So if you want to completely conquer every character, you may need to restart the game several times to play.
These romantic plots really make the character creation of Baldur’s Gate 3 even better. When you date your companions, they will reveal their thoughts and anxieties to you, and you will understand them better. No matter their ending, whether they make great achievements or leave sadly, it will make you feel more emotional.
Overall
I can’t imagine how much effort and passion Larian Studios put into Baldur’s Gate 3 to create such a stunning work. As a sequel 20 years later, it successfully continued the legendary story of Baldur’s Gate, using ultra-high degrees of freedom and deep combat to let more people appreciate the unique charm of DND. It brought me a blissful experience that no other CRPG has ever had, and made all the games I played this year pale in comparison to it.