Larian Studios / Screenshot by Dan Ackerman / CNET
Dragons appear pretty much immediately. The dungeons may have to wait a little later because a Cthulhu-like monster sticks a brain snail in my eye. No, it's not a ceti eel, it's a Mind Flayer parasite. And all of this is part of the cinematic opening of Baldur's Gate 3, possibly the most anticipated PC game of the year, now available as an Early Access game for $ 60 for both of them steam and GoG for Windows and streaming over Google Stadia.
Eventually the giant airship that you are a prisoner will crash and you will escape mostly unscathed and be free to go on a good old-fashioned search, meet fellow adventurers along the way and hopefully remove your brain snail before turning into one Mind Flayer itself.
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The old school lineage is strong here, dating back to the original 1998 Baldur's Gate based on the Dungeons & Dragons RPG. A sequel to 2000 (Baldur's Gate 2) and a handful of expansions followed, as well as numerous remakes and updated versions such as the 2013 Enhanced Edition, which is still one of the best classic role-playing games for iOS.
With quarantine-friendly RPG websites like Roll20.net, celebrity D&D livestreams, and even a boost from his key role in Stranger Things, it comes as a surprise to me that the official Dungeons & Dragons branding at Baldur's Gate 3 is virtually non-existent. If ever there was a time for the old school D&D brand to get involved in anything, it is now. All in all, you don't have to be a D&D fan or familiar with previous Baldur's Gate games to get into BG3.
However, it helps to be familiar with more modern offshoots like the Divinity: Original Sin series, as I am in mine first impressions of the live gameplay from the beginning of this year (making it the last personal game demo I participated in before COVID-19). That's because this new Baldur's Gate game was created by the same people who created one of our favorite games over the years. Divinity 2017: Original Sin 2. The minimal onboarding and tutorials in the early version we played assume you are at least passively familiar with games where a team of heroes take turns launching attacks.
This may be because the version of Baldur's Gate 3 available from Tuesday is not the finished game. It's called "Early Access," a term used by the Steam online game store, and now many game makers are describing an ongoing work that players have to pay for and play early for. This means that a lot can change in the game, that there are bugs and glitches, and that in general it is not expected to be completely polished.
For day 1 of an Early Access game (I had to try it a few days before the official release on October 6th), Baldur's Gate 3 feels very playable and I did not encounter any game-stopping bugs. But it's also rough around the edges in places. The camera tends to get stuck in the area or zoom wildly. I found it surprisingly easy to misfire when trying to direct action for my characters, and many of the game's internal systems for spells, combat, and inventory management are unclear or inconsistent.
It's also pretty hard from the minute you hit it. I was completely murdered in a few early encounters, even though I was pretty good at this style of play. For a game that is determined by the dice behind the scenes, I seemed to miss a lot of chances of hit of over 90 percent. There are also on-screen dice rolls that show a clever 20-sided dice image for various tests. I also seemed to miss almost all of them.
Highlights:
- The combat system allows three actions per round: a combat action, a secondary action and a character movement. It's clear and understandable and requires a strong strategy. It reminds me of tabletop game systems like Zombicide or Arkham Horror.
- The game looks great and I was able to run it on an Nvidia 2080 Max-Q GPU with full detail settings and 4K resolution, so it should be very scalable.
- Narrator is a treat like in previous games from this developer. Still, it lacks some of the dark humor that made Divinity: Original Sin so great - the game takes itself a little too seriously.
I asked my CNET CRPG enthusiast Rich Brown to weigh his thoughts, and I'll add those of David Katzmaier in a deeper dive later this week, including (hopefully) a foray into the game's multiplayer features.
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Rich Brown
Baldur's Gate 2 is my all time favorite game. Point. For the past 20 years, every time I checked a gaming news site, I would click hoping to see an announcement for Baldur's Gate 3. That's a long time to build up a range of expectations.
I spent about six hours building up the press for Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access. It's too early to say whether it will maintain the same level of quality as its predecessor for so many hours of play, but I'm happy to report that I've enjoyed what I've played so far.
My favorite thing about the game so far is that it proves that Larian can at least tweak the traps of Dungeons & Dragons on Larian's deeply entertaining Divinity: Original Sin 2 engine and produce a game that is fun. The maps I've explored so far, the inventory system, and the interactive environments all look familiar to me if you've played Larian's last two games. That's not a bad thing. Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 are some of the best modern isometric CRPGs.
In addition to Larian's familiar elements, the D&D aspects are strong enough that Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access feels unique. The 3D rendered 20-sided cube that appears for certain skill checks is perhaps the most popular for Dungeons & Dragons, but without spoiling anything, Larian has adopted the bottomless lore of D&D and the unique gameplay mechanics of the character classes layering them with a thickness that I've found satisfactory so far. I say this both as a fan of the Baldur's Gate franchise and as a casual gamer (really a DM forever) of the current fifth installment of Dungeons & Dragons.
It's the depth of the setting, with its various races and factions, its diverse urban, rural, and downright alien environments, and the sheer history written in the lore of all that make Dungeons & Dragons a compelling playground for me. The way Baldur's Gate 2 encompassed this vast area helped keep my interest going during the 200 hours I put into it. My short time with Baldur's Gate 3 isn't even enough to make a serious judgment about the Early Access release, let alone the last game that's at least a year away.
Even so, I woke up at 3:30 a.m. this morning to make sure I had at least six hours to write this, and I had no problem getting up that early after getting my first taste with a couple of hours two nights ago . I look forward to diving back in. If what I've seen so far depicts how Larian will bring Dungeons & Dragons' Faerun setting through the rest of Early Access and into the end game, I can easily imagine investing 200 hours into Baldur's Gate 3.
