This is, no doubt about it, the most boundary breaking game I've played this year, and it will surely not be topped.
Baldur's Gate 3 is a massive, and I mean beyond undersantably MASSIVE game. Knowing this, it is unavoidable that it has some kinks here and there. For now, later parts of the game have trouble loading all necessary textures at once, and some tiny freezes happen in combat which forced me to reload previous saves. I'll also mention that, knowing almost nothing about D&D before starting this makes it hard to get into. Tutorials are almost non-existent and auto-saves very rare. I had to restart a few 30-minutes of gameplay before I learned to quick-save by hand often. There's just a lack of guidance for completely new players that makes it hard to approach, though I do like this better than having a million tutorial pop-ups every 5 seconds. It just takes a long (and confusing) while before gameplay mechanics an story start to coalesce into something clear.
But really, all of this doesn't make a dent in the immaculate video game experience this was.
The deep freedom that every moment, area, NPC and party character affords is unparalleled. The writing is so, so, so good. Seeing all the other open world games with flat «video game» writing gets me thinking at times that nothing better can be done. Baldur's Gate 3 simply smashes those preconceptions. It's at once poignant, hilarious, charming, surprising, and genuinely jaw-dropping more than once. I love and care for more characters in this one single story than all of the combined Horizon and Hogwarts Legacies' NPCs out there. It's just that good across the board. Original ideas and characters keep coming in such a frequent flow that it seems easy to just pump out all those fully fleshed, one-lined, throw-away NPCs. But it's not easy. It's terribly hard, as most other games keep showing us. This is just an even bigger compliment to everyone at Larian that it works as well as it does.
Gameplay is basically as good. It's full of choices, in and out of combat. Everything feels deeply affected by you, and the experience of playing Baldur's Gate really made me engage in Role-Play. Most RPGs don't really let you go that far in this aspect of actually playing a role made by you. This game provides that ultimate fantasy through and through and give the player so much room to experiment, it's mind-boggling.
I simply cannot believe all the cogs in this game come together as well as they do. Not only is it massive in scope, it maintains a level of quality in gameplay, graphics and story throughout that's hard for most AAA studios to even touch for a couple of hours. It was an absolute joy to discover and partake in this epic adventure, and I'm glad to see such a heartfelt effort by a big studio be celebrated for making something intelligent and different.
Baldur's Gate 3 is a massive, and I mean beyond undersantably MASSIVE game. Knowing this, it is unavoidable that it has some kinks here and there. For now, later parts of the game have trouble loading all necessary textures at once, and some tiny freezes happen in combat which forced me to reload previous saves. I'll also mention that, knowing almost nothing about D&D before starting this makes it hard to get into. Tutorials are almost non-existent and auto-saves very rare. I had to restart a few 30-minutes of gameplay before I learned to quick-save by hand often. There's just a lack of guidance for completely new players that makes it hard to approach, though I do like this better than having a million tutorial pop-ups every 5 seconds. It just takes a long (and confusing) while before gameplay mechanics an story start to coalesce into something clear.
But really, all of this doesn't make a dent in the immaculate video game experience this was.
The deep freedom that every moment, area, NPC and party character affords is unparalleled. The writing is so, so, so good. Seeing all the other open world games with flat «video game» writing gets me thinking at times that nothing better can be done. Baldur's Gate 3 simply smashes those preconceptions. It's at once poignant, hilarious, charming, surprising, and genuinely jaw-dropping more than once. I love and care for more characters in this one single story than all of the combined Horizon and Hogwarts Legacies' NPCs out there. It's just that good across the board. Original ideas and characters keep coming in such a frequent flow that it seems easy to just pump out all those fully fleshed, one-lined, throw-away NPCs. But it's not easy. It's terribly hard, as most other games keep showing us. This is just an even bigger compliment to everyone at Larian that it works as well as it does.
Gameplay is basically as good. It's full of choices, in and out of combat. Everything feels deeply affected by you, and the experience of playing Baldur's Gate really made me engage in Role-Play. Most RPGs don't really let you go that far in this aspect of actually playing a role made by you. This game provides that ultimate fantasy through and through and give the player so much room to experiment, it's mind-boggling.
I simply cannot believe all the cogs in this game come together as well as they do. Not only is it massive in scope, it maintains a level of quality in gameplay, graphics and story throughout that's hard for most AAA studios to even touch for a couple of hours. It was an absolute joy to discover and partake in this epic adventure, and I'm glad to see such a heartfelt effort by a big studio be celebrated for making something intelligent and different.