Baldur’s Gate 3 review: Larian Studios’ big sequel balances expectations in early access - Polygon

Now in early access, Larian Studios’ big sequel balances expectations and execution.

The first is to continue the legacy of the Baldur’s Gate franchise from the early 2000s.

The game launched in early access on Oct.

Since announcing the early access details over the summer across several livestreams, the developers at Larian Studios have not been shy about saying that this initial product is going to be a very rough draft of a small portion of the game.

Baldur’s Gate comes with a built-in fan base of people who have been playing these games for 20 years, but those players exist in a strange space when it comes to Baldur’s Gate 3.

Also, many of them have invested countless hours into the absolutely bizarre mechanics of past Baldur’s Gate games, like THAC0 and pause-and-play combat, inherited from the D&D of the late 1990s.

To add another snag, these fans went years without a follow-up to Baldur’s Gate 2, and when one finally came in the form of Pillars of Eternity in 2015, the dam broke, and the genre was flooded with isometric games from other development studios chasing the aesthetics and feelings of the Baldur’s Gate games and Planescape: Torment.

One more complicating factor here is that Larian Studios chose to make Baldur’s Gate 3 its next project after the successful Divinity: Original Sin 2, which was received by many as the new gold standard when it came to RPG design in the Baldur’s Gate legacy.

This is a unique burden for this game, in some sense, and it feels like entering early access in such an extremely rough state is a way for Larian to take some of the pressure off by giving itself enough time to parse through the extreme reactions and expectations from players.

As it stands in the early access version of the game, Baldur’s Gate 3 has very little to do with the narrative of the previous entries in the franchise.

Baldur’s Gate 3 pays clear homage to its predecessors through design choices that you can feel moment to moment as you play the game.

The early access version of the game also has a few classic Baldur’s Gate quests that can best be described as “who’s lying?” These are quests wherein Person A tells you something about Person B, and when you talk to the latter, they tell you that Person A was lying the whole time?

You have to make a choice, and you’re not going to feel good about it.

All of these successes when it comes to making something that carries the core of Baldur’s Gate are what makes the rest of Baldur’s Gate 3 feel off, especially the adaptation of 5th-edition Dungeons & Dragons.

The problem with adapting this flexible system of D&D 5e into a video game is that video game rules are, almost by definition, in charge.

The best way to create variation in video games is to make more rules, not fewer.

And so the act of playing Baldur’s Gate 3 is a rough one because of how slowly it moves and how constrained it feels to have to play this rule system “by the book.” It’s like hanging out with the worst rules lawyer on the planet.

You don’t secure the Baldur’s Gate license and the lore around it without committing to D&D as your ruleset, and the places where the design team has worked on the toolset for the game (such as how versatile jumping is) feel great.

They were not extremely quick experiences, but by comparison, the classic games feel fast and loose where Baldur’s Gate 3 can often feel like a constrained, slow slog through various systems stacked on top of each other.

When the Baldur’s Gate vibe and the 5e assumptions are working in tandem, the game is really doing something special.

Similarly, there is a camping mechanic that wasn’t in previous Baldur’s Gate games that smooths out the experience and allows for some character and narrative continuity between quests.

It also functions as something akin to Mass Effect’s SSV Normandy in that it allows you to have conversations with your companions and some NPCs that join you across multiple quests or regions (although players only have access to one region in this version of the game).

6 in early access on Google Stadia, Mac, and Windows PC.