For all Dungeons & Dragons players out there, Baldur’s Gate 3 just might be your game.
Larian Studios, an independent gaming studio founded in 1996, recently released its third installment in the Baldur’s Gate franchise for PC and PS5 with plans to release it on Xbox consoles in the near future.
The game takes place in a D&D style world, where you create your custom character consisting of a wide variety of player classes and subclasses that give you different abilities as well as advantages and disadvantages. For example, there’s a Wizard, known for a wide variety of magical abilities and spells. You can also be a Paladin, a holy knight equivalent in the D&D world. Furthermore, your character is entirely customizable with gender, pronouns, cosmetics and more.
The story begins with you and a variety of non-playable companions being infected with a Mind Flayer parasite that threatens to turn you all into Mind Flayers unless you remove them. Joining together, you and a party of diverse and potentially powerful companions embark on a journey to do just that. The range of companions is wide, with 10 different allies to choose from, all romanceable of course.
Speaking honestly, I have barely scratched the surface of what Baldur’s Gate 3 has to offer. However, even I can see the elaborately-crafted world as well as the attention to detail when it comes to portraying a D&D style game. Outcomes to either dialogue decisions or most actions are determined by both a roll of a 20-side die and your character’s skill stats, as is the case in any D&D game. The combat is also turn-based, as it is in D&D, with the order of turns determined by yet another roll of a dice plus the character/enemies’ stats.
The developers clearly did their homework in both replicating the style and the feel of playing the tabletop game with your friends. It’s easy to imagine each of the companions being played by another person around the table. On that topic, the game is multiplayer, so you and your friends are able to run a game together with your own custom characters.
With all of this in mind, I think it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room: what this game means for the future of indie/AAA gaming. Baldur’s Gate 3 has hours upon hours of both playability and replayability with almost endless possibilities with characters, class, multi-classing and subclasses.
This game with all of this content was produced by an indie studio. Meanwhile, games produced by AAA studios in recent years were barely playable with constant crashes, broken mechanics, and various glitches upon launch.
Most infamously, CD Projekt Red’s “Cyberpunk 2077” suffered this exact fate after years of hype and promotion. According to PCMag, the game was so bad upon release that the company even apologized for the game’s unplayability and gave refunds to players. However, the game recently went through various updates and even released an anime series on Netflix that brought back interest around the same time.
However, “Baldur’s Gate 3” didn’t need any of these things to deliver a satisfying product. Such a stable and playable release shows that there is little-to-no excuse for these massive studios to release such broken messes when an indie studio can one-up many of them in only a month of release.
With such a wide and immersive world where almost anything is possible, “Baldur’s Gate 3” delivers a true, heartfelt, and entertaining experience for both D&D enthusiasts and gamers alike.
Final rating: 9.5/10
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