Developer: Larian Studios
Platform: PC
Genre: RPG, Strategy, Early Access
Publisher: Larian Studios
The bad guys this time are Mind Flayers, powerful enemies, who control the minds of their opponents and enslave beings wherever they go. Things start off on board of the tentacle ship of a Mind Flayer, an unmistakably evil squid face that infected the player’s character with his own little tadpole that crawls through your eye until your brain. After creating your own character, you will escape the ship in a collision before heading out to take the tadpole off your skull before you turned into a mindless zombie. It doesn’t take long to gather a cast of companions whose goals align with yours, and you’ll soon be exploring a large coastal region hoping to find a way to help yourself.
In this initial access version, all of act 1 is playable, with two more to come in the next year or so, which means that there will be a lot of content eventually.
The character creation is very diversified (unfortunately not the appearance and voice options, there are only a very few to choose, although, it is an early access version of the game and they might put a lot more options, for me seeing a bearded female dwarf was already awesome enough for now hahaha and you also can put a male voice in a female character (and vice versa). Take your time to build your character, after doing yours you have to build a “crush” for you hahaha yeah! You read it right! You will have to build a person that you feel attracted too.
Right from the beginning, you can see that the graphics are beautiful and so is the soundtrack but I’ll talk about them later on.
During the game, you will face a dice simulation to decide what is going to happen, these “tests” occur from time to time when you make a decision that needs a certain ability like intelligence, dexterity, etc… It works like this, according to the situation the game will give you a target number that will automatically be shown already with the decrease of your bonuses, for example, if you have a +5 intelligence bonus and the target to get the successful “test” is 15, the target number that will appear to you is 10. You have the possibility of loading just before a dice test so you can roll it again… I think the game should add an auto-save on those cases or something to “avoid” that because it takes away the whole meaning of playing an RPG with a dice system, but that’s just my opinion of course. Another thing to drive the story is the choices you make during the dialogues, that’s always fun for me because you get to interpret the character you created, for me, I’m always a grumpy dwarf hahaha.
Oh! Small tips; The tutorial is a bit hidden under the map, so if you need to have a look at it, and your inventory is based on weight so don’t go picking everything you find when you are close to getting “heavy”.
The battles happen in turns and the mouse arrow shows you the percentage of success (keep both eyes on that). A good tip is to use the scenario in your favour, like jumping over small hills to run away from an enemy and still be able to attack it from distance (you can even say “it’s over Anakin! I have the high ground!” if you want to… I’m joking). During battle you can loot the dead bodies… that was new for me.
Something awesome that I saw on the game is that the scenario is very interactive, you can do a few things that makes the game very dynamic like; dip, shove, hide, jump, throw, dash, knock and help. You can move freely when not in battle, during battle you have a yellow stamina bar that allows you to walk a certain amount of steps.
Something really important in Baldur’s Gate 3 is the camping, so your party can rest and restore their energy, but if you want to make changes on your party you need to go to the “main camping”, to do that you need to find a purple rune carved on a stone to be teleported to it (you can also use this rune to fast travel around the map which is very big).
What caught my attention was that inside your party it can grow certain… intrigue among them and it can get ugly, your actions also have an impact on what your party thinks of you, depending on their alignment.
The game’s classes so far are;
-Cleric – Life Domain; Light Domain; Trickery Domain
-Fighter – Not a sub-option
-Ranger – With an option of “favourite” enemy and also to choose Natural Explorer (each sub-option gives a different bonus, ex: If you beat a Tammer you will summon a family member, with the urban tracker you have proficiency in disguising and breaking down doors, the other three give resistance to fire, cold and poison (Wasteland Wonder: Fire / Cold / Poison))
-Rogue: No Sub Class
-Warlock: The Fiend or The Great Old One
-Wizard: There is no subclass
The soundtrack is delightful to hear, it goes well with everything that is happening in the game and it only gets better and better. The voice acting is very good! I enjoyed the characters’ “energy” that those actors put on them, the narrator’s voice is very relaxing and goes well with the game’s mood. The only thing that usually bothers me is that the main character spends most of the time quiet… like he was mute.
The game’s graphics are awesome, there are so many rich details, for example, one of the tiefling’s eyes that are “on fire” or the scenario’s lighting and “movement” is something outstanding on Baldur’s Gate 3. The scenario as I said before is very dynamic, your spells can interact with it, for example, if the path is on fire you can use a water spell to put it out, if the place you are is very dark and you have a character with a good “night vision”, you just have to select him from your party and boom! You will instantaneously see better through the darkness.
I’ll keep my impressions to a minimum because it is an early version of the game, so you will see many bugs that are being solved with time, to be honest none of them bothered me because I kept in mind that this was just the early version. I had the chance to play the game on its maximum graphics and that allowed me to appreciate the work that the developers had made on this game.
On overall it is an old school RPG, there isn’t any “news” on the genre, but Baldur’s Gate 3 does a great job on bringing some new features, and this game has a huge impact on its long-time fans.
I’ll give an 8.0 to Baldur’s Gate 3 because even though is an early version and you have to ignore the bugs and the loading screens take a long to load (and I believe my PC was more than okay to play it). The game is very involving, and the story, characters, soundtrack, graphics are awesome and it is getting constant updates.
My pc has;
– GeForce GTX 1080
– 16GB RAM
– i7
– Direct X12
Overall: 8/10
Writer
Photography enthusiastic and a diehard games fan (Thanks to FF7 )! And I´m from Brazil btw \o ahhahaha
