A mini-review from someone who’s never played Dungeons & Dragons.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of those games that’s pretty hard to ignore—it’s all anyone’s been talking about for the past two months since its full PC release. There’s certainly a lot to draw people in—especially that one bear scene that everyone’s talking about—but you might have doubts if the game is for you if you know nothing about Dungeons & Dragons.
Fear not, I’m here to dispel those doubts. I’ve had an incredible time playing Baldur’s Gate 3 while knowing absolutely nothing about D&D. The game welcomed me in all the same, and I’ve been enjoying it while learning a bit about D&D along the way.
Baldur’s Gate 3 starts strong with a mix of tutorials and learning as you go. It never throws you off into the deep end, instead gradually introducing more mechanics as you progress through the opening area with its simple enemies and gross, fleshy passageways.
Somehow, this game has managed to balance an incredibly complex and branching narrative with clear, accessible storytelling that makes sense to both D&D experts and people who don’t know a single thing about D&D lore.
Remember to save!
The game features a robust save system. By default, you can have 25 manual saves and 25 autosaves at a time, but this can be increased all the way up to 50. And you will use them, if you’re anything like me; in a game with so many branching paths and thousands of tiny decisions that might have major consequences, I’ve gotten into the habit of saving before saying anything risky in any conversation.
The F5 key will be your friend—it’s the shortcut to quick save. You can save any time you like: in the middle of a conversation, mid-cutscene, halfway through a tough battle, in between every response to a rather fickle character, and more.
A very important note: although the game autosaves, it does so very infrequently, only before major story beats. You will need to do most of the saving yourself, or you may risk losing hours of progress.
What difficulty should you play at?
One of the first choices you’ll make in the game (before spending two hours in the character creator) is the difficulty mode. The three difficulties are Explorer (easy), Balanced (normal), and Tactician (hard). You can change the difficulty anytime you want, so you don’t have to stress about which to pick at the beginning. Hardcore gamers love to judge people who play on easier difficulties, but they’re in the game for a reason. The developers designed these modes to be played, after all.
I’ve been playing on Explorer, and it’s been just the right amount of challenge for me. The mode includes lowered enemy health, raised player health, discounted items, and other small changes, which can help out a lot for those who are less familiar with this type of game. The only drawback of the Explorer difficulty is that you are unable to multiclass, which is when you gain the perks and spells of two different classes, but for newcomers, a single class already has plenty of factors to balance.
Control schemes: keyboard versus controller
The developers of Baldur’s Gate 3 went above and beyond when it came to supporting multiple types of controls. The default is with a keyboard and mouse, of course; as a CRPG (computer roleplaying game), it assumes the default control scheme of a computer. However, if you hook up a controller, the entire UI of the game switches drastically. Text is bigger, action menus are changed to radials, inventories fill the whole screen, and you control your character with more traditional stick movement instead of point-and-click controls.
One possible reason for these changes is that players using controllers might be farther from their computer screen, or even hooked up to a TV. Smaller text and menus may prove difficult to view in these contexts, so they’ve been modified to be easier to read. These alternative controls feel surprisingly natural, and I’ve played entirely with a controller so far with very few issues.
What about the prequels?
One of the biggest concerns I’ve seen floating around is whether or not players need to have played Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II in order to understand the newest entry in the series. Thankfully, the answer is no! The story of Baldur’s Gate 3 takes place over 120 years after the events of Baldur’s Gate II, and in the real world, it’s been 23 years since Baldur’s Gate II was originally released and almost 25 since the release of Baldur’s Gate. Although both games received critical acclaim, the graphics and some of the mechanics have started to show their age.
Technical specifications
It should be noted that Baldur’s Gate 3 is not entirely flawless—it is certainly a masterpiece, but not one without its issues. One of the first problems you will encounter comes before even opening the game: the size. This game is an incredible 150 gigabytes, far larger than most other games I’ve played combined, and is now the proud owner of 16% of all of the storage space on my computer.
If you manage to clear enough space, you’ll need to find a place with good internet and get comfortable. The game can take hours to fully install. Personally, I set up an auto clicker to click once every minute to keep my computer from falling asleep while I got other, more productive things done.
While it looks beautiful, this beauty comes at a high performance cost. My gaming laptop really struggles to run it on the very lowest graphics settings. It runs very smoothly, but my poor PC gets hot enough to heat a room in the winter. I’m no computer expert (and neither is the average player), so it’s possible there’s more I could do to make it run better.
The drawbacks, and ways to learn from my mistakes
There are a lot of things to keep track of at once, which can sometimes feel a bit overwhelming. For people like me who can’t resist picking up every shiny thing they see, you’ll quickly find yourself encumbered under the weight of all of the dishes, books, baskets, bones, and other knick-knacks scattered around the world. I had to start learning to check the value of items before picking them up, as many items are only useful for selling, such as silver platters and fancy plates, while others are both useless and worthless, such as boring common plates and cups (and bones and organs, for some reason).
Although the huge open world is certainly amazing to explore, it doesn’t come without its drawbacks. As with any complex game world, it can be hard to pick between branching paths. When I came across what looked like important castle ruins at the beginning of the game, I promptly turned the other way, because I assumed that the castle must be the main way forward and wanted to explore what I thought was the side path first. This caused me to miss this early area until much later and an important character within to get so sick of waiting for me that he came to find me himself.
The map of the game is covered in a black fog and is revealed as you travel. This makes it impossible to tell main paths from side paths before taking them, which is both a benefit and a drawback. It can lead to interesting side adventures that you weren’t expecting to take, but it can also lead to you missing important stuff—I missed two companions that I could have found relatively early on because I failed to check the paths that led to them. I ended up realizing that I had missed them while doing other research online.
One thing that confused me for a while was where I was allowed to walk. The walkable paths and inaccessible background parts can look identical to one another. I ended up realizing that the map has black boundary lines on the edges of walkable terrain, though they can sometimes be deceiving as this path will break up when there’s a climbable cliff face or something similar.
One of the game’s greatest features could prove to be a source of frustration for some players. The branching dialogue and story options result in a massive amount of differences in the story, some very minor and others much larger. For example, early on, I saved a gnome who was tied to a windmill. I recently encountered him again and realized he has a whole story going on that would have been very easy to miss. Not only is it inevitable that you’ll miss interesting story bits in your playthrough due to not meeting the correct conditions, but you’ll also be locked out of a lot of them because different choices can lead to such different results. This is just something you have to learn to accept for games like this. On the bright side though, it gives you something to look forward to for repeat playthroughs!
Some final tips
Something that has helped me so far in making choices within the storyline of the game has been looking at other people’s opinions online. This is definitely a risky strategy since it’s easy to accidentally spoil yourself, so it’s not for everyone. That being said, I’ve gotten lots of good insight from seeing what other people think about certain choices, both from the perspective of having played more of the game and from having general knowledge about Dungeons & Dragons.
Hopefully I’ve helped with the doubts that some of you may have been feeling regarding this popular yet complicated game. Baldur’s Gate 3 has given me some of the most enjoyable gaming experiences that I’ve had in a long time. I’ve explored the deep relationships with other characters, finished many fulfilling quests both major and minor, and seen many funny moments that help break up the darker tone the game can take at times. If I can convince even one more person to enjoy this game, then I think this will have been a success.
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