I can’t help myself – I have to spend another week’s worth of digital ink on Baldur’s Gate 3.
(This blog is spoiler-free, minus whatever the screenshots give away.)
After 25 hours of play with the full version, I’m confident in saying Baldur’s Gate 3 is the masterpiece the hype suggested it would be. So far, it’s a rare example of a game that lives up to high expectations and – at least for me – even exceeds them.
Baldur’s Gate 3 violates a ton of “industry rules.” It’s unapologetically hardcore. It’s a pack rat’s dream and nightmare in one, with a clunky old-school inventory system and a thousand mechanically useless items.
It has no in-app purchases and no planned “live service” roadmap (though I’m sure Wizards of the Coast is backing up truckloads of money to Larian’s door for an expansion). And while the game has robust co-op support, the majority of the audience is playing solo.
The industry, as it does, will take all the wrong lessons from its success. I anticipate a ton of high-priced Baldur’s Gate knock-offs rolling out in three to four years – mediocre big-budget turn-based RPGs that “smooth off the rough edges,” slap on a battlepass, and die rapid deaths in the marketplace.
Similarly, Larian is unlikely to repeat this level of success with their next release. After building a game of this scope and scale, key team members will be burned out and itching to do something new. As great as Larian is, it’ll be a struggle to “keep the band together” for a direct sequel or something equally ambitious in scope.
All that said, there are takeaways from what Baldur’s Gate 3 accomplishes that are valuable for role-playing game designers.
Smart Setting
The Baldur’s Gate series is set in the classic “Sword Coast” region of the Forgotten Realms. The Sword Coast is the most generic setting in Dungeons & Dragons – pure classic Tolkeinesque European fantasy, with castles, wizards, orcs, and elves. It’s “boring” enough that it’s often mocked by hardcore D&D fans who prefer more creative campaign settings, like post-apocalyptic Eberron or horror-themed Ravenloft.
What Forgotten Realms has going for it is a well-documented mountain of content, some dating back to 1987. There are devastating historical events like the Spellplague; there are nefarious organizations like the Zhentarim and the Red Wizards of Thay. There is a robust pantheon of clearly-defined gods with long histories, interrelationships, and agendas. And over the years, the Forgotten Realms has been the setting for a host of popular novels and video games.
The Forgotten Realms is familiar and comforting. There’s a reason that the Dungeons & Dragons movie, Honor Among Thieves, leveraged it in Hollywood’s attempt at bringing D&D to a wider audience. It’s the same reason BioWare chose it as the setting for both the original Baldur’s Gate games and its Icewind Dale titles.
I love Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity games, but there’s a lot of world-building that those two games have to do that drags down their early pacing. New concepts, gods, and places needed introductions; cultures had to get fleshed out; the player’s place in the larger whole was less defined, which slowed up character creation and attachment.
The trick Larian played with Baldur’s Gate 3 is to start from the comfort-food foundation of the Forgotten Realms setting, then push the boundaries in creative ways – just like BioWare did, dropping Baldur’s Gate 2 players into Jon Irenicus’ strange dungeon. At the start of Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian traps players on a flying Mindflayer ship, hopping across planes in the opening segment before crashing on the Sword Coast.
The value of a familiar setting played a brief role in my own career. Halo Wars, Ensemble’s final real-time strategy game, started internal development as an RTS with a new intellectual property. When the opportunity to leverage the Halo IP came up, not everyone at the studio was on board. Internally, folks were in love with the new science-fiction world they’d created for the original game.
In retrospect, the Halo license made the game more successful than it would have been as an original IP. There was a cost in making that switch, one that’s hard to quantify – a fair bit of wasted work and some unhappiness on the team – but in the end, it was the right call.
There’s no doubt new IP development is critical for the long-term health of the industry. Skyrim would not have been a runaway evergreen success without Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, and Oblivion. Diablo 4’s success builds on the excellent work done in Diablo 1, 2, and 3. And Baldur’s Gate 3 stands on the shoulders of BioWare’s amazing work.
But the lesson for designers is that (as long as the team has a good relationship with the owner of an IP) even a comparatively generic setting offers plenty of room for creativity. Baldur’s Gate 3 explores unseen edges of the Forgotten Realms while leveraging what fans love: familiar characters, extensive history, and iconic places.
Larian respects the Forgotten Realms setting, but they aren’t afraid to push the boundaries to delight and surprise the audience. They’ve retained all the benefits of the built-in fanbase without compromising their creativity.
Smart Content
Good game developers know that in a big RPG, “content is king.” All the robust combat systems and cool loot in the world won’t matter if the player has no context for their actions. “Collect ten rat pelts” was enough of a quest justification when Everquest and World of Warcraft first launched; audiences in 2023 will demand more.
Larian delivers that “more.” I have yet to do a quest that didn’t feel organic, grounded, and context-appropriate. Through Act 1 and the early part of Act 2, there hasn’t been a single task that felt like filler. Some brief side quests are unrelated to the main story, but often these quests deliver a good laugh and they never outstay their welcome.
Further, the game cleverly inverts traditional RPG tropes in a way that feels like the best of pen-and-paper roleplaying. Genuinely tough decisions frequently result in unexpected outcomes, but so far, those outcomes have always felt fair.
Getting the player to feel like choices have genuine consequences is hard for RPGs to accomplish. Larian’s game is a masterclass in executing the concept. There’s a moment in the first few hours of Act 2 where I felt like I understood how the next several steps of my journey would play out, only to have the rug pulled out from under me with a tragic, game-changing, but logical result.
Similarly, combat encounters all feel smartly designed. Much like a pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons campaign with a good DM, there are no filler encounters. Everything is custom-designed to challenge the party. (Quicksave is your friend!)
Folks that have played Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin games are familiar with their model. If anything, the encounters in the Original Sin games were too punishing at times, requiring foreknowledge of gimmicks and “preparation of the battlefield” to win fights.
Baldur’s Gate 3 combat encounters are a better, logical evolution of Larian’s earlier work. Less foreknowledge is required; instead, players who use all their tools and scout out potential battlefields are consistently rewarded for seeking out creative options.
Smart Audience
The approach to combat is just one demonstration of Larian’s trust in its players. The design is confident and robust enough to allow failure – cutting off quest chains, offering alternate solutions to problems, or hiding away some of the best loot behind complex and entirely optional areas.
Baldur’s Gate 3 assumes players are smart. Though it does have modern conveniences – quest markers, a minimap, fast travel, and a robust quest log – much of the content not only supports but encourages extremely creative play.
Exploration takes a front seat as well. Like Bethesda’s best moments in Skyrim, there’s plenty to find by thoroughly poking around in the corners of the maps. Enormous chunks of content are tucked away in a fashion that’s mind-blowing to a generation raised on games that hand-hold players to the next objective.
Similarly, in many of the dialogues with NPCs, Baldur’s Gate 3’s design seeks to forge a partnership with players. In that way, the game is much like a smart DM that expects top-tier play out of a creative group at the table.
On every quest, the game screams “Trust me – I’ve got you. You don’t need to reroll that failed persuasion check. The journey I’m about to take you on is going to be interesting, even when you fail.”
Great Success
Baldur’s Gate 3 is far from perfect. Act 2 has moments that feel less polished than the early access content. The dynamic and reactive nature of the game means sometimes you’ll miss key story cinematics, and events or party interactions will happen out of order. I’ve had a couple of crashes and seen a few user interface bugs.
And that’s another lesson: a game doesn’t have to be “perfect” to be great. In a few years, when players look back on their time with the title, they won’t remember the one crash every ten hours (especially if those issues are patched soon). They’ll remember the incredible story moments or the fight with the giant spider where they pulled off a clever trick and turned a tough encounter into a trivial one.
Numbers show Larian will be well-rewarded for their hard work. Over the weekend, Baldur’s Gate 3 hit 800,000 peak concurrent users on Steam, in the mix with perennial Steam champions Counter-Strike, DOTA 2, and PUBG.
If you’re unfamiliar with peak concurrency as a concept, it’s how many people are playing the game at once – typically a fraction of the number of players that have bought the game. Even for a title with a successful early access period (around two million sales), those are some crazy numbers – enough to land Baldur’s Gate 3 a slot in the top-ten peak concurrency numbers of all time.
Plenty of wrong lessons will be learned from Baldur’s Gate 3. I expect several big players in the industry will give us a front-row seat to disaster as they try to replicate its success. Slapping the D&D license on a game or adding complex turn-based combat won’t turn a mediocre RPG into a megahit.
But there are plenty of takeaways too. Just like groundbreaking role-playing games that have gone before – like Disco Elysium, Pathologic 2, Pentiment, and Planescape Torment – Baldur’s Gate 3 has great things to teach RPG designers who are looking to build games that have choice, consequence, and strong player agency.
If you’re reading this and you’re not one of the bazillion people that’s already bought Baldur’s Gate 3, it’s available on Steam. It’s a great time for RPG fans! Back next week with a non-Baldur’s Gate 3 topic.