Baldur’s Gate 3 Rewards You for Your Unexpected Choices

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game about making choices. Encounter an imposing, demonic creature in the depths of a cavernous underground temple and, depending on how the player has created their character, the monster may be convinced to kill off its hellish accompanying soldiers and even banish itself back to the inferno. The enemy might also be defeated more conventionally, with slashes from a sword and blasts of electricity, knocking over barrels of grease and setting the battlefield on fire.

Find the player character tasked with retrieving an important item locked away in a well-guarded room and it’s possible to sneak in to retrieve it, perhaps lie effectively enough to be granted entry, or, once again, simply turn everything surrounding that protected room into a bloodbath.

The Baldur’s Gate series began in 1998, created by BioWare, the studio that would go on to make popular role-playing series Mass Effect and Dragon Age. The first two games (Baldur’s Gate 2 was released in 2000) established BioWare as one of the foremost developers of a clunkily named subgenre: the “computer role-playing game” or CRPG. As BioWare’s post-Gate work increasingly blended direct action with role-playing, though, it drifted away from the statistics- and text-heavy subgenre, which found itself relegated to a niche in the market. Fans had to look to the work of developers like Belgium’s Larian Studios, which found success with sprawling, traditional CRPGs like 2014’s Divinity: Original Sin and its 2017 sequel, Original Sin II, for games made in what seemed to be a dying design ethos.

This summer, Larian took over where BioWare left off nearly 23 years ago and released Baldur’s Gate 3. To the surprise of many, this modern CRPG has found an enormous player base, breaking records on computer game storefronts and receiving widespread acclaim.

Spend a bit of time with the game and it’s not difficult to see why it’s caught on. Baldur’s Gate 3 is not only a throwback to a style of role-playing design enjoyed by those already won over by past games, but a fresh argument for its approach to RPGs. It makes what’s always been compelling about the subgenre accessible to players who might otherwise have been put off by the learning curve of seemingly impenetrable games.

The allure of CRPGs has always been the enormous range of choices—in combat, in exploration, in conversation, in interactive character development—afforded by their design. It’s a subgenre based on the guided creativity enabled by table-top RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons that foregoes the need to get a group of equally committed friends together for regular sessions with a complex board game. (The Baldur’s Gate series, in fact, takes place in a Dungeons & Dragons setting and is based on its design rule set.) Player drawn to the free-form exploration of an open-world game, the grand-scale, interactive stories of a mainstream RPG, or the flexibility in combat offered by many modern action games can find all of these elements wrapped up in a CRPG.

The only issue is that these games can be pretty intimidating to the uninitiated. They typically present players with an eye-watering volume of information to digest, from the walls of statistics in character creation screens to the multitude of actions that can be selected from an opaque command bar of mysterious abilities. Baldur’s Gate 3 is similarly dense, though it teaches audiences not through a War and Peace–length manual or a sluggish introduction filled with pop-up tutorials but by encouraging a trial-and-error approach to its many rules for interaction.

There’s a delightful looseness to its implementation of what are ultimately rigid systems. Players can easily reroll the (sometimes visually represented) dice whose numbers govern their success or failure in persuading other characters in conversation or landing a hit with an arrow or smack from a longsword. They can reload a save file to approach a difficult fight with different tactics informed by what worked or didn’t on the last try. Maybe most importantly, they can make a lot of mistakes outside of combat and Baldur’s Gate 3 will often just keep going, incorporating those mistakes into the player’s own story, without flashing a “game over” screen.

A simplistic but compellingly urgent plot—the main characters are infected with mind-controlling tadpoles that will burrow deeper into their brains if not soon removed—ensures that players have motivation to work through the opening hours’ challenges. Before long, the multiple plotlines that require the player’s attention, the desire to learn more about the game’s cast and world, and the hook of learning to navigate battles that seemed impossible a short while earlier come together to give Baldur’s Gate 3 the kind of forward momentum of a plot-heavy TV show or page-turner.

It furthers this desire to get lost in the setting by packing its environments with a wealth of micro stories, discovered by chatting with the right person or stumbling upon a specific patch of landscape. These range wildly in mood and form, from uncovering the killer in a murder mystery to freeing a gnome who’s been tied up to a windmill blade.

The characters that drive these stories include a gang of child thieves led by a demonic-looking, Oliver Twist-style scamp with glowing red eyes and goat horns; a snarling wolfman and hulking ogress caught in the midst of an illicit sexual rendezvous; a talking ox; and an angry pixie stuck inside a lamp, among many others. Checking out a dark cave yawning open on the side of a mountain, searching for hidden rooms in houses, or spelunking through a city’s labyrinthine sewer system will almost always pay off curiosity with an unexpected story that’s both compelling for its own sake and may also help flesh out the game’s fiction or reward the player with new items and experience points.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is, at times, fairly standard high fantasy, complete with pointy-eared elves, wizards in robes, and slavering goblins. It’s also aware enough of the goofiness built into its setting that it appeals to the fantasy-averse, too. The tone doesn’t devolve into the kind of winking sarcasm that would make it outright parody, but it also doesn’t take conversations filled with references to magic artifacts or evil bipedal squid so seriously that there isn’t a thread of levity running throughout. There’s an appealing sense of carefree joy to the adventure, even though the game isn’t above settling down and sobering up when it needs to create a sense of foreboding appropriate to dangerous situations or attempt scenes of emotionally resonant drama.

This carefully balanced tone is essential to the game’s success. Where the kind of expansive freedom some games offer can rob their narratives of a sense of real authorship or a sustained atmosphere, Baldur’s Gate 3 exerts enough control over the play experience that it never feels like an empty sandbox. It’s more than a blank page and a pen that leave the responsibility of making entertainment up to the audience’s own creativity. The player is allowed to shape the fine details of their journey through the game, but Larian Studios is in charge of what they’ll see and do along the way.

There’s a confidence to the execution of this kind of design that’s all too rare in mainstream games. The result is an opportunity for the audience and creator to meet each other halfway in the act of play, the former trusting that there’s no wrong way to move through the experience, and the latter having afforded a breadth of possibilities wide enough to account for innumerable styles of interaction. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a notable display of the potential that comes from a talented studio working within a genre whose strengths it understands well, even if that genre has temporarily fallen out of fashion.