Player freedom is pushed to the absolute limit in Baldur’s Gate 3. From character creation to combat, the game offers an unmatched degree of freedom, and even after two thorough playthroughs and a dozen ongoing campaigns, I haven’t even scratched the surface. Every experience is different, and each of the characters I’ve made feels distinctive. While the game can’t always match the spontaneity of a real-life Dungeon Master, it still manages to give players a lot of agency and guarantee that its extensive, web-like narrative is gripping from beginning to end.
The first scene of Baldur’s Gate 3 takes place inside the Nautiloid, a Lovecraftian spacecraft driven by the illithids, a race that resembles squids. You are infected with a parasite that slowly (and painfully) transforms its host into a tentacle-adorned mind flayer after choosing a class and creating your avatar. Before the transformation is finished, you and the other members of your party who are affected must figure out how to get rid of the parasites. It’s a fantastically sinister setup that enables Larian Studios to assemble a diverse group of characters with a wide range of ideologies, personalities, and backgrounds and give them a common objective. The majority of the time, these characters aren’t adventuring together out of friendship but rather out of necessity. It’s frequently a tense alliance fraught with internal strife and conflict.
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The fact that Baldur’s Gate 3 prioritizes its characters so frequently makes it better. The plot, which basically boils down to “purge the parasite and save the world,” isn’t all that interesting on its own, but the diverse cast of characters makes it much more memorable by adding an extra layer of nuance that grounds the entire experience with more personal stakes. Astarion is a pompous and flamboyant rogue with just enough charm to win you over, Karlach is a hot-headed tiefling barbarian with a heart of gold, Lae’zel is a battle-hardened warrior who puts an interesting spin on the fish-out-of-water archetype. There are a total of 10 potential party members, and each one is supported by witty writing, faultless acting, and lively animations.
The game’s characters’ responses to your choices and how they develop as a result are what stand out the most. Your interaction with your party depends on how you play your character. You can either feed Astarion’s dark tendencies, like his capacity for sadism and power-lust, or you can skillfully try to steer him away from them. Astarion can thus serve as the dramatic counterpoint to a wholesome character or the evil confidant to a more erratic one. No matter how you choose to play your character, you will make friends with some people and enemies with others. If you have a lot of disagreements with a party member, they may decide to leave the group altogether. This is part of what makes Baldur’s Gate 3 feel so reactive. The party dynamics and character interactions remain surprising on each subsequent playthrough, even though the plot and setup are consistent across numerous playthroughs.
The game’s humor also keeps the characters and interactions interesting. If you embrace the absurdity, Baldur’s Gate 3 can be hilariously funny. Because of your bad judgment, poor decisions, and unpredictable combat interactions, the humor works so well. This means that you and your party feel special in these lighthearted moments. The funniest parts of the play feel unintentional, although some are written into the script, such as getting a goblin to kiss your feet in Act 1. For instance, Lae’zel and my character had a touching conversation as my character learned to appreciate a sunrise she had previously hated. However, the moment was somewhat ruined by my appearance because I neglected to remove some clown makeup that I bought at a circus.
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A steadfast presentation underpins these scenes and connections. The cinematic approach Larian Studios took with dialogue makes every conversation feel handcrafted for a game with so many variables. Characters are expressive, every line except your own is fully voiced, and the camera moves fluidly from scene to scene. Although this strategy isn’t new, Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the few games to implement it on this scale. Although presentation isn’t everything, in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3, it gives every playthrough, no matter how absurd, the impression that it was done on purpose.
This impressive degree of responsiveness carries over into battle. Combat is based on the 5th edition D&D rules, but Larian Studios made some adjustments to make it more user-friendly in a virtual environment. As a result, the combat system is complex and multi-layered and operates similarly to a turn-based tactical RPG. Each character starts out with one action and one bonus action. Secondary skills like jumping or using an item call for a bonus action, whereas attacks and spells typically require an action. Although there are some exceptions, most of your moves that deal damage demand an action. Hidden dice rolls are used to calculate the outcome of combat. This introduces some uncertainty into the equation, similar to D&D.
However, Baldur’s Gate 3 stands out from other tactical RPGs due to how adaptable its combat system is. Even in some of the key battles, the game hardly ever tells you “no.” In fact, combat becomes more absurd and unpredictable as you level up. For instance, I used a polymorph spell on a particularly difficult boss to transform him into a goat before having our tiefling goddess Karlach kick the goat into an abyss. The friends I played with in Act 3 discovered that the Hero’s Feast spell renders the entire party impervious to poison damage until the following long rest. This allowed our wizard to cast Cloudkill from any location, allowing our fighter and paladin-warlock to mop up the suffocating enemies while ignoring the deadly effects of the spell. Even something as straightforward as giving a level 11 fighter Haste and Action Surge so they can attack nine times (10 if they have a bonus action attack) in one turn feels like breaking the rules to execute a cunning play that can significantly alter the course of battle, but the game encourages it.
A well-prepared party can destroy even some of the game’s most difficult enemies because the combat is so flexible, especially near the end. The fights never get boring, even when they start to feel a little too simple. Every interaction between spells, trap in the environment, or cunning move feels like an original idea that only you and your party could have thought of. A few traps were spewing smoke powder bombs during one battle, which would explode after a turn and launch anyone in the blast radius into the air. Disabling the traps or avoiding the bombs would be the obvious course of action. The timed bombs didn’t go off right away, so I used my sorcerer to set up a Wall of Fire while the other members of my party carefully threw the bombs to throw my opponents into the fire. Was it productive? Most likely not. Was it successful? Absolutely. Baldur’s Gate 3’s willingness to let me experiment with all of these factors and reward my ingenuity is evidence of how much creativity the combat system can foster.
Every aspect of Baldur’s Gate 3 cooperates to deliver a dramatic third act, depending on your decisions. Key combat encounters are appropriately epic, and the entire story takes place in the crowded city of Baldur’s Gate. The story builds to a challenging final decision. It seems like Baldur’s Gate 3 saves the best for last, despite the first two acts’ excellent performances. Particularly notable is how character arcs are resolved. Karlach’s tale concluded in my adventure with a touching, heartbreaking scene that nearly made me cry. While this was going on, I discovered some of Astarion’s trauma and was able to “fix” his darker tendencies. Both storylines felt equally satisfying and rewarding, despite being different.
However, your choices could also result in a weak third act with no emotional payoff at all. My party and I managed to kill or annoy just about every significant character in a very chaotic cooperative campaign. Even though your quest log still directs you to some of Act 3’s most important set pieces, without characters like Shadowheart and Astarion to provide context, the majority of them felt empty. It’s an odd issue to have because, in most games, you wouldn’t be able to kill off characters who are so crucial to the plot, but Baldur’s Gate 3 allows you to do so and there are repercussions. If those characters are no longer present, is it Larian Studios’ responsibility to make sure that each quest, storyline, and character arc is satisfying? I disagree, and in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3, I believe that the player’s unrestricted freedom is much more crucial to the overall experience. You often reap what you sow, which can be a depressing and isolating outcome.
That kind of result, if anything, demonstrates that the degree of freedom in the game goes beyond a solo adventure to co-op, where the variables are made even more complex by having other human-controlled adventurers. You can play the entire campaign with up to four other players by having each of them create their own character. Surprisingly, the co-op experience is very similar to the single-player one. Although it does have some peculiarities, any player can advance the plot, make crucial choices, and annoy NPCs in secret. Knowing that one choice you make could potentially ruin an entire questline or character arc that the rest of your party might overlook is liberating (and a little terrifying).
I made the choice to take on the role of the Dark Urge, a murderous pre-made character, in my co-op run. I made the decision to select all of the dialogue options that were unique to the Dark Urge in order to role-play this character effectively. This meant that from the very beginning, I bit off Gale’s arm, and we never saw him again. His questline and character arc vanished as quickly as my character could swallow Gale’s severed arm. Another time, one of my party members was attempting to diffuse a tense situation between some tiefling refugees and the druids of Emerald Grove. He was attempting to calm everyone down when I stepped too close to their idol, upsetting the entire community. Although it was amusing at the time, since we had already decided not to save scum, this meant that we had failed an entire quest line because I had grown a little too impatient.
Even if everyone in your party acts morally upright, tracking companion quests can be challenging, especially if there are three or four players actively participating. Conversations frequently repeat themselves, only specific players can talk to certain party members at times, and the game can’t always keep track of who said what to whom. If you do have a four-player campaign going, it might be difficult to bring party members along for their individual quests. For instance, Shadowheart left our party at a crucial juncture in her story because we couldn’t fit her in. There are workarounds for this, like selecting an origin character at the start of the campaign or switching out party members immediately. However, selecting an origin character restricts your ability to customize, and changing your party’s composition at any time requires at least two other players in order to be successful.
By the time my party reached the third act, Shadowheart had left, Gale had disappeared after I bit off his hand, Wyll had perished in the Emerald Grove incident, Karlach had declined to join us as a result of the Emerald Grove incident, Minthara had attacked us after one of the party members attempted to read her mind shortly after a sexual encounter, and I had killed Astarion because I didn’t like the way he had treated me. Lae’zel was the only member of our party to survive, miraculously unaffected by our (mostly my) senseless violence. As a result, the final act was disjointed and hollow, leaving us to fill in the blanks. Once more, the enormous degree of freedom in Baldur’s Gate 3 is the root of this problem. Larian Studios could have installed safety rails to give us the “proper” experience, but doing so would have sacrificed the game’s emphasis on freedom, which is crucial in cooperative settings where each player should feel like the protagonist of their own tale.
The co-op’s already outstanding combat is improved even further by the preservation of complete freedom. The pace of skirmishes slows down to feel more strategic when there are up to four players, each of whom controls a character. As your party acquires new spells and skills, communication becomes increasingly important. This can be done to carry out high-level combos and strategies occasionally, or it can just be to avoid getting burned or thrown off a cliff by your friends. In either case, cooperative combat develops into a tense and intensely satisfying experience that values cooperation and teamwork.
I played on the PlayStation 5 for about 20 of my 200 hours of playtime. Acts 1 and 3 of the console version, which I played, were absolutely flawless in terms of performance. I had no problems with the combat, exploration, or dialogue, and because of the cross-save feature, I was able to continue where I had left off on the PS5, Steam Deck, and PC. Even though I prefer using a mouse and keyboard for a game like this, Baldur’s Gate 3 works surprisingly well with the DualSense. Radial menus handle the majority of the labor-intensive tasks. You can access your action menu at any time and navigate through radial menus that you can customize to hold your actions, attacks, spells, and items. However, managing your inventory can be a little tricky, especially if you’re playing alone and moving items among the four members of your party. It can be a little overwhelming at first, but I don’t know how Larian Studios could have fit all those interactions into a controller in any other way. And rather than navigating by clicking on a map, I preferred directly controlling my character and the camera with analog sticks.
Split-screen co-op for two players is also possible on the PlayStation 5. It’s a nice addition that is nearly as feature-rich as online cooperative. But cramming the HUD and all that important data into two distinct lengthwise panels is by no means graceful. I did experience a few minor audio glitches as well, especially when dialogue wasn’t always triggering.
Even though playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on PlayStation 5 isn’t the ideal experience, doing so is still worthwhile if it’s your only choice. The interaction wheel and inventory may still be going through some growing pains, but when you consider the size and ambition of a game like this, it all seems insignificant.
In Baldur’s Gate 3, a character remarks, “Too much freedom can be frightening.” In the context of the story, it’s a potent line, but it also has a deeper meaning in relation to Baldur’s Gate 3. It takes some time to fully grasp the significance of the unprecedented freedom it provides for the game. The sheer amount of options and outcomes can be overwhelming at times. But it doesn’t take long for it to become clear that Baldur’s Gate 3 offers players a unique opportunity to shape their own fates. Baldur’s Gate 3 stands out for its freedom and responsiveness, along with its superb presentation and amazing characters, which is why, even after 200 hours, I keep returning to it. Although having too much freedom can be unsettling, Larian believes that its players will make the most of it, for better or worse.