Baldur’s Gate 3 is where my Q3 went. It’s amazing and an easy GotY contender. It’s also incredibly fiddly and crunchy and terminally over-stuffed with content to the point that it might be a bad thing.

Short Shameful Confession: I could not get into classic Bioware and Obsidian RPGs. I tried, honestly, but they were infinitely too crunchy for me, largely because it took until Pathfinder and later D&D 5th Ed. for me to really comprehend a TTRPG.

I also skipped Larian’s previous works for . . reasons I don’t really know. Having seen the quality of product they put out, I am now strongly considering fixing that.

So with one game I got to right two past Game Crimes, and it only cost me $120 (because Wife and I were playing simultaneously) and 117.5 hours of my life.

BG3 has – by a large margin – one of the most complicated and yet least buggy sandboxes in all of gaming. I know I said basically the same thing about Tears of the Kingdom, but BG3 is orders of magnitude more complicated. D&D 5th Ed. – while vastly more streamlined than past editions – is still not simple. It’s weird, it has endless edge-cases, esoteric interactions, and a high degree of general goofiness that most developers just don’t have to deal with. It’s weird to the point that a studio would be considered insane to build something like it from scratch if they just needed a rules system for their RPG Video Game.

And yet . . it works, and works with minimal compromises? Some things had to be tweaked and nerfed from baseline 5e, but you can basically do whatever you want from the 5e PHB. Personally, I just directly rebuilt the monk I most recently played. I just looked at his character sheet, picked all the same stuff, and then went about my business playing him like usual: attack, attack, flurry+push, proceed to next target.

Interestingly, I think spending 100+ hours in BG3 might have made me a more proficient (or at least more aware) pen & paper player, because it constantly reinforces what you can do. Do you still have a bonus action? Seriously do you? Why haven’t you used it? USE IT. And Jumping! Why have I never jumped in a tabletop game? Jumping is BROKEN. Why have I never pushed someone? Pushing is INCREDIBLY overpowered! It’s so obvious, but unless you have happy little icons informing you what you can do at all times, it’s so easy to just not think about it.

The interactions in the game are spectacular: if you can think about doing something, you can almost certainly do it and it will work as expected. Yeet a dude into a bottomless pit? Sure. Shoot a walkway out from under an enormous spider, so they fall on their buddy? Totally works. Cram a bunch of explosives in a barrel so you can set them all off simultaneously causing overwhelming damage? Yes. Instructing your wild-shaped druid to belly-flop onto an enemy from a great height? Oh yes. Thunderwave and Shatter also appropriately send everything not nailed-down across rooms like shrapnel. I’ve also pulled off a multi-turn combo of Ice Storm to deal damage and create a huge area of ice, then Alchemist’s Fire to melt the ice, then a lightning arrow to electrocute everything in the big puddle. And of course constructs will take extra damage from that.

But Larian went further, and made sure enemies of sufficient intelligence know how to use the sandbox to their advantage too. Blind-immune enemies will cover the map in Magical Darkness that they can freely wander around in. Enemies with Vine-Whip (or similar) will use it to yoink people and split your party. Elemental-immune enemies will gleefully use those elements with reckless abandon, nuking huge swaths of the map. Flying enemies will screw up the floor and then whack at you repeatedly when you keep falling over. Fighting on a catwalk? Enemies will push you off the edge, so yeet them before they yeet you. This extensive awareness and use of a complex playing field leads to encounters that simultaneously feel fair and even, but also challenging, but also heavily rewarding of creative thinking. You’re typically lucky to get one of those, not all of those, and yet Larian really pulled it off spectacularly here.

The vast vast vast vast majority of things about this game are amazing, but I have two key gripes.

  1. The inventory system is truly horrible, every version of it (Solo, Group, Camp Stash, etc). There is no way to fix it. Throw it out and start over. It technically works, but every second spent interacting with it resulted in severe psychic damage.

  2. Party management is also awful, and it sort of overlaps or dovetails with my gripes about inventory. Your “full” party maxes out at 9 fully playable characters, including your PC. You can only actively interact with the inventory of four of them at a time. Swapping party members out can happen at any time, but you can only add people back in camp.

So, swapping party members around is just garbage if you’re swapping out – for instance – one martial character for another martial, or one spell-caster for another. I handled this by temporarily dismissing a character I was planning on keeping, inviting the new character, re-balancing gear, then swapping out the outbound character with the temporarily dismissed one. Just egregious amounts of shuffling people around to get your party equipped competently.

Also as per usual I have a “I don’t know if this is good or bad”: There is potentially Too Much Stuff in this game. And not just the normal kind of Too Much Stuff, like content you can’t experience during a single play-through. It’s got that, like a pair of characters you’re forced – not explicitly – to choose between. There’s also variety of alignment-based choices to make all over the game, which frequently provide you with a decent spectrum of choices, not just “mustache twirling villain” and “the most lawful good character ever”.

I’m more talking about stuff you can just straight up miss, or stuff you can exclude yourself from because you chose to approach an encounter one of 37 different ways. And then there’s stuff like different options you can get based on your custom character’s background, class, specific perks, etc. Or like, there’s meaningful alternative ways to approach areas that I never interacted with, like holes you can send a familiar through or a tiny-sized wild-shaped person. It’s a completionist’s nightmare, to the point that I think it’s going to be nearly impossible to objectively quantify what “100%” even means for this game, let alone actually do it.

I’ve opted out of all that, and just played through once. I did every quest I came across naturally. I know I’ve missed stuff, I’ve had endless conversations about experiences in the game where both sides of the conversation had zero overlap. Or if we did have overlap, it was in setting and characters alone – how we got there, what we did, and what the outcomes were were wildly wildly different. To get those kinds of experiences in a narrative-driven game that only has a couple distinct zones and isn’t some sprawling randomly-generated open world filled with Radiant Quests is something incredibly special.

The quests, save for maybe two, were all pretty spectacular. Well written, good choices, good varied combat encounters, incredible options for how to approach encounters, and so much reactivity. Basically every quest had hooks for at least one party member to get something “special” out of it, ranging from an extra voice line, or an extra interaction, or a special reward, or a special option for how to approach. This is expected for like “Companion Quests”, but in BG3 it’s all over the place. Even technically outside of a “quest”, just having certain characters in your party at the right time will result in extra little bonus bits, like if you’ve got Karlach with you in early Act 2, when you reach Last Light Inn she will gleefully fangirl out over getting to meet Jaheira. It adds so much life to these characters to have interactions like this, and I loved it. It added a whole extra driving factor to party choice, where I would have to decide both “who do I think will be most effective for tonight’s adventure” and also “who’s opinions do I want to hear about the most out-of-combat”?

Much digital ink has already been spilled over how amazing the cast is, but yeah, I loved them all too. Even the ones I hated and left in camp most of the time because warlocks are hot garbage in this game. The writing and acting in this game were both spectacular, and deserve all the awards.

Actually, no, just back up the dump-truck full of awards. Highly Recommended, but with the caveat that you have to know what you’re getting into. You have to know it’s a deep deep dark hole that will consume you. You have to understand that you will go in every session thinking “ok I’ve got a very specific plan, we’re just going to do one specific quest, I know exactly where it is and I’m very well prepared” and then five hours later you still won’t have completed the combat encounter.