Imagine you’re sitting around a table with friends. You’re looking down at your miniature standing on some white card with a grid drawn on it as the DM starts weaving together a tale.
You’re all adventures brought together by fate and a desire for cheap ale. While you all share stories of past experiences, a bard picks up on what’s being shared and starts to immortalise the tales into song.
All is good, and the air is filled with that buzzing excitement that only seems to exist within tavern walls when the large, heavy door to the tavern flies open, and a figure, covered in blood, stumbles in before collapsing to the ground and in a weak, quivering voice with an outstretched hand, the figure forms but one word before falling silent: run.
And just then, the DM looks out at all of you from behind his DM screen and tells you to roll for initiative.
At its most raw and stripped-down level, this is Dungeons and Dragons, a story shared among friends and an adventure crafted by every roll of the dice; this is Baldur’s Gate 3.
This isn’t going to be a traditional review of Baldur’s Gate 3; hundreds are already available for you to go and read if you’re curious.
Instead, this is a story about how a video game ignited a spark inside me that grew into a blazing flame while playing and got me ready to finally sit down and play the game of Dungeons and Dragons I’ve been putting off.
There are many ways to describe Dungeons and Dragons, I mean Baldur’s Gate 3, to people, but it’s impossible to describe how visceral and exciting the game experience is.
Too often, we get video games that give players the illusion of free will and choice. Sure, you can pick from one of these three dialogue options, but will any of them influence the story’s direction? Rarely.
However, in Baldur’s Gate 3, everything you and your adventuring party do together shapes and changes the game and experience you share.
One of the hardest things to translate from Dungeons and Dragons to a video game is the freedom to see where your crazy ideas will take you. However, this is something that Baldur’s Gate has managed to encapsulate perfectly.
From distracting a merchant with your bard song, shoving a giant spider off of a mountain to her demise, to picking up and throwing a chair, stacking barrels to reach higher ground or dipping the tip of your arrow into a candle to fire a flaming shot – the options are there for you to discover and make a part of your story.
As an adult with a love for tabletop gaming, one of my biggest regrets was not getting into Dungeons and Dragons as a child.
I’ve always loved strong narrative-driven experiences, and having control over how a story bends and twists is everything I want out of a game and more.
However, starting to play Dungeons and Dragons as an adult for the first time is harrowing and terrifying. And not just because Dungeons and Dragons come with a whole plethora of rules and mechanics unlike anything I’ve played before, but because I lack the surety in myself and the confidence to really have fun in the game.
All that fear melted away within my first 30 minutes of playing Baldur’s Gate 3, which is why it’s such an achievement in the tabletop-inspired video game space.
Within the game, Larian Studios, the developer has managed to take a small corner of the Forgotten Realms from Dungeons and Dragons and turn it into a highly detailed and stunning beautiful fantasy world, brought to life by engaging and exciting characters voiced so perfectly, Matthew Mercer would be proud.
Baldur’s Gate never feels like it holds your hand in any way. Yet, there is a safety to be found in it, the safety to discover some of the magic the Dungeons and Dragons holds.
Every part of Baldur’s Gate 3 oozes with life, and because of this, the choices you make along your journey carry the weight they should and the alliances you forge feel true.
This isn’t a game you play; it’s a game you fall in love with.
Larian created a game with so much freedom associated with who you want your character to be within their world. The game boasts over 29 subraces with unique abilities and models and 12 classes that each play completely differently and will fill a specific role in your party.
But beyond that, it’s also just got one of the best character creators outside the top MMOs. It would be easy to imagine your character simply blending in among a cast of hundreds of characters you will encounter, yet that never happens.
But put your Dragonborn rouge in a room filled with the same type of character, and each of you will still stand out and feel unique – a truly unimaginable feat that Larian managed to accomplish.
There’s also a level of freedom regarding your decision-making that hasn’t been fully explored within the video game space before. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game that rarely ever says no to players and instead encourages you to tackle each problem in a way that makes the most sense to who your character is.
Sure, your rouge can lockpick that wooden gate to open it, but your huge hulking barbarian can also take an axe to it. And your magic-wielding ranger can try burning it to the ground with a fiery arrow – the choices are yours to experiment with and make.
Before playing Balder’s Gate 3 with my friends, the idea of sitting around a table and looking them in the eye as I tried to come up with a story or justify something I wanted to do or try just seemed so far removed from my comfort zone.
But now it’s something I get excited about. Just within our first couple of hours in Baldur’s Gate 3, we had already started to weave our unique tales and legends, and recalling some of the moments we’ve shared is an experience unlike any other I’ve had in a game.
Not only will you and your friends remember that time you accidentally barged in on a Bugbear and Ogre, making like the birds and bees, but the game will also remember.
There is just something utterly exciting about being called a dirty pervert by a Bugbear related to the one you walked in on hours after it happened that delights the soul.
It also gave me the confidence to want to engage in these stories – because you never know when simply choosing not to knock at a door might leave lasting ripples throughout the game.
Your character in the game also grows, gains confidence and flourishes in this world alongside you. When you start playing, your character is as inexperienced and unconfident in the world as you are.
But give it a few hours and levels. That fragile little butterfly you started playing is now an effective killing machine with the confidence to flaunt it
Another feather out of the Dungeons and Dragons cap that Larian was able to take and truly make its own is that nothing that happens in the game ever feels like filler.
When you sit at a table with your friends and your DM asks you to roll the dice for a Dexterity test to see if you make it to the top of a tree because your party needs to deliver one of its golden fruits to a strange woman standing next to a mysterious well, it never feels irrelevant or like you’re just wasting your time.
This is precisely what Baldur’s Gate managed to do. The story never lets you forget that you’re a hero. There is always this feeling of needing to prove your worth to the game and yourself. Everything you do, however big or small, feels like an integral part of the game and a measure of your character.
Everything players do helps shape not only their adventure but their motivations, morals and personality, regardless of how far detached from the main story it may be.
When I first sat down to play Dungeons and Dragons, I was scared and uncomfortable. Now, after the many lives I’ve liked in Baldur’s Gate 3, I’m ready to walk to the table, a lute in hand, because this Bard has his own legends to sing about.
