I thought I would get this review of Baldur’s Gate 3 out of the way because I recently started playing the early access version and absolutely love it. While this game doesn’t appear to have the class customisation options that Baldur’s Gate 1 had, it has many good things going about.

There were things about the first game that used to annoy me, such as the inability of a rogue to find traps and be in stealth simultaneously, which absolutely made no sense as to why it was that way. Still, in the enhanced edition, the find traps were automated, so you don’t have to constantly move and press the find traps button. That’s beside the point. Apart from that, the first game was solid, but I still like this game.

To summarise, playing Baldur’s Gate 3 is more like playing a real D&D adventure and tricks you into thinking that you are almost watching an interactive movie. There are options in this game that I never would have thought of putting into a D&D video game, like the ability to knock people unconscious.

I recently read a review about this game that said the only thing good about the gameplay is the graphics, and I have to wholeheartedly disagree. Even though there are a few things I don’t like about Baldur’s Gate 3, overall, the game was worth waiting for.

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The Good

I will cover the good parts of this game, which there are many such as:

Unexpected additions such as jumping, height advantage and knocking people unconscious
Class creation is more accessible in this game than it was in the original.
You encounter all the classes you would need early in the game
Usage of the environment as a weapon way more than in Baldur’s Gate 1
All characters can hide
Combat is turn-based
The graphics

Unexpected Additions

The developers have certainly taken into account the improvements from other RPG games, and there are additions to this game that I wouldn’t have necessarily expected such ability to interact with your environment.

This includes jumping a certain height based on your character’s strength, allowing the character to get to high ground or jump over hazards such as fire.

The ability to jump ties in with the advantage of ranged weapons you receive when you are higher than your opponent, which means that getting high ground against the opponent can be a game-changer.

Also, I love the ability to knock out characters, and I have had a unique interaction where I knocked out some characters who later reappeared and had to kill.

Class creation

As stated before, class creation is more accessible than in the original. You are given 27 points to apply to different stats. No random points are given to entice you to keep rerolling till you get something perfect.

There doesn’t appear to be multiclassing in this game which I am not sure that I entirely like, but I am not sure if this will change once the game moves away from early access.

You encounter all the classes you need early in the game

Without spoiling, you encounter all the classes you need in the early game with a cleric, wizard, rogue, fighter and warlock.

I believe that warlock is a new class that wasn’t present in Baldur’s Gate 1 as it’s new to 5th edition D&D where the original game was based on advanced D&D second edition.

Usage of the environment as a weapon

One of the things I really loved about the first game was creating excellent strategies, such as setting up a kill zone using the grease spell (which is a wizard spell that essentially covers an area in oil which makes it slippery for creatures to move across and is flammable)

This spell was my bread and butter in the first game, but it was useless in dungeons because you would often have your rogue (a thief character) walking in front of the party to detect traps.

Because the rogue wasn’t able to find traps while in stealth, it meant that unless I knew where an enemy was in advance because I had already encountered them and died or just reloaded the save, it meant I couldn’t really take advantage of the spell.

Not so in Baldur’s Gate 3. Because the rogue can hide and detect and disarm traps, this game allows for much more strategic gameplay than the original game.

Also, there are a lot more item & spell interactions, such as you can have one strong character throw an oil barrel at a group and then have another use a fire spell to cause an explosion in the middle of an enemy group and set the area on fire so that if enemies try to move through the fire, they take damage and are set on fire.

There are also spells that cause water to cover an area which can be used to put out a fire or for electrocution of enemies if you use an electricity spell, or you can freeze the water to make it slippery to pass.

All characters can hide

In this game, all characters can hide. This doesn’t mean that a heavily armoured cleric can sneak up to the back of an enemy, but it does mean that you can often see an enemy before they can see how to allow you to set up some strategic plays.

This addition really makes this game feel more natural as adventurers would be sneaking through a dungeon and not just running straight forward and running into enemies like what would happen in the original game if you weren’t using stealth and were using the find traps ability which you couldn’t use and hide at the same time in the original game.

Combat is turn-based

This is an exciting change as the original game was sort of turn-based in terms of specific things you could do within a time frame, but now the combat is turn-based, and you can optionally go into turn-based mode yourself if you want to set up a strategic attack.

This is really awesome as it significantly allows you to make use of certain spells that affect the area in front of the caster, such as colour spray, which was almost impossible to do in the original game with a wizard because it meant putting your caster in danger but was also really difficult to do in the chaos of the original game.

This means that excellent area-of-effect spells like fireball, which is a spell that causes an explosion in an area, really couldn’t be used by the wizard because I found that the enemies would see me when I would see them, so I couldn’t get the drop on them.

This really limited the spells that a wizard could use, and I had to use area-of-effect spells that would only affect enemies as otherwise, I would end up blowing up my own party (which sadly did happen a few times while I was learning)

Now that the combat is turn-based, I can say use the fighter character to throw a barrel of oil or gunpowder first and then have a wizard or cleric set the oil/gunpowder on fire with a spell or have another character use a fire arrow. In Baldur’s Gate 1, this was not often possible.

I can only think of one instance I was able to do this in Baldur’s Gate 1, which was when you encounter a pack of wolves that also contains vampire wolves that require enchanted weapons or magic to damage.

I set up a trap by casting a grease spell in front of me so that when the wolf pack would go after me, they would hit the grease and hopefully get stuck while I peppered them with bows and the vampire wolves with magic missiles.

This was very enjoyable but something rarely able to do in Baldur’s Gate 1, which is excellent that you can do in Baldur’s Gate 3. This game rewards excellent strategy and planning and often gives you multiple options on how to approach each combat.

The graphics.

The graphics in this game are fantastic. They are absolutely brilliant and really immerse you in the story. We live in a golden age of technology when a game can look this realistic, and I am not even playing it with VR.

The Bad

There aren’t very many bad things about this game, but no game can be perfect, and thus I will cover what I didn’t like about the game.

You can only have 4 characters in your active party at a time
No more multiclassing
Changes to the rogue character class in terms of detecting traps

You can only 4 characters in your active party at a time.

This is one change that I really don’t like. In D&D, you usually need at least two characters: the rogue, cleric, and a tank character such as a fighter, paladin etc., and you often want a mage for their tactical flexibility.

This typically leaves you with about two characters that you can pretty much experiment such as a character with good charisma, such as a sorcerer, warlock etc.

In this game (at least in early access, hopefully, this changes), you can only have 4 characters.

And so far, I think there are only 6 characters to recruit. While of the 5 you have, they all fill essential roles, which means that the starting character you make will determine which classes you play with.

Like I started as a cleric, and thus I needed the rogue character to do what rogues do, such as opening locks and disarming traps though the rogue character seems almost hopeless at detecting traps.

You need a cleric for healing and also want a fighter for tanking and dealing straight damage, which means you now only really have one free character to play with. So, I had to choose between the warlock and the wizard.

The warlock was good at speaking and had an excellent cantrip, a spell that a spell caster could cast as often as they wanted, but the wizard had a superb selection of spells.

In the original Baldur’s Gate, you could have 6 characters at a time, and there was plenty to choose from, whether you were evil or good, and plenty to cover every conceivable role that a party would need.

But in Baldur’s gate 3, you are forced to decide what party to take from limited options. Now I understand why they did this as now everything appears to be animated, and thus more characters mean more animations to do, but I feel this problem can then be fixed by what I will talk about next.

I hope they add many more characters as the game moves forward from early access.

No more multiclassing

In the original game, this wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad problem because you could take more characters. Still, in this game, it is a real problem because since there are so few characters and you can only have 3 other characters in your party, the ability to multiclass would really be handy.

I can see creating a cleric/rogue multiclass with high wisdom for perceiving traps and for, casting cleric spells and high dexterity to improve armour class and doing what rogues do best such as disarming traps and unlocking chests etc.

Changes to the rogue character

This isn’t a complaint about the game itself but rather the game system used, which is D&D 5th edition. In the original game, the rogue character would have a certain number of skills they would get per level up (the base rogue was 25 points) that they could allocate to specific skills, and one of those skills was finding traps.

As a rogue levelled up, you would take points in finding traps and disarming them. In Baldur’s Gate 3, your character’s ability to disarm traps appears to be based on dexterity. as well as sleight of hand skills, which makes sense but also, your ability to detect traps is based on Wisdom, which means that Rogue needs to have both high dexterity for sneaking, disarming traps and unlocking containers and high wisdom to detect the traps.

Unfortunately, the rogue companion seems to have very high dexterity but pretty low Wisdom, which means he doesn’t seem to find traps that often. The thing is, though, the rogue class uses dexterity and intelligence for their saving roles. Hence, it means another skill that the rogue has to invest in, which is why a rogue/cleric multiclass would be good in specific ways because then you would actually be able to use the wisdom which otherwise the rogue doesn’t seem to need.

I’m not saying this would be the best class but it would mean you could use one character to fulfil both roles allowing you to be more flexible about which characters you choose to include in your party.

I would like to see a rogue/cleric multi-class with the trickery domain to see how cool that would be, but you can almost take that now if you take the arcane trickster subclass, which I will talk about in part 2 of this review.

Conclusion

While there are a few bad things about this game, this game is a really excellent experience. I will also talk about this in part 2 of this review, which goes a bit more spoiler-heavy and talks about the different ways of finishing quests that I noticed in the game, which really takes into account your ability to interact with the environment providing the strategic game with many options to completing tasks.

Review of Baldur’s Gate 3 Early Access Part 1