Baldur's Gate 3

Through a litany of modern games mired by microtransactions and shifty live-service releases emerges a shining beacon of light: Baldur's Gate 3. Your buddies at work are talking about it; your favourite Discord servers are awash with videos about it; heck, even Grandma and her bridge club are wittering away about it (probably). The game has quickly become a cultural phenomenon and with my playtime knocking the three-digit mark, I finally feel ready to evaluate my adventure through Faerûn — so let’s dive in.

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Baldur’s Gate is a series based on the ever-popular tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. The first two titles — both developed by Bioware — are over two decades old, yet they remain the darlings of DnD gamers to this day. When it came to tackling game number three, however — well, that task fell to none other than critically-lauded Divinity: Original Sin developer Larian Studios.

The game’s namesake, Baldur’s Gate, is a fictional city, a bustling, merchant-filled metropolis on the west coast of Faerûn. Faerûn is a fictional continent on the planet of Toril, third planet from the sun and anchor point of the great moon Selûne. Toril is one of the eight planets in Realmspace, or the Torilian system, which itself is part of the — alright, okay, I hear you; I’ll stop. But the point I make is this: the Dungeons & Dragons universe and its Forgotten Realms are decidedly enormous. So the first question you might be asking yourself is this: is Baldur’s Gate 3 for me? Can I jump in here? Or do I have to trawl my way through the many, many preceding games, books, television shows and tabletop campaigns first? Let’s answer that together.

The overarching narrative of Baldur’s Gate 3 centres around the player character and their ragtag band of recruited companions as they seek out a cure for a particularly nasty form of infection: a mindflayer tadpole forcibly lodged in their brains and threatening to imminently transform them into mindflayers themselves. It’s a compelling premise and one with a plight that is easy to understand, drawing the game’s diverse main cast together in a way that requires no previous understanding of the DnD setting or themes.