Baldur's Gate 3 Review (Maquiel)
Spoilers for Dragon Age Origins and Baldur's Gate 3 below.
I remember when I was 14 years old I played a game called Dragon Age Origins, an RPG set in a fantasy world with magic and the like, where you could form a party with other characters from the world.
There was this one time where I was in a tower full of mages that was being attacked by monsters, or something like that, my party found a group of mages who had taken shelter in one of the rooms inside the tower and my evil witch companion suggested killing them all for being cowards. Being an edgy teenager and roleplaying as an evil edgy half-elf wizard, I obviously agreed, so we got to doing a little magicicide and kept going our way, cleared the tower, finished the game a long while after, and that was that.
I enjoyed the game so much I started a new playthrough, got to the mage's tower and found this group again, but this time I decided to help them instead of giving them a ticket to the afterlife and, to my surprise, it turned out one of the mages, an old woman, could become one of your companions. She had tons of dialogue, a personal quest, a personal story to tell, and the game allowed me to miss this completely My decision of being an edgelord and slaughtering a bunch of mages caused me to miss a possible companion, and the game was full of situations when your actions would impact your character and the world around you. One of my companions left my party near the end of the game because I spared a guy he hated. In one playthrough, I'd ally myself with a group werewolves and kill a settlement elves so I could have them in my army for the final fight, in the other I'd help the elves cleanse the werewolves of their curse, losing them as allies but befriending the elves. You could help people in distress or make matters worse, and the world would continue on, and this was true for the whole game.
I searched a long time for a game that could give me that same feeling, of being in a world that doesn't give you the "right" or "wrong" path, but simply choices and consequences, but none would do it. Not the other Dragon Age games, nor Mass Effect, nor The Witcher, nor thePathfinder games, and I eventually gave up, thinking that I was seeing DAO through rose-tinted glasses, the special feeling I had being no more than nostalgia.
Ten years or so from that, I played Baldur's Gate 3, and I finally felt I was playing DAO for the first time all over again.
This game accounts for everything, and I mean everything. Every single conflict can be solved in a multitude of ways. Whether you play the hero or the villain, the ways in which you can act can vary depending on how you got to the place, your character`s class, your race, your past actions, your companions, your character skills. And it doesn't matter what you decide to do, the game keeps going, the world changes to fit the consequences of your actions, the biggest example of this being that you can side with the goblins who are attacking the druid` grove, the first settlemet full of friendly npcs you find, and the game will carry on, with a completely different scenes after that, your companions reacting accordingly to the atrocity you made them commit and the main quest will continue despite destroying what seemed to be your best chance of survival at the moment. And you can miss this entirely.
Being in early access, I can't talk much about the story, but what we have so far is really promising. Each companion is wonderfully voiced acted, and they all have interesting backstories and quests that you may only get to see if they approve of you enough.
Combat feels amazing even though it can be a little slow at times, being turn-based and lacking RTWP as an option. Every hit carries a lot of weight, and most of the spells look and sound incredible. Larian's done a pretty good job at adapting the D&D 5e rules to a video game format. Also, the music is fantastic overall.
Right now, the full game is two months from being released, and I'm hoping the finished product has the same level of quality the early access has shown. For in that case, this could truly end up becoming an unforgettable experience.