Game On: Baldur’s Gate III aiming to be the ultimate Dungeons & Dragons video game

Initially announced in 2019, Baldur’s Gate III is finally around the corner – due to be released Aug. 3 on PC and Sept. 6 on PlayStation 5. Marketing for the game has been ramping up over the past few weeks, with a teaser trailer and lots of new information revealing just how massive the game’s shaping up to be.

The world of Dungeons & Dragons is incredibly large and varied, so Larian Studios has plenty of content and lore to work into the game. They’re promising hundreds of hours of content, hundreds of characters to interact with and a highly customizable character creator featuring 12 classes and 46 subclasses, 11 races with 33 subraces between them and around 600 spells to utilize. It’s obvious Baldur’s Gate III is aiming for a high level of replay value.

The question becomes, then, whether all that content will be worthwhile. Larian’s writing is a bit campy at times, and I’ll freely admit my friends and I got burned out on Divinity: Original Sin long before the game’s ending. I’ve been skeptical about Baldur’s Gate III for almost four years now, but the most recent reveals leave me more optimistic.

The first and foremost problem is calling it Baldur’s Gate III. While there have already been unrelated spinoffs utilizing the Baldur’s Gate name – which is simply a large city in the “Sword Coast” region of D&D’s Forgotten Realms setting – none have been bold enough to label themselves a true sequel to the original saga.

The original Baldur’s Gate saga holds a legendary reputation, and for good reason – 2000’s Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn holds a score of 95/100 on Metacritic from 30 critic reviews. To this day, it holds a spot among the top 50 highest-rated video games of all time. The trouble is, the 1998 original through the Throne of Bhaal expansion released in 2001 wove one continuous storyline. Baldur’s Gate III does not continue that story.

For that reason, I struggle to call it Baldur’s Gate III, even though it does apparently feature cameos from previous characters Minsc and Jaheira. The combat will also be turn-based, as opposed to the “real-time with pause” approach its predecessors utilized – a significant change.

Perhaps the most important thing, however, is its faithfulness to D&D. While many other games have cropped up in Baldur’s Gate’s stead, none have so successfully epitomized D&D. And judging by everything Larian is setting out to do, I’m optimistic that Baldur’s Gate III will set the new D&D video game standard.

For instance, while the game’s main quest will remain the same between playthroughs, the developer has introduced character backgrounds and “origin characters” with predetermined backstories that affect certain aspects of the game’s narrative – similar to Cyberpunk 2077’s “lifepaths,” except those turned out to be relevant for all of 30 minutes at the beginning of the game. Larian is setting out to do much more than that.

The tales of your deeds and/or misdeeds will be publicized in the “Baldur’s Mouth” newspaper, and evidently players can even break into the newsroom and force the hard-working journalists to change their stories.

Game mechanics like this excite me, because quite a few video games over the years have advertised “choice” mechanics that, in reality, change very little about how the story plays out. I don’t expect Larian to suddenly break that mold, but I do believe they’re taking a step in the right direction with Baldur’s Gate III.

I grew up playing its predecessors and positively adore them. While I still believe the Baldur’s Gate III name is erroneous – more of a marketing decision than an artistic one – it could be a very worthwhile spiritual successor.

I don’t buy into early access titles, those who have participated in Baldur’s Gate III’s early access demo have almost nothing but favorable things to say. I look forward to reviewing it in earnest in August. Stay tuned.