4/5 ★ – Lord_Hazenberg's review of Baldur's Gate III.

Super late to the party as I wanted to actually finish this game before typing anything out, but I come bearing an Antarctic level cold take. This game is really good. I know, hold your shock & awe. I sit here with 230 hours across 2 playthroughs. One solo up to Act 3, and one coop which is the campaign I finished. I won’t get into main story or companion spoilers as that’s essential to a first experience with a RPG, but I will discuss some points that hopefully haven’t been done to death already. I adore every bit of BG3 as it reminds me of pre EA Bioware. This game has the original 2 Baldurs Gates & Dragon Age Origins encoded in its very DNA, but it is not without flaws. The third act especially is still quite buggy. Dialogue prompts won’t show up, essential NPCs can’t be interacted with to continue quests, & even a certain character’s romance will stop entirely due to bugs. But the game gets better with every update so these could easily go away with time as the devs have been very consistent with patches & updates. Early access was a bit of a bait & switch. The character creator was a little more in depth, but I don’t mind the current one. Paladins not being able to choose a deity anymore was a strange withdrawal. And of course they changed the standard male/female option to body type A/B & pick your pronouns crap. I understand making every companion player sexual, because you don’t want them to feel limited in the character creator, but I feel it also takes away from the companions’ characters. The game goes out of its way to make sure you know that Gale is very straight and Astarion is very gay, so them being okay with whatever the player makes is odd from a story perspective. This game is also very obviously made for a modern “critical role” D&D audience as freaking everyone in this game is gay. I think 1 of the major main story characters is canonically heterosexual. Everyone else is either touching tips, slamming clams, or partaking in both. Not even I am immune to this as my female sorceress banged the tiefling hottie. If that’s the case then at least tone down the population in the city to give my PC a breather since I know none of these people are making babies. Act 3 also hits you with the side shave grannies & tranny necromancers. But enough about my negatives, almost every other aspect is astonishing. Act 1 alone is a 10/10 from a role playing aspect. The amount of freedom to solve the quests is refreshing but the quest design is even better. Nothing feels like busywork and always points you to a new area with new encounters be those combat or dialogue. Enemy variety is fantastic as well. You won’t be fighting goblins for 100 hours and even normal human enemies can be flavored up due to their class, level, or faction affiliation. Every interaction being fully voiced & animated just adds even more to this already impressive game. All in all, this is indisputably the 2023 game of the year as Elden Ring was last year. Nothing else has even come close to this level of audience retention, mainstream attention longevity, & overwhelming positive acclaim. I am a huge fan of Divinity Original Sin 2, also by Larian Studios which I have reviewed (shameless plug), and Baldur’s Gate 3 met those expectations and in most cases has far surpassed them. As for my personal game of the year? It’s a toss up between this & Armored Core 6, and it’s borderline impossible to compare the two as they’re vastly different experiences.