A beginner’s guide to beginning Baldur’s Gate 3

theverge.com:

After six years in development and three years in early access, Baldur’s Gate 3 is now live everywhere in the world. Due to the sheer size of the game, with reports boasting 174 hours worth of cutscenes and over 17,000 ending variations, and an impossible review window — The Verge received our code on Sunday — it’s going to take a while before formal reviews start popping up. (Or at least it should, but there will inevitably be some places that mainline the game in service of an uncaring SEO machine.) But thanks to the limited time I did get withBaldur’s Gate 3, I can offer some tips, tricks, and thoughts that will get you through the first 20 hours or so of the game.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a chonky-ass game, taking up around 120 gigs of space. My computer’s only about three years old, running an Intel i5-10400 with 16 gigs of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660. With these specifications, I’m solidly between the minimum and what Larian recommends, and it is evident. While I haven’t experienced any serious performance issues, it’s obvious from the constant sound of my desktop fans whirring that BG3 is a very resource-intensive game. So make sure you’ve got a rig capable of running it beyond the minimum requirements. Or simply wait until the game comes out on consoles. The PS5 launch is on September 6th; the Xbox launch is… well… considerably later after that.

Make sure you’ve got a rig capable of running it beyond the minimum requirements

BG3 has been in early access for three years, which, according to a Bloomberg profile of the game’s development, was a successful way for fans to experience bits of the game while giving developer Larian Studios more time and money to finish this gargantuan endeavor. However, with the game