Baldur’s Gate 3 Review: A Critically Successful Dice Roll Into the Colossal Forgotten Realms

gadgets.ndtv.com:

The beauty of Dungeons & Dragons lies in its immersive role-playing structure that bestows upon you the role of an author, but you never truly know where the story is headed. It's quite humane in that sense, where no matter how well-prepared you are, fate's inevitable gnarly fingers might have different ideas for us. Larian Studios' latest Baldur's Gate III explores the Forgotten Realms, a dark fantastical corner of D&D that's brimming with devils, deities, and the supernatural. A highly dynamic world that reacts to the digits on a polyhedral dice to weave an emotional tale about a group of broken people, gambling their lives against sinister forces that ooze Lovecraftian vibes. On the other hand, you can take a backseat and watch it all fade to misery, as you scroll through Astarion fan art and look up the quickest ways to romance bears in-game.

That's the kind of impeccable choice-based writing that powered Baldur's Gate 3 to its instant success, at one point glueing 875,343 Steam players to their seats. The amount of passion and care dedicated to minor details is astonishing, and personally, I feel like calling it anything less than a cultural phenomenon would be an insult. It's not very often that a modern-day RPG anticipates failures or out-of-the-box actions from a player and delivers equally absurd outcomes that let you continue the journey regardless. It fully embodies the meaning of player choice, with events unfurling at a pace you desire and rarely setting any limitations for what can be done. Sure, that level of escapism can be credited to age-old tabletop RPG mechanics, but when a game's programming ignores player agency to keep vital characters alive or restarts a level for narrative purposes, it loses its