Every cell in my brain – all two of them – told me that I would not like Baldur's Gate 3. I've never played D&D, a Baldur's Gate game, or a hardcore CRPG. I'm not a creative or creatively motivated person, and I've never been one to seriously role-play in RPGs. I do like turn-based combat, but I know in my heart that I'm an action junkie. How the hell am I going to get into an RPG that is explicitly built around all of these off-putting and unfamiliar things?
There was a point around 30 hours in where I was convinced that I would never 'get' Baldur's Gate 3. It was all so overwhelming – the D&D rules, the sprawling magic, the branching paths. My perfectionism worked against me; I became frustrated with the fiddliness of the game and constantly worried I was doing everything wrong, or at least sub-optimally – a fate worse than death. I ended up reloading some saves upwards of 10 times each trying to get exactly the outcome I wanted in a few Act 1 encounters – not even save-scumming a dice roll, just trying to pass my imagined grading system.
"I might hate Baldur's Gate 3," I said to our own Ali Jones, who'd already given the game full stars in our Baldur's Gate 3 review. But I kept at it. I'd had some fun in Act 1, I reasoned, and I really wanted to see what all the fuss was about. 100 hours later, I've finished Baldur's Gate 3 and named it my game of the year. We at 12DOVE have also put it at the peak of the best games of the year 2023. Turns out everyone was right. This game is so good that, even as the most exhausting gaming experience I've had in years, and possibly ever, it's managed to make all those off-putting and unfamiliar things seem fun and approachable and worthwhile for the first time.
Playing anything but Baldur's Gate 3
Let me put this journey into perspective. In the months that my Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough took me, I also beat Lies of P, Armored Core 6 (three times), Lords of the Fallen, Risk of Rain Returns (multiple times), and the final five bosses of Elden Ring in NG+ (just for the hell of it). Didn't break a sweat. I played and beat a few other games, but I think this list really demonstrates where my comfort zone lies.
Baldur's Gate 3 is the most intimidating game I've ever played. If I was a deck in a card game, this RPG would be my hard counter. Loading it up felt like walking into the gym. Except every day is leg day. And the only exercise allowed is split squats. I've never put off playing a game like this before. Right up until the late game, I'd regularly struggle to sit down and actually play it, irrationally afraid of the mountain of decisions I knew I'd have to make. It was textbook decision paralysis amplified by the fact that my comfort games were both plentiful and excellent this year.
Don't get me wrong, I'd often stay up until 2am hanging on every dramatic turn. But even knowing full well that I would have fun, the very next day it would still take conscious effort to dive back in. You don't just walk into back-to-back leg days, people, else you might not be able to walk at all. Maybe I'll just beat Armored Core 6 again, actually, I'd think. Maybe I'll play Hearthstone Battlegrounds or Genshin Impact or Destiny 2. You know that thing where you clean your whole house with hitman-like precision just to avoid doing the thing you know you should be doing? That was me, but with games.
I think what finally got me over the hill, other than actually getting a handle on the basic rules of D&D, was accepting that things are supposed to go wrong. Trying to get every single variable to align perfectly is like trying to staple rain to a tree. I also focused on the things I actually like instead of forcing myself to role-play, or chiding myself for not being creative enough with my solutions. You know what, until 'normal attack everything' stops working, I reckon I'll stick with that, thanks. And what do you know: it basically never stopped working.
What I do like about Baldur's Gate 3
I like building characters in RPGs, so I doubled down on my party of choice and stopped trying to rotate companions all the time outside of rare story interactions. My core team consisted of my Paladin Tav, a stealth archer Astarion, healer Shadowheart (my beloved), and an all-rounder Gale. If I needed to, I'd swap out Astarion on occasion. Finally meeting Gale after, I don't know, 26 hours (don't ask) was a big improvement, I'll tell you that. To anyone struggling with Baldur's Gate 3, my biggest tip is to get a Wizard and load 'em up with AoE, crowd control, and utility spells. My second-biggest tip is: apply Fireball until dead.
The fact that it is easy to miss big, important details and encounters makes the ones you do find that much more impactful.
I also like exploration, but exploring Baldur's Gate 3 when I wasn't confident in my understanding of its combat or narrative systems made me feel anxious and unprepared. I was so hung up on the fear of missing something that I couldn't enjoy the fun of finding something else. This brought another watershed realization: it's impossible to see everything in this game in one go, and futile to try to. That's the whole point.
I was able to connect this with my experience in another massive open-world game, but one that's more my speed: Elden Ring. The fact that it is easy to miss big, important details and encounters makes the ones you do find that much more impactful. I know this in my heart, I just couldn't see it through the fog of war that Baldur's Gate 3 creates for a total noob like me. Larian's taken this approach to a new extreme, explicitly catering to even impossibly rare edge cases in order to pay off the promise of its world, and Baldur's Gate 3 does this better than arguably any other game.
As I came to grips with how the RPG operates, I became more eager to round the next corner and check under every rock, buoyed by the confidence that I would find something meaningful and that I could probably handle it. (I played on normal difficulty, and by the end regretted not choosing Tactician as the game became too easy.) The enthralling reactivity of the world started to come into focus, at one point leading me to write an entire article about the time my Paladin rizzed up some bosses so hard they exploded.
Final exam
I didn't really hit my stride until Act 2, so I enjoyed the final half of the game much more than the opening act. My favorite memory of Baldur's Gate 3, the point where I thought I'd mastered the game (I hadn't) and that it could seriously be my GOTY, came in Act 3. It was the bit where you rescue all those people from the underwater facility and then storm the Steel Watch factory. I beat the entire sequence of events on my first try – no reloaded saves – without a single friendly death. I was leapfrogging movement abilities, chucking potions of speed, using summons strategically, healing all my newfound soldiers. For once, normal attacking a whole lot was not the answer. It was the most unconventional battle yet, and it was heart-in-throat exhilarating.
Even if I didn't have a zillion other games weighing on my mind, I don't think I'd have the energy to do all this again, folks.
For the cherry on top, the fight against the Gigachad Steel Watch was an absolute joke – a testament to how much better my party and I had become. I insta-killed the first machine with Astarion, stunlocked another with Gale, and finally made the big lad drop his weapon before rooting him in place within Shadowheart's locust AoE, my Tav positioned just outside its reach for the tank-and-spank.
After all that time the game spent gassing these robots up, they went down like a house of cards. Their overseer, Gortash, was no different. I swapped Astarion out for Karlach just to give her the satisfaction of killing the bastard, and even with no idea how to play her as a Barbarian, Gortash's ego was soon papered all over the walls of his office. Absolutely vaporizing the haughty little fuck was maybe the most satisfying anti-climax I've ever played.
I was equally pleased with the ending I got. I finished all the companion storylines and avoided a grisly, Illithid fate, which was all I was hoping for. Everyone got a reasonably happy ending, which honestly surprised me. Finally immersed in the CRPG waters, I immediately thought about starting a new playthrough to experiment with other classes and party members. I've been hearing a lot of praise for Bards and Monks, after all. Then I thought about all the other games I could play in another 100 hours and just as immediately abandoned the idea.
Even if I didn't have a zillion other games weighing on my mind, I don't think I'd have the energy to do all this again, folks. I rarely replay games and it's a miracle I made it through this game at all, so I'm quitting while I'm ahead. Some part of me does want to play more Baldur's Gate 3, but even with months of experience, leg day is still leg day.
