Baldur's Gate III

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Baldur's Gate 3 is the game where Larian Studios took the Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition ruleset and committed to something almost every other RPG only pretends to do: making your choices actually change the game around you, permanently, rather than quietly resetting the board a few hours later. Released in August 2023 for PC and PlayStation 5, with Xbox Series X|S following afterward, it is a turn-based role-playing game about a party of adventurers infected with a mind flayer parasite, racing to find a cure before it transforms them into monsters. That premise exists mainly as an excuse to put the player in front of an enormous number of decisions, and almost none of those decisions get quietly reversed later the way most big-budget RPGs eventually have to. The setup begins on a nautiloid ship crashing through the Sword Coast. You wake up with a tadpole in your skull, a handful of strangers trapped in the exact same situation, and no map to work from. From there, the campaign fans out across three full acts and an enormous amount of optional content, almost all of it built to react specifically to who you decided to become and who you decided to trust along the way. Companions remember what you told them. Factions remember who you sided with in a fight three acts earlier. NPCs you spared or killed in act one can resurface in act three in ways that genuinely surprise players who assumed the game had moved past that choice. What makes this work at the scale Larian attempted is the sheer density of the underlying Dungeons & Dragons ruleset, translated faithfully rather than simplified for a video game audience. Combat runs on real tabletop mechanics: initiative order, advantage and disadvantage, verticality, environmental interactions like fire and water, and spell combinations that reward genuine system mastery rather than simply picking the strongest option in a menu. Every encounter can be approached as a fight, a negotiation, a trick, or some combination the game did not explicitly design for but allows anyway, because the underlying rules support it rather than fighting against it. Few RPGs manage this level of reactivity without the seams showing somewhere, long stretches of recycled dialogue, companions who forget what just happened, choices that look meaningful but resolve identically regardless of what you picked. Baldur's Gate 3 is not flawless, and a game this size inevitably has rough edges in its less-travelled corners. But across a hundred-plus hours and three full acts, it remains the clearest evidence in years that an RPG can treat consequence as a core system rather than an occasional flourish, and that commitment is exactly what the score here reflects.

The thing you'll love. Or hate.

2026-10-03 · By Game Avant

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