Baldur’s Gate 3 Review: Larian’s RPG Still Holds Up

Baldur’s Gate 3 arrived in 2023 carrying two decades of expectation on its back, first as the spiritual successor to a pair of BioWare classics and then, after years of early access, as the game a huge slice of the RPG audience had already decided to love before launch. That kind of pressure sinks plenty of sequels. It didn’t sink this one. Larian Studios built a turn-based RPG on the Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition ruleset that rewards curiosity, punishes laziness, and somehow still runs on hardware that isn’t a supercomputer. Years past release, it remains one of the most complete role-playing games on PC and console, and this review looks at why it holds up on replay rather than just on a launch-week high.

The setup is simple enough to explain in a sentence: your character wakes up on a Mind Flayer ship with a parasite in their skull, crash-lands on the Sword Coast, and has to find a cure before the tadpole finishes the job. Everything after that sentence branches so aggressively that no two players end up with the same story, and that branching is the actual subject of this review, because it’s the thing every other decision in the game serves.

Gameplay: Turn-Based Combat That Rewards Reading the Room

Combat in Baldur’s Gate 3 is turn-based, built on the 5th edition ruleset, and far more tactical than the phrase “D&D video game” tends to suggest to people who haven’t played one. Positioning matters. Height matters. The environment is not scenery, it’s ammunition: barrels of oil, patches of grease, chandeliers hanging over enemy formations, water that conducts lightning damage to everyone standing in it including you if you’re not paying attention. A fight that looks unwinnable on paper often has a solution sitting in the room, and finding it is more satisfying than any damage number the game could show you.

Character building leans the same way. The class and subclass system pulls faithfully from the tabletop rules, which means multiclassing, feat selection, and spell preparation all carry real weight rather than being cosmetic flavor on top of a fixed build. A Fighter who dips into Rogue for extra action economy plays meaningfully differently from a pure Fighter, and the game trusts you to figure that out rather than gating it behind excessive tutorializing. This is a game that respects system mastery, and players who enjoy planning encounters rather than button-mashing through them get the most out of it.

Party Composition and Companions

The six-companion roster is where a lot of the tactical texture comes from, since each companion arrives with class tendencies, personal quests, and opinions about your decisions that shift their approval and, eventually, their loyalty. Swapping party members between fights to cover a specific weakness (bringing in a caster for a fight against enemies clustered in a corridor, say) is encouraged by the camp system, and the game never punishes you for optimizing your lineup the way some RPGs do by locking companions to fixed roles.

Difficulty Options

Four difficulty settings run from Explorer, which trims combat lethality for players who want the story without the tactical grind, up to Tactician, which sharpens enemy AI and adds encounters that assume you’re using every tool available. Honor Mode, added post-launch, strips manual saves entirely and turns the whole campaign into a single continuous run, which is the mode to pick if you want the game’s reputation for punishing mistakes to actually mean something.

Story and Presentation: A Cast Worth the Investment

The writing is the game’s biggest asset, and it’s worth being specific about why. Every companion has a fully voiced arc that intersects with the main plot instead of sitting beside it, full-body motion capture on every conversation instead of static dialogue trees, and choices that ripple forward in ways that are frequently invisible until an act later. A decision made in the first few hours about who to trust or which faction to side with can close off entire questlines two acts down the road, and the game rarely announces that a door has shut. That’s a deliberate design choice, and it’s the reason so many players describe finishing the campaign and immediately wanting to start a second run with different choices.

Visually, the game commits to a painterly high-fantasy look rather than chasing photorealism, and it ages well because of that choice. Character models hold up in close-up cutscenes, environmental design shifts convincingly across the game’s three acts (a coastal grove, an underground city, a corrupted metropolis), and the cinematic camera during dialogue does a lot of work making conversations feel like scenes rather than menus. The soundtrack, largely orchestral with recurring themes tied to specific characters and locations, supports the tone without ever demanding attention it hasn’t earned.

Companion Writing and Romance

Companion romances get outsized attention in discussion of the game, and for good reason: they’re handled with more nuance than the “gift enough approval points” formula common to the genre. Relationships develop through actual conversation choices and shared history rather than a hidden meter, and the game is comfortable letting a romance fail or a friendship sour if the player’s choices point that way.

Act Structure

The three-act structure front-loads an enormous amount of freedom in Act 1, narrows the geography somewhat in Act 2’s more vertical, more atmospheric setting, and closes with a busier, higher-stakes Act 3 that some players feel is comparatively over-scoped and bug-prone relative to the first two. It’s a fair criticism. The final act was clearly the most compressed on the development timeline, and while patches have smoothed a lot of it out, it’s still the weakest of the three in terms of pacing.

Performance and Technical Notes

On PC, performance scales reasonably well across a wide range of hardware, though the game leans hard on CPU performance during busy fights with a lot of active spell effects and NPCs on screen, which can produce frame dips in crowded scenes even on otherwise capable rigs. Load times are short outside of the day-one patch era, and the multiplayer implementation, up to four players in drop-in co-op, works well enough for a party to genuinely split up and pursue different conversations simultaneously, though voice chat and camera management across a split party takes some adjustment.

Save-scumming (reloading before a bad dice roll to try again) is trivially easy on the standard difficulties, which is either a mercy or a temptation depending on your relationship with random number generators. Honor Mode exists specifically to remove that option, and it’s the version of the game that best captures what tabletop D&D actually feels like when the dice genuinely don’t care about your plan.

Console Performance

The PS5 version, and the later Xbox Series X|S release, both run at a respectable frame rate with a UI reworked for controller input, cross-save support between platforms, and split-screen local co-op on PS5 that’s a genuinely impressive technical accomplishment for a game this systemically dense. Console players lose a small amount of the mod-friendliness PC enjoys but gain a controller scheme that’s noticeably more comfortable than most CRPGs manage.

Value: How Much Game Is Actually Here

A single playthrough runs somewhere between 75 and 100 hours depending on how thoroughly you explore, and that number climbs fast if you’re the type of player who reads every piece of found text and talks to every companion after every rest. Because so many quests branch based on class, race, and dialogue choices, a second playthrough with a different build and different alliances doesn’t feel like retreading old ground, it feels like a different game wearing the same setting. Combined with a robust mod scene on PC and continued post-launch support, the amount of content per dollar is difficult to match elsewhere in the genre.

Verdict

Baldur’s Gate 3 earns its reputation. The tactical combat rewards genuine system knowledge, the writing treats player choice as a structural pillar rather than a marketing bullet point, and the third act’s rougher edges don’t undo everything the first two acts build. It’s a long game that respects the time it asks for, and it’s still, years after release, one of the strongest arguments for turn-based RPG design on the market.

Score: 9.5/10

Conclusion

Baldur’s Gate 3 justified the years of early access hype by delivering a turn-based RPG that treats tactical combat, character writing, and player agency as equally important pillars rather than picking one to specialize in. It isn’t flawless, the third act shows the seams of a compressed development schedule, but the sheer density of meaningful choice across a 75-to-100-hour campaign makes it one of the defining RPGs of its generation.