Spoiler Warning: Some bosses and environments in Act 1 are described. One major encounter in Act 1 is described in detail.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is an exceptional game. I’m not breaking new ground when I say that, but to avoid that point hanging over the rest of the discussion, it’s best to not leave it merely implied. I want to focus on a design philosophy Larian took with the game that elevates Baldur’s Gate 3 from good to great. Larian used Baldur’s Gate 3’s foundational elements to build gameplay systems that respect the player.
The Fundamentals
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a principled game in that all of its base design decisions are on solid foundations. Baldur’s Gate 3, being as well-designed as it is, acts as a good lens through which to view those foundations. Having some or all of these qualities doesn’t mean a game is great. It instead means that the game’s other qualities will have an opportunity to shine. The following list is not exhaustive, nor is having all of the qualities necessary; rather the more of these qualities a game has, the more likely it is to be good:
Cohesive: Baldur’s Gate 3 is cohesive. The designs of different systems link cleanly together. Dialogue choices flow smoothly into combat or trade, the tension between exploration and combat is motivating rather than stifling, and the story branches are complete enough that players feel comfortable making RPG decisions based on narrative desire instead of combat power. There is a strong connection between what the narrative or setting of the game implies and what the player is asked to do. Environments are built to support stealth in situations where stealth is logical, like when avoiding the ambush in the Blighted Village. Enemies feel appropriately strong compared to their narrative presence and NPC reactions to player choices feel grounded in the setting of the game. The art style is consistent across assets and armor dyes and camp clothes still fit within the reality of the game world. NPC dialogue is grounded, even when humorous.
Tight: Baldur’s Gate 3 is tight. There are few if any extraneous systems that don’t earn their place in the gameplay loop. The game offers an impressive number of ways to approach any situation, but the types of situations you’ll be asked to approach are, mechanically speaking, constrained. There is no moment in which the player has to learn a fishing or racing mini-game. When the player has to use a forge to smith a Sussur Bark weapon, the gameplay is consistent with the other elements of the game: collecting materials and using the item combination menu. The game, of course, has systems that aren’t directly related to its central loop, but it does not have systems that make that loop arduous or complicated. For example, buried treasure is not an integral part of Baldur’s Gate 3’s gameplay loop, but it does serve as an unobtrusive reward for exploration.
Engaging: Baldur’s Gate 3 is engaging. The player is compelled to interact with the game, whether narratively or mechanically. In Baldur’s Gate 3 this takes the form of spectacle, depth, and story. Major combat encounters are worth seeking out, despite often being difficult to find, because they implement new mini-mechanics that are interesting to work around. The fight against Auntie Ethel is substantially different from the fight against the Spider Matriarch, despite them both being major encounters of similar difficulty. New settings are stunning and varied in aesthetic; the Ravaged Beach, Underdark, and Rosymorn Monastery are all part of Act 1 and each is visually distinct with completely different sets of enemies and puzzles. The characters the player encounters are deeply compelling, so the player goes out of their way to help or hinder them. The most driving factor of the game is the relationship with companions, which is strong enough to carry the game on its own. Playthroughs with different companions feel vastly different from each other.
Polished: Baldur’s Gate 3 is polished. Technical issues are rare, text formatting is consistent and readable, and the UI is intuitive to navigate. Veteran CRPG players will find the controls immediately natural. Players new to the genre might struggle for the first few hours of the game as they get used to the click-to-move system and the turn-based action bar; they will soon adapt and find the controls second nature. The game’s UI changes between the PC and console, improving the notoriously obtuse controller layouts that CRPGs tend to have. The game has close to zero major technical issues and very few minor bugs, which is impressive for a game as large and deep as Baldur’s Gate 3. The game runs remarkably well on various hardware, including on handheld devices like the Steam Deck.
Fun: Baldur’s Gate 3 is fun. Moving the characters and using actions feels good. The animations of characters running, jumping, and attacking are smooth and the spell effects are flashy. Watching a well-buffed character jump 40 meters straight up to reach an enemy on a ledge is rewarding. NPC dialogue is well-written and the banter between companions is endearing. There are truly funny moments like when Astarion meets Gandrel and when Shadowheart and Lae’zel struggle over the expression “bury the hatchet.” The gameplay loop is psychologically satisfying. It is exciting to line up a fireball so it hits as many enemies as possible or land a lucky dice roll in a tense argument. It feels rewarding to talk one’s way out of a tough combat encounter. The puzzles have creative but comprehensible solutions, often more than one, which makes solving them feel earned rather than given.
It’s possible to have too much of any of these traits. A game that is too tight risks being formulaic; a game with too much polish loses its charm. There is also an aspect of subjectivity to these qualities; every player will have a different tolerance for art style inconsistencies, the things that make moving a character feel good to one person may be different from the things that make it feel good to someone else. Nonetheless, these qualities are present in every good game, Baldur’s Gate 3 especially.
Going Beyond the Fundamentals
There is a marked difference between a game that is good and a game that is great. A great game is likely to have many of the qualities of a good game, but that is not sufficient. Baldur’s Gate 3 uses its strong foundation to support an ambitious vision of player freedom.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is both massive and detailed, a rare combination in games of any kind. This gives the game a particular advantage in that it has a lot to show the player and all of it is worth showing. Baldur’s Gate 3 can afford a lot of restraint in its quest and level design because it doesn’t need every player to see everything in the game. To be sure, a lot of this comes from mutually exclusive story paths; this is a feature found commonly in CRPGs though Larian did decidedly more with it than most. The real ingenuity, though, is how much restraint is shown locally, in specific encounters.
Most games form an implicit pact with the player; there are places the game needs the player to go, but it will subtly guide them there. As such, the player feels that they’ve never truly solved any puzzle or discovered any secret on their own. In Baldur’s Gate 3, there is no pact. The player is not expected to see the majority of hidden content. Instead, Larian has flooded the world with so much hidden content that the player will naturally discover these places without the game’s help. These discoveries feel earned, organic. Things in Baldur’s Gate 3 exist in the places they do because that is where they belong in the world Larian has created. This also defines puzzles which are far from the typical placeholder puzzle that most RPGs use. A puzzle in Baldur’s Gate 3 may ask you to creatively use some innocuous item in your inventory or remember an obscure piece of information from a conversation with an NPC. In keeping with the theme of player respect, most of these puzzles have more than one solution so that players feel the game is a real world that reacts to their actions.
Most interestingly, this design philosophy was used when building combat encounters, which are filled with environmental interactions that the player can use to give themselves an advantage or avoid a disadvantage. These environmental interactions are not gimmicks that a fight is built around. Instead, they are tools that the player can notice and use if they choose to. In the Spider Matriarch fight, the player does not need Gale to shout, “You should destroy the web to make the giant spider fall!” The player intuits that from the setup of the arena, and importantly, the encounter works even if they don’t. The goal is to give the player the opportunity to invent a unique solution to the combat puzzle, and for the game to be able to support that solution regardless of whether it was something that Larian considered.
As an extreme example of this, take the fight against Grym in the Adamantine Forge. The Grym fight is a mechanically unique major encounter designed around the environmental interactions of the Adamantine Forge. Throughout the Underdark, the game signals to the player through NPC dialogue, found notes, and the spectacle of the forge itself that the fight is going to be much more difficult than the surrounding content. The game also leaves clues as to the two central mechanics of the fight: that Grym cannot be damaged unless it is superheated, and that the large forge hammer could deal a lot of damage. As usual, the player does not need to have seen these hints to succeed in the fight, but they help. The intended fight path seems to have been as follows: have a character pull the lever that floods the forge with lava to superheat Grym. Have another character stand under the forge hammer to attract Grym. When he is in the middle of the forge, have a third character pull a lever to bring down the hammer to deal massive damage. Is it possible to do this without companions? The community has discovered variations of the following method. First, pull the lava lever. Then teleport to the middle to attract Grym to stand under the hammer. Drop (but do not throw) a healing potion at your feet. Finally, throw a fire bolt or shoot an arrow at the forge lever. This triggers the hammer, killing Grym and you at the same time. The hammer also breaks the healing potion which will then spill out onto the central platform, resurrecting you from the downed state. This plan was almost certainly not directly envisioned by Larian. Instead, they built levers that players could shoot, potions that spill their effects when broken, and the ability to drop items in a way that leaves them interactable in the world. This is what respecting the player looks like in practice; Larian assumed that players would imagine creative solutions and built a sandbox that would support them.
A game cannot be great if it is not first good. Larian used their game’s strong foundational elements to construct an expansive and reactive world that respects the intelligence and creativity of the player. Baldur’s Gate 3’s story, its characters, its set-piece encounters—these elements stay with the player because their details make them feel real in a way that video games rarely do.