D&D General Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access

Baldur's Gate III is now available for early access on Steam and on Stadia.

I couldn't get the Steam version working on my Mac, but the Stadia version works just fine. The opening tutorial level is pretty gruesome (at one point I had to squish somebody's brain) and the mind flayer airship you're trying to escape from beings to mind the movie Aliens a lot.

Character creation is quick and easy, although options in the early access are limited. The gameplay is like Divinity Original Sin 2 with the 5E rules layered over it. I've only played an hour or so of the game, and as an early access game, it is occasionally a bit buggy, but nothing showstopping (yet).

This isn't a review (I haven't played enough of it to do that, and I don't think it's fair to review an early access version anyway); it's mainly just an alert to the few people who don't already know it's available. If any such person exists!

 

[Paragon Lost]

That Ars Technica review was absolute garbage. Half of the review was him complaining that he wasn't using all of his movement on his turn, which is dumb for obvious reasons. And the other major source of complaint was the companions, when Larian straight up said to everybody that the evil companions were going to be the first ones available and that players will be encouraged to play as evil for the first part of early access because they wanted to test out the evil options that most players otherwise wouldn't take. They've been very transparent about that. You can certainly argue about how well written or not those companions are, but that's not what the review was doing.

Yeah I didn't agree with his whole issues with movement. I agree with a lot of the other points made though.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It's currently very easy to take a "slaughter everyone" approach at the moment. I expect more non-homicidal ways of overcoming obstacles will be added later.

As for the companions, they don't have alignments printed on their character sheets, but, broadly speaking, two are good, two are evil, and one is neutral.

 

[MonsterEnvy]

Yeah I didn't agree with his whole issues with movement. I agree with a lot of the other points made though.

I lot of his complaining was about D&D mechanics and stuff.

 

[trs31]

There are pros and cons to early access but after a couple of hours I've uninstalled it and got a refund. It is only very basic at this stage with a few classes up to level 4. If it where a demo I say it looks like we'll get a good game in the end but that's over a year away and there are better things to do with £40 in the meantime.

 

[trs31]

sorry double post

 

[Mallus]

Does it really require 150 GB of storage? Is that, like a typo on the Steam page?

 

[Sonny]

Does it really require 150 GB of storage? Is that, like a typo on the Steam page?

Right now my install is 80GB and this is with a early game that only has one chapter in it. So it's not a typo.

 

[MarkB]

And it has some DOS2-ish features. But I'm fine with that, I like DOS2. Firebolt is much more fun when you can actually set people on fire with it!

One thing that was irksome: You can use Firebolt to create a burning patch on the floor. And you can then dip a bow in the burning patch, and use the bow to shoot a brazier to light it - which is clever. But directly shooting a brazier with Firebolt doesn't set it alight.

However, that's exactly the sort of oddity I'd expect to see in early access. No doubt they'll have it fixed by full launch.

It's currently very easy to take a "slaughter everyone" approach at the moment. I expect more non-homicidal ways of overcoming obstacles will be added later.

I've talked my way out of a fight or two so far. It helps that I'm playing a charismatic warlock.

I've also found that taking the right approach makes a big difference to a fight. There've been a couple of combats which went very badly the first time around, but a lot better once I played to the characters' strengths.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I've talked my way out of a fight or two so far. It helps that I'm playing a charismatic warlock.

Yes, I thought I better try the ranger, since it is the most different from P&P, and is the only class currently in that doesn't have a companion. So I'm a dwarf with a charisma of 10 and no social skills. It's really hard to not be a murder hobo.

I've also found that taking the right approach makes a big difference to a fight. There've been a couple of combats which went very badly the first time around, but a lot better once I played to the characters' strengths.

It's certainly tactically interesting. Raven familiar kicks butt.

 

[Erdric Dragin]

How do they expect anyone to play this game properly unless you have the latest PC that's like $1,000+? This is why I can't get into PC games. Either you spend as much as a car down payment, or you deal with playing on a used/refurbished 3 year old system. And there's several PC games I want to get into but, sadly, cannot because of the expensive tech barrier.