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!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

NB I have seen rumours that there are three more companions planned, possibly in later chapters, including a MGSH and companion.

 

[Seramus]

Same. Eight companions total + custom with it's own content.
Plus the ability to make mercenaries (which are probably just customs).
I hope Us becomes at least a Dogmeat like bonus companion.

 

[Nymrod]

For what it's worth when you use cheat engine to modify companions, there appear to be TEN slots, though one is taken by the character. Could be a function of the script that was made and not of the game ofc. But anything below eight would be a disappointment.

 

[Nymrod]

NB I have seen rumours that there are three more companions planned, possibly in later chapters, including a MGSH and companion.

Gotta ask, what is a MGSH???

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Gotta ask, what is a MGSH???

Miniature Giant Space Hamster

 

[CapnZapp]

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.

Not much of a spoiler - there's bandits in this game - but the first proper bandit gang you encounter attack on sight. Feels rather wonky to have to kill named humans without ever learning their story.

I would guess the priestess and the spawns are the two obvious candidates for evil. But I thought the Githiyanky fighter was evil too? Not sure I'd peg the wizard as good, "self interest" most often translates to neutral in D&D...

 

[CapnZapp]

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

No, the requirements were recently doubled. Probably for future use.

 

[CapnZapp]

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!

Sure but that's actually one of the things that make it feel less D&D to me.

In fact, it feels too much like DOS2.1 to me...

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Not much of a spoiler - there's bandits in this game - but the first proper bandit gang you encounter attack on sight.

Not necessarily, it is possible to resolve that encounter without combat.

Feels rather wonky to have to kill named humans without ever learning their story.

I would guess the priestess and the spawns are the two obvious candidates for evil. But I thought the Githiyanky fighter was evil too? Not sure I'd peg the wizard as good, "self interest" most often translates to neutral in D&D...

Gale is happy when you help people, and gets upset when you perform evil actions.

 

[CapnZapp]

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.

They don't.

You can get it on Stadia, with very low system requirements.