Baldur’s Gate III

Larian consummates its long love affair with D&D

PC, Stadia

TDeveloper/publisher Larian Studios Format PC, Stadia Origin Belgium Release TBA

he marriage of Larian Studios and Baldur’s Gate might seem one made in Celestia – aka, final resting place of the Lawful Good. Larian, after all, has already crafted perhaps the finest successor to BioWare’s sorely neglected party roleplaying series in the shape of Divinity: Original Sin II. Still, we must confess to a wriggling worm of doubt.

Larian’s Divinity games are celebrated as much for breaking the classic CRPG template as cleaving to it – consider the pandemonium of Divinity’s magic and element systems, whereby you’d cast fireballs to evaporate spilled blood, then poison the resulting steam so that undead characters regained health while walking through it. The game’s taste for knock-on effects is true to the tabletop roleplaying on which Baldur’s Gate is based, in which dungeon masters and players constantly test one another’s wits, but for some CRPG devotees, it was a bridge too far. In shouldering the burden of a direct successor to the ’90s games, due out this year in early access, will Larian be forced to rein in its knack for coordinated chaos?

The answer comes 45 minutes into our demo, when studio founder Swen Vincke is reduced to hurling a character’s boots at a bandit, after losing two main story characters to a badly executed ambush. Having bought himself some breathing room, he conjures a magic hand to slap the enemy about while he tries to enlist the aid of bystanders. After winning the encounter, Vincke forgets about the magic hand, leaving it dangling over the slain bandit and himself up the creek during a subsequent clash with rooftop snipers. Fortunately, he has a teleport scroll in his pocket, allowing him to turn the tables and proceed to the demo’s conclusion, a mere hour or so behind schedule.

Here, he treats us to a feast of overplanning more redolent of Looney Tunes than high fantasy, exploiting Baldur’s Gate III’s mix of turn-based and realtime play to leap one party member from a beam into the blind spot behind the area villain – right in the middle of a Tarantino-esque stand-off. He then drops a barrel of smokepowder at the character’s feet. The ensuing blast doesn’t kill the villain, but it does plonk him down right next to one of Vincke’s melee-oriented characters, who promptly kicks him into a gorge full of spiders.

It’s rarely a mark in a game’s favour when a demo has no fewer than three intermissions, but in this case, we’re left enthralled, as Vincke tries his luck at everything from kissing a goblin’s foot (with view to removing a toe ring) to sucking the blood of a sleeping party member. The greatest gods of the Forgotten Realms are, of course, the dice,

here shown tumbling on screen every time you take a risk in conversation, exploration or a brawl. Vincke frequently reaps the wrath of these fickle deities. At moments of particular desperation, he’s forced to exploit the demo’s own limitations to proceed – repeatedly slamming a door in a sentry’s face to trick her into skipping her turn. More sportingly, he also derails a undead ambush by stealing weapons from corpses before they resurrect.

It is, to put it generously, an absolute farce, and one of the most enjoyable presentations we’ve ever witnessed. D&D can seem po-faced from afar, but as Vincke reminds us (after polishing off the demo) no two D&D sessions are the same, and Larian is an extremely open-minded dungeon master. The only requirement is that every prop or variable should affect the whole, even if it was dreamt up for the fun of it. “If we put something in, it has to be for the entire game. It has to have gameplay applications from the beginning to the end. Otherwise, it’s just a gimmick.”

As with Divinity, Baldur’s Gate III offers both an exotic cast of pre-written characters and the chance to fashion something still more bizarre from dozens of races and sub-races, classes and traits, backstories, genders and body types. You might quest forth as an elven vampire spawn, fleeing your master while reckoning with a newfound resistance to daylight. Or you could don the gladrags of a halfling lightfoot entertainer. All characters share the misfortune of being abducted by mind flayers – brain-eating cthulhoids, nowadays associated with Stranger Things. During the prologue, you’re brought aboard a Nautiloid vessel and treated to a close encounter with a mind-flayer tadpole, which burrows through your eye into your brain.

The tadpole will swell over the course of the game, eventually turning you into a mindflayer. Your goal, naturally, is to find a way of removing it, a quest that takes you from the wreck of the crashed Nautiloid through the streets of Baldur’s Gate itself to the threshold of hell. Being a mind flayer host has a few perks. You can commune telepathically with similarly afflicted souls, many of them worshippers of an entity known as the Absolute. There’s a world-changing conspiracy to unearth, needless to say, but you’ll spend more time thinking about the minutiae, be it keeping your footing on greasy surfaces or deciding whether to mug a thief who has succumbed to a mislabelled potion.

The turn-based battles are an elegant stew of Divinity and Baldur’s Gate features. You spend points to move, fight and use abilities, exploiting differences in height, elemental property and light level across beautifully ornamented maps. The D&D features include free ‘bonus actions’, such as dipping a weapon in fire or helping a comrade up. That free move can be crucial, but more decisive still is the returning ability from Divinity to have some characters roam the map in realtime while others are locked in battle. You can leave a fight unresolved indefinitely while exploring or pursuing the story, as long as the character in your hand stays out of the combat zone. This allows for some familiar misdirections. You might send your cleric to the other side of the map to stop her hearing a less-thanethical conversation choice, only to reel her back into the proceedings when that conversation takes a turn for the bloody.

Larian’s challenge, as with Divinity, has been to fashion a coherent narrative around systems that beg to be creatively abused. Vincke has consulted both with D&D licence holder Wizards Of The Coast and former Baldur’s Gate designers, though he cautions that “we’re making a new game, not the old game – we’re forward-focused”. Among his most important confidants are his children: he’s taken to playing rudimentary D&D games with them in the car, posing scenarios and resolving outcomes with a single die. It’s a useful reminder, he says, that D&D is broadly what you make of it. “They don’t care about the [established] systems – they just want to know what’s going to happen. It was crazy how quickly they were hooked, to the point that it became annoying, because they just want more and more and more.”

The turn-based battles are an elegant stew of Divinity and Baldur’s Gate features