Steam Rating: Overwhelmingly Positive (340,000+ reviews) | Metacritic: 96/100 (PC)
Developer: Larian Studios | Release Date: August 3, 2023 (PC), September 6, 2023 (PS5) | Steam Price: $59.99
"The conversation around Baldur's Gate 3 at The Game Awards 2023 wasn't really a competition — it swept GOTY, Best RPG, Best Multiplayer, and four other categories. The Steam community's verdict is just as decisive: "the most reactively authored world in the history of the genre," "my companions felt more real than most fictional characters I've ever encountered," "I've played it three times and each run felt like a different game." Finding substantive criticism takes real effort. That's not marketing. That's what happens when a game delivers on everything it promises.
Twenty Years in the Making: The Return of an RPG Legend
Baldur's Gate 3 is developed by Larian Studios — the Ghent, Belgium studio whose Divinity: Original Sin 2 was already considered one of the best CRPGs ever made. With BG3, they took the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition ruleset, Wizards of the Coast's Forgotten Realms setting, and the legacy of Bioware's original 1998–2000 Baldur's Gate series, and built something that made the 25-year wait feel entirely worth it.
The premise: a Mind Flayer tadpole has been implanted in your brain. Left untreated, it will transform you into a tentacle-faced monster that eats people's minds. You have a ship, a motley crew of fellow infectees, and a continent of Faerûn to explore in search of a cure. Along the way, the game reveals that your tadpole is a little different from the others — and that the crisis threatening the Forgotten Realms runs considerably deeper than one infected adventuring party.
A single playthrough of BG3 runs 80–120 hours for a focused player, considerably more for explorers. The game has three acts, hundreds of quests, and a world dense enough that players on their third or fourth playthrough are still finding content they missed entirely.
D&D 5E as a Video Game: Turn-Based Tactics at Its Best
BG3 implements the D&D 5th Edition ruleset with fidelity that tabletop players find remarkable and accessibility that pure video game players find immediately natural. Every action is resolved by dice rolls — modified by your character's abilities, the enemy's defenses, and environmental conditions you can create and exploit.
The core combat loop:
- ▶Each turn grants an Action, Bonus Action, and Movement — exactly as in tabletop D&D
- ▶High ground increases attack rolls; shoving enemies off ledges deals fall damage
- ▶Setting oil barrels on fire, freezing wet surfaces to knock enemies prone, luring enemies into choke points — environment manipulation is not optional. It's how you win fights that look unwinnable
Class system:
Twelve base classes, 46 subclasses, and full multiclassing support. A first-time player can run a straightforward Fighter and have a complete, satisfying game. A theorycrafting veteran can spend an hour at character creation optimizing a Paladin/Warlock/Bard multiclass and then run that experiment across 100 hours of content. Both approaches are equally valid, and the game never punishes you for playing the way that's fun.
The Companions: Characters Who Outlive the Game
The characters you travel with in BG3 are not party members in the traditional sense. They are fully realized people with histories, goals, contradictions, and traumas — and the game gives them the writing and performance to make them feel real.
The main companions:
- ▶Shadowheart: A Shar cleric who denies the goddess of her birth. Her hard exterior, her defensive sarcasm, and the secret at the center of her character arc make her the most emotionally complex companion in the game
- ▶Astarion: A high elf vampire spawn who spent 200 years enslaved to a monster. Charming, self-serving, deeply damaged — and the character whose story resonates most with players who engage with his full arc
- ▶Gale: A wizard who was Mystra's lover and suffered a catastrophic fall from grace. His specific brand of lovable pomposity conceals a genuine death wish he's trying to process
- ▶Lae'zel: A Githyanki warrior forged in one of the most brutal military cultures in the Realms. The party's most effective fighter, and the character whose worldview shifts most dramatically across the full game
- ▶Karlach: A tiefling barbarian who had her heart replaced with an infernal engine and spent a decade in Avernus. The warmest, most immediately likable companion, and the one whose situation is genuinely unfair in ways the game doesn't try to paper over
- ▶Wyll: The "Blade of Frontiers," a folk hero whose heroic image conceals an infernal pact with consequences he can't outrun
Each companion reacts in real time to your decisions — sometimes approving, sometimes storming off, sometimes revealing something new about themselves because of what you just did. Romance storylines are included for multiple companions and handled with more care than the genre usually manages.
The Choices Actually Matter
Every RPG claims meaningful choices. BG3 delivers them. The difference is systemic: decisions in Act 1 structurally alter what NPCs, locations, and options are available in Acts 2 and 3. Not through cosmetic variations on the same outcome, but through genuine branching.
How it works in practice:
- ▶Siding with or against the Goblin camp in Act 1 determines which NPCs survive to appear later, which locations are accessible, and which endings are possible
- ▶Killing, sparing, or recruiting specific characters changes who is standing in the final confrontation
- ▶A full "evil playthrough" unlocks a completely different set of major quests, companions, and an ending that flips the entire story's alignment
- ▶Critical dice roll failures (rolling a natural 1 on Persuasion when you really needed to succeed) send the story in directions the game has fully accounted for, rather than just failing a flag
The game also does not telegraph its consequences. You make a choice. The consequences appear hours later, when you've forgotten what you decided, and the callback lands harder for it.
Co-op: The Intended and Chaotic Way to Play
BG3 supports full four-player online co-op across the entire campaign. Each player controls their own character; all players are present for dialogues and votes independently on conversation options, which produces the exact chaos you'd expect.
One player initiates a diplomatic negotiation. Another player, bored, starts a fight. A third player uses the distraction to pickpocket the quest-giver. The fourth player watches the entire plan collapse and immediately saves the game so they can show people later. This is the authentic BG3 co-op experience, and it's why the multiplayer GOTY win was deserved.
Save files are per-host in co-op, which means you can't freely alternate who hosts without everyone returning to the same state — something to plan for before starting a campaign with friends.
Official Korean Language Support
BG3 has included complete official Korean support since launch day, August 2023. Larian Studios commissioned and maintains the Korean localization directly — this is not a community patch. Every UI element, item description, quest text, companion dialogue, and story branch is in Korean.
The translation quality is high by consensus of Korean players: character voice registers are maintained across each companion's speech patterns, D&D terminology is handled with consistent Korean equivalents that align with existing tabletop community conventions, and major content patches (including Patch 8) have been fully localized without gaps.
"To enable: Steam Library → right-click Baldur's Gate 3 → Properties → Language tab → select Korean
What the Awards Don't Capture
BG3 won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2023, BAFTA Games, D.I.C.E. Awards, and essentially every other major ceremony that year. Metacritic PC score: 96. Steam: Overwhelmingly Positive on over 340,000 reviews.
None of that captures what makes BG3 stick with players after they finish it.
It's the moment a character you've traveled with for 80 hours says something in the epilogue that reframes everything you thought you understood about them, and it lands because Larian spent the whole game earning it. It's the playthrough where you made every decision differently and found out that "differently" means encounters you've never seen, NPCs you never met, and an ending where different things are broken and different things are fixed.
It's a game that treats its players as adults and trusts them to handle consequences. In a genre that often over-explains, over-protects, and over-guides, that restraint is the rarest quality of all.
Tips for First-Time Players
- 1Don't agonize over class selection: Any class clears the game. If you're new to D&D, Fighter or Rogue gives you the most intuitive toolkit
- 2Read the dialogue options before clicking: Hover over choices to see which ability scores affect the associated skill checks before you commit
- 3Save in multiple slots: Not because you'll fail — because you'll want to replay a decision that turned out differently than expected
- 4Grab the high ground before fights start: Height advantage is a meaningful accuracy bonus in D&D 5E, and BG3 implements it fully
- 5Dice failures are not dead ends: Rolling a 1 on Persuasion doesn't ruin a quest — it redirects it. Let the failure play out before deciding you need to reload
- 6Bring your companions to their origin locations: Many companion questlines gate significant dialogue behind being in the right area with them in your party
Verdict: The New Standard for Role-Playing Games
Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't just deliver an excellent RPG. It establishes a new baseline for what the genre should aspire to: a world that genuinely reacts to player agency, companions who feel like people, and a second playthrough that is substantively different from the first. Larian Studios took twenty years of CRPG history, built on everything that worked, discarded everything that didn't, and shipped a game that makes its contemporaries look underpowered.
If you haven't played it, there is no better time. If you've played it once, there is an entirely different game waiting in the same file.
GamePeak Score: 99/100