Larian built an RPG with real consequences for nearly every choice, and it rarely misses.
Larian Studios spent six years building Baldur's Gate 3, and it shows in a way most RPGs never manage: the game actually remembers what kind of person you're playing. It's a turn-based RPG built on Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition rules, translated into a video game with more care than that sentence usually implies. I've finished it twice, once as a rogue who talked her way out of nearly every fight and once as a paladin who couldn't lie if his life depended on it, and the game noticed the difference constantly, not just in a stray line of dialogue but in entire quests playing out differently depending on who I'd decided to be.
Combat is where the tabletop bones show clearest. Every character sheet has real stats, real spell slots, real advantage and disadvantage rolls, and the game shows you the dice as they land. You can shove someone off a cliff, ignite a barrel of grease before an archer walks through it, or turn invisible and skip a fight entirely. None of it feels bolted onto a normal action RPG. It's the actual ruleset, run by a computer that never gets a rule wrong and never lets you fudge a save in your favor.
“I've never played a game that remembered so much about who I said I was.”
A lot of that friction gets smoothed over by Amelia Tal's narration, which reads like an actual dungeon master running the table, snarky asides and all. She's the one telling you a lock looks tricky, or that your character clearly regrets what they just said, and it's some of the best voice work in the whole cast, which is saying something in a game this stacked with talent.
The party carries the back half of the game. Astarion is a scheming vampire spawn with a genuinely sad backstory hiding under the sarcasm. Shadowheart is a cleric keeping secrets even from herself. Karlach might be the most likable companion in an RPG in years, a tiefling barbarian who escaped literal hell and just wants to feel sunlight on her face without the infernal engine in her chest burning through it. Their personal storylines run the length of the whole campaign, and Larian isn't shy about letting some of them end badly if you make the wrong call along the way.
Act 1 is the strongest opening few hours of RPG design I've played this decade, packed into a forest and a ruined temple with almost no wasted space. Act 2 narrows into a genuinely oppressive shadow-cursed swamp that trades openness for atmosphere and mostly earns it. Act 3, the city of Baldur's Gate itself, is the weak link. It's still good, but it's where the game's ambition finally outpaces its ability to test everything, and you'll notice more bugs, more quests that don't quite close out cleanly, and a framerate that used to dip hard in busy districts.
Larian kept patching through the back half of 2023, and most of the roughest edges from launch are gone by now. Save-scumming a pickpocket check is still faster than it probably should be, some companion approval swings happen off-screen in ways that are hard to read in the moment, and inventory management for a six-person party hauling loot from three acts of looting gets genuinely unwieldy by the end. None of it broke a playthrough for me. All of it is worth knowing going in.
You can also play as one of the companions directly, an origin character with a fixed background and a slightly different lens on the same story, which is the kind of feature most studios would announce and never actually finish. Larian finished it. Dark Urge, a custom origin built around a secret, murderous compulsion you're actively trying to resist, might be the best character concept in an RPG this generation.
I put ninety hours into my rogue and started a third playthrough less than a week after finishing the second, which isn't something I can say about an RPG in longer than I want to admit. If you bounced off it at launch because of the Act 3 framerate, it's worth a second look now that the patches have landed. If you haven't played it yet, don't wait for a sale. You'll spend more on takeout during the playthrough than the asking price already justifies.