When I got the chance to play Baldur's Gate 3 in early access, I jumped on it—I've been a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast for roughly 40 years, going back to Blue Book Basic D&D as a small child in the late 1970s. To the best of my knowledge, I've played every licensed D&D and AD&D computer RPG ever made. They haven't all been winners, but the original Baldur's Gate was probably the most widely loved of the franchise—it boasted an expansive, interesting world with bold voice talent and characters.

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The new entry in the Baldur's Gate series is, unfortunately, not cut from the same cloth. The game's rendering engine is incredibly beautiful, but the characters it renders are shallow, trite, and frequently downright hateful—and the storyline, at least for the first 15 hours, is pretty similar.

1. ©2004 - present, The Gibberlings Three. Baldur's Gate I (1998), Tales of the Sword Coast (1999), Baldur's Gate II (2000), and Throne of Bhaal (2001) are ©BioWare. Dungeons & Dragons material is ©Wizards of the Coast.
2. For Baldur’s Gate 3 players, this is a super detailed NPC guide that contains attitude, equipement advice, skills, combat and more, let’s check it out. I take a different approach to my NPC guides than most guides.
3. Story-wise, things get off to a lively start with an absolutely bombastic opening cinematic that sets the scene aboard the tentacled ship of a Mindflayer, an unambiguosly evil squid-face that's.

What this game misses the most is tabletop camaraderie—even the ersatz version you get from a good computer RPG. Even if lawful good and chaotic neutral characters butt heads on the other side of a DM's screen, an adventuring party should feel as though it has real bonds and a unified purpose. That sense of togetherness didn't emerge in the first 15 hours of Baldur's Gate 3—and maybe that matters more to me than to you, but I imagine I'm not alone in wanting a D&D quest to feel like a shared experience.

I'll try to avoid any serious spoilers, but it's impossible to talk about the storyline's issues without at least a couple of minor reveals—which I'll limit to the first two hours or so of gameplay.

The transformation into a Mind Flayer is horrific (Image: Larian). The trailer looks like it conveys a much darker tone than the original Baldur's Gate and looks more in line with BG 2. An old mercenary may have grown callously evil after years of moving from one war campaign to another and having given up on herself ever being worthy of a good life. A sorcerer might choose to monstrously torture and kill a loved one to gain the power necessary to save an entire town.

You are in way above your paygrade

I went into Baldur's Gate 3 effectively blind. I knew nothing about the storyline and just sort of hoped for either the return of Minsc and Boo or a worthy successor to their colorful antics, along with a rich Dungeons & Dragons setting, presumably largely urban. I waffled over character creation—I've always preferred to play magic-users, but the first few levels of a wizard's life are incredibly painful due to their lack of hit points, quickly exhausted spells, and inability to wear decent armor or hit the broad side of a barn with their silly little newbie staves.

Fighters, on the other hand, tend to be a bit boring—wear the armor, swing the weapon, hit the baddie—but they're much heartier initially, particularly in games that start you off without a party. Ultimately, I decided to put on my robe and wizard hat. Being a level-nothing wizard isn't as bad as it was in earlier rulesets—you have inexhaustible cantrips available to you now, which do damage pretty close to a starting-level fighter's. At level one, you'll still lose almost any fight to any other level-one character class, but at least it is a fight. Psychonauts crack.

Normally, the first couple of levels of a D&D game that begin with level-one characters have you taking on rats in a sewer or maybe a few particularly unathletic wolves. Baldur's Gate 3 decides instead to put you on an Illithid Nautiloid, surrounded by mind flayers and intellect devourers, in the midst of a three-way fight between the Illithids (mind flayers), red dragon-riding Githyanki, and the occasional cambion.

For perspective, think of Star Wars Episode IV, but imagine that it opens with Luke waking up in Darth Vader's Star Destroyer—and instead of Imperial lackeys, every crew member is a Sith with mind control powers. It's under attack by a Mandalorian fleet, which hates you as much as they hate the Sith. And you don't have Han, Chewie, Obi-Wan, or even C3PO to help.

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When your wide-eyed, clueless wandering is interrupted by Leia—ahem, I mean, Lae'zel—she's more than snarky. Her hatred is palpable when she describes what she wants to do to your character: '[slice] you from navel to nose.'

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Oh, and there's a time bomb in your brain, too. If you could ask C3PO for advice, he'd probably suggest a new strategy: letting the Illithids win.

The Divine Remix aims to rebalance and change several aspects of divine-magic-using classes, such as clerics, paladins, druids, and rangers. The mod was originally known as Cleric Remix.

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This originally started as a project to simply add some cleric kits to Baldur's Gate II. Andyr and NiGHTMARE, already planning something similar (though far more extensive) for their upcoming Lands of Intrigue mod, came on board and helped us with the concept, implementation, and scope of the mod. The mod has several goals, aimed at enhancing role-playing for these four classes. First was an overall expansion of kits and options available for each class--there are many, many Faerûnian deities available, and while we won't be able to address all of them (including several of the more common deities or, more specifically, their specialty priests), the mod will give the players new ways to explore the stories and adventures of both BG and BG2. To truly accomplish differentiation, however, we had to really revamp the divine magic system. Most notably, we've optionally adapted the PnP system of spell spheres (more on this below) to better reflect the diversity of beliefs among deities and their followers. A handful of new spells have also been added.