Baldur’s Gate 3 Is Fun, But Let’s Be Honest: It’s Kinda Overrated

I have wasted way too many hours in Baldur’s Gate 3. I’ve dated a tiefling, thrown shoes at goblins, and talked to more mice than one ever should. It’s a blast. Despite most of the internet naming it the greatest RPG of all time, I disagree. BG3 is fun, but it’s overrated.

First, there’s the writing. In a world as dangerous and rich as the Forgotten Realms, the dialogue feels too often like it walked out of Tumblr. Any heavy moment always risks getting blown away with a cheeky quip, a comfy dose of Whedonesque snark (Fisher, 2019). A moral quandary about opening a floodgate of mind flayers should feel like it was not scripted for retweets; often yanking you out of the drama and making it difficult to take the darker beats of the story seriously.

Then we have the romance in all of this NPC business. RPG games have always been spaces for growth and change, and BG3 is not that; nor does it pretend otherwise. It throws each and every question/reaction back onto the player. Polygon even pointed out that the sex mechanics often overshadow plotlines in this game (Hernandez, 2023). You get to that point where all your companions seem quite a bit more interested in just rolling on top of you in a sleeping bag than anything else, and the whole thing starts to resemble a fairly generic dating sim rather than a high fantasy tale.

And here is where it gets juicy: it does not feel like Baldur’s Gate. This is mechanically Divinity: Original Sin 3 in a Forgotten Realms costume. The quintessential Larian DNA (Chalk, 2020) is evident throughout, added with a dash of mayhem and the long unanswered question of “what if I just try to set everything on fire? This is all well and good, but it still feels like the Baldur’s Gate name brings with it certain expectations that it doesn’t manage to quite deliver on. When original series fans enter a tavern, they may feel as though they have caught an entirely different band playing.

To be fair, however, BG3 is an excellent model of modern Dungeons & Dragons – we’ve never really seen a game try so hard to replicate detailed 5E mechanics and its rich lore (Tassi, 2023) and it is jaw-dropping in its scale and ambition (Grayson, 2023). For the tabletop role-player who likes to gather around the kitchen table and roll dice, this is as close to doing it on a computer screen as you can get.

But a masterpiece? Not quite, exactly. Sure, it’s gorgeous and wildly entertaining to play through, offering dozens of hours of gameplay. But it also quippy, sexually charged, and tonally uneven.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a fantastic RPG, maybe even one of the better modern offerings. Not the best. Sometimes hype is the real final boss.