Baldur’s Gate 3 review: The world-beating RPG made in Dublin

This latest in the Dungeons & Dragons series from developer Larian goes to extraordinary lengths in empowering the player to shape your character for good or evil and bend the world to your will.

Although Belgian in origin, Larian carries out a lot of its work at its Dublin offices, where it employs more than 130 people. Only an obsessive like me would read the privacy notice at the beginning as it prominently identifies New Bride Street in Dublin 8 as its “official seat”. But up to 450 people worked on Baldur’s Gate 3 at Larian’s various studios worldwide.

The story trundles along recognisable RPG lines – something about a band of plucky heroes fighting an evil race – but with sub-plots spiralling in myriad directions depending on your actions. All you know at first is that you’ve woken up with a mind-control parasite in your brain and desperately need to get rid it.

Hot on the heels of the game’s debut on PC– which itself was in Early Access for years – here comes the PS5 edition. Remarkably, it encompasses everything the mouse-and-keyboard version has to offer, with only a handful of interface quibbles and a few glitches here and there.

Don’t expect a dumbing-down for console of what is undoubtedly a massively complex simulation based on the convoluted rules and conventions of D&D. If you’ve never played a real-world tabletop game, prepare to fall in the deep end and learn to swim pretty fast.

The first clue arrives with the character creator, which offers a bewildering array of choices with little guidance as to what the implications may be. Sure, you might recognise the archetypes built into its 12 classes – bards to sorcerers to druids – but good luck understanding the relative value of secondary attributes such as dexterity or charisma. Apparently, there a total of 46 subclasses with no meaningful explanation of how they may influence proceedings.

The opening act introduces your party to the lands of the Forgotten Realms, stuffed with quests, hostiles and potentially friendly strangers. How you approach them, how you talk to them, how you react – almost everything affects the outcomes. But the one unpredictable constant is a roll of the die.

At regular intervals, your interactions – anything from combat to conversations to lock-picking – will be governed by the result of a random toss of a 20-sided die. Sure, you can tip the scales with some of your abilities but you remain at the mercy of luck.

Just when you think you’re no longer out of your depth, Larian throws more permutations in the mix as your party grows and your spells and powers multiply. No wonder this unfathomably intricate game took so many years to develop.

Thousands of lines and millions of words have been fully voiced to good effect, with only the occasional hammy delivery breaking the immersion. Visually, this vast universe has the capacity to surprise and delight with its menagerie of characters and bevy of landscapes.

The one big casualty of the transfer to PS5 is the interface. Larian has streamlined its systems as best as possible for the move to a gamepad but there are many times where your substantial arsenal of spells and actions become too unwieldy for the button set-up or radial menus. Worse still, icon sizes in the likes of the inventory still assume the player is sitting a metre away from the screen. You will have to squint and dally to work what exactly is equipped, for instance.

Still, if hunching closer to your TV is the price to pay for a superlative RPG, then so be it. Larian’s achievement with Baldur’s Gate 3 is to convince you anything is possible in this delightfully alive and responsive world.