Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a story-rich, party-based role-playing video game developed and published by Larian Studios, set in the Dungeons & Dragons universe of the Forgotten Realms.¹³ It is the third installment in the Baldur’s Gate series and follows a party of characters infected by illithid — mind flayer — parasites who must resist or embrace the growing corruption within them as the land of Faerûn falls under siege.¹⁵ The game released for Windows PC on August 3, 2023, after nearly six years of development.¹⁷¹³

The original Baldur’s Gate, released in December 1998 and based on a pen-and-paper Dungeons & Dragons campaign run by BioWare’s James Ohlen, is still regarded as among the finest computer role-playing games ever made, remembered for its flawed cast, political plot, and pausable real-time combat; BioWare released an equally well-received sequel, Baldur’s Gate 2, in 2000.⁶¹⁰ Larian is a Belgian developer that spent years as an educational-games studio before investing in its Divinity franchise, which launched in 2002.⁶ The sixth entry in that series, Divinity: Original Sin, nearly bankrupted the studio despite a successful Kickstarter? campaign.⁶

CEO Swen Vincke? first approached Wizards of the Coast about making a new Baldur’s Gate after finishing Original Sin, but the project only became real many years later when Nathan Stewart, the head of Dungeons & Dragons, invited him to Seattle and later presented the pitch to the board of Hasbro?.⁶ Vincke has said he wanted to move Larian into “big, expansive Triple-A cinematic RPG” territory, and that an established intellectual property would draw the attention and staff needed for so large and risky a project.¹ He characterized the difficulty of securing the sought-after license by joking, “I rolled a D20 and I won”.⁶ Wizards’ support was extensive: the studio sent Larian books and miniatures and gave the team broad creative freedom, even producing the tabletop campaign Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus in part to support the game.⁶

Development

The game was built on Larian’s proprietary Divinity Engine, in development since 2011 and rebuilt to work cinematically for Baldur’s Gate 3.⁶ Everything in the game is performance capture — an estimated 1.5 million words of it — produced across two motion-capture studios in London.⁶ Larian announced when work began that its goal was to put everything from the Player’s Handbook into the game in terms of options.¹⁶ The launch version raised the level cap to 12, higher than the originally announced 10, and added the Dragonborn and half-orc races and the Monk class among other Player’s Handbook content.¹⁶ Larian described the game as having 174 hours of cinematics and more cinematic dialogue than three times all three Lord of the Rings novels combined, with an average playthrough estimated at 75 to 100 hours and around 200 hours to see everything.¹⁶ The studio has framed accessibility — the ease of picking up and playing that it considers fundamental to D&D itself — as a central design goal, carried over from Divinity: Original Sin 2.⁶

The game entered early access before its full launch, a strategy the developers considered important for leaving room for players to make their own stories.¹ Writing director Adam Smith and lead writer Chrystal Ding, both longtime Larian fans who had grown up with or played through the earlier games, joined a six-year development effort that CEO Swen Vincke and his team have described as life-changing.¹

The story grew out of the D&D setting itself. Very early in production the creative team settled on making the mind flayer central, an idea Vincke drew from a picture in the D&D manual Volo’s Guide to Monsters.⁶ The game is set after the tabletop campaign Baldur’s Gate: Descent into Avernus, which Wizards produced in part to support Larian.⁶²² The setting is the Forgotten Realms, the D&D campaign world created by Ed Greenwood?.²¹

Relationship to Dungeons & Dragons

Where the original Baldur’s Gate games of 1998 and 2000 — developed by BioWare? and based on the second edition of the D&D ruleset — used pausable real-time combat, Baldur’s Gate 3 adopts turn-based combat to stay true to the fifth-edition system and port it more directly.⁶ Vincke reasoned that the game is set a century later, that the Forgotten Realms lore had been heavily rewritten, and that because fifth-edition D&D is itself a turn-based system, Larian could port more of it almost one-to-one.⁶ He described Larian’s approach as being “the dungeon master,” working with Wizards’ framework but applying “house rules” where a video game required them.⁶

Many of the game’s base mechanics come verbatim from Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, including ability scores using the same point-buy system, classes, feats, saving throws, and spellcasting tied to spell slots.⁷ Larian nonetheless altered the ruleset in numerous ways: spell durations are measured in turns rather than minutes — Sleep, for instance, lasts two turns instead of the tabletop’s one minute — spell ranges are compressed to 18 meters, spells no longer require material components, and any class can read spell scrolls.⁴ The studio changed the action economy so that drinking a potion, shoving, and jumping became bonus actions, speeding combat while removing the ability to grapple.⁴ Other departures include weapon abilities attached to each weapon, relaxed magic-item attunement, a gamified version of the Inspiration rule tied to a character’s background, and an initiative roll using a d4 rather than the tabletop’s d20.⁷ Reviewers characterized the result as Larian’s “homebrew D&D campaign” and one commentator noted it changes the core D&D rules “in a myriad of ways” while remaining a strong introduction to the fifth-edition system.⁴⁷

Gameplay and multiplayer

Players embody bespoke Origin Characters — among them the vampire spawn rogue Astarion, the wizard Gale, the githyanki fighter Lae’zel, and the Shar cleric Shadowheart — or create a custom protagonist whose story is shaped by dice rolls.¹⁵²⁰ Combat rewards use of the environment and verticality, letting players sneak, shove, poison, pickpocket, ambush, and trap their way through encounters.¹⁵ The game supports two-to-four-player cooperative multiplayer, but unlike many modern games, characters are tied to campaign save files rather than player accounts, with the host owning the save.³¹¹ Once created, player characters cannot be removed from the party except by reverting to an earlier save, so continuing a co-op campaign alone requires the host to control the other characters.¹¹ Co-op players can wander apart and act independently, one player fighting a turn-based battle while another explores elsewhere, and the game offers online, couch, and split-screen play.¹¹¹⁵ A later update, Patch 8 in April 2025, added cross-play across platforms and was described by Larian as the final major game patch.³

Design influences

The design of Baldur’s Gate 3 draws heavily on the conventions of tabletop role-playing games beyond the specifics of the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset. Writing director Adam Smith, who joined Larian as lead writer after Divinity: Original Sin 2 and worked on the project for its entire development, has cited the studio’s practice of playing tabletop Dungeons & Dragons together during production as a formative influence on the game’s writing.²³ He described one of the strongest challenges as replicating the role of a permissive dungeon master—knowing “when to let go as a writer” and let players pursue their own fun while subtly steering them back toward the intended content so they did not become lost.²³ Larian’s earlier Divinity games had already earned a reputation for feeling as though they were run by an indulgent dungeon master who let players get away with unconventional plans, a sensibility carried into Baldur’s Gate 3.²³

Several of the game’s combat and exploration mechanics were shaped by Larian’s own Divinity: Original Sin design rather than by the tabletop rules, giving Baldur’s Gate 3 an emphasis on environmental interaction absent from standard fifth-edition play.¹⁰ The game encourages the use of terrain and surfaces as weapons: shoving enemies off ledges for fall damage, exploiting muddy ground that slows or knocks down foes, and detonating explosive barrels.²⁴ Larian reworked the action economy so that shoving and jumping became bonus actions, ensuring melee characters almost always had an option available, a change contributor observed pushed such maneuvers toward being near-optimal choices rather than niche ones.²⁴ The studio also made magic items situational rather than uniformly powerful—granting effects such as bonuses tied to the surface a caster stands on—to preserve balance while distributing far more loot than a typical fifth-edition campaign.²⁴

The story’s central conceit likewise grew from published D&D material: Vincke has said the idea of making the mind flayer central came very early, drawn from a picture in the manual Volo’s Guide to Monsters.¹⁰ The narrative structure follows tabletop storytelling logic, opening with what tabletop terminology calls a “kicker”—the mind flayer tadpole infection that propels the party forward—and punctuating the campaign with “bangs,” dramatic moments that force players into consequential choices, techniques familiar from early tabletop design theory and from the BioWare?-developed computer role-playing games that preceded it.²¹

Release and reception

The full PC release arrived on August 3, 2023 — moved forward from an originally announced August 31 — with the PlayStation 5 version following on September 6, 2023, and macOS and Xbox Series X/S versions later that year.¹⁶¹⁸ Larian reported that players logged 1,225 combined years of playtime over the game’s first launch weekend.¹⁸ On Steam the game holds an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating, with 96% of its 442,812 user reviews positive as of July 2026.¹³

Baldur’s Gate 3 Official Launch TrailerGameSpot

At the 20th BAFTA Games Awards in 2024, Baldur’s Gate 3 led with five wins including Best Game, taking prizes for music and narrative, along with the EE Players’ Choice award and a supporting-performer award for Andrew Wincott as the devil Raphael.² Composer Borislav Slavov? took the Best Music trophy, telling the audience that “if you don’t leave a piece of your heart in the music, nobody can enjoy it,” while lead writer Sarah Baylus collected the narrative award and Vincke accepted the top prize surrounded by his colleagues.²