Baldur’s Gate 3 Is a Fantasy Epic to Be Played After Dark

Let’s cut to the chase: The hottest, sexiest video game of summer 2023 is a Dungeons & Dragons adaptation.

Baldur’s Gate 3 has been something of a surprise sensation—not bad for the sequel to a beloved but long-dormant pair of PC role-playing games from the ’90s. Millions of players have lost themselves in Baldur’s Gate 3’s huge fantasy world and the host of weird and fascinating characters within it, either alone or online with their friends. Those players are finding often hilariously (and occasionally uncomfortably) sexy antics within. But they’re also being captivated by a world full of discovery and experimentation, and a story that can change dramatically and often unexpectedly based on their actions.

Why people are talking about Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3’s rocket to the top of the video game charts is a long and complicated story, but here’s the short explanation as to why players are infatuated with the game: It drops you into a rich fantasy world full of history and larger-than-life characters, and it gives you the freedom to tackle the problems and quests before you in countless ways. You choose how to navigate conversations; succeed or fail, and you direct the conversation and possibly even the game’s story in a totally different direction. And the world of Baldur’s Gate 3 is driven by complicated but intuitive physics and rules that make experimentation both fun and absolutely critical to success.

It’s also very, very sexy. If you’ve been living under a rock for the past 10 years, you may have missed the explosion of games that allow you to develop romantic relationships with characters. Baldur’s Gate 3 goes farther than just about any big game ever has with actual sex scenes that, combined with quite a lot of violence, make this a game you probably won’t want to play around kids. To be clear, you don’t have to romance anybody—in my 50-plus hours with the game so far, I’ve gently but firmly turned down a number of advances that ranged from sweet and a little awkward to an inquiry that in the real world would involve a report to human resources.

How to play Baldur’s Gate 3

The first thing you do in Baldur’s Gate 3 is either pick a named character with a predetermined set of abilities and history or create your own—the premade characters otherwise become available as companions as you play through the game. The character-creation screen might be intimidating, but you should feel free to pick what sounds interesting. Baldur’s Gate 3’s companions provide a lot of options for combat, exploration, and even conversation, so it’s hard to mess things up here.

However, the character-creation screen does introduce Baldur’s Gate 3’s biggest hurdle: a particularly complicated collection of systems and rules. Baldur’s Gate 3 takes the most recent version of D&D’s pen-and-paper role-playing game systems and reproduces them almost exactly in this PC game. It’s such a faithful translation of the tabletop game that as you attempt various skills, abilities, and conversational strategies, an actual 20-sided die (or dice) appears throughout to determine whether your efforts are successful.

Baldur’s Gate 3 looks a lot like an action game at first glance. But when conversations start, you see dialogue options that are directly influenced by the skills and attributes you’ve chosen; if you’re a thief, for example, you see rogue-oriented options, while wizards and sorcerers might have prompts that let them try to understand the magical underpinnings of the objects around them. When you encounter hostile creatures, Baldur’s Gate 3 transforms from a real-time point-and-click interface—where you click on the map or an object, and your characters immediately walk toward it—into a turn-based system. You then see die rolls over every creature on screen that signal their initiative, and then … well, this is where things get complicated.

We don’t have time to explain all the rules here, but I recommend saving the game often and experimenting with everything (unless you want to spend hours online researching the rules of 5th-edition D&D). If you can get past the initial wall of rules and potential options, Baldur’s Gate 3 reveals an astounding degree of freedom and problem-solving opportunities. Wood is flammable, oil and alcohol are combustible, water conducts electricity, and falling (or being pushed) off a cliff is bad for anybody’s health.

All of that makes every combat encounter an elaborate series of interactions and possibilities, frequently from a number of altitudes and locations. And thanks to the open nature of the game, you can often set up ambushes or surprise groups of monsters and rain down magical destruction before anyone knows anything is happening—or sneak around and avoid the confrontation entirely.

And you can do it with your friends: Baldur’s Gate 3 supports online cooperative play for up to four people, each of whom can roam around the world as they like.

Should you play Baldur’s Gate 3 now or wait a while?

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a great game that throws players into an amazing fantasy world quickly and dramatically, contriving a dire series of events that thrusts a group of unlikely companions into a situation where they’ll have to work together in order to survive. They might get the chance to save the world, too, if they can avoid killing one another. And you can maneuver yourself into situations where virtual friends you’ve spent dozens of hours with will turn on you, if you make certain decisions. It’s unbelievably rewarding.

But Baldur’s Gate 3 is also a little ragged in places. Many video games have bugs and bits of broken stuff, and Baldur’s Gate 3 honestly has more than most, given how big a game it is, as well as how many possible options exist for every situation. And Baldur’s Gate 3 is currently PC-only until September 6, when it’s scheduled to launch on the PlayStation 5.

Whether you play it now or wait, though, it’s amazing already—multiple Wirecutter staffers spent dozens of hours in the Forgotten Realms in the game’s first week. But that amazement will be less frequently punctuated by annoyance in a few months, if you can wait.

This article was edited by Signe Brewster.