Baldur's Gate 3 is a 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons game and the most complete CRPG made in decades. It won more awards than it has room for and mostly deserved them.
Turn-based combat, an enormous branching story, and a level of reactivity that means two playthroughs genuinely diverge rather than reaching the same scenes by different routes.
Three acts, and what they are like
Act 1 is a wide wilderness with several routes through it and more content than the critical path suggests. Act 2 is shorter, darker and more linear. Act 3 is a city, and it is dense enough to be overwhelming.
Most complaints about pacing are about Act 3, where the quest log fills faster than you can clear it.
Combat
5th edition rules, faithfully implemented, with generous use of the environment. Shoving people off ledges is a legitimate strategy and the game knows it.
Action economy decides fights. Anything granting extra actions, Haste, Action Surge, a Thief's second bonus action, is worth more than raw damage.
Companions
Seven of them, each with a full questline, opinions about your choices, and the capacity to leave. They are the best-written part of the game and missing one costs a substantial amount of content.
Recruit everyone you meet in Act 1. Several are easy to walk past.
Reactivity, which is the real achievement
The game accounts for outcomes most games would not bother tracking. Characters remember, quests resolve in ways that close others, and there are far more endings than a game this size normally attempts.
That reactivity is why it rewards a second playthrough more than most.
Difficulty
Explorer for story, Balanced for a fair fight, Tactician for players who know 5th edition, and Honour Mode with one save file and boss abilities that exist nowhere else.
Do not start on Honour Mode.
Time commitment
75 to 120 hours for a first playthrough, more if you talk to everything, which you should.
Do you need to know D&D
No. The game explains its rolls, shows the maths, and works fine as a story-driven RPG for somebody who has never opened a rulebook.
Knowing 5th edition helps on higher difficulties, where the action economy advice above starts mattering, but Balanced is comfortable without it.
Multiplayer
Up to four players, each controlling a character, and it works well. Everyone can be in different conversations simultaneously, which is chaotic and entirely in keeping with actual tabletop play.
Origin characters
You can play as one of the companions rather than creating your own character, which gives that character's backstory and quest a different weight.
The Dark Urge is the notable one: a custom origin with its own compulsions and one of the strongest arcs in the game. It is the recommended second playthrough.
Time and pacing
Act 1 alone runs 30 to 40 hours if you explore it properly, which surprises people expecting a prologue.
There is no penalty for taking your time and considerable penalty for rushing, since content does not carry between acts. Treat the act transitions as the only real deadlines in the game.
Guides
The builds guide covers multiclassing and the action economy, the walkthrough covers act order and points of no return, and the beginner's guide covers character creation.
