I, like many other people, started diving into Baldur’s Gate 3 today. I’d already played a bunch while it was in Early Access, despite normally avoiding paying for games before they’re fully released and avoiding doing testing work that I’m not getting paid for (though, obviously, some exceptions apply since I’ve helped out friends with projects in the past). I actually bought it way back in early 2021, because there was a big media push for it and it was on sale. Or I had a coupon of some kind. Maybe a voucher? I don’t remember that period terribly well, on account of early 2021 including one of my worst insomnia boughts since high school, so I’m not sure how I got it for fifteen dollars, only that I’ve got a receipt that says I paid fifteen dollars plus tax for it. I remember thinking that it was probably not going to be that cheap at any time prior to a special sale the winter holiday period after it came out, so I might as well get it then and never play it. Then one of my friends also got it and we played it a bunch together. Not a whole lot, maybe twenty hours total, but enough that I was genuinely excited for the game’s release and fairly confident in my ability to zip through the early parts of the game after replaying them so many times with my friend.

Turns out that they added a whole lot of stuff between the early access and final release. Or, more likely, kept a lot of stuff out of early access so there’d be plenty of game for people to play when it finally released. I went from being fairly confident about what I was going to do from the start of the game to spending two hours trying to figure out what class I wanted to play and what I wanted my character to look like. I also don’t know how much the game has changed between more recent updates of the early access game and the released version since I didn’t play it for at least eight months (though probably closer to a year) prior to release, but I was caught off guard by how much had changed during the portions of the game I’d already experienced in early access. While the intro was largely the same in the places that mattered, the early battles had shifted in difficulty. Suddenly, encounters I could breeze through (including contributing to the death of the Fiend on the Mind Flayer ship) were no longer so easily resolved. Combat encounters I could handle through quick sneak attacks from my rogue suddenly needed more effort and strategy. I was never playing on a particularly high difficulty, but I still feel like the combat encounters I’m hitting now are actually tough. I have to carefully weigh my resources and use short rests to keep my front line in fighting condition. In early access, I almost never used short rests, only finally resting once I’d burned through all of my spells which I generally saved for the tough fights. Now, I have to spend more and more resources to get through encounters. That said, I haven’t lost any companions yet, though there were a couple close calls, but I imagine it is only a matter of time before I need to use one of the bountiful revivify scrolls to fix someone up.

The way that some of the early specifics have changed and others have not has kept me on my toes. I’ve been unwilling to make any weighty assumptions based on past experiences, always checking to verify what might happen before I do something reckless, and I’ve been rewarded for my caution many times. I’ve also seen a lot of changes to personal quests from back when I knew them in early access, all of which come off as massive improvements in my book. Things trickle out more gradually, such that the whole process of getting to know each of the companions feels more natural. Characters rarely blurt things out unless you manage to advance your relationship with them so quickly that there aren’t enough moments for the game to prompt dialogues and cutscenes. I had a period where Shadowheart was blurting out secrets every time I traveled between the camp and the full world, which felt funny considering how much she supposedly likes secrets, for this very reason. Relationship progress with my other companions, though, feels more natural as I wander the world, looking for new things to collect, quests to complete, and enemies to slay, as they occasionally drop bits of information about their lives or get so winded by a little climb that they demand I let them eat a magic item.

Other than that, it’s just a fun game. I’m having a pleasant time playing it, even if I’ve barely had a chance to put any real time into it (work and social obligations have kept me busy for the two days the game has been out as of writing this). My major recommendation, should you choose to buy and play this game, is to play a fully custom character for your first play-through. Don’t even play a customized Dark Urge character like I did. Just go in with a blank-slate character and experience the whole thing through fresh eyes, unclouded by the singing in your blood that calls for violence with such an alluring tone that you are not even given the option to resist at times. It is not, as I thought, an interesting way to explore compulsions and possible possession. It is a brutal, bloody path where your sense of autonomy over your player character is frequently challenged in a way that had me considering just starting over completely when I got to my first indication that things weren’t what they seemed about five hours in. Then there was the squirrel incident and I’ve learned to clamp down on any interactions that might lead to the possibility of violence, though that hasn’t saved me entirely… Apparently some events Just Happen and all you can do is try to find ways to avoid them or sometimes prevent yourself from doing something horrible. I did a bit of research, since I wanted to figure out what I’d signed myself up for, and while I’ve avoided too much in the way of spoilers, I’m glad to know you can actively fight against and express horror for the things you wind up doing. That, at least, lets me control the way I react to these horrible murderous compulsions which are honestly so bad I’m not sure I could stomach doing a run of the game that would lean into them even a little bit…

Anyway, I’m sure this game is going to consume my life as soon as I’ve got some time to spare it. I’ll be pretty busy this weekend (the one following the day I’m writing this) and still fairly busy the weekend after, so it might be a while before I can play it for more than a couple hours at a time, spaced out between all my other obligations and attempts to fix my sleep schedule. Which, to be completely honest, has been entirely waylaid by this game so far. I stayed up way too late the night the game came out, so I could get a couple hours in after it had finished downloading. I imagine that, unless I manage to break the habits and patterns of the last few weeks, I’ll be doing the same thing every night this weekend [and boy howdy did I]…