Can you believe it? Baldur’s Gate 3 is out now on the PC. I paid full price ($60) for this game in Oct 2020, and have played a demo or early access of the game. I maxed out my character, and have patiently waited for the full game… which finally came out August 3, 2023.

I personally think they took way too long to work on the game, but I can understand why they held back… considering how awful the Cyberpunk 2077 launch was in December 2020.
A year or two later, Cyberpunk is now a decent/good game, but in 2020, when it came out, it was clearly not ready for mainstream.

They recommend that you need to start fresh with Baldur’s Gate 3, so that’s what I did. This meant deleting old save files and completely uninstalling any previous version of the game. The download was over 100GB and took a whole day to get it downloaded… but it was worth it.

Playing the first part of the game, yeah, they’ve really changed a lot of things. I remember fighting on a deck before reaching the control room… but in the final release of the game, you just head straight to the room. I wonder if it’s based on some decisions I made early in the game ? That’s fine, because I felt cutting out that whole deck area speeds up the game to get you to land and on your quest.

I’m playing it slow right now… saving before rolls, so I can get the ultimate outcome. I know that’s now how you’re supposed to play, but this is how I play: I want the best option for my character.

On launch week, Baldur’s Gate 3 experienced incompatibility problems, so I wasn’t able to cross save from the ROG Ally to my Lenovo Legion Desktop computer. I think they fixed the problem, as I recently was able to get one of my cloud save (but not the latest save).

Baldur’s Gate 3 on the ROG Ally

As you can see from the ROG Ally screen shot, it looks fine at medium setting. The screen is only 1080p, but given that you’re playing on a small 7-inch display, it doesn’t look bad. Of course, running the game on a NVIDIA 3060 dedicated video card, at max ultra settings… well it definitely looks much better.

I’m still pretty early in the game, only reaching level 3 as I write this. The game maxes out at level 12, so leveling up takes a long time. I’m making a lot of mistakes… but that’s part of the fun. In fact, I just found out that I missed one of the characters, Gale, who I totally didn’t see. I know he exists because I played the early access and have gotten him in my party before.

I love all the characters in the game, particularly Shadowheart. Her mannerism, her visuals, her voice acting is, by far, just the best. She’s played by Jennifer English. In fact, all the actors in the game are amazing.

So far, everyone who’s played the game have praised it. It’s so rare for a game to be this perfect… and especially for a genre that major studios have ignored: the role-playing-game genre.

Lately, I’ve been really disappointed in Diablo 3, I cannot enjoy this game when it constantly requires an online connection. My ROG Ally isn’t always connected, so that just means I’m not playing Diablo 3. Guess what? Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t require you to be online and it doesn’t have DRM. It’s refreshing and I’m happy to say that from what I’ve seen, Baldur’s Gate 3 is my number one game of the year.

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