Baldur’s Gate 3 gameplay reveal: A huge leap past THAC0, early access in 2020

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  Dragon versus nautiloid, round one. [credit: Larian Studios ]

Larian Studios, the game maker behind the Divinity: Original Sin series, kicked off this weekend's PAX East expo with an eagerly awaited look at their next massive RPG: Baldur's Gate 3. This sequel to the acclaimed Dungeons & Dragons video game series, which was created by BioWare and left idle for over a decade, is already in a fully playable pre-alpha state, and an hour-long gameplay demo revealed what we can expect when the new game's "early access" version launches on PCs "in a couple of months."

In short: the Baldur's Gate games you know and love appear to have been delicately treated in their handover to Larian, with upgrades befitting the span of time since BG2 launched in 2001. This is a modern game, in terms of 3D environments, dialogue, motion capture, and quality-of-life tweaks, but it's also built on top of existing tabletop rulesets—and hearkens back to the era just before D&D 5E, when miniatures and tactical movement still reigned supreme.

The PAX East reveal event included footage of the game's epic, pre-rendered opening movie. As a jaded games critic in 2020, I rarely type that kind of sentence in earnest, but the footage's visual storytelling—about an evil force inflicting creepy eyeball-sucking worms onto a series of heroes to power a town-destroying Nautiloid, which is then chased off by heroes riding fire-breathing dragons through a portal into an icy tundra—is some of the most killer stuff I've seen attached to an RPG since, honestly, 2007's Lost Odyssey. After this opening cinematic, players learn that they've successfully captured and killed said Nautiloid, all while teleporting it (and ourselves) to a region roughly 200 miles east of the Baldur's Gate location in D&D's Forgotten Realms universe.

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