If you’re playing smash hit Baldur’s Gate 3 but have never played a game like it or Dungeons & Dragons before, you may find it difficult and overwhelming.
Baldur’s Gate 3 can be a complicated and punishing experience, especially in combat. There’s a lot to think about during each encounter, and the game itself does little to help the player understand its many systems.
As an RPG based on the 5th-edition Dungeons & Dragons rule set, Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t work like many other popular video game RPGs, so for newcomers there is a degree of unlearning that needs to be done to succeed.
While D&D veterans instinctively understand how to compose a balanced party, position their characters advantageously before initiating combat, and how to maximise their chance to hit, the unfamiliar may be left feeling bewildered and downbeat as they repeatedly fail combat encounters. And given just how incredibly popular Baldur’s Gate 3 has become, it seems reasonable to assume there are many newcomers having trouble right now.
IGN has a useful Baldur’s Gate 3 beginner’s guide that includes tips and tricks, but Larian director of publishing, Michael Douse, took to Twitter to offer some useful advice that gets to the heart of the experience Larian aimed to create.
“If you’re coming into Baldur's Gate completely new, and you’re not used to this genre I can give you one tip: worry less about closing out quests and winning fights, and instead focus on exploring, toying with the tools and systems, remembering to take it slow, and trust the dice,” Douse said.
“It’s not a game about heading to a waypoint and clearing the map for a reward. It’s a game about both narratively and systemically overcoming challenges using your wits and creativity. You’ll be rewarded in areas you least expect it, as you start to own the narrative. Agency!
“Talk to animals. Talk to the undead. If you can’t, find out how. Something locked? Knock. Inaccessible? Stack crates. Turn into gas. Shrink. Grow! Everything you think you can’t do, you quite possibly can. Trust yourself, and trust the dice. It reacts to your success & failures.”
Douse’s point about trusting the dice is an important one. Anyone who’s playing Baldur’s Gate 3 will know failed checks are commonplace, and it’s all too easy to miss an attack, even when it looks impossible to do so. Understanding how to increase your chance to hit is a key component of combat, although Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t do much to explain how to achieve this.
“It’s okay to miss,” Douse replied to one Twitter user who made this point. “Even if you don’t win them all, you can still win, and in your own way. Unless you die. That’s on you.”
Ultimately, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a complex, hardcore RPG and there’s no real way around that. If all else fails? Reduce the difficulty and save often!
IGN’s Baldur’s Gate 3 review in-progress is full of praise: "I’ve been waiting 14 years for another alignment of the planets like Dragon Age: Origins, when an old-school CRPG got a big enough budget to look like a high quality animated movie – but the design hadn't been completely steered in the wrong direction in a misguided attempt to reach a different market like the later two Dragon Ages," reviewer Leana Hafer wrote. "This is the closest anyone has ever come to recapturing that magic."
Baldur's Gate 3 is now available on PC, with a console release set for a later date. For more info, check out how our guide to building a character in Baldur's Gate 3 as well as our guide to Baldur's Gate 3's races and subraces.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
