Baldur's Gate 3: Should You Kill Or Drink With Thisobald Thorm?

is a fantastic game with a complex plot and nuanced characters, but it's also pretty hilarious at times. From start to finish, it is packed with moments that are laugh out loud funny. Mirroring its source material, manages to walk the line between serious dramatic moments and having a sense of humor perfectly.

An effective party composition can make all the difference in , but one of the most powerful setups is likely to fly under the radar. The companion characters that can be added to a party offer a nice variety of skills, so the obvious avenue might just be to pick a custom character class that complements a few favorite companions well. Multiclassing can optimize things a bit further, taking party members down specific leveling avenues to get the most out of combining the features of different classes.

It's possible to immortalize a custom character in , but it can be all too easy to make a mistake that will forever affect Tav's preserved legacy. Whether helping everyone in sight or going down a path of evil, it's safe to say that any protagonist is going to leave a major impact on the world. Making sure that history has something to remember them by might be a touch narcissistic, but it's arguably justified as long as it ends up looking good.

doesn't offer a lot of rewards for choosing to run a morally evil playthrough. However, Larian Studios has helped remedy that to an extent through patches and hotfixes, which have put content involving Minthara that ended up not working back into the game properly by fixing the triggers. But there are still big downsides to recruiting Minthara despite those fixes that leave whether she's worth recruiting lingering.

has a lot of romance for a game about saving the world, with many characters for the main character, default name Tav, to build a relationship with. However, it’s not only the main adventuring party who gets to enjoy a little romance. Dotted throughout the game are many NPC couples, making the world of Faerûn feel more alive with their love and sometimes their tragedy.

does an admirable job accounting for player creativity and experimentation, but certain possibilities are blocked off by limitations that can be immersion-breaking and lead to some head-scratching moments. The task of emulating the experimentation of tabletop is a challenging one, as the lack of a dungeon master that can respond naturally to improvisation means that the game has to account for a surplus of scenarios ahead of time. Many of 's biggest failures to manage this are all tied to the same mechanic that feels like it has a uniquely incomplete implementation.

One of the crowning achievements of is the player's ability to make consequential, substantial, and significant decisions — choices that can enormously alter the course of a playthrough. Although these choices can be diplomatic in nature, some of the game's NPCs are better off dead — both for the player's experience and, in some cases, the overall narrative. Dispatching certain characters can have little to no long-term effect beyond material gain; however, killing other characters can drastically change the game's overall landscape, its events, and even, in a few examples, the ultimate conclusion of a run-through of the game.

may be a long experience, but developer Larian Studios found some smart ways to make it engaging across the full course of its runtime. It's possible to play through the game in an efficient manner, skipping sidequests and random activities to focus on the main story experience, but focusing on speed doesn't feel like the most rewarding way to take on its challenges. Although the ways in which maintains interest and variety may not always be immediately obvious while playing it, stepping back to think about its design reveals just how smart it really is.

includes countless choices to make through the game that change the party's path as they try to solve the problem of the Absolute along with the Mind Flayer tadpoles in their brains. Naturally, not every choice has positive consequences. Instead, some result in characters leaving the party, too upset or disgusted to continue traveling with the group, and that might mean losing out on quests or a skill set that rounds out the team in combat.

The side quest "" forces players to decide the fate of a former SovOil agent named Katya. The quest begins with Ana and Steven, two members of a Brazilian intelligence agency, hiring V to find their missing friend and former collaborator, one Mark Bana. Bana wore a biomonitor at the time of his disappearance, which is still giving off signals to suggest he might be alive. However, the agents warn that it might not actually be Bana behind the signals. V tracks Bana through Organitopia, a natural history museum taken over by technological scavengers, and at the end of it all, finds Katya.

There are a variety of weapon options in , all offering different damage types to suit different play styles. One of the more versatile is the finesse weapon; these melee weapons use Dexterity as the primary stat rather than Strength, often allowing them to be dual-wielded. These weapons are perfect for rogues, rangers, and bards as well as classes who don't traditionally use a weapon such as spellcasters.

may not always feel like the most powerful tool in , but it has a surprisingly wide range of utility that can make it effective in many different scenarios. In the tabletop version of, is an exceptionally versatile tool, as anything that a player can think of to do with it might be allowed by a DM so long as the request is reasonable. The nature of video game programming makes it slightly less improvisational in, but developer Larian Studios has prepared for quite a few potential uses nonetheless.