Highlights
- Baldur's Gate 3 has successfully brought the magic of a tabletop campaign into gaming while creating its own unique identity.
- The Lower City of Baldur's Gate serves as the primary location of Act 3, offering a massive zone filled with handcrafted content and closure for past character arcs.
- Larian Studios has overcome the challenge of depicting the scale of the city of Baldur's Gate, delivering one of the most impressive cities in the RPG genre.
Baldur's Gate 3 has cemented itself as one of the biggest releases of the year, with Larian Studios' commitment to fully realizing part of the Sword Coast of Dungeons and Dragons’ Faerun having played a big role in the game's success. Filled with highly memorable environments and NPCs across its three massive acts, Baldur’s Gate 3 has succeeded in bringing some of the magic found within a tabletop campaign into the medium of gaming while also creating its own sense of identity.
Adapting the Forgotten Realms into one the richest worlds the universe has ever seen in the realm of video games, the project of Baldur's Gate 3 came with the inherent challenge in depicting the scale of the titular city. A major port metropolis trading hub of the Dungeons and Dragons lore, the version of the city shown in the first two entries of the series was made during a time of far less technical fidelity. Taking a more realistic approach to the graphical style of Baldur’s Gate 3, Larian Studios has overcome the odds and delivered one of the most impressive cities the RPG genre has to offer.
Fantasy Video Game Cities Are Tough to Execute
Combining the complexity of both an open-world city and RPG experience can be an ambitious undertaking, and most games have opted for alternatives to circumvent the challenge. Relatively small settlements like Whiterun and even Solitude from Skyrim and the empty grand halls of Dark Souls’ Anor Londo are just a few examples of the plethora of video game levels in the genre that hardly fit the definition of “city”.
Impressive representations of cities have been pulled off in RPGs like Knights of the Old Republic with its starting zone of Taris or its sequel’s Nar Shaddaa, but these places are still often just multiple separate areas of rather small size themselves. Baldur's Gate 3 may still be most well known for its beginning Act 1 section known as the Wilderness, but the game's later part goes all in on delivering a city that has been a dream come true for many players.
Larian Studios Has Delivered the Most Complete Depiction of Baldur's Gate Yet
Serving as the primary location of Act 3, the Lower City of Baldur's Gate is a massive zone filled to the brim with handcrafted content. Alive and filled with everything ranging from smaller quests to underground murder conspiracies, Baldur's Gate 3 brings back memories of the best aspects of places like Cyrodiil's Imperial City from Oblivion. Dense with unique NPCs and buildings complete with interiors, the city of Baldur’s Gate also breathes new life into the lore established by the first two games through offering closure for the arcs of several characters of the past.
The Lower City may be huge in its own right, but it is rumored that an entire other section known as the Upper City was cut from Baldur's Gate 3. Mentioned multiple times throughout the game's third act and rumored to have had significance to several other cut elements, the opulent Upper City may even have the potential to return one day in an expansion. Regardless of this possible omission that could have affected Act 3, the Lower City and its outskirts are still nothing short of overwhelming for many. Considered an anomalous marvel of quality in the modern industry, Baldur's Gate 3 is well represented by a city that stands as one of the biggest rewards waiting for players that manage to survive into the late game.
Baldur's Gate 3 is out now for PC. A PS5 version releases on September 6, and an Xbox Series X/S version is expected to launch in late 2023.
