After weeks of hype and glowing praise for the PC version, Baldur’s Gate 3 finally comes to PlayStation 5 on September 6th. Larian Studios’ epic role-playing game is six years in the making, with over 174 hours of cinematics, a script roughly two million words long and more. What should console players expect when jumping in, especially with early access going live this week? Here are 14 things to keep in mind.
Classes, Races and Multiclassing
When creating a character, there’s an absurd amount of choice for selecting your class, sub-class, race, etc. There are 12 classes, from Paladin and Ranger to Barbarian and Monk, with 46 total subclasses, including Gloomstalker, Oath of Vengeance, Berserker, and more. You also have 11 different races and 31 subraces, each with benefits and unique traits (like Darkvision) that can influence a playthrough. If that weren’t enough, multiclassing allows mixing and matching classes in different ways to create absurdly powerful builds.
Spells, Actions and More
Baldur’s Gate 3 offers over 600 spells and actions, which is crazy when you toss upcasting magic into the mix. Thanks to the level cap of 12, you gain access to Disintegrate, Circle of Death, Eyebite, Globe of Invulnerability and more such powerful spells. You can further customize characters with Feats like Alert for more Initiative and a total lack of surprise (which is a good thing when ambushed), and Actor for an increase to Charisma.
Exploration, Inspiration Points and Goals
Exploration is a pretty big part of the game, as you encounter new characters and quests while adventuring. It always pays to go off the beaten path, especially since you gain XP for simply uncovering new parts of the map. However, completing Background Goals is also encouraged. These are objectives associated with your Background, like defeating a strong enemy with a single attack as a Soldier, which provide Inspiration Points. Inspiration Points are good for Skill Checks, allowing you to retry if you fail and potentially obtain a different outcome.
Targets 60 FPS on PS5
For all its brilliance, Baldur’s Gate 3 has its share of performance issues on PC, especially in Act 3. Larian Studios is working on addressing the same, but the PS5 version will at least target 60 frames per second out of the gate, per a PlayStation Blog post from June. There are no details on the resolution or file size on PS5, but expect it to occupy a significant amount of installation space.
Controller Support
Though there’s some concern over playing such a massive role-playing game on a controller, the implementation is handled quite well on PC. Character movement feels better since you directly move a character instead of pointing and clicking. Oddly enough, it even has some superior features, like sorting items by value and weight when trading with an NPC and selling from everyone’s inventories instead of clicking through each manually. The only trade-off is that item and party management feel like more work, so hopefully, the PS5 version will address some of this.
How Combat Works
If you never played a Dungeons and Dragons-style game before, don’t worry. Combat in Baldur’s Gate 3 is turn-based, but characters with higher initiative get to go first. An invisible die determines whether an attack succeeds or misses, how much damage it deals if it lands and whether the target can mitigate or avoid incoming attacks. There are Critical Misses, which always fail, and Critical Hits, which always land and result in more damage.
You have a set amount of movement, and along with regular actions, you can take bonus actions, including jumping to cross greater distances. There are other factors like proficiencies, Advantages/Disadvantages and much more to account for, but you can still get by through understanding the basics.
Choices and Consequences
Dungeons and Dragons, by its very nature, is driven by decisions and the ensuing consequences. Baldur’s Gate 3 is no different, and the outcome may not always be what you expect. Depending on who you side with, who you decide to spare (or kill), who you help and the dialogue chosen, different things may occur, and they steer the story in all kinds of directions. So before reloading from a previous save, consider letting the story play out.
Freedom of Choice
Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t a sandbox title by any stretch of the imagination, but it offers an insane degree of freedom. Want to pickpocket someone and sell their wares for some quick coin? Drop a piece of the environment on an enemy to get the drop on them? Speak to corpses to glean information, or shapeshift into different characters? The game allows for all of that and then some. Even in combat, you can shove enemies, throw weapons (or allies) at them, and much more.
Splitscreen Co-op
Of course, another appeal of playing Baldur’s Gate 3 is the co-op, with up to four players teaming up to cause chaos. The PS5 version supports local split-screen, so each can go their separate ways and potentially hinder each other. Inventories and Inspiration Points are shared, though you can lock the former if you don’t want a party member taking your items.
All PC Updates
The PC version has seen several updates since its launch, including four hotfixes and a major patch with over 1000 fixes. The good news is that all this will be available when the PS5 version launches. Patch 2 is also on the way with improvements for performance, and fixing a bug that prevented about 1500 lines of dialogue for a particular companion.
Cross-Save
With cross-save, you can take your progress on PC and carry it over to PS5 (and vice-versa). If you want to play local split-screen co-op on the console but use an existing character, you should be able to do that. A new feature is also in the works that allows for removing co-op players from a campaign. Hopefully, this means you can bring a character over, play with a friend in split-screen and then dip out to continue your campaign on PC. Time will tell.
Early Access
Purchasing the Digital Deluxe Edition will provide 96 hours of early access to the PS5 version, allowing you to jump in on September 2nd. Oddly enough, the PlayStation Store listing previously indicated 72 hours of early access for Act 1 only, but it’s been updated. The preload should be live at the time of writing, which should help with the large install size.
Playtime
Before release, Larian Studios touted that Baldur’s Gate 3 would take about 75 to 100 hours to complete, which could go up to 200 hours for a completionist playthrough. HowLongToBeat estimates about 186 hours based on how leisurely you are, but it’s important to remember that this doesn’t encompass all the content in the game. Depending on your class, decisions and more, you can have a different experience with unique cinematics, characters and endings.
Multiple Endings
Speaking of which, there are multiple endings to unlock based on your choices. While “17,000 variations” was thrown about before the PC version’s launch, it’s important to note that this applies to the epilogue, as you see the effects of different decisions. Think of it as a way to see how your overall journey turned out, for better or worse. Don’t go expecting 17,000 different endings.
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