Baldur's Gate 3 First Impressions

 So, today marks the long-awaited full release of Baldur's Gate 3... just not for me. See, I'm a Mac user, and while I'm very happy that Larian Studios is making this game available on the Mac, the actual Mac client isn't going live for another couple months.

So, while I purchased the game today, the version I got is the Early Access build still, which I don't think is optimized to run on a Mac. I have an M1 Macbook, and while it's not a totally-souped-up gaming machine, it's still pretty good in most cases.

Baldur's Gate 3 plays on it, but there are long pauses in between lines of dialogue and the framerate isn't fantastic. I'm hoping that this all resolves itself when the fully-optimized Mac client comes out.

All that technical stuff out of the way, though:

I made myself a version of my original D&D character, the Human Great Old One Warlock, Conrad Nightfire. He's a neutral good but off-his-rocker young Noble who took on eldritch powers from a mysterious being known as The Shattering Tower of Oedom-Het. Naturally, the computer-game version can't go deep into backstory and such.

The game starts off with a hell of an opening - aboard a Mind Flayer Nautiloid ship (flying biomechanical tentacled airship) you and a number of other people are infected with Ilithid tadpoles - the first stage of Ceremorphosis, which is how Ilithids reproduce (basically, the tadpole merges and eats your brain and then takes over your body, eventually transforming the body into another Ilithid). Judging from all the dead Mind Flayers aboard the vessel, the sole survivor must be trying to rebuild a colony or something.

But while the Nautiloid attacks a city in Faerun, apparently to capture more victims to feed on or convert, a group of Githyanki riding red dragons enter through a planar portal and strike at the Nautiloid. They give chase, even as the Nautiloid plane-shifts to various other locations.

And then it winds up in the skies of Avernus, the uppermost layer of the Nine Hells. Here, you break free and can encounter Lae'zel, the Githyanki Fighter, and Shadowheart, a half-elf cleric, who join you in trying to reach the Nautiloid's helm to try to escape, all while devils (mostly imps) attack and try to take the ship.

While I've defaulted to having my original character, Conrad, being the face of the party and the one to do all the inspecting and interactions, you can actually select any of the party members to do these things, and I suspect that this will be important when, for example, you send your Charismatic characters to speak with NPCs (which Conrad is good at anyway) or sending Astarion, the Rogue, to deal with traps or locks.

Combat works very similarly to how it does in 5E, though if you're used to using a grid, it can make you feel a little unmoored having the game simply calculate distances without the need for such a thing. There are also some additional actions and such that you can perform, including special abilities with a lot of weapons, and also making the house rule of, say, drinking a healing potion be a bonus action, part of this system. Also, distances are measured in Meters, which... look, I agree that the Metric system is better, but I'm just so used to the imperial system when it comes to this game.

Also, everyone has British accents. It's fantasy! Let my pseudo-medieval/renaissance characters speak with modern American accents! (That said, I like the voice acting so far).

Still, the underlying mechanics of 5E are pretty closely hewn to, and the challenge, I suspect, will be in running several different characters at once, given all the options available. Having hit level 2, I picked up Agonizing (spelled Agonising, British-style) Blast and Repelling Blast, two of my favorite Warlock invocations. For now I'm doing the standard low-level Warlock strategy of Hex+Eldritch Blast.

All this being said, I might wait to play more of this until the official Mac release later this year. It seems like a big and cool enough game that I'll want to get the best version of it.