I played 15 hours of Baldur’s Gate 3 early access, and I want them back

This was an early access build of BG3, so we will not be focusing on glitches—just structural problems. [credit: Jim Salter ]

When I got the chance to play Baldur's Gate 3 in early access, I jumped on it—I've been a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast for roughly 40 years, going back to Blue Book Basic D&D as a small child in the late 1970s. To the best of my knowledge, I've played every licensed D&D and AD&D computer RPG ever made. They haven't all been winners, but the original Baldur's Gate was probably the most widely loved of the franchise—it boasted an expansive, interesting world with bold voice talent and characters.

The new entry in the Baldur's Gate series is, unfortunately, not cut from the same cloth. The game's rendering engine is incredibly beautiful, but the characters it renders are shallow, trite, and frequently downright hateful—and the storyline, at least for the first 15 hours, is pretty similar.

What this game misses the most is tabletop camaraderie—even the ersatz version you get from a good computer RPG. Even if lawful good and chaotic neutral characters butt heads on the other side of a DM's screen, an adventuring party should feel as though it has real bonds and a unified purpose. That sense of togetherness didn't emerge in the first 15 hours of Baldur's Gate 3—and maybe that matters more to me than to you, but I imagine I'm not alone in wanting a D&D quest to feel like a shared experience.

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