"Baldur's Gate 3" Review

Publisher: N/A

Developer: Larian Studios

Available for: Microsoft Windows, Mac OS, Playstation 5

Reviewed for: Microsoft Windows, Playstation 5

Let me give you a small story that sums up my feelings about Baldur's Gate 3 perfectly.  I picked up the game on my PC when it came out and had several, several problems. Horrific bugs, glitches that broke certain aspects of the games, textures that took solid seconds to load in, crashes that crashed my entire PC, horrific framerate drops, just about everything you can imagine in terms of issues. My PC isn't that old and it runs other, far more demanding games (such as Elden Ring) just fine...so I don't know what the issue was, but suffice it say the game just didn't work. I got maybe halfway through act 3 with the framerate at a nauseating level that was seriously making me queasy before I finally decided I'd had enough.

So, I put Baldur's Gate 3 down for good on the PC....

and went to pick it up on PS5, as it had just launched there the day beforehand. There, I started my whole playthrough again from the very beginning. 

That's how excellent Baldur's Gate 3 is. I had a horrible experience with it on the PC, but I decided to spend the money on it a second time on the off-chance that the technical experience was better on the PS5. Not only that, but I had god knows how many hours in that original playthrough, got so close to the end, and decided to start again all the way from the beginning to do ultimately the same things all over again with the same character before I even saw the credits roll on the original playthrough. That's twice the money and twice the time I expected to spend before the fat lady sang, all because what was there was so good that it warranted those decisions. 

So, I loved Baldur's Gate 3, and I've got two different versions I could review. But since I loved this game so much, I'm going to elect to review the PS5 version and just warn to you to steer clear of the game on PC unless you're confident that your system can handle it. 

Thank goodness I have a structure I typically use, otherwise I'd have no idea where to start. Baldur's Gate 3 is the third installment in the Baldur's Gate franchise that gave Bioware their rise to fame in the days before Dragon Age and Mass Effect. Now helmed by Divinity: Original Sin developer Larian Studios, this third installment in the series once again bases itself on the rules and concepts of Dungeons an Dragons. 

With this in mind, you play as a voiceless protagonist whose race, sub-race, gender, class, sub-class, origin story, look, and genitalia are entirely up to you. As that may have implied, this game opens up by giving you the ability to create your character, and while you don't have the ability to make horrid abominations like you might in other character creators, you have a hitherto unprecedented amount of options for customization. 

You have options based on race, and sub-race, for instance. If you play as a Tiefling like a did (demon people), you can choose which of the archdevils you're "related" to (which determines what elemental resistances you have and what your base skin color is), what types of horns you have, what color the top and bottom of your horns are, and you have a set of eyes exclusive to your race. In a similar vein, if you play as a Dragonborn (big lizard people), you can choose from one of like 6-9 sub-races each with different scale color and resistances, several jaw bone-lining options, several horn options, a handful of tail options, several chin-scale options, etc. That's just two of 11 races with 31 total sub-races. And that's just the skin-deep stuff. 

There are also classes and sub-classes. You have: Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Warlock, and Wizard. I don't quite understand all of those, so I'm just going to go through some of them to give you a little taste! If you're a cleric, then you'll typically use healing magic, some offensive magic, and mid-tier weaponry. From there, you'd have a choice of sub-classes with additional talents or benefits, with each sub-class being a different deity that you serve. If you're a fighter like I was in both of my playthroughs, then you have less access to things like magic or special abilities, but you end up having the ability to attack more times per turn than most other classes. From what I understand, if you're a monk, you forego proficiency with weaponry in favor of unarmed combat, and the tradeoff for this is that you can attack more times per turn than any other class. If you're a paladin, you play by an entirely different set of rules than any other class where you have to hold true to an oath and face serious consequences if you break it. I think that should give you a decent idea of the kinds of variety in the classes.

So, anyway....all of that is what goes into your character. Now, where was I?...oh yes! You play as whatever-the-hell you go with, and the game begins with you waking up as a freshly-escaped captive aboard a mindflayer ship. Mindflayers are essentially humanoid octopi that reproduce by putting tadpoles in the eyes of unwitting victims. The tadpoles transform their hosts into new mindflayers shortly after being introduced. You, being a captive on this ship, have one such tadpole in your head. However, after escaping from the ship and teaming up with other escapees, you realize that the transformation process has been delayed for some reason. So, you and your merry gang of companions venture forth in search of a cure for your collective condition while you still have time. The story obviously expands FAR beyond this premise, but I refuse to spoil anything else about it. What I will say, though, is that the story and characters are excellent, and the more time you spend getting to know the world and the characters, the more you're going to enjoy this. One last thing I'll say on the story front is that this is exactly the kind of storytelling structure that I adore. Every little thing you do gets payoff in the end. A little thing you come across 10 minutes into Act I could, for instance, actually be a hint as to what the entire plot is actually about. For me, I stumbled across a major hint about where the plot was going to go and thought absolutely nothing of it. So again, the more you engage with this world and the characters therein, the more you're going to get out of this experience. 

So on the subject of engaging with this game, let's now talk about the gameplay experience. This is a classic old-school turn-based CRPG based on Dungeons and Dragons rules. With that in mind, there are actually two separate sides to gameplay: problem solving and combat. Problem solving involves mainly interactions with other characters and determining the outcome of situations. 

For instance, you might come across a group of tomb raiders at the entrance of some ruins. Upon noticing you, this group might demand that you leave because the bounty in the ruins is theirs for the taking. You have a couple of ways you could go about reacting to this. You might try to persuade them that the ruins will be more dangerous than they're worth. You might try to deceive them into thinking the ruins are haunted. You might convince them that you'll kill them if they don't leave. You might peer into the ringleader's thoughts and exploit his emotions to manipulate him into calling their quest off. You might have a magic user in your party cast a charming spell on the ringleader before you even enter into the conversation to be more persuasive in whatever you do. You might just cut out of dialogue immediately to attack. You might try at some of those persuasive maneuvers and get forced into combat. You might convince the group to leave and then attack afterwards, gaining a significant advantage. All of these options and more are readily available to you in just about every encounter you have that isn't automatically hostile. 

In addition to these options, you also have dialogue options specific to your race and/or class, so suffice it to say that you have more than enough options to resolve problems. But just choosing an option willy-nilly is almost never a good idea (unless you just want to solve everything with combat). Depending on how you create your character, what your stats look like, what team members you have in your party, what items you have in your pack, etc, certain approaches will be more likely to succeed than others. 

This being a game based on D&D, most things are determined by dice rolls with base values of 1-20. Tasks that are easy to do (such as telling a tiny man that you can overpower him) require dice rolls above a certain low number (you might need a 2 to succeed, meaning you're likely to roll a number above that). Tasks that are hard to do (such as being a tiny man telling a giant guy that you can overpower him) require dice rolls above a certain high number (i.e. you need an 18, meaning you're more than likely going to roll lower). Borderline impossible tasks (such as being a tiny man telling a god you can overpower him) require dice rolls above a number higher than what is possible from just a vanilla dice roll (one particularly infamous story moment requires a dice roll at or above 30 in order to succeed). 

You always have the base dice roll, but depending on your stats, you can gain a permanent +1 up to +5 (or negative values) to your dice rolls of a particular nature. So if you have a lot of proficiency in persuasion but not intimidation, you might automatically add 3 to whatever the dice say in a persuasion situation but lose a point from your roll in an intimidation check. In addition, certain party members can have spells or abilities that give advantages to certain dice rolls or allow you to roll two separate dice and choose the highest value between the two. This same effect can be achieved with certain potions or scrolls. So if you have a character with stats that allow for +5 to persuasion, you have a party member that can cast a spell that gives a general +1-+4 to general dice rolls, you have a party member that can cast a spell or use an ability that adds an additional +1-+4 to persuasion rolls, and you have a potion that adds an additional +1-+4 to persuasion rolls, then you have a total potential addition of 8-17. With this in mind, say you come into a situation where you can roll to succeed in persuasion, and you need to roll at or above a 10. In this situation, even if you rolled a 2, the bare minimum additional points would let you succeed, and the maximum would give you a decisive success. Or in the aforementioned situation where you need at or above a 30 to succeed, you could succeed with at least 11 of the additional points. The only exceptions to this rule are natural 1's and natural 20's. 

These are the least likely rolls you can achieve. If you roll a 1, you automatically fail whatever you're trying to do. But if you roll a natural 20, you automatically succeed in whatever you're trying to do no matter what you needed to roll to succeed. What I mean by natural is that the base value you got from your dice roll is 20. So if you roll a 15 and get 5 additional points, that doesn't count as a natural 20. So if you need a 30 to pass and roll a 15 with 5 extra points, you fail. But if your roll with no additional points is 20, you succeed. Keep this discussion in mind. There are some differences in this system between problem solving and combat, but this section is still the baseline you need to know to understand combat. 

On the opposite side of the gameplay spectrum, we have combat. This being a classic-style CRPG, combat is a turn-based affair. But it isn't like Pokemon (where turn order is based on a speed stat) or Fire Emblem (where the player moves all their units in a single turn, followed by a phase where all the enemies move). Like almost everything in this game, turn order is based on dice rolls, with this roll being influenced by initiative. At the start of every combat encounter, every unit involved makes a dice roll, and the turn order for the whole combat experience is decided in this way. If you're lucky, you'll get rolls that see as many of your party members moving back-to-back as possible, but more often than not you'll have rolls where at least one party member moves several turns away from the rest (*cough* Astarion *cough*), in which case you'll just have to make the most of your situation. 

As for why you'd want as many party members as possible moving back-to-back, the obvious reason would be that you get to pile on the damage to whatever enemy or enemies you wish in one fell swoop. But in addition to that, if more than one party member is set to move after the other, you can actually select which one moves first. So if there's one particular enemy you're worried about and you have a mage, a barbarian, and a fighter, you can formulate a strategy to kill this enemy or do as much damage as possible based on what skills or spells these units have. For instance, you might send the fighter in first to attack as many times as possible, then have the barbarian use a rage ability to attack as many times as possible with some benefits. From there, if there are minimal hit points left on the enemy in question, you might have the mage use the magic missile spell (which has zero chance of missing) to guarantee a kill. Or you might have the mage go first with an extremely powerful spell and have the melee party members swoop in afterwards to try and finish the job. So that's how the turn order is determined and how you might use it to make decisions, so let's talk a bit more about the moment-to-moment gameplay.

Just like in the problem solving, there are a couple dice rolls that determine the outcome of a given turn in this gameplay structure. The first dice roll is for accuracy. There are several things that help determine your accuracy. The first factor is an enemy trait called "High Defense." I don't actually know what this means, but every enemy that has that automatically takes your accuracy down at least 15% (unless your attack is a guaranteed 100%). Beyond that, if a character is afflicted with a status condition such as poisoning or burning, that knocks the accuracy down a couple percentage point. Then, there's enemy placement to consider. 

For melee attacks, if you have an enemy right next to you, you lose a little bit of accuracy because of the intimidation that comes with being within an enemy's damage range. However, for ranged attacks, the accuracy percentage suffers a lot more, because the aforementioned intimidation makes a bigger difference if you're having to aim at a distant target than if you're trying to hit the guy in front of you. Then, there are factors such as lighting. Yes. Lighting. That's primarily for ranged attacks, but if you aim for a target in a part of the area that's slightly too dark, the accuracy takes a toll. And even beyond this, there are certain skills/abilities/spells/whatever that impact accuracy in exchange for an advantage on some other roll and vice-versa. Based on these factors and I'm sure several more, you're presented with a percentage that represents the likelihood of your attack hitting when you're preparing to launch an attack. Assuming that you roll a favorable number, your attack will hit. 

From there, there's a combination of two more dice rolls: one for attack strength and one for enemy defense, and the defense gets subtracted from the attack strength to determine the total damage dealt by this attack. Or at least, that's my understanding...the game doesn't exactly show you the magic behind the calculations and I haven't ever played D&D in real life, so take that report with a grain of salt. 

One thing is for sure though: your attack is 100% determined by dice roll. Any weapon you can equip shows you a potential damage range: a minimum and a maximum. If a weapon has additional damage capabilities (such as added fire damage, for example), a damage range for that is displayed as well. So when you attack, all possible damage avenues are rolled for, and the results of the rolls is the damage you do. 

Beyond that, there are also what are called "saving throws". In most situations, these are dice rolls that determine whether or not you or an enemy feels the secondary effects of an attack. For example, if an attack has the potential to set the victim on fire, a particular stat will determine the likelihood of that. So, if the strength stat determines whether or not an attack sets the victim on fire, the victim's strength stat will either give them an advantage or disadvantage in the dice roll. If the roll is favorable, the victim isn't set on fire, otherwise they are. In addition, these saving throws come into play in scenarios that might exist in or out of combat. 

For example, say a stretch of ground in an area is covered with grease. If you walk on that grease, regardless of whether or not you're in combat, with just about every step you take, you need to pass a saving throw to not slip and fall. Obviously, the consequences depending on the context are different. If you're not in combat and you slip, your character will just be down for 5-10 seconds and you'll have to wait for them to get back up. That can be annoying, especially if you end up failing the roll several times, but it doesn't really affect anything. In combat, however, taking a tumble on the grease immediately ends your turn. So, if you're a melee character and have to make your way across some grease, you'll need to hope and pray you roll favorably for every step you take across that surface, otherwise you have no hope of launching the attack you wanted during your turn. So, that's a high-level overview of what combat looks like. Like everything else in this game, this is just the tippity-tip-top of the iceberg, as describing everything would involve having to break out the full D&D rulebook plus some Baldur's Gate 3 documents as well. 

If I had to list one complaint about combat, it's the accuracy. As I've already said, a percentage chance to hit is listed before you launch an attack, but unless the percentage is 99%, it feels like the percentage is actually 25%-50%. It could be that both myself and my brother (both of us played through the game twice) had horrible luck, and it's also possible that we're both less patient than the average Baldur's Gate 3 reviewer. I've laid out several details regarding how the accuracy roll is calculated, but when I was playing the game with this knowledge in mind, I couldn't help but feel like the odds were stacked against me in terms of accuracy. I would sometimes launch an 80% probability attack only to miss 7/10 times when the probability would imply I would miss 2/10 times. Save-scumming (the process of saving the game right before you launch an attack, in this case) is a possible workaround, but I tried that too, and the results were exactly the same. Veteran D&D players are probably rolling their eyes. That's fair. But for non-veterans like myself, we need to have a discussion about difficulty. 

Difficulty based on accuracy is totally fair AND fun in situations where your actual ability to aim is tested. Difficulty based on random chance is neither fair nor fun. The difficulty in Baldur's Gate 3 largely depends on the latter. As I've already said, I've played twice and started a third playthrough, so it's not like it's a huge problem, but it's the biggest problem I have with gameplay...and in a world where people seem to give this game a free pass from every sin it commits, I feel the need to put my foot down. The difficulty in Baldur's Gate 3 is almost entirely artificial, and you have no counter-argument. That being said, I have to once again re-iterate that I not only played this game twice (working on a third), but purchased it twice after getting to act 3 on the first try. The difficulty is almost entirely artificial, but clearly it doesn't take away that much from the experience. Something that balances the scales a bit on this is that the same artificial difficulty applies to your enemies. I've been in situations where I've had 4 arrows fired at a party member only for 3 of them to miss and one of them to critical miss (meaning the dice roll was a 1). That's rage-quit worthy stuff right there. So it's not like the odds are stacked against you and you alone. 

At the start of this review, I mentioned how the PC version (at least the one I played) suffered from truly unforgivable technical problems. I also mentioned that I would be judging this game based on my PS5 experience and just leave you with a warning about the PC version. So, in this traditional last segment of the review that focuses on the technical side, I'll just be discussing what I experienced on the PS5. While the technical side of the PS5 version is much, much better, I'm sad to say that it's still lacking. First, however, let's focus on the positives. The overall graphical quality is excellent, featuring high-quality textures, excellently-done motion capture, lively animations in every conversation with every person you ever talk to, and a framerate that is unrelentingly strong until act 3. Beyond that, the soundtrack is god-tier, with the main theme, "Down by the River" being both an excellent scene-setter for quieter moments and a Lord of the Rings-theme level of story gravitas in more intense moments when a full orchestra and choir is added. 

But now, we must start talking about the technical negatives. In the final push, I experienced truly horrific audio glitching. There was a consistent ripping and/or tearing sound (and not the Doom kind) that was overwhelming and unpleasant. In these situations, my first course of action is usually to turn my headphones off and on (I can't help it, I work in I.T.). My headphones are wireless, after all, so that kind of thing can happen. However, the issue persisted even after going through that process, and the problem went away after I finished the final push and reached the boss at the end. 

There was also an instance where a character had been set on fire in a combat encounter, and the effect didn't end when it was supposed to. So, outside of combat, the character was still taking damage every second. Using the "help" action didn't fix it, using a potion (which cures burning as a side effect) didn't help, taking a "short rest" didn't help, Hell, even when I went to camp, the character was still taking damage. Not even reloading the save file helped. Thankfully, something about taking a "long rest" finally did the trick. 

Then, in act 2, there was an instance where I was having each party member flee combat because an enemy was stuck in the terrain (an enemy also got stuck in the terrain in the final push, though they eventually wriggled themself free). When you have a character flee combat, they show up back at camp. However, after getting my whole party out of combat, I noticed that there was a character missing. After cycling through my party members one-by-one, I realized the missing character was the half high-elf rogue, Astarion. When I jumped into his shoes, he was still in act 2...but at the entrance to act 2 that I entered from in my first playthrough, on the opposite side of that act's map. Even if I had him return to camp, if I had him leave camp from there, he'd just appear back in this far-off place. So, there was nothing else to do. I had to take my party with one man down, survive all combat encounters between where we left off and where Astarion was suddenly transported to, and have him manually join the party from there. There's a possibility that taking him off the party while in camp would have solved the issue, but I didn't think about it until I started writing about this bug, and I shouldn't have had to try that in the first place. 

But poor Astarion's technical problems didn't stop in act 2. In act 3, he acquired a truly unforgivable bug attached to his entire character. If I put clothes on him, such as a great set of armor, he would lose it at some random time. It wasn't after long rests or short rests. Just, at completely random intervals, he would lose all of his clothes except his underwear. So Astarion spent most of act 3 in just his underwear, and I spent so much gold on good armor to try and counteract both the defensive detriments and the nearly naked male figure on my TV only to have it disappear not just from the character model, but from the character inventory. 

That's right. It's not just that he would take clothes off. They would just disappear into the ether. In the end, I had to take him, my go-to archer, off of my party for the endgame in favor of the act 3 ranger recruit strictly because I needed an archer that wasn't effectively made of cardboard due to a bug. For people who go into these kinds of RPGs thinking of nothing but stats, that kind of thing might not be an issue. But Astarion is my favorite party member, and I couldn't bring him along in the final push because I wouldn't be able to take it seriously with him in his tighty-whities the whole time. There was a somewhat similar bug with Lae'zel in act 1, actually. One night at camp, she ended up losing her shirt and ending the day half-naked (and this game does not shy away from nudity). The shirt, like with Astarion, had disappeared from existence, so every time I had the party take a long rest, I'd have to double-check that my neighbors weren't looking through the window. However, after equipping a different nighttime top on her, the issue went away for good. So while it isn't as serious as the Astarion clothes fiasco, it's still another example of that bug in action.

And the act 3 technical issues don't stop there. In addition to some framerate drops (though not nearly as bad as on the PC version), there were one or two quests that broke. In one case, an objective didn't update when it needed to, so I had to look up a guide to proceed. In another, a quest event didn't fire (I was supposed to be ambushed) and I once again had to get a guide to proceed.   

The menus are also an enormous pain to navigate on consoles, and they too are subject to bugs of their own. Filtering, for example, doesn't always work. For a good half of my playthrough on PS5, every time I tried to see equipment only, nothing at all would show up. Compounding onto this issue is the lack of any kind of shared inventory outside of your immediate party members. Within your immediately party, you can swap items in and out of each other's inventory or send items to storage. However, you cannot access the inventory of any other party member, and you can't access storage without being physically in camp to interact with the storage chest. Realistic? Yes, other than being able to instantly teleport items to storage. Fun? No. So if you need to cycle a bunch of new weapons and armor through your whole party, you have to swap out your party members and manually transport the items that way. 

That wouldn't be a big problem if it weren't so tedious to swap out your party members. But it's beyond tedious. In order to swap one party member for another, you have to be in camp. From there, you have to find the party member you want to swap out in camp, initiate a conversation, then tell them to wait in camp. Then, you have to find the party member you want to swap in in camp, initiate a conversation, then tell them to join you. You can't do it in reverse order. Furthermore, you can 100% send party members back to camp when you're out in the world, but there's no option to tell them "send character x here when you get to camp" or anything like that. And if you meet a new party member and don't have an empty party member slot available, there's no option to tell them to take one of your current companions' place. If you're just speeding through the game with the characters you want and not trying to advance the stories of any other characters, you won't have much of a problem with this. But I was trying to do as much as possible, so this was a nightly headache for me.

Then there are few other less serious technical problems. There's the occasional low texture, the occasional animation glitch, etc. There are also times when there are serious delays between when you initiate an action in combat and when that action plays out. So, you might attack an enemy and your character will swing their sword, but nothing will happen. Then 3-10 seconds (or longer) will pass and the enemy will have their "being attacked" animation and the damage will show up. This also happens sometimes when enemies initiate an action. 

Then, there's a serious lack of tutorializing on some smaller (but nonetheless important) gameplay systems. For instance, there's no explanation that you have the ability to jump or what you might use it for. There are some situations where jumping is literally the only way to proceed, and the only way I found out was by accidentally pressing the jump button while trying to escape from a prison I accidentally landed myself in because I didn't realize that looting a dead body was a crime punishable by imprisonment...yet another thing not really explained. I had a third example, however, in trying to write about it, I realized I'd have to really get in the weeds again to adequately explain the challenge. So, just take the two examples I've already laid out and run with them. 

Before I conclude this section, I need to lay out a design decision warning for you to look out for. This game is obviously very old-school, and one of the ways in which it's old-school is in its autosave feature. You're going to want to save constantly, and I mean constantly-constantly. Anything could happen at any point, and if you fail a battle, you're at the mercy of the game's autosave system if you haven't saved in a while. I lost an entire night's worth of progress because of this several times in my original playthrough, so if for some reason you have even less free time than I do, you're really going to want to take my advice to heart. Don't listen to the "hardcore gamer" crowd. Save-scumming is not only a perfectly valid way to play this game, I'd argue that it's kind of mandatory for anyone other than the "hardcore gamers." So, just keep that in mind.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "....and the PC version was somehow worse than that?!" I realize that this has been a pretty damning technical section, but there are things you need to remember. Obviously, the biggest thing to remember is what I've already said numerous times: that the PC version was literally over three times as bad as this, and I still paid full-price for this game again for the chance of it being better. That speaks to how much the technical qualities ultimately matter in the face of everything else. But in addition to that, you have to realize that this is, for all intents and purposes, an indie game. The game came out in early access years ago, and though it had the popularity of the saga and of D&D behind it, it didn't have a big money publisher or anything of the sort behind it. This was accomplished with a relatively small team of passionate developers with only their only company's finances behind them, and given how huge the game is, how much content there is in it, and how complicated all the systems driving this car are, even a technical rap sheet like this one can still end with a recommendation. Remember how everyone (including myself to some degree) gave Tears of the Kingdom some forgiveness because of its ambition in spite of it making the same technical mistakes as its predecessors? Well, Nintendo has billions more dollars than Larian. They have the inferior hardware, sure, but the fact remains that this game is even more marvelous a feat of engineering than TotK. So despite the fact that this game's technical issues warrant a bigger paragraph(s) of failures than any other technical section I've written this year, it still gets a full recommendation from me.

Folks, unless you've been living under a rock, you've already heard that Baldur's Gate 3 is one of this year's greatest games and a true landmark for RPGs in a world where RPGs have sort of dwindled in popularity. With that in mind, I'm here to confirm that. I'm not a fan of these CRPG-style games with isometric views. My tolerance for micromanaging party members isn't what it used to be back when I first played my favorite game, Dragon Age: Origins. And when I come up against truly horrific technical problems, that's usually the nail in the coffin for me. But you know what? I don't think I'm likely to pick up another CRPG again...but if Larian makes it, I 100% will. You know what else? This is the ONLY time in history that I've ever felt feelings similar to the feeling of playing that aforementioned favorite game of mine, Dragon Age: Origins, for the first time. And you know what else else? The pizza is cold......I mean, this is one of only two times where I've given a game a whole other playthrough when a technical problem at the end destroyed the experience (the other one was Necromunda: Hired Gun). And you know what else else else? This is the only time I've purchased a game a second time to give it that aforementioned second playthrough. Given the amount of things wrong with this game and the magnitude in which issues appear, it's far too early to say if BG3 will be my GOTY or not. But it's gonna have to be a seriously impressive next two months to knock this game out of the top 5, at least. 

Let us review: 

Combat woes - 0.5

Technical issues - 1.0

The final score for Baldur's Gate 3 is...

8.5/10 - Near Fantastic

Bravo, Larian, bravo!