Baldur's Gate 3 Wiki

Baldur's Gate 3

Baldur's Gate 3 is a party-based role-playing game developed and published by Larian Studios, built on the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition ruleset and set in the Forgotten Realms. The story opens with the player abducted by a mind flayer nautiloid and implanted with a tadpole that is slowly turning them into a squid-faced horror, a process that instead leaves four adventurers sharing a psychic link and a common deadline. Across three acts the party travels from the wreckage of the nautiloid through the Emerald Grove, the Underdark and the shadow-cursed lands to the city of Baldur's Gate itself, chasing a cure and stumbling into a conspiracy of dead gods, cults of the Absolute and a Netherbrain. Its defining feature is freedom of approach: almost every encounter can be talked through, sneaked past, or won with improvised physics, and the 12 classes, 11 races and hundreds of spells and items interact with a reactive world that remembers what the party did. The game supports single-player plus online co-op for up to four players, and a free Patch 8 update in 2025 added cross-play, a photo mode and twelve additional subclasses.

• Dungeons & Dragons 5e Ruleset - Armour Class, advantage and disadvantage, saving throws, concentration, bonus actions and reactions all follow the tabletop rules, so positioning and action economy matter more than raw stats.
• Inspiration and Backgrounds - Each character's background (Noble, Urchin, Soldier and so on) grants Inspiration when the player acts in character, which can be spent to reroll any ability check.
• Reactive Dialogue and Skill Checks - Conversations are resolved with d20 rolls modified by Persuasion, Deception, Intimidation, Insight, Arcana and the other skills, and racial or class tags unlock unique options (a Drow can pass as a cultist, a Barbarian can simply roar).
• Environmental and Physics Combat - Barrels of oil, water surfaces, grease, ice, chasms and falling crates are all weapons; shoving an enemy off a ledge, dropping a chandelier or freezing a puddle to make a floor slippery is a first-class tactic.
• Long Rest and Camp - Long rests restore spell slots and hit points but advance time and quest states, while the camp doubles as the hub where companions talk, argue, romance and reveal their pasts.
• Illithid Tadpole Powers - Consuming tadpoles unlocks a separate psionic skill tree with free-use abilities such as Charm, Shield of Thralls and Black Hole, paid for with a growing risk of ceremorphosis.
• Companion Approval and Origin Characters - Six Origin companions plus two conditional allies react to choices, and approval gates romances, personal quests and endings; any Origin can also be played as the protagonist.
• Difficulty, Honour Mode and Dice - Explorer, Balanced and Tactician difficulties rebalance encounters, while Honour Mode locks the run to a single save and gives bosses legendary actions.