It's early days for Baldur's Gate 3. An end of year release window seems to have leaked but there's "no exact date" for when it's coming out, according to developer-publisher Larian Studios, of Divinity: Original Sin and Original Sin 2 fame. And when it does come out - simultaneously on Google Stadia and Steam - it'll be in early access first. Understandably, early access can seem a bit icky to some, but Larian's argument for it seems fair enough: the game needs en-masse testing from its own audience if it's ever going to come together, and having now seen a marathon, over three hours long presentation of live gameplay, I can see why. Baldur's Gate 3 is a game with an extraordinary level of systemic depth and remarkable complexity. Across the board it's a game that'll need time. Time to polish, time to balance, and quite a bit of time from the player, I'd imagine, to really get anywhere close to understanding and mastering its systems. But from what was shown of the game and what Larian has told us in our Baldur's Gate 3 interview, it'll be worth the wait - and then some.
Our presentation opened with the same stupidly pretty CGI intro you'll have seen from the Baldur's Gate 3 panel going on at PAX, before a quick run through the character selector, a skip over the "secret" tutorial, a couple of hours of early game party-gathering and dungeon crawling, and then a closer look at a massive, later-game dungeon that showed all the flashy systems off with a little more depth. To start at the beginning though, on the most fundamental level, Baldur's Gate 3 is a darker, more viscerally detailed story than what you might have been used to from Larian.
The story begins with a bunch of Mind Flayers - angry, definitely-not-Cthulhu squid people with some pretty gnarly magic powers - flying around in a jumbo squid mothership called a Nautiloid. On board, you and a handful of others are held prisoner and infected with what could more or less be described as brain worms: a "tadpole", with lots of teeth, bores its way under your eyelid, through the back of your eye and into your brain. The Nautiloid crashes, you wash up on a spot of beach, and your mission is to find someone who can get that tadpole out of your head before it pops through your skull and rather gruesomely turns you into a Mind Flayer yourself. As I said: a bit darker than Divinity.