Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access Is Now Available, Contains Around 25 Hours Of Gameplay

Larian Studios, the makers of Divinity: Original Sin 2, is working on Baldur’s Gate 3 and recently released it on Steam’s Early Access program which covers only Act 1 of this long-awaited RPG based on Dungeons & Dragons.

What exactly is in this early access version?

Larian stated that the early access version of the game will be roughly around 20-25 hours depending on how you play it. There will be six classes: Cleric, Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Warlock, and Wizard. There will be nine races with a few sub-races to customize your main character and 5 characters to recruit to your party.

And again, this is just for Act 1. Larian is aiming for the full game to be around 100 hours long with a total of 3 acts, so this is a small taste for now, but you’ll need to cough up P2,599 (~$60) to give it a try.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is set in the current era of the Forgotten Realms and mind flayers are the big baddies as they found a way to travel between worlds via flying tentacle ships. You and your companions were abducted by one of the mind flayers, and attempts to turn you and your companions into mind flayers with parasites. Only it doesn’t instantly work for some reason and the game starts with you escaping from captivity. But the parasites remains inside your party members and makes a lasting effect on you and is now tasked to gather more information on what’s inside you.

If you’re familiar with Larian’s previous work — more specifically Original Sin 2 — then you have a good idea what you are getting into. But to be more specific the game is based on the developers interpretation of Dungeon’s & Dragons 5th Edition ruleset and aims to make it feel like a true D&D experience.

When it comes to storage space, the early access version of Baldur’s Gate is pretty large as based on it’s Steam page it requires 150 GB available in order to install it. Once installed, it only takes 80 GB but will likely reserve the rest for future updates.

Here ‘s Baldur’s Gate 3’s system requirements.

Minimum:

• OS: Windows 7 SP1 64-bit

• Processor: Intel i5-4690 / AMD FX 4350

• Memory: 8 GB RAM

• Graphics: Nvidia GTX 780 / AMD Radeon R9 280X

• DirectX: Version 11

• Storage: 150 GB available space

Recommended:

• OS: Windows 10 64-bit

• Processor: Intel i7 4770k / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X

• Memory: 16 GB RAM

• Graphics: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB / AMD RX580

• DirectX: Version 11

• Storage: 150 GB available space

Baldur’s Gate 3 is expected to be in early access for at least a year. Larian Studios have not announced a release date of the full game as Larian says “it’ll be ready when it’s ready”

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Writer’s take: Excited to play Baldur’s Gate 3 as i’m a big fan of Divinity: Original Sin 1 and 2 and I believe Larian Studios are the best fit to bring back a beloved RPG franchise to the spotlight.

While I do find the value of communities being part of the development process, I was never fond of the process of early access as I prefer to take in a game when it’s considered fully released. I’ll just have to keep my excitement for the game in check for now.

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