Combat in Baldur's Gate 3
5e doesn't make for a good video game combat system
In recent years, the popularity of the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game has exploded. Critical Role, a group of professional voice actors who livestream their D&D sessions, had their first campaign adapted into an Amazon Prime animated series. Last year, a feature-length film with Chris Pine and Hugh Grant, set in D&D's Forgotten Realms fantasy world, was actually good. The time has been ripe for a modern, big-budget D&D video game.
Larian Studios proved it was the best candidate for making that game when it launched Divinity: Original Sin 2 in 2017, which was widely praised as one of the best computer RPGs ever made. Following this success, Wizards of the Coast gave Larian the license to develop Baldur’s Gate 3, a sequel to a beloved two-decade-old RPG game also set in Forgotten Realms.
Several years later, Baldur's Gate 3 was released and became one of the few modern games to not only live up to the considerable hype, but even exceed it. Many regard it as the best game of 2023 and, like D:OS2, one of the best RPGs of all time — in large part due to a diverse cast of characters and compelling choice-driven narrative.
But while much of the pre-release excitement was down to Larian’s well-deserved reputation, it was the collective desire for a good D&D title that did the heavy lifting of generating excitement for BG3. So it’s somewhat ironic, perhaps even tragic, that the game's D&D foundations are also the root of its biggest weakness: the combat.
5e combat is lackluster
There have been several editions of D&D over the years, each with their own mechanics and sets of rules. The 5th and latest edition — 5e for short — is the one adapted in BG3 . Regrettably, the consensus is that despite its widespread adoption, 5e is far from being the best TTRPG rule set. It's not even D&D's own best.
Much of that has to do with how 5e tends to push players toward a pretty lackluster combat system. One of this system's flaws is the binary nature of attack rolls and saving throws. It's a literal roll of the die, the outcome of which can only be a hit or miss, usually with no in-between. Consequently, there's no guaranteed reward for making good decisions or putting together a strong plan. There's no sliding scale of success, which can be frustrating for tactical players who like to make careful plans.
If you play a character that casts spells, missing often effectively forfeits your entire turn along with a precious spell slot. This can be especially patience-testing in a tabletop setting because you typically control only one character. Missing a turn ensures you may not do anything impactful for long stretches of time as you must now wait for every other player at the table to plan out their actions, roll and count dice, and roleplay before it comes back around to you. When it does, the voided spell slot might ensure you have nothing really interesting to do — or may incentivize you to avoid trying to use the ones you have left, if you think you can get away with it.
Missing isn't as penalizing when playing martial characters, who typically get more actions per turn — but this is mitigated by a general lack of meaningful options for those characters. Often, their best course of action is to spam as many basic attacks as their turn allows. This remains true in Baldur's Gate 3.
Built for roleplay, not tactics
Since a bad roll can always throw a wrench in the works, 5e encourages playing safe, which goes against the power fantasy that draws many people to roleplaying games in the first place. That said, the die's unpredictability can force creativity — if you're willing to roll with the punches. In fact, improvisation is probably key to making 5e interesting at all, and of course, that can work because of the open-ended nature of tabletop roleplay. Some might even argue that this is the whole point of a TTRPG.
However, this puts it all on the player to find ways to have fun, without much help from the game itself. Professional players like those at Critical Role and Dimension 20 are immensely entertaining because of their ability to inhabit their roles, embellish their actions, and play off each other. Ultimately, it is they who produce the magic — not the game rules they're working within.
Most players are not professional improv comedians or voice actors. Even if they were, as advanced as video games are getting, that degree of self-expression in the virtual world is impossible. In a game, everything you do must be permitted by code instead of the whims of the Dungeon Master. When the limitless possibilities of tabletop roleplay are squeezed through the filter of predetermined game systems, restrictions emerge no matter how good and open those systems are.
Fortunately, BG3’s systems — the environmental ones in particular — are quite good. What's more, there are advantages to the video game medium. Outside of co-op modes, the ability to control a full party of four, rather than just a single character, helps mitigate the issue of wasted turns. And even if there's a charm to your DM's cobbled-together miniature set for this week's boss fight, it can't compare to having every tavern, every camp, and every combat encounter fully rendered in 3D.
Yet even a beautiful virtual city can't overcome the many flaws of 5e's combat, which go far beyond binary roll outcomes. The system hasn't been fundamentally redesigned in a decade, and it shows. Whether you look at combos and synergies, individual abilities, or leveling choices, it's all a little lacking. Unfortunately, this can lead to the combat being dull not just when fighting enemies, but also when choosing your character's combat abilities, another important part of the fun factor for RPGs. The uniquely-designed boss fights were the only thing keeping me interested in the combat through most of the game's final act, and credit to Larian for that.
It doesn't help that Divinity did it better...
Ultimately, BG3's combat tends to highlight 5e’s reliance on a good DM, player creativity, and in-party interactions for combat to actually be fun. But that's the game Larian was tasked to adapt, so it’s hard to fault the studio for not delivering more on that front. In fact, it's hard to see how they could have improved on 5e even more than they did. Again, credit where it's due.
And they have improved on it. Interesting item effects, well-designed enemies, and interactive levels all help elevate BG3's combat encounters above the experience you would typically have while playing D&D around a table. But it would be too much to expect a 5e game to shed its 5e roots, after all. Leveling up your character is still largely uninteresting. It often doesn't matter what abilities you use in combat, particularly for martial characters. Casting an expensive single-target spell often feels like a one-way ticket to disappointment.
Another irony is that the studio’s previous game — the very one that earned Larian the honor of making BG3 in the first place — was much more successful. Divinity: Original Sin 2 wasn’t flawless, but the builds were deeper and more varied, the party synergies more complex, and player decisions more directly impactful on the battlefield. It is simply more rewarding and satisfying to engage in D:OS2's combat, as well as to prepare for it. It's a system that was developed from the ground up for use in a video game, after all, and it should come as no surprise that it works better than one designed for tabletop play — and a mediocre one, at that.
Without knowing that Larian had already done better — without the drawback of that comparison to D:OS2 — it would likely be easier to view BG3's combat in a better light. Yet, could Larian Studios have done any better? It's hard to see how, at least without making a significant departure from 5e. It’s just a shame that arguably the biggest contributor to BG3’s popularity is also its biggest flaw.