Baldur’s Gate Trilogy Ranked – Which Game Is the Best?

When Baldur’s Gate 3 launched, it was hailed as the new gold standard in cRPGs. The game’s strikingly detailed visuals, approachable gameplay, colorful cast, and some clever viral marketing all came together to create a gaming phenomenon. Since its release in late 2023, Baldur’s Gate 3 won numerous awards, was proclaimed the Game of the Year by many, and maintained remarkably high scores from critics and players alike.

And while it’s hard to argue that Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t a good game, the real question is – is it the best Baldur’s Gate game? Though, to be more accurate (considering titles like Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance), we should probably put is as – is it the best Baldur’s Gate game from the mainline trilogy?

Criteria

Seeing how Baldur’s Gate 3 launched in 2023, while the original Baldur’s Gate was released all the way back in 1998, with Baldur’s Gate 2 following hot on its heels in 2000, comparing things like visual fidelity, prevalence of voice-acting and cutscenes is pointless. Instead, we’ll be looking at things that make a good RPG and a fun, timeless gaming experience.

Here’s our list of categories (you can think of these as the evaluation criteria):

• Ruleset Implementation: how faithful the games are to the pen-and-paper rulesets they’re using.
• Gameplay and Story Connection: when a game’s story and systems inform and support each other.
• Reactivity: how a game reacts to your characters and actions.
• Baldur’s Gate: the iconic city of Baldur’s Gate.
• Companions: how memorable your team is.
• Main Villain: the big bad you’ll be going up against.
• Exploration: the importance of exploration to the overall package.
• Dungeons: the first big D of D&D.
• Boss Fights: the kind of battles that go the extra mile.
• Ease of Access: how easy it is to get into the games.

We will look over each as its own section below.
(Feel free to also make use of the Table of Contents to help you navigate through the article.)

Side Note on Beamdog’s Enhanced Editions

For the purposes of this article, we’ll be analyzing Beamdog’s Enhanced Editions of Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2, for the most part. They’re the easiest way to experience these cRPG classics these days, and, after some extensive post-launch patching, are pretty stable and bug-free.

And since the Enhanced Edition of Baldur’s Gate uses Baldur’s Gate 2’s updated engine, the two games should be considered one and the same when it comes to their underlying rules. Still, if you want to have a “pure” Baldur’s Gate experience, you should get your hands on a non-Enhanced copy that’s much better balanced and optimized for a low-level adventure the original Baldur’s Gate is.

Ruleset Implementation

All Baldur’s Gate games use the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset and its Forgotten Realms setting. Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2 use the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, while Baldur’s Gate 3 uses the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons (it’s still advanced, mind you, but at some point we dropped that bit for brevity’s sake).

To this day there are plenty of people who consider the second edition of AD&D to be the pinnacle of the system, as evidenced by the whole Old School Revival (OSR) movement. But while a discussion of whether a system where the less armor you have, the more armor you have can be any good is definitely worth having, this isn’t the place for it. Instead, we’ll be looking at how faithful the games are to the pen-and-paper rulesets they’re using.

As a reminder, we will be looking at Beamdog’s Enhanced Editions of Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2 when making these judgements but, with that out of the way and without going into more minute details, the winner of this category is obvious.

Ruleset Implementation Winner

It’s Baldur’s Gate 3, simply because the game is turn-based, much like the pen-and-paper version of D&D.

BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate games use the Infinity Engine that was originally designed for a real-time strategy, and so in an attempt to be cool and modern, both games move away from D&D’s turn-based nature towards a more fast-paced real-time-with-pause system.

Now, we’d be remiss to not mention that BioWare’s RTwP is not “true” RTwP, as under the hood both their Baldur’s Gates use “rounds” that last 6 seconds each. This approach creates a somewhat unique system that sits somewhere between real-time and turn-based games. Paired with a complete absence of attacks of opportunity, this creates a gameplay cadence that’s pretty fun in its own right, but it has very little to do with how the actual D&D is played.

Granted, Baldur’s Gate 3 also takes plenty of liberties while implementing the fifth edition of D&D. These include changes to character creation, classes and skills, homebrew subclasses, bestiary stat adjustments, and some funky rules that are sure to raise an eyebrow of anyone familiar with the system (magic item attunement and scroll scribing and usage are just a few examples of that). But even so, Baldur’s Gate 3 sticks much closer to its roots, and as such we proclaim it the winner of this category.

Gameplay and Story Connection

This here category is perhaps the most important thing a game needs to transcend the realm of mere fun and entertainment and become a truly timeless memorable experience. It’s when a game’s story and systems don’t exist in parallel and instead inform and support one another that you get a true masterpiece. Achieving a meaningful connection like this is really hard, and so few games even try it.

Baldur’s Gate

Following the exciting intro revolving around your hasty departure from Candlekeep, the early chapters of the original Baldur’s Gate have you dealing with an Iron Crisis plaguing the region of the Sword Coast you’re in. This crisis is eventually revealed to be connected to the overarching plot of the first two games where descendants of Bhaal, a deceased god of murder, compete with one another to see who can succeed their grim ancestor.

In gameplay terms this means that every time you swing a metal weapon, it has a chance to break, making you feel the crisis as a real and mighty annoying thing. As you advance through the game and start getting your hands on magic weapons, this stops being an issue. But, seeing how you start the game with pretty much nothing, losing that nice two-handed sword at the most inopportune moment can really sting and become a memorable moment.

Since we’re not really concerned with spoilers for what is close to a 30-year-old series by now, your character is at some point revealed to be another descendant of Bhaal. Deciding whether you’ll be following in your forefather’s footsteps and trying to eventually get yourself on his throne, or instead rejecting his gifts and living your mortal life is one of the central conflicts of the first two games.

In Baldur’s Gate, between the game’s chapters you’ll be treated to dream sequences where depending on how you’ve been playing you will either see yourself succumbing to Bhaal’s influence or fighting against it. For doing so, your character will be rewarded with unique abilities that act as spells you’ll be able to use regardless of your character class. And the key thing here is that you won’t be getting your pick of highlighted dialogue options where you decide to be good. You’ll have to actually be good (or evil) throughout the preceding chapter to get your reward. And this adds more weight to all your choices and actions.

Baldur’s Gate 2

In Baldur’s Gate 2, these dream abilities are eventually replaced by the Slayer form that turns your character into a powerful melee warrior at the cost of some reputation. Whether you decide to use the Slayer form or not is a consideration, but apart from that, your dreams in the second game are set in stone.

Baldur’s Gate 2 does throw a few new curveballs at you. If you played through the first game as a Good or Neutral character and weren’t playing as a Thief yourself, chances are you’ve been using Imoen as your resident lockpicker and trap disarmer. At the start of the second game she gets kidnapped, and saving her becomes your big priority for the first half of the game. Losing your Thief can be really annoying in a game filled with traps and all those pesky locked doors and containers. Luckily, the game provides you with a convenient substitute soon after.

If you play your cards right, this combination of events can eventually lead to a very satisfying plot twist in the later part of the game. Now, if you don’t have any connection to Imoen from the first game, if you have another Thief ready and willing, and if you don’t use the substitute, this whole subplot loses a lot of its impact.

Aside from that, Baldur’s Gate 2 also has this thing where upon finding yourself in the city of Athkatla, you’ll quickly learn that you don’t have a license to practice magic within its borders. Should you disobey, you’ll get fined and eventually attacked by powerful wizards. And since by that point your party should be around level 10 and have access to some pretty potent spells, all of a sudden not being able to use them can sting a lot, prompting you to progress through the game’s plot in order to restore your spellcasting abilities.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 tells a new story with some vague ties to the events of the first two games, and so it uses its own story hooks and gameplay elements. And on the surface, it’s poised to blow the story-gameplay connections of the first two games out of the water. At the start of the game, you and your party members get implanted with Mind Flayer tadpoles which theoretically gives you a few days tops before you get transformed into Mind Flayers yourself. On top of that, you start developing these special tadpole powers supposedly at the cost of your brain. There’s even a fancy brain-burrowing animation and all. You’d think this setup will be used to add urgency to your quest and maybe in the process help solve the age-old rest spam issue plaguing D&D-based games since time immemorial.

Instead, the game doesn’t acknowledge these things in any meaningful way. You’ll get all these NPCs telling you how much danger you’re in, everything and everyone will rush you to deal with your tadpole problem. And if you don’t – absolutely nothing will happen. In fact, not making camp and resting for the night at every available opportunity will have a negative effect on your playthrough, as the game expects you to rest often. Otherwise, you’ll miss a lot of story developments and break a few quests.

You can also decide not to use or develop your tadpole powers, but that will be similar to deciding not to use swords. You can do it, but it will merely make your game a bit harder and more annoying. There are no negative consequences to eating every single Illithid tadpole you can get your hands on. This pretty much removes Baldur’s Gate 3 from the running in this particular category.

Gameplay and Story Winner – Baldur’s Gate

It’s a much closer contest between Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2 here. But, since you will need a specific party composition going as far back as the original game in order to experience the full scope of Baldur’s Gate 2’s gameplay-story connection, Baldur’s Gate with its Iron Crisis and reputation-based dream sequences is the winner here.

Reactivity

Reactivity is how a game reacts to your characters and actions. It’s the consequences you get for making choices. A truly great RPG lives and dies based on its choices & consequences. And it’s the sort of thing that separates an RPG from a game with “RPG elements.” Around the time of the first two Baldur’s Gate games, this idea of games reacting to a player’s choices was still fresh, with the original Fallout games blazing that trail and others cautiously following in their footsteps.

Baldur’s Gate

Despite releasing merely a year after Fallout, Baldur’s Gate was already utilizing some of the lessons learned from the post-nuclear masterpiece. The game has multiple spots where depending on the choices you make, encounters can progress in vastly different ways. For example, when you’re tasked with infiltrating the Bandit Camp, you have multiple ways to discover its location, and then once you do you can either go in swords blazing, sneak your way through it, or bluff your way in and interact with the bandits in a peaceful manner.

On top of that, whenever you interact with NPCs, Baldur’s Gate also takes into account your party’s Reputation stat, as well as the individual Reaction attribute of your party members. Add to that the frequent personality clashes between your companions, companion pairings that will only join you as a duo, and factional rivalries between some of the companions, and you’re left with plenty of tough choices (and some min-maxing tricks) when it comes to assembling your perfect party.

Baldur’s Gate 2

Baldur’s Gate 2 continues this trend and even offers you some opportunities to join different warring factions, which will determine which quests you get and who you’ll be fighting later on, like the early-game choice between the Shadow Thieves and Bodhi’s Vampire Coven. Later on, you’ll visit the drow city of Ust Natha, and depending on your actions, the city can either welcome you in or be hostile to your party. Or, if you play your cards right, you can even skip that section entirely.

The second game also ramps up class reactivity by introducing player strongholds. You have to be a particular class to get access to a stronghold. And when you do, you’ll get a place to call your own, as well as a series of stronghold-specific quests with unique rewards that other classes don’t get.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Moving on to Baldur’s Gate 3, a game that has the benefit of decades of experience when it comes to RPG reactivity, right out the gate, you’ll notice plenty of unique dialogue options based on your character’s race, class, and background. Keep playing, and you’ll soon start seeing that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a game that’s really big on choice, but not so much on consequences. All these unique options rarely if ever unlock any sort of exclusive content for you, they’re just another way to get the job done with some additional roleplaying flavor.

You do get the occasional flash of brilliance where you can either help protect the Druid Grove from the goblin invasion or instead join that invasion yourself. This choice will determine which companion you’ll be able to recruit later on and change some things around the end of Act 1, beginning of Act 2. Now, whether or not it makes any sense for your character to join the goblins is probably worthy of its own article, but the option is there and we’re happy it is.

The vast majority of the game’s choices, however, take a page out of Mass Effect 3’s book and offer an illusion of choice. Like the Act 1 encounter with Auntie Ethel where you can either make a deal with her, attack her and let her go, or kill her outright. But then whatever you do, she still appears in Act 3 and is involved in the exact same quest. Another Mass Effect 3 influence is how throughout Act 3 you’re gathering allies for the final battle, but they only become relevant for a single big fight at the end, a fight you can easily skip by sneaking around, making all your ally-gathering efforts pointless.

What’s worse, is that when it comes to the main story, Baldur’s Gate 3 really doesn’t want you to deviate from the Larian-sanctioned path. When you attempt it, like when you stab your shady Dream Visitor the first chance you get, the game ignores your choice and continues on its predetermined path. And when you really try to break away from the confines of its railroaded story, like refusing to work with the Emperor to contain Orpheus at the beginning of Act 3, the game hits you with a kill screen and even mocks you for not going along with it. This is made even more annoying by the fact that later on you do get to free Orpheus and join forces with him. But try doing it a bit earlier than Larian wants you to, and it’s game over.

Reactivity Winner – Baldur’s Gate 2

Because of that, even though Baldur’s Gate 3 has a staggering amount of skill checks and build-based dialogue choices, we have to give this category to Baldur’s Gate 2 for all the unique content provided by its strongholds.

The City of Baldur’s Gate

For a game – or series of games – called Baldur’s Gate, you’d imagine the city of Baldur’s Gate would be a pretty important thing. Integral even. So, let’s consider just how important Baldur’s Gate is for the three mainline titles.

Baldur’s Gate

In the original Baldur’s Gate, it takes a while for you to actually reach the city. You first have to get your bearings, become an adventurer, deal with the Iron Crisis, assemble some clues, and then realize that all roads lead to Baldur’s Gate. When you arrive there, you’ll discover a vast multi-district city with numerous quarters, ways to get around and points of interest. The people you meet and the quests you pick up there will send you all over the map, provided you didn’t completely scour it prior to visiting the city. But even then, the stuff inside the city will open up new paths and adventures for you. Baldur’s Gate in Baldur’s Gate is vast and packed with content.

Baldur’s Gate 2

Baldur’s Gate in Baldur’s Gate 2 doesn’t exist. Your main hub of civilization in that game is Athkatla, a city in an entirely different region of the Forgotten Realms. You do visit plenty of exciting locations in that game but never swing around the titular city. This pretty much takes Baldur’s Gate 2 out of the running in this category.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 follows in the footsteps of the original game where the city of Baldur’s Gate is your eventual destination. Before you get there, you have to deal with a lot of problems and bust through plenty of obstacles. When you reach the city, however, you’ll be stuck inside, as the entirety of the game’s final act takes place in Baldur’s Gate. And even though you do get to visit some famous city landmarks while you’re there, like Wyrm’s Crossing, you’ll mostly be confined to the Lower City and its sewers. This leads to some awkward transitions like the way you access Cazador’s Palace, and in general leaves you wanting. When all the content of the whole final act is squeezed into a single district, it starts feeling too cramped.

The City of Baldur’s Gate Winner – Baldur’s Gate

Because the only game in the series to contain the city of Baldur’s Gate in its entirety and utilize it to its full potential is the original Baldur’s Gate, it pretty much wins this category by default.

Companions

A cast of interesting companions is capable of elevating even a middling RPG to great heights. While Baldur’s Gate was far from the first to utilize NPC companions, it elevated the practice to a new level and created a lineup of characters that resonated with a lot of people and is fondly remembered to this day.

Baldur’s Gate

Compared to some of the games that came after it, Baldur’s Gate’s companions are quite simplistic. You don’t get these moments where after every big development you get everyone together in your camp area and gradually, bit by bit, learn their life stories. Which eventually leads you to their personal quest or maybe a romance. In the first game, all you get are introductory conversations and some occasional interjections during your questing, plus various inter-party banters, rivalries, and innuendos.

Even so, this was enough flavor to leave a lasting mark on people. To this day it’s hard to mention Baldur’s Gate without someone quoting one of Minsc’s lines. Viconia remains the quintessential RPG femme-fatale. And the duo of Xzar and Montaron can rival any Chaos cultist in how amusingly unhinged they are. This effect is further strengthened by the fact that most of the game’s companions come with unique abilities available only to them or some special piece of gear only they can use.

Baldur’s Gate 2

Baldur’s Gate 2 saw that people resonated with the companions in its predecessor and kept pushing this aspect of RPGs forward. That game is actually pretty modern in how it handles its companions. There you do get those protracted conversations with your crew while trying to learn everything there is to know about them. And you even have romances.

Now, if you’re someone who enjoys romances in RPGs you probably view Baldur’s Gate 2 as an exciting trailblazer doing so much for a feature you like. If, however, you see romances as nothing but a blight that distracts from the actual adventuring and sucks up the valuable resources that could’ve been used on something actually interesting, then Baldur’s Gate 2 for you is a herald of decline.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Decline that culminated with Baldur’s Gate 3. Where every interaction with companions that isn’t tied to their personal quests is of a romantic nature. It’s like friendships, rivalries, and camaraderie don’t exist in that game. If you’re talking to a companion, the game pretty much assumes you’re doing it to get in their pants. Which is just terrible on so many levels.

But even outside of romances, Baldur’s Gate 3’s cast of companions is not doing too hot. On the most basic level, their personalities tend to be annoying, abrasive, and plain not fun to be around. This, of course, is a personal preference type of thing, and you are free to disagree. Even among our staff, we have people convinced that Karlach, for example, doesn’t deserve to be thrown into an active volcano at the first opportunity. And while we won’t argue about preferences here, the whole Origin system that comes with Baldur’s Gate 3’s companions just doesn’t work.

This same system worked much better in Divinity: Original Sin 2. Mainly because that game doesn’t have any ties to D&D, a system where creating and leveling up your own character is one of the biggest draws. But when you do that in Baldur’s Gate 3 and make your own custom protagonist, you get relegated to being a passive observer. Your companions are all connected to the game’s story in various world-shaping ways. And you’re just a dude who was at the wrong place at the wrong time, playing second fiddle and solving their problems for them. It’s just not a satisfying setup.

There’s also a complete disconnect between the companions’ stories, personalities, and builds. Gale is this supposed master wizard who rubs shoulders with Elminster and is a Chosen of Mystra, the goddess of magic. And yet when you meet him, he’s just a level 1 scrub like the rest of you are. This gets even worse when you meet some old fan-favorite, like Minsc. You encounter him as a run-of-the-mill Ranger with high Dexterity and a reasonable Wisdom stat allowing him to use his Ranger spells. When in his original iteration he was a berserker with a big sword and brain damage that prevented him from using magic at all.

This leads us to another big point against Baldur’s Gate 3’s companions – they all follow the same rules as any other character. We can, of course, blame the freely available respecs for that, but since that’s not the topic we’re discussing at present, we can only look back with fondness at the time when character-building decisions mattered and companions had special builds that reflected their personality.

Companions Winner – Baldur’s Gate

And for that reason, we proclaim Baldur’s Gate the winner of this category. It did introduce all these beloved characters and shaped who they are. If you’re someone who enjoys romances, we won’t fault you for putting Baldur’s Gate 2 ahead of the original, but as we’re not too fond of that feature, we’ll stick with the first game.

Main Villain

A good antagonist is an important part of raising the stakes and making you feel like your adventure has meaning. It can also be very fun to hate a great villain.

Baldur’s Gate

Baldur’s Gate opens really strong in that department, as it hits you with a topical Nietzsche quote and then shows a cutscene portraying an ominous figure in spikey armor committing a murder. Then the game starts and it doesn’t take long for you to meet this same heavy metal individual who proceeds to kill your foster father, with you narrowly escaping a swift execution.

As you play through the game you learn more about your would-be assassin and how he’s not this big mindless brute but instead a shrewd operator with fingers in many pies and one of the key people behind the Iron Crisis and the brewing conflict with a neighboring state. You also learn that this Sarevok is your half-brother who sees you as an obstacle to getting old daddy Bhaal’s undivided attention. In other words, Sarevok is a constantly present danger connected to every major event in the game. He’s powerful, cunning, and evil in a very calculated sort of way. A great villain.

Baldur’s Gate 2

And then Baldur’s Gate 2 has Jon Irenicus. Who once again comes out strong right out of the gate by imprisoning you in his dungeon, killing off half your team, kidnapping your sister, and as you learn later on, stealing your soul. As he does all this to take revenge on his elven brethren for wronging him ages ago, he looks and sounds super cool. And while his methods are rather unsavory, on a certain level he does have a point. So when you do finally defeat him, you can’t help but feel bad for the guy who got dealt a lousy hand. Another great villain.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 bucks this trend and just doesn’t have a main villain. The closest thing it has is the Absolute. Who’s just a rumor and a vague concept you learn about early on in the game, and later realize that it’s actually a Netherbrain. And while a giant floating brain that wants to enslave everyone is definitely a threat, it just doesn’t work as an actual villain you can have any feelings towards.

There’s also the Emperor. But while the squid-head is definitely shifty and up to no good, depending on how you play your cards he may not even become your adversary. The same goes for Raphael the devil.

And then there are the Dead Three and their Chosen. Who get introduced late into the game, barely get any mustache-twirling screen time, and have to compete for the big bad position even among themselves.

Now, had the three all been rolled into the J.K. Simmons-voiced Ketheric Thorm, and had he been given more opportunities to chew scenery, then he could’ve been in the running for the best villain of the series. But since you deal with him at the end of Act 2, he just doesn’t get the chance to shine.

Main Villain Winner – Irenicus (BG2)

It’s a much closer competition between Sarevok and Irenicus. But purely because Irenicus doesn’t get a somewhat clumsy redemption arc in the sequel, that then gets unceremoniously disregarded and nullified in the third game just to turn him into the bloodthirsty brute he initially appears as, Irenicus manages to snag the victory in this category from between Sarevok’s spikey gauntleted fingers.

Exploration

Exploring the wilderness, venturing into the unknown, and looking through dusty old nooks and crannies are all an integral part and a big draw of RPGs.

Baldur’s Gate

The original Baldur’s Gate understands this well. It presents you with an expansive map of interconnected locations where from the moment you start your adventure, you can go pretty much anywhere. Some areas will be unavailable to you as they require certain quests to unlock, while others are populated by monsters too tough to fight for a rookie party. But the opportunity to go into those dangerous areas is still there. The moment you get your bearings, you’ll be able to abandon your main quest and simply start exploring the Sword Coast.

You’ll be rewarded for this exploration with a fight, a quick chat with a passerby, a side-quest, or even just some hidden treasure. But because the game’s areas are wide and open, most of the time you’ll just get to enjoy a peaceful stroll, look at some pretty trees and listen to birds chirping and streams flowing. Some people dislike all this downtime in Baldur’s Gate. We believe that it’s one of the game’s greatest strengths. It provides a sense of scope and the feeling of adventure that help frame the game’s more heroic events and create a memorable contrast. When you’re out exploring in Baldur’s Gate, that’s precisely what you’re doing – exploring, not just jumping from one bit of content to the next in an effort to maximize your XP-per-hour stat.

Baldur’s Gate 2

Baldur’s Gate 2 keeps the overall structure of the first game, but it does away with the vast open locations in favor of more content-dense quest hubs. You still get to travel around and on occasion get waylaid and ambushed as you do, but overall, the second game offers a more directed experience. It makes up for that by the sheer variety of places you visit. A bustling southern capital, a magic prison, ancient towers, mystery-shrouded islands, lost cities, beholder lairs, the fabled Underdark, and the list goes on. While you won’t be getting as much downtime and square mileage to explore as you did in Baldur’s Gate, this variety is sure to sate your curiosity and keep things fresh and exciting for a long time.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t follow in its predecessors’ footsteps and instead models itself after Larian’s Divinity: Original Sin games where each of the game’s acts is condensed into a single large map. These three maps – one for each of the game’s acts – do have plenty of expansive sub-areas, some of which, like Act 1’s Underdark, could probably be expanded into their own acts.

But even so, this necessity to squeeze everything into a single map creates a cluttered feeling. Everything is too dense. Instead of this grand adventure you can spend months or even years on, Baldur’s Gate 3 feels more like a weekend at the country fair. It’s a fun and exciting weekend, sure, but it still lacks the scope of a proper adventure. You can’t really do much exploring when you leave the act’s main populated settlement and three steps later come upon the lair of rare mythical beasts, then climb a ledge and find yourself in a goblin-infested village, take a left turn and arrive at an ancient abandoned temple, or take a right and get the first-row seats to a dragon sighting paired with some extra-dimensional visitors.

This theme-park design ensures that you’re never bored, not for even a second. But it robs the game of whatever atmosphere and mystery it could’ve had if the developers had enough confidence in their content to just let it breathe.

Exploration Winner – Baldur’s Gate

With that in mind, even though it doesn’t possess the sheer variety of Baldur’s Gate 2, the original Baldur’s Gate wins this category mainly because it understands that discovering something is only worth it when you have to actually work for it.

Dungeons

A game based on Dungeons & Dragons should really have some nice dungeons. It’s right there in the name. Luckily, the entire Baldur’s Gate series doesn’t disappoint in that area. Each game in the series has at least some dungeons that can easily go on the “Best Dungeons of All Time” list.

Baldur’s Gate

Baldur’s Gate’s Durlag’s Tower is easily the gold standard of dungeons. It starts off as a mystery landmark, then becomes a tourist attraction, a ghost story, a death trap, and finally a smaller part of a bigger puzzle. As you go through the tower and deal with its traps, battles, and riddles, you learn more and more about its past inhabitants and their demise to then avenge their deaths and set things right. It’s large, expansive and challenging, and offers a nice combination of story, combat, and exploration.

Baldur’s Gate 2

Baldur’s Gate 2’s Watcher’s Keep then, is essentially Durlag’s Tower on steroids. A significantly higher-level adventure, its traps are deadlier, evils more ancient, rewards much greater, and the final battle against the Demogorgon and its minions will make even the toughest Elden Ring fights feel like a nice afternoon stroll through the park.

Baldur’s Gate 3

While Baldur’s Gate 3’s overworld exploration leaves a lot to be desired, its dungeons, especially in the first and second acts, are nothing short of outstanding. Grymforge in particular is an absolute blast and has everything a good dungeon needs. You have several distinct factions with interests you can exploit, multiple levels, walkways and hidden paths to discover, and some secondary mysteries with connections (that don’t immediately become apparent) to other parts of the game. There’s also a non-obvious side-adventure in there about collecting moulds to craft some adamantine gear. Plus, multiple ways to resolve the central conflict. An absolutely fantastic dungeon that you can even miss should you take a different path into Act 2.

Dungeons Winner – Three-way Tie

With such strong showings from each of the games, it’s downright impossible to choose the best one here. The elegant simplicity of Durlag’s Tower, the high-level excitement of Watcher’s Keep, the complex variety of Grymforge. They’re all great and all have their merits. And so we declare this category a three-way tie.

Boss Fights

Baldur’s Gate

The original Baldur’s Gate is a decidedly low-level adventure. This doesn’t leave us with a lot of options when it comes to exciting boss fights. A tough Gnoll, an Ogre Mage, and Sarevok with his merry band of Bhaal enthusiasts are as good as it gets there. The game still has plenty of challenge, mind you, but it’s more of an attritional variety and tests your preparation more than your battle prowess.

Baldur’s Gate 2

Baldur’s Gate 2’s higher-level nature allows the developers to spice things up and throw some more unique challenges your way. Be it the complex mage duels, the aforementioned Demogorgon, everyone’s favorite dragon Firkraag, or the status-effect rich beholder lair. While they’re sure to put your game knowledge to the test, revealing that standing far back and sending a raging Minsc in alone to deal with those pesky beholders is a viable strategy, these are still just challenging encounters perhaps lacking in the showmanship we expect out of a proper boss fight these days.

Baldur’s Gate 3

It’s understandable, really, as during the days of the first two Baldur’s Gate games, boss fights were seen as more of an arcade or console thing, a childish frivolity we as a society were starting to move past. Baldur’s Gate 3 exists at a different time. A time when boss fights are the new hotness, and so the game goes all out on that front. Its boss fights are grand and elaborate, oftentimes have different ways to beat them, and can be an absolute spectacle or a complete gut punch depending on how you approach them. Some, like the end-game fight against Raphael, even have their own orchestral accompaniment.

Boss Fights Winner – Baldur’s Gate 3

Because of this dedicated attention to detail, Baldur’s Gate 3 is the clear winner in this category.

Ease of Access

This final category is only tangentially related to how good of an RPG each mainline Baldur’s Gate title is. Still, it’s worth considering if all you really want is to spend some time with a nice game.

Baldur’s Gate 3

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an absolutely massive behemoth of a game totaling around 120 GB in size. You’ll want to install it on an SSD and have a really beefy PC if you want to have decent performance. Alternatively, you’ll need a current-gen console to play it. And then there’s the issue of save files. If you follow the age-old advice to save often and in different slots, soon enough your save game folder will balloon into several dozens of gigabytes on top of the main install. And since the game keeps those saves on your system drive that may not necessarily have all the free space in the world, this can become an issue.

Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate 2

In contrast, the first two games will take up a total of around 5 GB, don’t care where you install them, and will run on a toaster. You can even get them for your Nintendo Switch or an iOS or Android phone or tablet. They also tend to go on frequent sales, allowing you to snag them for next to nothing. And thanks to the Enhanced Editions, now that they’ve been all patched and polished, you can play the games without any hassle on a modern system. You won’t even need to install any third-party mods.

But should you decide to fiddle a bit with your install, you can use the Baldur’s Gate Trilogy mod that combines the first Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate 2 and its Throne of Bhaal expansion, as well as Beamdog’s Baldur’s Gate: Siege of Dragonspear interquel into a single seamless experience you can play like one huge game. So despite their age, the original Baldur’s Gate titles remain very easy to get into and play in 2024 and beyond.

Ease of Access Winner – Baldur’s Gate

Thanks to the Trilogy mod we can play the first two games as one, sure, but since this here is a competition, the fact that the original Baldur’s Gate is where the story begins, is the game that introduces the setting and the characters, and it starts you at level 1, means that it ends up taking this final category.

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In the end, the second and third games win in two categories each, while the first Baldur’s Gate takes a whopping five, proving that the original is still the best. What do you think about this assessment? Do you have any other categories in mind for such a comparison? Feel free to let us know in the comments below.