10 great Dungeons & Dragons games for when you (finally) finish Baldur’s Gate III
Does Baldur's Gate III have you craving more Dungeons & Dragons action? Here are 10 other great D&D games that you can play right now
Games Features Dungeons & Dragons
Baldur’s Gate III is dominating the gaming world at the moment, with Larian’s long-in-the-works sequel to the classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure eliciting high praise, tales of adventures, and also a whole lot of, well… What we can only refer to as “bear horniness.”
But while BG3 is a massive game, you are probably going to finish it eventually. (Unless you’re playing on Tactical; those mind flayers don’t mess around when you’ve got the difficulty cranked.) Which demands the question: What do you do if you still have a hankering for more D&D based gaming fun, but don’t have a DM or a crew to roll with?
Lucky for you, hypothetical reader, few brands have interacted with the world of video gaming more aggressively than D&D. In fact, there are so many games based on Wizards Of The Coast’s beloved rule-sets—dating all the way back to the days of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s—that it can be a bit overwhelming to know where to start. But don’t worry, weary adventurer: We’re here to be your personal Volo’s Guide, pointing you in the direction of the best D&D games, throughout history, to help you scratch that post-Baldur’s Gate III itch.
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The original Baldur’s Gate is a mystery where you’re trying to unravel who’s manipulating a resource shortage for financial and political gain, and what their true motives are. That’s not exactly generic fantasy.
Came here to say this.PLUS, I still kinda enjoy BG1 more than BG2 – DESPITE the better NPCs & companions – because BG1 feels like a complete, conjoined, living (sometimes boring) world…where BG2 feels like a well-curated series of instances.
I’ve beaten BG1 multiple times over the years, but I’ve never actually managed to beat BG2. It’s just never grabbed me in quite the same way. I’ve just started replaying it though, and maybe this time it’ll stick
I’ve got to say…BG2 goes downhill after Athkatla. It’s a rather classic case of blowing your load in the first act. The Underdark is boring, and then after that it’s straight on in to the endgame.
Yeah, I don’t know – it’s like the team had a great opening, a (couple of) great ending(s), and a TON of great ideas to fill in, in-between. But nothing really to marry them all. Or maybe they just thought we were bored with the “open world”-i-ness of BG1 (Narrator: We weren’t) and decided to cram fast travel in there, everywhere.I appreciate everything BG2 improved upon from BG1, but I still will replay BG1 over BG2, in a heartbeat. <3
I love Athkatla; it’s such a rich, detailed, and beautiful city, utterly glorious – and being 2D, hand-drawn, it’s still gorgeous today. But I’m thinking about the only time I played through BG2 – which was recently, with the Beamdog remaster – and I remembered why I never finished it before: it’s pretty much on rails after Athkatla. Athkatla was great, because it was open. Once you get to the underdark and the pirate isles, it’s just back and forth fetch quests. And we’re told who the baddie is right from the get go, so there’s not really a mystery.
I have finished each (BG1, BG2) completely, probably…twice. But I have STARTED each many, MANY times, and gotten only a few hours in, each time. :DThey’re both definitely worth pushing through/completing, if only for the (literal and figurative) closure.Bonus: give BG1 another try via the “Baldur’s Gate Reloaded” mod for Neverwinter Nights 2! It is a blast.
Where’s the very OK but still fun Dungeons & Dragons: Warriors of the Eternal Sun?
I enjoyed it a lot when I was a young lad; I held onto the password they give you at the end to port your progress into the sequel, but it never was made.
Go for the eyes, Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
RUUUUUN!
I have been years hearing RUUUN. Though he says something completely different. I mean, never trust me again on anything.
List fails without Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: The Cloudy Mountain for Intellivision. It was pretty crazy for its time.
How can it be possible that you didn’t include Temple of Elemental Evil or the SSI Gold Box series? These are some of the most accurate depictions of D&D in a computer game.Temple of Elemental Evil is available at GOG and has some excellent mods for QoL and additional content.https://www.gog.com/en/game/the_temple_of_elemental_evil The SSI Series is available at GOG as well as Steam https://www.gog.com/en/game/forgotten_realms_the_archives_collection_twohttps://store.steampowered.com/app/1882370/Pool_of_Radiance/
They did talk about the SSI gold stuff, and they’re right, most of those are not fun to play unless you’re looking at it from a different lens. They’re important parts of D&D, video game, and Forgotten Realms history, but they’re rough. Spot on with ToEE though. It was overshadowed by so many other big RPGs at the time, but the actual gameplay was basically one of the best TTRPG recreations around. I learned a lot as a young DM from that game.
The recent steam release added so many QoL improvements to the gold box.It’s quite fun
Oh good to know. I’ll have to check those out. I always remembered my dad playing those games, but I could never quite get the hang of them myself at that age.
I mean, TOEE is famously buggy as hell and unstable. Speaking just for myself, I’ve never been able to get it to run on any computer no matter which fan mods or patches I install.
For me, Livonya’s mod cared for all the issues
I sincerely hope that Larian will dabble with the Planescape setting at some point. They could even make it a semi-sequel to BG3, featuring some familiar characters in support roles. Of course they’d have to decide a “canon” ending for BG3 to do that sensibly…
I’ll give a nod to the old gold box games from TSR.
How can you not mention Solasta? A 2021 game based on 5e
Or “Black Geyser – Couriers of Darkness”, while we’re at it.
I guess because it’s not officially D&D, just a licensed home brew version. But I’m with you. I think it’s adaptation of tabletop to PC is a bit better than BG3’s actually, particularly it’s good use of the grid. And its dungeon maker tool is also good. Definitely the NWN2 for this generation.
Spoiler about Planescape: Torment…
You want your character to die – several times in fact. Doing so helps advance the storyline.
where are the Gold Box games? CLASSICS
Classics, but also the arguably best of them all, Pool of Radiance, has many interface issues (you have to manually memorise the spells every time and manually heal during rest)
Cool thing about Pool of Radiance that didn’t come back until the Krynn games ( I think) was the ability to actually clear an area of monsters!
Frankly, I’d recommend avoiding most of these at all costs. (Keep Torment, BG and BG2 and maybe Eye of the Beholder, and ditch the rest.)If you want something to play after Baldur’s Gate 3, my first recommendation would be Pathfinder: Kingmaker or Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Nominally Pathfinder isn’t D&D, but it’s built directly on top of D&D 3.5e with the serial numbers scraped off.Then once you’re done with those, maybe Solasta: Crown of the Magister (more of a fantasy XComlike than an RPG, but literally just straight up the D&D 5e ruleset with the proprietary bits, once again, filed off) or Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 (not D&D, but directly aiming at making at being Baldursgatelikes otherwise).
Not quite Dungeons and Dragons but the Pathfinder (a D&D rules offshoot) games by Owlcat Studios are fantastic and well worth a go if you want more D20 CRPG fun.And of course Larian studios previous title Divinity Original Sin 2 has a ton in common with BG3 and also well worth a go.
Although never quite as narratively ambitious as the earlier Baldur’s Gate games
This sells “Mask of The Betrayer” short. I would argue that it vastly surpasses BG I in narrative ambitions, maybe also BG II (with the exception of Throne of Bhaal).
There’s a clear line leading from “Torment” to “Mask of The Betrayer” (arguably drawn by Chris Avellone), I would say — it has weird and interesting companions, an interesting premise (basically, you’re a cursed being with a hunger for souls), and some interesting places it leads to.
my takes- Baldur’s Gate 1 is a wonderful game. There are different d&d edition rules between the original game and the Enhanced Edition but please play the EE: it fixes so many bugs and glitches of the original game. Also it still features the unique feeling of D&D with a Level 1 spell caster, that guy that will be slayed by any rat and will only have one or two burning hands spells until resting again. But then you become Level 2, then Level 3, and then you are the wolf bully and it feels so right.- Eye Of The Beholder was a D&D streamlined take on Dungeon Master where, well, most of the rpg attributes did not matter that much and where most of the fun is on level exploration. EOB1 is more free form, EOB2 is very tightly designed and even prettier, both benefit from The All Seeing Eye tool for automap. EOB2 is one of my favourite games and I always considered it kind of a Wolfenstein/Doom era FPS but grid based.- Gold Box games can be mentioned. Pool Of Radiance is incredibly fun and tight but the interface… oh that interface, from the era where automatic re-membering spells or automatic healing during rest was something not present. Still, another game with a huge sense of accomplishment. That got better in subsequent games which, unfortunately, were not that fun or epic. Imho.- Neverwinter Nights 2 always felt so incredibly junky to me.
I had Eye of the Beholder on SNES and never made it out of the first dungeon. I could defeat the creatures but couldn’t find the door. But I loved selecting my party. It was also the rare game that used the Mario Paint mouse.
This is a great list! Baldur’s Gate I and II get their rightly-deserved spots as first and second on the list; but perhaps a little more emphasis on Throne of Bhaal would have been nice – after all, the devs at the time said it was really “Baldur’s Gate III.”
Only thing I’m surprised not to see is Temple of Elemental Evil. It did a superb job of continuing the Baldur’s Gate-style gameplay using D&D 3.5 rules (my personal favorite, and the father of Pathfinder 1.0’s ruleset). Also, it used one of the most beloved campaigns as a base for the game. The bugs it was associated with have all been fixed by mods.
Where’s the slide for “Just play D&D with friends in your (parents’) basement”? Seriously, as good as the games have been they all seem to pale in the fun of playing in person with friends. I loved writing and playing various third party modules using the original NWN game tools. Heck, I still have folders with my NWN modules (with various homebrew content) that I can draw from for my Pencil&Paper D&D DM duties.
In the original Baldur’s Gate, you must solve a mystery to find out who and why are taking advantage of a resource crisis for personal and governmental gain. That isn’t your typical fantasy, precisely.
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