Baldur’s Gate 3 bosses are brutal and sometimes brilliant

Baldur’s Gate 3 is full of unique challenges that other RPGs don’t offer, like having to rescue a gnome strapped to a windmill. Every time I complete a silly quest, there’s a challenging encounter which forces me to think strategically. This is especially true for boss fights; Larian absolutely loves to pit me against encounters that test my wits — and sometimes my patience. Due to the variety of bosses and their arenas, no boss fight is ever the same. But the companions I roll around with also give me different dialogue options for handling the game’s big bads. This boss fight showcases Baldur’s Gate 3’s ethos of creative freedom, even if they’re sometimes a pain. And they’ve made me a better player.

I’m playing as an assassin, along with my true love Astarion, best pal Shadowheart, and grumpy githyanki Lae’zel. It wasn’t long before I discovered how they could combine their strengths. Lae’zel opens fights, hitting enemies with Distracting Strike, giving everyone else on our team advantage, and then Astarion and I sneak-attack any adversaries left standing. It’s our bonding activity as a couple, and it’s also how I steamrolled through big chunks of the game so far.

Image: Larian Studios via Polygon

Occasionally, though, the game gets devious, and I’m faced with a boss fight that forces me to rethink my strategy entirely. The Spider Matriarch taught me to use my head and stop playing around. My usual strategy wasn’t working due to the hypermobile swarms of baby spiders, and I eventually employed a combination of Karlach’s sweeping attacks and environmental damage from falling rocks, which made me feel like a genius.

The boss battle arenas have also been consistently entertaining and creative. The Underdark is the setting for one brawl, where everyone’s surrounded by deep channels filled with lava. Any player with even a crumb of cruelty will quickly come to the conclusion: “Why use my traditional abilities like a Sucker when I can simply use knockback abilities to outsource that work to lava?” Knockback is actually a surprisingly useful and entertaining solution to a couple of tough fights.

To be fair, I don’t The following are some of the most effective ways to improve your own language skills.I’m going to dig into these scraps. I can often use persuasion — or deception, if I’m feeling spicy — to get out of even the most embarrassing or sticky situations. Sure, the prison warden in Moonrise Tower may have caught me wrist-deep in a hidden chest, but that doesn’t mean I’m . With a little confidence, my elf can gaslight her way out of fighting an area boss she hadn’t meant to antagonize — as long as the dice don’t betray me.

Image: Larian Studios

But I’m a sucker for my beautiful boyfriend Astarion, whose caprices betrayed me during one particularly nasty boss fight. A demon, displacer creature, and an army of infernal goons were all I had to face. It was a pleasant surprise to find that I could communicate with the demon. But Astarion didn’t like that, and he hissed at me to shut up and just start murdering. As relationships are all about compromise, I spent a full day fighting that boss before finally getting lucky. The game gave me inspiration by my party’s happy faces, even though I had started out reluctantly. I was able to go into the following boss battles with more knowledge.

There have only been a handful of times, in my playthrough, where boss fight conditions have felt less fair — or where creative solutions didn’t seem to make a huge difference. It was difficult to deal with the ambush in Act 2 at Last Light Inn, where one poor cleric is blamed for a failure condition. She gets swarmed by gargoyles, which isn’t her fault, but she You can also read about how to get started. flee from them in a panic — which then triggers multiple attacks of opportunity. It was a long fight, but I managed to win.

It feels as though leveling up is only half of the reason I feel so much stronger; the other half is that I’ve figured out some ridiculous tactics that I can pull off with a basic set of supplies. Some of the tactics I used were learned in desperation when the game forced me to do so, while others I discovered on the battlefield.

Strength of Baldur’s Gate 3The strength of the game lies in its dialog, choices and characterisation. But I’m enjoying the gameplay as well, and the memorable boss fights are a big part of that. I’m fighting against foes I have legitimate grudges against, and bigger and weirder foes keep cropping up over the course of the campaign. As I head into Act 3, I’m looking forward to seeing what else the game has in store — and hopefully there aren’t any other Last Light-style surprises in my future.