Highlights
- Stealth in RPGs is often limited or ineffective, but Baldur's Gate 3 introduces a robust and enjoyable stealth system that allows for sneaking, pickpocketing, and one-shot kills.
- The game features a light and visibility system, allowing players to manipulate their surroundings to hide in shadows and avoid detection.
- While the stealth system in Baldur's Gate 3 is generally well-designed, there are some inconsistencies and limitations that could be improved upon in future updates, such as the inability to hide bodies or throw objects as distractions.
Playing stealthily has always felt like one of the great freedoms that should be offered by great RPGs, yet in reality it’s often proven elusive. In classic RPGs like Dragon Age: Origins and Baldur’s Gate 2, stealth would basically be rendered null and void as soon as you entered combat (and there wasn’t that much stealth-killing you could do to set yourself up for combat, what with most groups of enemies functioning in clusters rather than walking patrol routes).
Larian’s own Divinity games were pretty nifty at stealth outside of combat, letting you sneak around stealing things, but again stealth in a more aggressive form—picking off unaware enemies, one-shot sneak kills, slipping in and out of stealth in actual combat—left a bit to be desired.
I’ve been hurt one too many times by half-baked stealth systems in RPGs (usually looking to immersive sims like Dishonored and Deus Ex instead for my stealthy kicks), but after a bunch of hours skulking around the shadows in Baldur’s Gate 3 as Astarion, I was delighted to find that you can seriously get stuff done and deal some damage as a vampiric assassin. It’s not quite in the Agent 47/Sam Fisher bracket just yet, but with a few little tweaks, it might just get there.
First up, there’s a light and visibility system in Baldur’s Gate 3, with three tiers of visibility based on how well lit the area you’re standing in is. With the ability to extinguish lights and torches around you, you can manipulate the environment to suit your shadowy ways, before tailing patrolling guards who walk past the dark corner you’re hiding in and pouncing to deliver stealth attacks perfectly capable of one-shotting weaker enemies without anyone noticing.
In Divinity, stepping into an enemy’s red cone of vision would automatically trigger combat (the cone got smaller the better at stealth you were, which always seemed like weird logic as it implied that somehow enemies’ eyesight got worse with each skill point, rather than your sneaking getting better). Those cones still exist in Baldur’s Gate 3, but walking through them triggers checks based on how good your sneaking is, which gives you a lot more room to maneuver quietly.
True to a good stealth game, there are legitimate distraction abilities as well. You can summon a cat to prowl around and meow to reel enemies in, or cast the cantrip ‘Minor Illusion’ to do much the same thing, allowing you to sneak into plenty of places unnoticed.
All this opens up the game massively for thief and assassin builds. As a thief, you have more tools at your disposal to get into places undetected, circumventing combat altogether as you break into a vault to steal some treasure or cross the threshold into a new area. As an assassin, meanwhile, you can sneak around the site of an upcoming battle, watch enemy patrol routes, and pick off enemies around the peripheries of the battlefield.
Baldur’s Gate 3 enables you to play this way, and it doesn’t feel cumbersome… for the most part.
See, when a game clearly goes to some lengths to create a solid stealth system, the holes in that system sometimes become more apparent. You begin to trust in its logic, so when it defies that logic it can be a tad jarring. Using a bit of good old-fashioned save-scumming, for example, I found that if an enemy comes across a body I left lying around, then I needed to be absolutely miles away to not trigger a fight.
When taking out some archers pre-battle in a large arena in the goblin camp, I sent my entire party up into the rafters way above the arena and put them all into ‘Hide’ mode, and yet upon spotting the body far down on the ground below, a patrolling enemy immediately triggered combat, even though no one in the arena actually knew where any of my party members were.
It’s a shame that those thoughtful systems like stealth checks and light-based visibility go out the window as soon as a body is spotted and you’re well hidden in the area. I’ve also encountered some strange triggers where I’d enter a restricted area, and I’d see a guard running over from a completely different area to confront and try to arrest me. Moments like these undermine the stealth fantasy that Larian clearly made some effort with.
You can technically hide bodies, but it involves the ‘Move’ function where your basically chucking a corpse a few feet, going over to it, then chucking it again (just throw it over your damn shoulder, or drag it by the leg if you’re feeling lazy like Agent 47!).
There’s also no way to, say, shove corpses into barrels or chests, while the much-vaunted ‘Throw’ function that lets you throw anything from stones to salamis missed a trick by not letting you throw things to create distractions. It’s all well and good having distraction-based spells, but not every grubby little halfling thief from the rough Lower City of Baldur’s Gate 3 has time to pore over arcane magic books; and even if you’re one of those fancy magic-learned thieves, why would you take up a precious spell slot on a distraction spell when you could just throw a cheese wheel instead?
With Larian’s tendency to release a ‘Definitive Edition’ of their RPGs some one year on from the full release—always featuring tweaks and even design changes aplenty—I’m hopeful that we may yet see some refinements to the Baldur’s Gate 3 stealth system. It’s pretty good as it is already, but with a couple of changes it could become truly great, allowing you to immerse yourself in that love shadowy RPG stealth experience unabated.