Baldur’s Gate 3 is, notoriously, an incredibly open-ended game. Larian‘s modern masterpiece is an RPG sandbox that gives you the tools to do basically anything you can think of. Want to stack a bunch of crates so you can hop onto a ledge, bypass a ton of characters, and skip a bunch of the game? Have at it. Want to rip a potential companion’s arm off the first time you meet him, completely eliminating him from the narrative? Sure. Want to kill everybody? It’s your playthrough, do what you want.
There Must Have Been Some Magic In That Old Missile They Found
While I love Baldur’s Gate 3 for conjuring the feeling that anything could happen, my favorite spell in the game is one that acts the same every single time. I’m talking about the old reliable, Magic Missile.
Related
What Will 2025’s Baldur’s Gate 3 Be?
Baldur’s Gate 3 took 2023 and 2024 by storm, but who will take the crown this year?
At times, playing Baldur’s Gate 3 feels like building a house of cards. The game is difficult enough that you often need to experiment to get through even the most basic combat encounters. You might try a new strategy that really seems to be working, then make one wrong move in the closing stretch and bring the whole thing tumbling down. It’s a game where everything, even the save system, can work for you or against you.
I don’t mind that. Learning to think strategically and creatively to solve the game’s combat puzzles is what makes Baldur’s Gate 3 so fun. But in the midst of that kind of experimentation, I’m grateful to have one sure thing to turn to, and Magic Missile is that one sure thing.
Magic Missile is a spell that allows you to shoot multiple energy blasts off at one time. If you have three enemies who are all at low health, you can use this one spell to hit each of them and, potentially, kill all three in one turn. When you pull that off, it’s a great feeling and Magic Missile’s 1-vs-100 ethos makes you feel like you’re David taking down Goliath when you pull it off.
Us Against The World
Those odd-beating numbers are useful on their own, but the thing that makes Magic Missile special is that it can’t miss. If you cast Magic Missile at an enemy, it will always hit.
Though, if an enemy is out of range, it won’t let you cast it at all.
This on its own doesn’t necessarily make it an especially good spell. In the early hours of the game, when your spellcaster is low-level, you can only send three bolts out at one time, and each one only does a few points of damage. But, as you continue to level up, you gain access to more and more bolts. Three becomes four, four becomes five, five becomes six. And as you gain levels, each individual bolt does more damage, too.
As the difficulty rises and you’re increasingly up against hordes of enemies, this becomes a vital tool to have in your toolkit. I’ve never tried the game on Tactician or Honor Mode, but even on lower levels, Magic Missile is crucial for crowd control. You keep several enemies on the backfoot, or hit one intimidating enemy with six bolts at once — all guaranteed to hit.
A year and a half after it came out, I still find myself thinking about Baldur’s Gate 3 every day. The experimentation is part of that, but the safety that Magic Missile provides is one reason I see myself returning to the game again and again.
3:50
Next
It’s Official, Baldur’s Gate 3 Is The New Skyrim
We’re gonna be talking about this game for a decade and more.