Baldur's Gate III's DualSense features explained by Larian Studios

Baldur's Gate III is a deep RPG of a kind that hasn't always been easy to play on consoles. Fortunately, it seems like Larian Studios has really done their job and in a lengthy post on the PlayStation Blog, product manager Emily Gera explains both how they've managed to make all the features easy to use (the secret sauce is plenty of radial menus), while also taking advantage of the DualSense controller.

The latter includes a lot of things that will enhance the overall experience, including the light bar, which is both cool and helpful:

"In battles between magic wielders, the light bar will take on the color of your spell - matching the color of the damage type or colored to the spell intent that you're casting. During moments of heightened pressure, its brightness will intensify, accompanied by resonating haptics.

When you're affected by a core status like Paralyzed, Bleeding, or Charmed, your DualSense controller will light up with a matching color."

But there's more to it as adaptive triggers and more are also being used for some extra features:

"We've also made use of the controller's adaptive triggers and added actuation points and feedback for left and right triggers, giving a sense of weight to the act of switching between menus. A light pull of the trigger will let you peek at your radial menus for a moment - a helpful feature in the heat of combat - while a hard press that pushes past the resistance point will lock in the menu."

Sounds good to us. The PlayStation 5 version of Baldur's Gate III launches today, while the PC version arrived last month. It is also coming for Xbox Series S/X (although without the DualSense features for obvious reasons) on a yet to be disclosed date this fall.