Baldur's Gate 3 has an impressive number of spells. There are currently 131 spells in the early access version, and Larian recently revealed 46 of the spells that will be added in the 1.0 release. That's quite a few, but according to Larian, it is less than half of the total number of spells that will appear in Baldur's Gate 3. According to the developer, the August 3 RPG will include "over 600 player spells and sub-spells." That means there are more than 400 spells in Baldur's Gate 3 that have yet to be revealed.

For comparison, Baldur's Gate 2 contains 275 spells, about 300 if you include the Throne of Bhaal expansion; Baldur's Gate 3 contains double that, so it is safe to assume that most of the spells in BG2 will appear! Baldur's Gate 3 will include about 300 spells. One thing in particular to look forward to is polymorphs.

One can't help but get a little excited at the terrifying prospect of having 600 spells to choose from. When developers tell me they've written a billion lines of dialogue or created the largest open world ever, larger than the surface of the sun, I don't listen: as far as I'm concerned, it's empty chit-chat, empty space. But D&D spells actually do something. Even the weakest spells can theoretically make or break a party, or at least help solve a problem. It seems impossible to include 600 spells without including the possibility of using spells to destroy the world.

Many of these spells may be damaging attacks that do not require super-complex system design to implement in a video game. However, what distinguishes Baldur's Gate 3's many spells from, say, Diablo 4's many spells is that there are quite a few D&D spells whose rules are not that easy to express in mathematics. The spell Commune, for example, allows players to ask their god three Yes or No questions and get real answers; without the DM playing the role of god, "Baldur's Gate 3" would have to limit the possible questions to those that can be answered, but in a sense it would be possible. This is not a confirmed spell for Baldur's Gate 3, but with over 400 unknown spells, anything is possible.

That is especially true given that Larian is known for letting the system run somewhat wild in its games. The studio removed the infinite loop from "Divinity: Original Sin 2" only because they determined that a bug made the loop possible. Before noticing the error, Larian intended to keep the loop: "If there's a glitch in the system, congratulations," producer David Walgrave told me at the time. Larian doesn't care if you find a legitimate but cheap way to bypass a large part of the quest line, for example, by cleverly using spells.

One of the limitations of spells in Baldur's Gate 3 is the character level cap of 12, which puts spells at 7th, 8th, and 9th level out of reach. This means that mega-spells like Power Word Kill, which instantly kills creatures with less than 100 HP, or Wish, which literally grants a character a wish at the DM's discretion, cannot be used. That said, there is no guarantee that these god-mode-like spells will not appear in future updates. A limited version of Wish appeared in Baldur's Gate 2, and a more powerful version appeared in Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Barre.

The spell I most want is Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion, which unfortunately is a 7th level spell.

Another tricky conjuration spell that is actually in the level range is the 6th level spell, "Transfer Through Plants." I doubt that "Baldur's Gate 3" will track down the "plants I've seen" and include a way to find them just for one spell.