We finally got a release date for the Baldur's Gate 3 Early Access at the conclusion of today's rather eclectic announcement stream. It turns out the reason they called it the Panel From Hell is that at the end of the intro cinematic, the illithid vessel carrying the player teleports straight onto a Blood War battlefield in Avernus, which is the site of the game's tutorial chapter. Instead of the extended gameplay footage of previous streams, the panel gave us a glimpse at various interesting scenarios which seem aimed at explaining why it's taken Larian so long to release the game. The lobotomy mentioned by Swen turns out to be an encounter with a trapped intellect devourer who can be recruited as a follower, which the development team implemented just two weeks ago. You can fully explore any zone with your familiar without moving an inch, use the animal handling skill to interact with any animal (including adorable owlbear cubs) and cast a Speak With Dead spell to converse with any corpse. Throughout the stream, the panel also asked viewers to vote on how to resolve the encounter with Crusher, the thuggish goblin previously seen in June's D&D Live stream, but unfortunately this ended in humiliating failure.



So at the end we learned that the Early Access release date is September 30th, probably. The game's Steam page now has an Early Access FAQ with some important details:

Another thing mentioned during the panel is that the Early Access build has a level cap of four. It's going to be much bigger than Divinity: Original Sin 2's Early Access was, though of course you won't be able to see all of its content in a single playthrough. However, unlike Divinity: Original Sin 2, character backgrounds in Baldur's Gate 3 will not be checked in dialogue. I guess they had to draw the line somewhere.