Baldur's Gate III (2023)

BG3 casts and incredibly wide net of gameplay and unfortunately gets tangled in the line. It stumbles and, on the way down, drags down the really enlightened RPG and combat elements into the same muck of save scummy, stealth finagling and crate searching simulation we've seen by every other open world game to come out since 2000.

I won't beat around the bush, this game is so overwhelmingly popular and successful that I can't even begin to pretend that my opinions haven't been influenced or reflected off of all the other discourse online. It's lovely that Baldur's Gate got a modern sequel, it's great that 5e D&D got that AAA rep that the last two major editions missed out on. I'm happy that it exists, but I don't think that 'replicating D&D' is a proper excuse for including so much drudgery.

As I mentioned, BG3 sits on a base of Fallout 3 style open world sim gameplay, just with a slightly more directed story path (it's not truly an open world game and that actually is to its benefit), but the shine comes in its Tabletop RPG accuracy and combat design. Almost all of the fights in this game, at all levels and scales, are excellent. There are considerably few annoying straight up fights, though I do worry about just how build-dependent they may be even on Balanced difficulty. I never had a problem, but using a straight up Champion Fighter or two may make the questline bosses insurmountable if you're not super savvy with how items interact.

The problem starts after that, because the combat system is used to house puzzle and tactical challenges outside of just fights and that's where the game's true Bethesda-style heart is. Starting from Act 2, you're going to be put in incredibly fiddly situations where 99% of things go right, but you have to restart because an NPC ran into a fire or an AOE blew up a chemistry set and immediately dunked on your whole team. This doesn't happen a lot, but the 'nearly no way back' game progression and saving means you can end up locked out of a character relationship, quest objective, or item because of the physics or sim elements causing some crazy chain reaction that simply makes it less fun to continue playing.

This repeats everywhere throughout the game, dialogue trees with RNG checks that, guess what, lock you out of content and require save scumming. Large amounts of incredibly fiddly stealth scenarios in Act 3 that can lock you out of content (or threaten to take away all of your gold) and require save scumming. As the game progresses it becomes more complex and overwhelmingly more dense and everything on the screen is one wayward click or misunderstanding from becoming an unrepetent disaster.

My 'do everything possible' run of the game was about 90 hours, of that I'd say only 2/3s was actual gameplay, that's more than an entire days, a raw 30 hours, that was spent just reloading things until I played out a scenario in an incredibly specific way or brute forced my way past checks that would have dead ended a scenario. And each time you have to walk into a 25 second loading screen.

The game is also far too complicated for its own good. Looting things is far easier than I remember Bethesda titles being, but ultimately you can loot so much so easily that money really doesn't matter at all, but selling things does cost you a lot of raw time and busy work. Tens of thousand of lootable crates end up adding zero value to the actual game. Similarly, the complex spell and physics interactions really seem like they're just there for really hardcore or challenge mode players, but the fact that you can use crates to climb your way into a house early really doesn't benefit the typical player. By the end, when fights got large, I was also getting large amounts of graphical glitches and constantly having to check online guides to solve soft lock situations (like selling a mandatory item that you have to pick up off the ground in a precise way or else you don't get a specific cutscene).

It's simply too complex for its own good and it did not need to be this way. D&D 5E definitely held the game back (and the relationship with Wizards of the Coast even more so, its plainly obvious they left the game open to story DLC), but the open world formula held it back even more so. I'm really, really tired of games embracing these finagly stealth systems, uncapped and unrestrained relationship managers, and 100% physic environments and ending up with worse games because of it that take far longer to finish and aren't in Early Access for literal years. Just... just make normal games. Please.

Gameplay: This is certainly the most impressive CRPG ever made, but mainly because it creates and allows players to get themselves in a fully acted story.

Yet the limit to level 12, and the lack of a full set of spells, and the direct translation of 5e means that certain classes are extremely boring. In comparison to Divinity 2 this game actually is far less engaging from a character building perspective.

This means that the levelling process is slow, and less involved, and people will have wildly different experiences. Re-spec is the most fun thing to do for your companions, but I fear many will never do this.

Writing: Characters consistently behave and act as though they are humans with a specific view on the world. And places people with different views in the same space. Group think has been a big detriment to media in the last two decades, with black and white thinking dominating. So a grey, realistic story is refreshing.

Acting: Some of the best in gaming. Not on the level of a focused story game, such as the last of us or recent final fantasy. But the mo-cap make every encounter meaningful.

Final Act: the massive city while impressive from a scale perspective, makes for a less intuitive experience than what happened in the previous two acts. The environments feel less unique and memorable. And it is difficult to understand who to talk to, though the game does signpost this a little.

This in combination with a less refined final act in terms of narrative and consequence makes for a half hearted ending. Specifically, in terms of gameplay, you will hit the level cap relatively early, for me levelling in games and the scaling of my power is important. So this made the final act far less enjoyable.

Small notes: The game does not give you an understanding of your build choices, so there is a feeling of flying blind. Anyone not familiar with DnD will be wholly confused. However, there is almost no possibility of making a choice that will even slightly influence the power level of your characters to a level that makes a difference.

Strong recommendations to play the following classes: sorcerer, druid, warlock, cleric, paladin.

Recommendation against: rogue.

Mods to expand the number of spells are available.

Act 1 is a great DnD set of adventures, nicely connected, filled with mostly nicely written and well played companions. Mechanics are fun, engaging although on intendent difficulty, a bit too easy. Quests are interesting and have a variety of tones, humor is nice but not over the top. Overall, act 1 of the game is the best cRPG we got in years, maybe since Tyranny. But then you leave act 1 and things start falling aparat. Every companion wants to pin you down and have a smooch, suddenly they are not just companions, but thirsty shells with side quests, some of them start to be really annoying and writing goes down, interactions are less and less frequent. Questlines start to fall apart, bug out, not register your decisions, or they become just meaningless. Still the area for act 2 has a ton of interesting and fun quests, cool encounters, good music, even if it is a worse rehash of act 1 with the same shtick (kind hearthed refugess, opposed by a bunch of aholes). Then you get to act 3 and the game starts throwing plotlines and characters from old games at you and it butchers every single one of them, often not making sense (like the Dark urge storyline, which is just stupid and seems to break any logic and causality of the setups of previous games). But bad fanfic of previous games plotlines aside, act 3, filled with cool, but east boss battles, struggles to close out any storylines, including the main one, which at the end of act2 finally shows what it really is - save/ruin the world plot using mcguffins.

Old games had this great feeling of having a personal hook to a story that has a more local, managable and believble stakes. Here, we once again go from goblin slayer, to world savior/destroyer. It is all so tedious. Combat mechanics are good, some companions maintain good writing throughtout the game (even if often undermined by buggy or unthough interactions) that is upheld by great vocie acting and animations. However the overall stories are often dissapointing or lead nowhere.

This has all the flaws of Original Sin 2 and then some, since it is a more ambitious project, but the first part of the game is so enjoyable that I am willing to forgive a lot, but not a bad story in a cRPG. If at least they would leave the old games characters and plotlines alone. It is nice to leave stories opened sometimes you know? Specially if you are not the one who came up with them, and just want to add yoru fan fic to "canon" when you can.

Story, writing and companions being the major complatins seem like a big blow to cRPG, but all of those also have their upsides and high points so with all the things that are not flawed in the game, or not as flawed as those I can only recommend the game, but with a rather bittersweet feeling.

Already having way more fun with Act 3! The density of the city environment really lends to the feeling that a cool new quest or character beat could be waiting around every corner, and the game delivers on that promise pretty dang frequently.

Special mention has got to go to Barcus Wroot, love how this seemingly one-off NPC goes on to have an intricate, parallel quest of his own that spans the entire game.

I already have too many additional runs planned:

1. Bard: I really want to play around with this class because I love a good support class, and Bard seems like a fun class for it's Charisma and unique conversation skills alone.
2. Cleric: I want to do a Cleric run because I love support healers and I'd like to play around with Light or Life Domain. I also thought this would be a good candidate for an ultra righteous run during which my character acts only upon principle and devotion.
3. The Dark Urge: who doesn't want to do a Dark Urge run? This is also a great chance to run as a Sorcerer, since that is the default for The Dark Urge.

Do I have it in me to do three more runs after I finishing my initial run? I don't know. Maybe I should just respec Shadowheart into Life or Light domain during my bard run and call it a day. Maybe then if I want to role play some sort of righteous jerk, I can roll a pally sometime in the new year.

The behaviour of characters in act 3 often didn't make sense in regards to their motive like the emperor who wants to be free of the brain joining the brain if you free orpeheus, this act is aslo the worst for companions repeating lines they've already said and characters bringing up completed quests like they are ongoing.

The games ending was so dissapointing that it soured the overall experience, here I was expecting an ending that would detail what happened after the ending based on your choices, something akin to fallout new vegas but all you get is brief farewells and a cryptic cutscene with Withers.