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.

Had a run-in with a really annoying bug. Two of my companions had an argument that led to a fight and the game prompts me to pick one to side with. But when I make my choice, the game bugs out dumps me back to my camp. Meanwhile, my party members talk as though the companion I didn't side with is gone, but they are still around and hanging out in my camp as though nothing has happened. If I reload my save, the issue happens again, and I'm afraid to continue in case it ruins one of the storylines. I searched online and there seems to be a way to work around the bug that I still need to try, but it still really ruined the moment.

Haven't dealt with this level of game-breaking junk in an RPG since Skyrim.

So they let jaheira overpower your character with vines no skill checks involved or roleplaying based on how your class would escape the vines just a strength option, what a bummer. (also those vines moved slow af)

Feels to me like they just wanted to make a character from the past games look good, but just ends up spoling the moment at least for me since I'm a power fantasy player.

Loving the game so far. Really struggling with work today cause all I can think about is this game.

It really is a next evolution on Divinity: Original Sin 2, rather than a pure successor to the original Baldur's Gate games. I'm not a huge Forgotten Realms buff and I was never able to get into the original games, so this is mostly fine with me; Larian's goofy writing always felt true to the way me and my friends played D&D. I do find the game to still be quite buggy at times, and I'd kill for a better autosave system to save me from having to be paranoid about remembering to quicksave. Can't wait to start a multiplayer playthrough with some friends.

I've put in 15 or so hours over the past few days and I'm having a blast. I'm happy to report the power of choice and relative creative problem solving is possible in this one. I had one instance yesterday where I needed to get back into a base. The main two options I could see were going in through the front door killing everything in sight, or sneak past some sleeping guards and break down a crumbling wall without alerting them.

I tried the sneaky route but kept getting caught because I needed to jump down from on high into the vicinity of the the sleeping guards and my thudding into the ground kept waking them up. Then I remembered I had the 'silence' spell on the party's wizard.

I had that wonderful feeling of 'wait, no, will that work?'. I cast silence to create a bubble of silence where my team needed to land and then again around the area where I needed to noisily kick down the wall and I was into the base in no time.

The smile that beamed across my face, I tell you..

It's absolutely amazing how well BG3 is doing. Over 800k simultaneous players on Steam, putting it at #9 all time across all games. Very cool to see a CRPG get that type of attention.

I'm not the biggest fan of Larian's writing and game design, but I'm still mostly having a good time with it myself. I would have much preferred to see Obsidian carry the Baldur's Gate torch, but I'm just trying to let the game stand on its own and enjoy it for what it is.

Honestly on the fence: been playing it for 10 hours over the span of two days and what I could notice there were still some things dragged from the EA version.

• Conversation bugs still happening that were carried from the EA build. Weird, considering we waited three years for them to be put through feedback and 'corrected'.
• Frames diving down after one hour of gameplay with no unnecessary stressors on the computer if not the game running (no Steam/Discord Overlays, no outside game optimization). Tempted to try the same trick that seemed to work with Hogwarts Legacy.
• Weird glitches and bugs such as conversations skipping, conversations hanging, sometimes conversations just somewhat cut short.

As far as gameplay goes, it's a standard D&D-esque game: it does what it does well, to a degree.

I wish it were better but for $60 and three years of 'preparation' and 'bug fixes', there's a lot to be desired.

Appeals to people who generally like 'popularized' D&D campaigns (Exandria, Critical Role, TAZ...) resulting in being a bit too forced on the humor at times if not downright creepy in some character interactions.

Not a full review because I am still playing it.

Baldur's Gate (1) and Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn are two of the first cRPGs that I ever played. They instilled in me a love of D&D and high fantasy in video games. I have awesome memories of playing those two games with friends and girlfriends (whom begrudgingly agreed to play with me) and loving every minute of it. I also loved playing NWN, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Cloudy Mountain on Intellivision (I'm old) and other RPGs, tabletop or otherwise.

I am ecstatic that Larian Studios put together a game that seems to be worthy of the title "Baldur's Gate". I am extremely excited to play it, though I feel the need to go back and play the previous two games to their completion.

Tomorrow is BG3's release.

We are being asked to:

1. re-download the Early Access version if you have played it in order to manually delete all save files from the game itself (not the folder, or Larian and Steam will have a fit).
2. uninstall the Early Access version because it has absolutely no bearing and nothing to share with the Full Release.
3. re-install the Full Release version (150+gb of game), specifically on an SSD storage.

And I should be glad and behave like all Larian fanboys and think that the three years long Early Access has been worthwhile when this is the launch we get.