Baldur's Gate III (2023)

Baldur's Gate 3 stands in a league of its own. What Larian Studios achieved with this project borders on extraordinary. The development cycle was long and stretched across the pandemic, but the result justifies that investment.

When it was first announced, I assumed it would feel more like Divinity: Original Sin 2 than a true Baldur’s Gate successor. In some ways, that impression holds. The systemic design, the freedom, and the studio’s signature approach are clearly present. Yet in the end, that distinction hardly matters. It delivers on the scale and ambition expected from the Baldur’s Gate name while retaining Larian’s strengths.

The production values are exceptional. Visually and acoustically, it operates at the highest level. More importantly, it is not only expansive but genuinely deep. The number of narrative branches, character builds, and mechanical interactions is staggering. It feels like a comprehensive statement of what a modern RPG can be.

The continued post-launch support and expansion of character options further reinforce that commitment. It is rare to see a studio maintain this level of ambition and follow-through. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a five-star achievement and one of the defining RPGs of its era.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is both a difficult to learn and difficult to master RPG epic. Even after a 112 hour playthrough, I’ve barely scratched the surface of this game. BG3 is the kind of game that players can enjoy for years and still discover new things. The numerous decisions in each of the three acts ensures that no single playthrough is exactly the same. In addition, the combat is so flexible that it is only limited to the player’s creativity. This alone, may sound like BG3 is an instant recommendation, but unfortunately, there are problems and major ones at that.

Even after the so-called “Final Patch” was released, the game is a buggy mess. I did not install any mods for the majority of my playthrough, yet I had more hard crashes than I could count; Numerous broken questlines, that either wouldn’t complete or get triggered; Party members that were impossible to revive; Items that were glitched and couldn’t be interacted with and so on. Usually loading an earlier game save will fix these bugs, but it’s an annoying workaround.

Inventory management is a hassle. There is no convenient way to search for specific elemental types. For example, I was in a dungeon where the foes were weak to lightning. In the inventory screen, there is a search bar, typing in “lightning” only retrieves items with the word “lightning” in the name. It does not list weapons/items with lightning effects. The game also has encumbrance, so that if a character is holding too many heavy items, they will be severely penalized. I am actually fine with this game design as it discourages players from hoovering up every single item that they can pick up. The problem is that Gold, the in-game currency, has weight to it and can also cause encumbrance. While it may make sense in terms of lore, it gets in the way of player fun.

The AI that controls the inactive party members during exploration is terrible. Characters will routinely get stuck in the environment and separated from the party especially in regions with chasms and cliffs. When a character discovers a trap, sometimes the AI will inadvertently have another character clumsy walk into it. Of course players can order the other characters to stop following the main character, but I abhor this amount of tedious micromanaging.

The game has a level cap of 12, which I think is too low. Players who completed most of the quests in the first two acts will easily hit the level limit in the final third act. Having such a low level cap disincentivizes completing side quests. While there is some legendary loot to be found and plotlines to unfold, the lack of any earned experience means that your party won’t be getting stronger or earning new skills for roughly the last 30 hours.

Mods are a godsend and help fix many of these maladies, but recommending the use of mods ruins the point of reviewing this game. It is only fair to judge this game as it was intended by the developers and not when it is enhanced (cough fixed cough) with community mods.

I don’t hate Baldur’s Gate 3, otherwise I wouldn’t have finished it. But unless you are familiar with D&D or similar strategic turn based RPGs, BG3 is a hard game to wholeheartedly recommend.

One of the best RPGs I’ve played this decade. Baldur’s Gate 3 is extremely story-rich and filled with an impressive amount of meaningful content. The quests rarely feel like filler, and even smaller encounters often have memorable characters, multiple solutions, and consequences that can affect events much later.

The main story is well paced and never felt rushed, despite how large the game is. The companion characters are one of its strongest parts, especially characters such as Shadowheart, Astarion, Lae’zel, Gale, Wyll, and Karlach. Each has their own personality, motivations, personal storyline, and relationship with the player, and their opinions of you can change depending on how you behave.

I completed three different playthroughs, and each time I realised how much dialogue, exploration, character development, and entire questlines I had missed. Different classes, races, companions, dialogue choices, and approaches to combat can completely change how situations play out, which gives the game a huge amount of replay value.

I also really liked the freedom to play as someone heroic, cruel, selfish, manipulative, or somewhere in between. Your choices can genuinely return to haunt you, whether through characters you helped or betrayed, decisions involving the Absolute, or actions taken during companion quests. The game does a great job of making choices feel important rather than simply giving the illusion of choice.

The graphics are good, the turn-based combat is consistently enjoyable, and the variety of classes, spells, environments, and possible strategies keeps it from feeling repetitive. Overall, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a very content-filled RPG with excellent characters, thoughtful quest design, strong storytelling, and an exceptional amount of replay value.

This game is pretty good, i like the visuals, story and worldbuilding, even though i've never been interested in D&D. Gameplay also is deep and gives you a lot of freedom with ways to enjoy the world of Faerun by managing equipment, party compositions, builds and multiclassing.

Even though i sinked A LOT of hours in BG3, and i still enjoy it overall, i'm still shocked that this game got so much praise and gets glazed online non-stop, despite having so many issues... There is too any of them to cover, so i will cover most important ones:

1. It's the most inflated game i've ever touched. Yes, there is a plenty of content to enjoy and secrets to uncover, Baldur's Gate 3 isn't the small scale game at all. But it's also ridiculously slow, if you've seen other people have spent 150+ hours in it, that's because of painfully slow and clunky movement, where your AI companions get stuck half the time, slow roll, level up, roll and re-roll animations (people will reload game on failed dialogue checks in BG3 way more often than in other games, since it's normal to be curious about successful outcome to see what happens) Even companions during camping are spread out all over the map, instead of deploying their tents around big campfire or something, like if they were trying to make you waste as much time as possible even on talking with/switching your party members.

2. This is pretty much the same problem as the first one, but i still wanted to point it out seperately, since it makes game less enjoyable on it's own as much as everything that i mentioned before.

   YOU CAN'T SKIP/SPEED UP ENEMY TURNS! You heard it right, you can't speed up enemy actions in combat in a PVE turn-based game! I've never seen that happen in any other game like this, unlike Heroes of Might and Magic, King Arthur Knight's Tale, Battle Brothers or any other mass scale turn-based game i could think of on flight. Sometimes you will literally have to face around 30+ AI controlled units (for example if you fight Druids in grove and have unarmed Tiefling allies), they all will take their slow ass turns with incredibly slow ass animations, turning around, running and so on.

   Sometimes i feel like Larian doesn't value their player's time whatsoever, and to me this game design is unacceptable.

3. Some parts of the game are incredibly tedious, especially Gauntlets of Shar. This has to be the most unenjoyable experience in a videogame i've ever had, since DiMa's memory puzzle in Fallout 4 DLC.

Overall i consider Baldur's Gate to be a solid 7.5/10 turn-based RPG experience with huge amount of choices that will make your every playthrough unique, but it's still extremely flawed and i can't disagree enough with all flawless ratings and even some of them claiming it to be a game of the decade.

My only guess is that whole marketing around the bear romance scene and cute/sassy Elf waifus and husbandos attracted a large plethora of photo mode enjoyers, character customization mains and other sorts of normies and casual. They simply had enough fun in character customization, cool Intro cinematic with nautiloid and stopped playing after finishing Act 1 while missing out on half of the content. Fact that only 60% of players have achievement to dig out 5 chests proves my point in a way, since it felt like i got at least 50+ of them in my playthrough, and i haven't even cleared all of the locations.

I thought I could finish an act or two during my winter holidays but no, didn't even finish Act 1. I think I am quite near though. I knew this was a long game but I didn't expect it to be this long. Loving the world so I don't mind. No offence meant to my fellow Druid brethren, but I enjoyed the Underdark arc more than the Wilderness arc.

I ought to be less stingy with using spell slots and not feel a little guilty after using them (or spell scrolls.) I wish I could recast spells - or move moonbeams and the like - while in Wild Shape, but I suppose if the spells have verbal components, then it make sense that I can only concentrate on them as a non-human-language-speaking creature, and I'm unable to do anything else with them. I wish I could still hear my own thoughts though. Sometimes I pass background checks as a dire raven or something but then because the creature doesn't speak, I don't really get any information from passing the check.

Apparently, I didn't review this after finishing my first playthrough. I don't quite recall why, but I suspect it would have something to do with having so much to say about it that I was promptly overwhelmed with no idea where to start.

I'm going to have to take the easy way out and do most of this in bullet points, because there's genuinely such a broad ocean of Stuff here that it's impossible to address everything. I'm halfway through my second playthrough, a half-elf fighter Dark Urge, but my first completed playthrough was a tiefling bard.

Positives:

• The companions are well-developed, interesting, and likeable. I don't particularly dislike any of them; I wasn't sure what to think of Lae'zel at first, considering she pounced on my gay as hell tiefling man declaring she knew he wanted to taste her, which was more than a little off-putting for both of us, but I warmed up to her by the end. I'm probably most fond of Gale, Shadowheart, and Astarion (that first run's romance choice was Gale), but I suspect my feelings will vary the more I play and the more I focus on different companions. The voice acting is broadly praised, and for good reason. I don't think I ever came across a character who was voiced badly or in a way that took me out of the experience. Astarion's is without a doubt the one most often brought up for this point, but I also really enjoyed Gale's.
• The roleplay aspect was certainly satisfying to me. I don't recall a moment where I wished I could do something and wasn't given the option to, minus some obvious ones like wishing I could save someone who dies no matter what which I understand not being allowed to do, and the replayability is high enough that before I'd even finished my first playthrough I'd already come up with 20+ character ideas I want to try out sometime.
• It's definitely made me more interested in D&D as a whole, as well as other CRPGs like this. I'd tried a D&D oneshot in the past, as well as a brief foray into Divinity Original Sin 2, but neither of them quite clicked with me at the time just because I was a little lost and had no clue what I was doing. Playing BG3 helped familiarise me with the rules and controls, so I now feel much more open to jump back into those.
• I love that the companions are all romanceable regardless of your character's gender, etc. I know some dislike that, but it makes sense considering bi/pansexuality is canonically the norm in the Forgotten Realms lore, and I personally much prefer being able to romance whomever makes the most sense with my character rather than having options that would have fit them most being locked away.
• The graphics are gorgeous; not the best I've seen in any game, in my personal opinion, but definitely great.
• The music. I'd wager most players have gotten "Down, down, down by the river..." stuck in their heads before, and I loved Raphael's boss theme enough that I stopped fighting and just sat to listen to it all the way through first.

Neutral/Mixed:

• The character creation. Some of it is brilliant; the amount of hair options is a first for games I've played, particularly compared to the norm with Bioware games where you get four variations of 'shaved head' and absolutely nothing longer than shoulder-length, and it gives you a decent amount of class, background, and race options to choose from. I do wish it had included some of the more out-there races, like satyrs, firbolgs, aasimar, genasi, etc., but the most common ones are all here. The ability to mix-and-match voice types, genders, and body types is welcome, as is the ability to choose your character's genitalia independent of those. However, after hearing everyone praise the character creation, booting it up to discover you can't even alter your character's face and can only select from a very scant handful of preset faces in 2023 was surprising, and not in a good way. Thank goodness I'm playing on PC with mods, because I didn't particularly like any of them.
• The combat was surprisingly fun for me, but it does take too long sometimes, particularly when you're facing off against a dozen or more enemies at once and have to wait for it to sloooowly cycle through all of their turns when most of those turns are just them moving somewhere else. This isn't helped by a bug I ran into fairly often where it'll just idle there on an enemy's turn for a minute or so until they finally move.
• It is a very long game, for sure. I wouldn't change this aspect, but it does mean I've yet to complete a full playthrough in one burst. With my first one, I reached Act 3 and then took a six month break before finishing because I was so burnt out, and my second playthrough I've done the same upon hitting Act 2.
• I'm never quite sure what my stance is on silent protagonists. It's a little immersion-breaking when everyone I speak to is voiced and my character isn't, but at the same time I enjoy the swathe of dialogue options you get vs. a more limited dialogue wheel like in Dragon Age: Inquisition or Fallout 4.

Negatives:

• When I first played, Act 3 was borderline unplayable. It was absolutely riddled with glitches and lag, to the point where it would take me a few seconds just to take a single step, let alone get anywhere. This was no fault of my PC, which can run absolutely every other high-requirement game I've ever tried no problem. I would have to exit the game and restart it to experience twenty minutes or so of no lag until it hit the point it started again. Hopefully this has been fixed since that first run; I guess I'll find out when I reach Act 3 again.
• It is frustrating that cutscenes will trigger and occasionally just throw whichever character was closest into the dialogue rather than your character. The amount of times I've missed out on opportunities because the game decided to have Shadowheart be in the cutscene rather than my tiefling, when my tiefling was the one with stats high enough to achieve what I needed to, was pretty exasperating. This is exacerbated when you're in multiplayer; I attempted to juggle two custom characters by myself for my Durge, adding his sister since she's important to his backstory but only controlling him, and I eventually had to give up and leave her in camp because camp cutscenes would constantly default to her rather than him.
• Pathfinding and AI can be unreliable. You'll likely find yourself going back and forth a lot trying to wrangle your companions into jumping over a gap, with them all jumping back over as soon as you switch to the next person.
• The load times... they're so long...
• Things can be a little confusing and unclear in the sense of the order of quests you're supposed to do or how many long rests you can safely take before certain things are locked off permanently. For the most part, you can tackle quests in any order you like, but once you hit Act 3 doing some quests too early and others too late will remove content or get characters killed, and in Act 1 too many long rests before completing questlines will result in you failing them. The latter is exacerbated by the fact that in later Acts you're encouraged to take a lot of long rests, so mixed messages.
• The dice rolls can interfere with roleplay, e.g. if you have a character who would be able to charm their way out of anything but is instead constantly forced by the game to make a fool out of themselves by rolling low on charisma checks.
• I wish there was more variety in the items you can find in barrels, bags, on corpses, etc. It's pretty much just endless rotten food or miscellaneous dishes and cutlery, which you can't use or even sell for gold, and it's eventually just not worth it to keep checking everything.

Struggled in the area with the noxious fumes and explosive flower traps. Turns out the key for me was splitting the party and controlling them individually so I don't have wandering characters who casually just walk into traps (which they've already perceived) before I disarm them.

We're leaving charisma guy back in camp from now on because we're not really using his charisma.

I did it, might as well explain how I got there:

On how to fix your modded game save file: no, you can't. Patch 7 has essentially modified how some of the more important mods work (ImprovUI, for example) and their upgrades will be parsed as a whole new mod by the game. The only recourse you have is to downgrade your game to Patch 6.

How to downgrade: there's two ways it might work for you

• Right click on Baldur's Gate 3 on your Steam library > Properties... > Betas and select the only option. Note that this is a Patch 7 Lite and not the original Patch 6, so if you have mods that already were throwing temper tantrums on Patch 7, you're kinda SOL.

• Download the old depot files of Patch 6. You can check here and here on how to do it.

If you don't want to do any of that and you prefer to do a fresh save game, keep Baldur's Gate 3 at Patch 7 and:

• delete everything in the "Mods" folder. Use BG3MM to find the folder but it usually is in your install folder > Data > Mods.
• If you previously had Native Mod Loader installed , delete the folder generated by it called NativeMods and, to be double sure you got it all, delete bink2w64.dll and bink2w64_original.dll from the Bin folder.
• If you also had Norbyte's BG3 Script Extender, delete the DWrite.dll in the Bin folder.
• Right click on Baldur's Gate 3 from your SteamLibrary > Properties > Installed Files > Verify integrity of the game files to start with a blank slate and 100% sure the game will work.

After you've done all of this, decide whether you want to uniquely use BG3MM (the best choice, found here) or only use Larian's Mod.io loader. This is important because not all (effectively, a large part) of mods are going to be on Mod.io due to limitations set by Larian in order to make the platform usable for console players as well. Stick to just one mod loader because Larian's in built mod checker will deactivate all your mods and force you to enable them one by one if you change something in their composition or add a new one, so if you change mods or anything of the likes, always check the Mod tab inside Baldur's Gate 3 proper.

Finally getting the hang of the controls and gameplay, and that's making me want to play more.

I learned from Frieren that it's alright to have two mages in your adventuring party but you need a frontliner. However, for this particular adventure, I need a charismatic guy and a dexterous guy so to have those two, I need to choose between having a healer and a frontliner. I suppose my Moon Druid could in a way perform either of those roles so it could still work out. Or maybe a warlock could be a frontliner. Part of the experience of adventuring with a party is making do with however it's composed anyway, and unconventional setups, if they work, could be fun.

Maybe I could keep switching party members although it's a little taxing to stay on top of all these class and subclass features. Maybe I could do without a cleric since I haven't fully figured out how to go about them. Maybe I just do whatever keeps me alive.

I'm about 20 hours into BG3 but I feel like I've only scratched the surface. Astarion is one of the most recognizable faces of the cast of characters, and yet, I only just now stumbled upon him. I was wondering! I was thinking, "When the hell am I gonna find that white-haired guy that is so prominently featured on the cover art?" Turns out I was supposed to run into him almost immediately, but I didn't until I reached the Underdark and then exited to go back and clear the rest of the fog spots on the starting area map.

I have no idea how the rest of the game is going to turn out; I don't know if this will end up entering my personal pantheon of all-time greats or if I'm going to completely lost interest and never finish it, but with what I've experienced so far, it's very clear to me that no matter what, Baldur's Gate 3 is one of the highest quality video games ever crafted. As a product, it feels like it has no equal; unmatched in terms of what is on offer and how deftly it has been realized.

I started this game damn near immediately after finishing Dragon Age: The Veilguard.

Damn, dude. I get what all the fuss about. I don't know if I've ever played a game that is this packed with detail, in just about every way a game can have detail. Everything from environments to the UI to the facial animations to the way your companions stand when speaking with NPCs, it's wildly impressive.

Right off the bat, the voice acting is second to none. I praised DAV's voice acting and stand by that, but this is just ridiculous in terms of how good it is. Every motherfuckin word is spoken so deliciously, every line delivered so authentically, haven't heard a single weak performance yet (10 hours in at time of writing).

Something else I noticed that I like is that you don't need to know anything to be engaged by the story. I have never played Baldur's Gate games and know nothing, but I'm following what I need to, and the way the story and lore are delivered is perfect. Nothing too dense, but also not so light that you feel like something larger is absent.

Likewise, the gameplay and mechanics are simple and accessible. There's nothing too overwhelming here.

The characters are exceptionally written. I don't mean that they're nice and fun and feel like fast friends; these companions feel like real individuals with their own interests and agendas. Some are courteous, some are standoffish, and some are downright hostile, and it couldn't be more interesting and engaging.

Choices matter, and boy, there are a lot of choices. Yet I don't feel paralyzed by them. I don't dread getting something wrong because the story goes on and things continue, which is not to say your choices don't matter - they do, and you will feel it when an interaction doesn't turn out the way you were aiming for - but it's not the kind of thing that you can't live with. And if you can't, you can always load from your most recent quicksave.

Damn, guys. Baldur's Gate 3 is the real deal. I see what the fuss was about. What a charming world and game. Very impressed and happy I dove into it.

Right from the beginning, I could tell this was going to be a wonderful game (caveats to come) and a game I’ve been waiting almost a lifetime to finally come. As a longtime D&D player, seeing my favorite game brought so expertly and beautifully to the interactive video game world was a lifelong dream. The graphics, the story, the mechanics, and the setting all came together in a way I hoped to see as far back as 1988. Larian did a great job putting this all together. Which I was very worried about as I really disliked D:OS 1&2. I did not like the way they created an open world that constantly punished you for exploring. I disliked the way they made it so that leveling properly was a must to advance but also made it so many quests had to be completed in the ‘correct’ way to earn sufficient experience. And in both cases, I just didn’t care about the stories enough to push through the frustrations. To be fully transparent, what really made me quit D:OS2 was that my save wouldn’t load and that was the final straw for me.

BG3 took many of the best parts of both games and improved on them. Maybe it was as simple as I actually cared about the story and the mechanics here but I found the game challenging yet enjoyable. The dice-rolling mechanic was a nice feature. The enemies hit most of the D&D classics. A real beholder rather than a spectator would have been nice (although as a main boss fight itself rather than part of a much larger battle).

My party consisted mostly of Shadowheart, Karlach, and Gale. Laezel annoyed me and Wyll was, unfortunately, neither as good a magic-user as Gale or as good a warrior as Karlach. I romanced Laezel, almost entirely by accident early on because she got on my nerves and I didn’t really care to explore that, and then later Gale but I ruined that relationship by sleeping with a devil. I never got the infamous bear scene. All in good fun!!

I did say I had some caveats. Despite how much I enjoyed this game overall, I wouldn’t rank it among my all-time favorites. In general, I felt like the difficulty in combats and quests was well-balanced. There was a lot of content and I even took both routes out of Act 1 just so I could see more of the game. But Act 3 included a couple of battles that were difficult enough that I was forced to forgo story in favor of metagaming for victory. I know many others have won those battles without finding ways to take down the boss before even starting the fight. I don’t know what I did differently but I couldn’t do it. I did manage to defeat the final boss with one character still alive but it was quite the slog. In general, the focus on refighting and strategizing these difficult fights pulled me out of the story a bit.

It played fairly well on my Steam Deck but I preferred my PC. The Deck could manage the graphics but generally only by having some blurry bits.

Started the day the PS5 version was released and finished Dec 30.

In tears 😭 I love this game so much, it has engrained itself as one of my all-time, if not my top, favorite game I've played to date.

Played a half elf/drow durge, her name is Winwalyn. Defeated the Urge and had her Shadowheart I'm different now moment by letting her short hair grow, got greyer hair, and after slightly from the ordeal. Even gained a scar from her fight with Orin.

(Romanced Astarion, kept that man a softie 🥺❤️)

My time with this game was frankly overwhelmingly positive. To play a game like Dragon Age: Origins but somehow even deeper in 2023 was incredibly rewarding, and the story, characters and world were wwell worth the over 100h journey it took to finish it (and that's not even counting the half finished playthroughs before I decided to roll with the Dark Urge).

Unfortunately, my experience was soured somewhat by numerous immersion breaking bugs, sequence breaks, and general annoyances, all of which are hopefully resolved soon in patches and perhaps even expansions. From companions commenting on events from 50h ago randomly, to characters spoiling the game due what I can only imagine as a infinte web of possibilities and branches (looking at you Mizora), or romances not progressing for no fucking reason leaving me confused and warping to previous saves to find a solution. I think you're beginning to see how some of these completely can take you completely out of this incredible experiences.

Over time however, i'm expecting this game to get better and better, and, hopefully, when I decide to revisit the forgotten realms, I can bump this game to its proper 5 out of 5 rating :)

Don't underestimate how overpowered "Shove" is as a skill.

This game has droves of bugs and performance hiccups the further you push into it. But all of these bugs and performance issues can be fixed with patches and already Larian has demonstrated they are committed to improving their game. What makes all these bugs/performance issues stand out all the more is how great the first act of the game is. It's polished, big and engaging with very few performance or graphical issues. This is likely primarily due to how the first act was in Early Access for 3 years or so and was heavily play tested. That refinement shows, but unfortunately makes the issues that start to creep in during Act 2 and even more so in Act 3 all the more apparent. I never encountered a game ending bug nor did I have a crash but in Act 3 there were some quests that bugged out and wouldn't complete or conversation choices that didn't appear for me to select.

So I have a lot more detail about the issues listed above, but I'll first dive into what was great about my experience and why I am still willing to rate this game high.

BG3 feels more like a sequel to their Divinity games than it does to BG1 and 2. To be fair, BG1 and 2 technically had turned based combat, it just played out in real time with the option to pause whenever you like to give commands. Divinity's turned based combat is actually closer to a DND session than the original BG1 and 2 are. Furthermore, with the changes in DnD 5th edition to effectively turn DnD into an MMO and a modern tactical action game, the Larian style fits more like a glove than ever before. They clearly built a new engine from the Divinity games and BG3 is a significantly more complicated game as a result. The sheer amount of actions you can take are a combination of an old school point and click adventure with an immersive sim and it's impressive they were able to pull it off. There are few invisible walls, and often times if you can fly or have the right athletics check there are a plethora of ways to get to the same objective. And that's excluding seducing or charming your way.

The sheer amount of character customization will be staggering for most players. Not only are there 12 playable classes, but each has 3 subclasses and you can multiclass however you want which creates effectively endless customization for your character. I ended up multiclassing my entire party which resulted in a power house group with a ton of utility. This did make the game significantly easier later into the game but it felt rewarding nonetheless. This level of complexity would normally turn me off, particularly if you refer to my Diablo 4 review, but this worked for me because I already play 5th edition so I came into this prepared.

That said, I think you need zero DnD experience to still enjoy this game. The difficulty is adjustable and overall forgiving so you don't need to play optimally to succeed. I'd recommend just pick characters and classes you think are cool and just vibe. There's also no grinding or filler in this game unlike Diablo 4 which is composed of ALL filler. You don't need to endless repeat the same dungeon over and over again for an item with 0.001% drop rate that finally makes your build viable! Instead, I spent over 100 hours experiencing new content the entire time and it was mostly well written and very engaging. Diablo 4 was designed to coerce you into playing it for 100+ hours. BG 3 felt like 3 games in one, with each helping push a greater narrative to a natural conclusion that is influenced by player choices. There were plenty of times I felt overwhelmed, particularly with how large and dense Baldur's Gate (the city but the game as a whole too) is when you first enter it in act 3. But I never found myself bored.

The impact of player choice is still limited but the writing makes it feel impactful which is an important distinction. What I mean by this is the master plot will largely play out the same way no matter how you progress through the different acts (help or slaughter the druid grove, you still need to progress to Moonrise tower though you may be presented as an ally rather than an enemy). But if you decide to engage in role playing, your actions will feel more profound which is an indication of how good the writing is overall. It has twists and turns with a satisfying conclusion.

The roster of characters is significantly smaller than the original BG game but honestly I think that's a good thing. Each character has complexity, conflict and a clear arc where they are a completely different person from the start and end of the game. Shadowheart blindly follows her order while ignoring it's exploitation and abuses but is able to dispel her own delusions. Lae'Zel is an austere zealot with a singular mission that eventually needs to confront and question her own faith. Wyll sold his soul to a devil to save thousands of lives. Karlach was betrayed by someone she trusted dearly and now is slowly dying as a result but wants mortality over eternal damnation. Ect. In contrast, the original BG 1 and 2 had memorable characters but they had few and fleeting character moments outside of a few narrow questlines. To be fair those games were made in the 90s so they were contending with smaller development teams and limited hardware. But I'll take a small well fleshed out group of characters any day over a bloated roster of characters that are all ultimately skin deep. You can also fuck any party member you want. That isn't a big pull for me, and the way romance is handled is pretty hollow but hey you can do it. I fucked a Mindflayer. No shame.

The biggest Issue I had with the game (most of the technical issues I encountered were immersion breaking but didn't bother me enough to quit the game) was the player character reactions during dialogue. The voice acting in the game is strong. You have JK Simmons as Ketheric for God sake. In contrast to the great motion capture and delivery for the hundreds of characters you encounter... there's YOU. Your reactions rarely line up to the emotional stakes of the moment. You could have this heartfelt tragic moment with a character then your character responds by pursing their lips and giving the derpiest half smile you have ever seen... so many times the vapid stare of the player character would completely ruin a given scene. Sometimes it was funny, but it's a damn shame they didn't put more effort into creating believable reactions from your character. I get that this was sort of a compromise for letting you customize your character fully... but I find it hard to believe they couldn't motion capture someone and apply it to your character model... o well.

I don't think the writing was flawless. Act 2 had the most issues with writing IMO (note that these are mostly quibbles and didn't ruin my enjoyment of the story). For example, Ketheric calls his order a "cult." No cult leader in their right mind would EVER call their cult a cult. It undermines their goals and ideologies. Orin does the same thing (referring to her order of Bhaal as a cult) and honestly I felt Gortash and Orin were very weak as antagonists. Ketheric was great and so was The Emperor because they felt like real characters that had arcs and became evil through tragedies. Ketheric basically sold his soul to bring back his daughter. In contrast, Gortash and Orin are just evil for the sake of evil... they want power and that's the end of their goals and aspirations.. Another issues with the writing is with Isobel. She runs away from Ketheric (father) after being revived and hides less than a mile away in the only town left and nearby. Pretty moronic.

The second most disappointing thing was the lack of animation with Boo. You recruit Minsc late into Act 3 and he is completely optional... still it's uncanny seeing Minsc talk to Boo but there's nothing there... I even tried reloading but they clearly haven't animated Boo yet which is disappointing given how contrived it is for Minsc (as a human) to be alive in BG3 and how much of a fan favorite he is. I also really wanted to use "talk to animal" to speak with Boo... but again I couldn't find a way to do it... very disappointing. Also Minsc's animations are poor and often incomplete. His forearms move separate from his biceps which results in some uncanny imagery and bending of the flesh. It also clips into the biceps. His dialogue tree also appears to be broken/incomplete.

I think what's most interesting about video game development is its humble beginnings. Back in the late 80s and 90s you could develop an entire video game in a few months with a small team of 5 people. Graphics were limited by hardware and it was a new medium with no defined rules so everyone was just fucking around to see what sticks and often just try to make a game that they wanted to play. The end result was drastic innovation and that's probably why people like to look back to a simpler time and comment on how games used to be better. In some sense, they are correct. Go figure, competition breeds innovation which is what big corporations destroying Anti-Trust laws through lobbying don't want you to realize. They cynically try to argue the opposite which is patently false. It's also why there's been drama around BG3. Companies don't like competition because it means there's a higher risk to not make money and they may need to invest more effort into a given product. The larger a corporation grows, the larger the number of corners they will cut for profit margins. Lack of competition breeds homogenization because when a select few control a market they get to define everything. They define what's a product and how much a product costs. If you don't like it, you have no where else to go. The point of this rambling is "Yes" video games are expensive and complicated to make now. Especially when contrasted to what was needed decades ago. A team of 5-10 people was no different than a full team at Nintendo working on Zelda. Thus the line between AAA and independent didn't really exist. Despite being 3 years in Early Access (BG3), Acts 2 and 3 still had droves of technical issues due to how complex and dense the game was to develop. I'm willing to overlook this games flaws because of the scope of the games ambition and the willingness and good nature Larian has shown to the fans (they've already released 2 patches). It's refreshing to have a company that wants you to have fun. Not a company that is trying to mine you for every dime you have for profit. Go figure. Make a great game and they will come... before micro transactions were a thing, making a great game was your only option to retain and gain consumers. But due to homogenization and conglomerations of video game devs (looking at you Activision...) to corner the market, it only takes a handful of greedy execs to define the rules and only one wealthy developer to defy them. Still, the retrogaming niche has been picking up steam as an alternative to the AAA market. You have Boomer Shooters. You have retro style pixel art action games and RPGs. All of these demonstrate that style is often more important to artistic enjoyment than over produced expensive bullshit... rant over.

In conclusion, BG3 was awesome. It has tons of flaws and plenty of room for technical improvements, but I would wager in a few years Larian can iron them all out. The game is still playable and is so large you are effectively paying for three separate games. Each act has it's own narrative with a satisfying conclusion that are all linked by a master narrative. I spent over a hundred hours completing the game, and there was still plenty of content I didn't experience. I think it will be fun to revisit this game in a few years after numerous patches have been released. I played this solo, so next time I will try some local couch co-op.

Here's a list of various bugs I encountered (this isn't comprehensive): Spider Lyre when entering act 2. Having Shadowheart as bard, she strummed an invisible lyre. When trying to long rest, if you don't have enough supplies in your inventory (but you do in your camp stash) it will say you can't long rest. But if you grab one item from the stash (when in camp) it will let you long rest. Also, the algorithm for using resources to long rest is pretty bad. Almost always it will go over what is needed and I needed to make small changes to not waste anything. Sometimes when quitting, I have to select quit again (it fails). Leap of faith trial in Justicars temple seemed bugged. I never was able to see the path before, though Shadowheart mentioned "I need to remember the path." Ended up being an annoying reload and save trial and error. Pathing is pretty bad at times. Example, using elevator in temple of Shar resulted in none of my allies getting on it. I rode the elevator back down only to crush and kill Korlach because she stupidly waited under the Elevator... Doors in Moonrise tower don't have an animation. I notice a lack of animation for doors throughout Act 3. I wasn't able to complete the "Avenge the Drowned" quest. I went to the dock and there was nothing down there. This might be due to me failing the "Iron Throne Quest" when I destroyed the Steel Watch Refinery. A bit disappointing. Not sure if it's possible to complete this quest under my scenario. Finally: Dame was disarmed in last fight and couldn't pick up her sword again. Only throw it which was annoying. A mind flayer's body in the last cinematic was awkwardly laying limp mid air and clipping into models.

I'm thorn: I loved the old games and, more recently, I found myself loving Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.... so I went back on this game.

I've owned BG3 ever since it came out in 2020 and the initial start was a mess and a failed endeavor: the game looked really nice and it performed okay for about 15 minutes or so before eventually bugging out. One time it was because something else was happening on the screen while I was trying to talk to a merchant, thus locking me in a forever dialogue with him. Another time it was my class feat suddenly not working.

Multiplayer was a mess in and of its own: the party would desynch without any warning and they'd lock the rest of it all in an endless fight, waiting for a turn that on their friend's screen was not even happening yet; it was asy to get stuck as it took only one of your teammates to talk with an NPC while you were talking to another to glitch into a sort of ethereal state where you could only be talking.

Save files were corrupted more often than not and going through an entire run to their "ambitious 1st Act" was near impossible if they released an hotfix that demanded you to restart the game.

All in all, a 0/10 experience. Characters felt flat, thrown at you in the most uninteresting way and without them feeling organic at all - they're eye candy at best and party fodder at worst: none of them are quirky enough to stand on their own and, worst of all, none of them happen to be of any substance where it felt remotely satisfactory to trigger banter between them.

Fast forward to 2023...

We've had many promises:

• More classes! ✔️ We have gotten Cleric, Ranger, Druid, Sorcerer, Barbarian, Bard and Paladin. Very slowly but we got there.
• More races! ✔️ We have gotten Drows, Tiefling and Gnomes.
• Level cap! ❌ Still capped at 4th level in 2022 and with a measly promise of maybe getting somewhere around 12 to 14 but less than a cap at 20. Depressing but it's the average for a player campaign, I suppose.
• AC cap! ✔️ Finally go over the 16 base AC with the best armor in the game. Took 2 years but we got there.

The game is still in EA but if you speak with the most loyal to Larian, they will tell you it's fine because it's the standard for Larian - pay $60 for an EA release that's barely playable and then wait up to 3 years for a full release. Not only Act 1 was teased to no end but they had added "another portion" to it and that's where it was. You can only play Act 1 but if you hear everyone that's fine because they had people come to their studios to play the rest. I guess what bothers me is the $60 price tag to be told we're the first swindlers that have to play a broken game until it's okay for the "lucky ones" to come in and test what's above Act 1 or higher than lvl3 Spells. For some reason and for the longest time, Larian did not want to add your stat modifiers to rolls either.

All in all, I've been finding a better experience with PoE (Pillars of Eternity) and Pathfinder: Kingsmaker/Wrath of the Righteous than the one I had with BG3.

I'll update it if we ever get tat sweet final August 2023 release.