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.

I’m posting this as a status update because I was a little too verbose for a comment and ran out of characters on the other thread. Ok, let’s do this.

Number of Games Completed:

~56 (sometimes I forget to put games on my completed shelf, especially if I’ve played them in the past, so there’s always a chance this number is higher.

Favourite Game Played This Year:

Will anyone be surprised by this answer? Of course it’s Baldur’s Gate 3. I usually don’t have a GOTY, preferring to leave my favourites unranked, but I was enamoured with this game, without question.

Why is it your favourite?

How many reasons can I cite? It made me feel like a kid again; it made me relive the feelings I had when I first played Chrono Trigger, which was a life changing game for me; it reminded me just how much I used to, and clearly still, love turn based combat; it gave me all the things I love from BioWare games solidifying Larian as a new favourite developer; it is Queer and fabulous; it’s funny; it’s emotionally satisfying with characters your can’t help but love; there are almost endless ways to approach every situation and the sheer number of angles that Larian accounted for is staggering; it’s very satisfying to talk your way out of a fight; it’s very satisfying to absolutely own a fight through careful strategy; completing tactician mode which nearly broke me when I made a very stupid decision based on a silly assumption about the final battle and stubbornly refused to go back to a prior save to better prepare myself and instead won by the skin of my teeth; completing honour mode which went a lot smoother than my tactician run because I wasn’t playing the Durge on an evil run and because I was very, very careful.

Least Favourite Game You Played This Year:

Scars Above.

I changed the category title because “shite” felt very loaded, especially when the previous category was “favourite”. None of the games I played were “shite” even if I didn’t enjoy them.

Why it wasn’t your favourite?

It’s not a terrible game, but it is a lacklustre one with drab and generic Unreal 4 visuals lacking real stylistic direction or punch, disappointing combat mechanics with uninspired approach that relies on colour coded weak points that feel very dated, a difficultly scale that ranges from way too easy to still too easy but tedious due to bullet-sponge enemies, a lack of complexity at higher difficulty levels, poor enemy AI, a lack of enjoyable boss fights with novel fighters mechanics, audio de-sync issues especially during cutscenes, a very generic and predictable story, and achievements so easy to earn that it’s hard not to wonder if the game’s devs were hoping to entice that segment of Achievement hunters that look for guaranteed Platinums. That said, I think the devs show promise and I’m not opposed to checking out their next project.

Most Played Game:

Can you guess? Yup, it’s BG3 again! 450 hours on Steam and over 100 hours on PS5, and four play-throughs with a fifth on the go.

Why did you play it so much?

I couldn’t get enough. I put over 130 hours into my first play-through and I couldn’t wait to devour the game all over again, and again, and again with the game only getting better with each play-through. I discovered something new each time I played and I can’t get over the depth of everything from character builds, to combat strategy to dialogue choices. Sure, some of that can be attributed to DnD 5e but Larian did some truly magical things to capture the feeling of a TTRPG complete with a creative DM, and I was feeling it.

Favourite Soundtrack From a Game You Played:

If I include soundtracks from anything I played in 2023, I have to pick Citizen Sleeper. Both that and In Other Waters have solidified Amos Roddy as one of my new favourite game soundtrack composers.

If I’m picking something released in 2023, I have to pick Goodbye Volcano High which just edges BG3 out for the win (I’m sorry Borislav, I still love your songs!)

Why do you like it?

The Citizen Sleeper soundtrack perfectly captures the emptiness of deep space, the cramped industrial corners, alleys and spires of a space station and the spore-filled ethereal space of the mycelial network. Every note encapsulates the themes and atmosphere of one of my absolute favourite games that I played this year.

Goodbye Volcano High has simply been on constant rotation on my phone and I can’t get enough of Dabu’s compositions with Lachlan Watson and Brigette Naggar on vocals.

Xbox User Gets Banned For Recording Baldur's Gate 3 Companions In The Buff

Xbox owners will probably know that the platform is a little bit strict when it comes to what you can and can't do online, having recently implemented a three-strike system to police its users. Most of you will likely have assumed that your own Media Gallery would be safe from the prying eyes of Xbox though, but apparently that might not be the case.

A few days ago, Baldur's Gate 3 player Daddy-Vegas shared a warning to fellow Xbox users on the game's subreddit not to record game clips of some of its more "intimate" scenes. In the Reddit post, they explain that they made a few game clips of some "naked camp fun time", in which he showed off all the companions in the buff as they wanted to demonstrate the game's "sausage physics" for his brother for a laugh.

Unfortunately, these clips were then uploaded to the Xbox servers by default, something the system does to help users share clipped content more easily. Xbox did not appreciate these clips and seems to have whacked Daddy-Vegas with a year-long suspension, with each clip being considered a separate infraction and testing the platform's three-strike system.

So Xbox users can get banned for content that isn’t publicly shared but that is just automatically uploaded to their own allotted storage, something that automatically happens by default. Nice, real nice 🙄

As the year comes to a close I’m reposting the link to the Top Games of 2023 thread in the forums for those who want to want to post their lists in a place that is easily searchable. I love going back to my lists from previous years and being able to find them easily on the forums is great. I’ll also repost the link to the year in review thread for 2023.

Top Games of 2023

A Year of Games in Review - 2023

Wishing every one a Happy New Year full of fun games!

Fuck it, I've never played a Baldur's Gate nor touched a D&D before, but I made my preorder for the deluxe edition. Put me down as Yet Another Sucker™ that fell for the charms of everyone's favorite rogue-ish vamp twink. Swiggity swooty, I'm coming for you, Astarion.

Huh, wait, what do you mean he's evil? No, no, it's ok, I can fix him, I swear, just let me--

Although I wish Steam provided some of these stats in hours instead of just percentage, they are still interesting. I’m particularly surprised by the fact that my playtime was almost split equally between Steam Deck and PC, especially since I only built my PC in September.

Getting close to the end.

I wish the story had not done the, “OH HO you dumb fucker! I can’t believe you thought you were working against me, really I was anticipating your every move and manipulating you!” thing. That being so predictable stands in contrast to the great panoply of options you have otherwise within the overall bounds of the story. I mean I get why it is, and it doesn’t diminish the overall effect and gravity of the frankly astounding work that this game is; I just wish personally for something different.

Hasbro has been playing Grinch in 2023 and it seems that almost the entire DnD team that greenlit BG3 has been let go as part of the in-house "cleanup".

I also want to thank @Wizards_DnD and specifically the DnD team for giving us carte blanche. I’m really sorry to hear so many of you were let go. It’s a sad thing to realize that of the people who were in the original meeting room, there’s almost nobody left. I hope you all end…

— Swen Vincke @where? (@LarAtLarian) December 14, 2023

Sold my copy of Mario Wonder for $75 cash last night and preordered this one. But man... The pricing really highlights just how badly western gamers are getting screwed.

The western release, exclusively available direct from Larian, costs $153 CDN after tax and shipping.

The Japanese release, which has full English support and demonstrates Larian can, in fact, distribute this through a publisher if they choose to, is $75 CDN on Play Asia.

Literally half the price. Same game. It's possible the JP version doesn't have the full game on the disc, but like... Half the price. In general, Japanese, Asian and to a lesser extent European gamers pay much less for games than North Americans. Physical sales also comprise much high portions of game sales in those territories. I suspect the two things are related.

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.