Baldur's Gate 3

Love it!

Amazing gameplay (if you don't care about balance too much), fun exploration, *excellent* encounter design. This alone makes BG3 worth playing. Sadly, the overall experience is dragged down by simply unfinished Act 3 and sometimes truly awful writing. Main plot storylines are mangled into a horrible mess by late rewrites. Larian did everything to fight, maim, warp and undermine the main gimmick of the plot (illithid tadpole). It's fascinating to watch. And headache inducing. I'm giving it 3 stars, it will probably rise to 4 stars with the Finished Edition.

just play it

Best game I've ever played since 1995. Fully voiced with great voice actors (not AI) and a well designed world.

Played and beat the game. Ambitious and with a big budget to back it up, but is clunky, janky, buggy, and full of oddball developer decisions. Put simply, Larian is largely concerned with populating a map with items and characters and has little concern for how players actually move through that map or interact with the game. The game is full of junk items and junk NPCs. The city in Act 3 has 100 unique NPCS that are voiced, which all have their unique way of telling you to "bug off, I'm busy." UI is often a disaster, especially when it concerns item and party management. Sequence breaking is easy to do. For example, killing a character before you get a quest to do so means you find the quest giver later, cannot explain that you already killed the target, and then have to trek back to the corpse to retrieve the corpse-head that wasn't there before so you can properly complete the quest. Certain elements of game logic are inconsistent. For example, resting (sleeping overnight) seems to have no effect on quest or story progress except for a couple of instances where suddenly it does matter. If you approach a quest in an unintended manner then you may find entire areas are fully empty of characters or things to do with little to no indication of what you did wrong. Character movement is slow, making exploring tedious if you need to backtrack. This is made worse by the fact that your companions will often get stuck so you have to manually move them over hurdles. Combat is often slow and tedious. This is made worse by Larian's uninspired encounter designs. Instead of unique or powerful enemies with boss mechanics, Larian will throw dozens of trash enemies at you. Then you have to watch 15 boring enemies painstakingly take their turn before you can wipe the floor with them. There's so much more to say. Story and companions have promise but flop languidly from a lack of direction, which unfortantely also describes the game at large.