Baldur's Gate 3

This is Divinity: Original Sin 3 NOT BG! I mean the graphics and game mechanics are good but as one that played the original game in my youth, this is a major disappointment. no atmosphere as was in BG, the plot is medium. if they named it something else I would probably give 4 stars. Its obvious they used BG just to draw veteran players of the original game. Left after 20 hours of gameplay :(

First, avoid playing it in co-op, it might seem like fun at first, but the game handles it poorly. Everything really falls apart when you control only one character. It's a Larian game with all the Larian things in it. Early access was long, animals spoil puzzles, ice steals turns, gas can be stopped by chairs. Thanks to that, the first act is excelent. You are walking into a multiple faceted conflict with your own agenda and you are given what feels like frankly overwhelming freedom in handling it. Things unfortunately do not last as you keep going. The game seeks to wow you with the scope and visuals of what keeps happening, but everything starts unfolding in very predictible ways. Your freedom is replaced with ability to nod approvingly, give out snarky comment or be mad about what's happening, and the game hardly acknowledges even that. After exploring vast theme park that is act one, you end up on a huge rollercoaster that is the rest of the game and you better strap in, it's a long, long way down. Just like the story, gameplay keeps rolling downhill as time goes on. The game has precious few fights that pit you against one or two powerful opponents and the rest is just tossing bodies at you, trying very hard to shake your focus as time between your turn grows to the point that you could could easily play another game between your turns. This is also why I strongly recommend avoiding co-op, there is no easier way to burn out than going down in combat once and never doing anything again. Tactician owes it's name to the fact that despite your enemies getting a hefty stat boost, extra inteligence does not help them handle you dashing away from the spot fight boke out in. You will witness trully bizarre things as the AI struggles to follow you and 16 enviormental hazards that were meant to kill you are no longer a factor. It's a decent game, but try to sometimes check if you are still having fun and dont push yourself to finish it, it does not get better.

I am easy to please. Give me a world with characters and stories and interesting plots with fun mechanics and I am good to go. Turn based or real time I like them both when implemented well. I put 30 hours into this game... I took a break for a week, thought about why I didn't like it. I picked it up again, I put it down shortly after. I walked away. I won't go back. This game is not fun. It is so close to DOS and so far from what the title Baldur's Gate represents. Honestly it is just an incredible let down. I think that what had happeneded was.... Larian purchased a title name with a sterling reputation and a high expectation from a solid fan base and turned it into DOS 3. Lets be real, this really is a DOS 3 sammich with nonsensical low quality romance content shoved into 2 pieces of Larian bread (DOS mechanics and DOS story telling) with a smattering of Forgotten Realms mayo on it. Sure its early access and some of the players are upset but we should all realize this is the new business model of game development. Why pay for testers when you can charge the player to test for you? It does make sense to some degree. What does not make sense is that this game is just so bad. Controls are clunky. Storytelling is poor as is the writing quality. The romance, which will be shoved down you throat because it is a key facet of each party member, is farcical at best. It's just really poorly done and aimed at a player who has the time and patience to learn multiple systems yet the maturity level of a 9 year old...... Who exactly was the target audience they were aiming for with this? You start on a beach...... I mean wtf. I own both DOS games and they have there merits but jeebus lawd almighty why did you not just name this DOS3? Eventually, hopefully, another game studio will buy the rights to the name BG and create something memorable for positives reasons.

Graphics are good, music is ok, voice acting is good, but everything else about it is just so infuratingly annoying to the point I kept turning off the game in frustration after 10 minutes of playing. I actually like Larian's other games so I didn't refund because I hope they can still make something good out of this, even if it won't be a BG game. First of all the exploration: most of your time is spent pixel hunting containers because there's literally hundreds of them on every screen, but the highlight function arbitratily shows only one or two. Then 95% of them are empty, 4% contain random trash and 1% contains important items, so you need to check all of them while your character awkwardly stumbles around and climbs over boxes to be able to reach anything. Accidentally reloaded when I forgot to save after looting a basement, just lost 25 minutes of "progress". Next the dice rolls. None of the failures lead to anything interesting. You either miss out on some lore/info in the best case, maybe get forced into an unsatisfying conclusion, but usually it just dumps you into a battle unprepared with the worst positioning imaginable while the entire zone turns hostile. Reload. But the worst part by far is the combat. Since you can only perform one action per turn, and none of these actions have any significant impact on the overall battle (only getting a good roll matters), there are zero tactical decisions to make. Every single turn is just move (or rather, jump because everyone gets jump with disengage built in as a bonus action), attack once. Fighting 6 small enemies? Well, now you're waiting two minutes while they each move and perform their single basic attack one by one. If you're lucky they miss most of them, if you're not your character is now down. In several battles the environment can be used in some way (usually this just instantly murders half the enemies), probably because Larian also realized you just want to skip through the combat asap.

Larian bought the rights to BG 3, so they could piggyback their vision of DOS: 3 into a deeper market. I bought the game on STEAM, and refunded it after 90 minutes. (STEAM gives you 2 hrs max) I did not necesaarily dislike the game, but I DID dislike, that it is not BG so much as DOS, set in a Forgptten realms world, sort of. Had they titled it what it is, DOS: 3, I would not have bought it in the 1st place, as I do not find the Div Orig Sin series to be that good. IF you really like DOS and DOS 2, then yu will most likey love this game. If you loved BG/BG II and sort of like DOS 3, you MIGHT like this game. If you didn't care for DOS/DOS 2; you will most likely not care fot his either.