Baldur's Gate 3

I played 60 hours in the first week and loved every minute of it. The world is beautiful, the character models are stunning. The story doesn't have the DOS jokey vibe. It's dark and adult oriented. The combat is refreshing. I know it's EA but i can't wait to get more content. People are complaining of crashes but in 60 hours i might have crashed 4-5 times. So really depends on your setup. I streamed about 55 hours of this. I don't think i have seen a better Early Access game. Not sure why people are complaining. The game will likely release in 2022. Best bang for your buck in 2020-2021-2022.

This game has set a new gold standard in RPGs. Ignore all the negative reviews from early access (esp.2020 and 2021). This game is already changing the industry for the better. It's excellent in all facets.

Beautiful and deep game with actually good voice acting and decisions which matter.

I liked this game a lot. Played through it twice - once as the 'good' guy, once as the 'bad'. Tried it a 3rd time before I got bored and quit. Almost everything here is great: Graphics, sound, interface, gameplay, story. The experience is quite linear, though, so there's no much pulling you back once you've finished. As far as being a BG game... well, it is in the sense that it's D&D, and there's a lot of depth in your party. That's forced on you, because you get to make at most one character and the rest of your party is pre-gen NPCs. Which is a blessing and a curse, because if you like their quirky personalities it's great, and if you can't bloody stand them, well, sucks to be you I guess. Personal preference, but I'd rather be able to make my whole party rather than have NPCs forced on me. The game is capped at level 12, which you'll probably hit when you're only about 2/3 of the way through the game. That's a downer, because a lot of the incentive to explore side quests and just generally do stuff evaporates when there's no more XP reward to be had. My chief complaint is that the game feels very constrained. This is Forgotten Realms, a planet-spanning campaign of sprawling lore. Yet BG3 takes place entirely on a stretch of road leading to Baldur's Gate and a small section of that city. It makes an epic game feel incredibly small. I'd rather they included an overland map and allowed you to explore a larger number of smaller area maps, as opposed to cramming everything into just a handful of large area maps. Sometimes the tiny game area impacts the story's believability, such as when goblins can't find the druid hideout, which is actually just a couple of minutes walk away. But, overall I think this game is worth playing. I'm hoping it spawns some other 5e D&D games that leverage the engine without being sequels, like BG did with Icewind Dale. My current fantasy is that they remake the Pool of Radiance series using the BG3 engine. That would be really cool.

This has got to be the game of the decade for me already (2020s), it's simply breathtakingingly engaging and fun. I've yet to finish the campaign after 87 hours of gameplay on and off since August 2023 with a friend - and I'm actually thinking of doing it again solo after we finish it. I want to play again with other characters, classes and make different choices during the story and while roaming the world. I don't really play a whole lot of games anymore, but this game has got me hooked. There's SO MUCH in this game, of everything! Gorgiously detailed places, engaging quests with many choices to make, fun/funny/scary/lovable characters, great dialogue and character animation (for this much content), items in troves, etc. I feel like I've been playing for several seasons of a tv series, but I still want more. It's epic. I've barely played the original Baldur's Gate games, so I can't really compared BG3 to them - but I've played through Divinity Original Sin 2 once, which was superb. This feels like an even better Divinity game, only bigger, better and truly set in the realm of Dungeons & Dragons, rather than being a bit dnd-like sometimes. Larien Studios are on fire - hellfire, perhaps? Let's hope their flames keep burning for a long time, I want to see them continue making great games. There aren't many studios I know of in this money-grabbing day and age which could produce such a fine gem of a game of this scale and quality.