Baldur's Gate 3

This game isn't BG3. Calling it as such suggests upholding a certain legacy. So far, after several hours, it seems to be exactly as the title suggests, Original Sin 3 in The Forgotten Realms setting with 5e rules. Now, mind you, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Could be great even, as long as you recognize you won't get that sense of nostalgia again. (I'm not talking about a direct continuation of the previous games. Those ended great). I do hope they will add an option for real-time with pause, like the previous versions. Other than that, while the graphics are certainly very nice, they are not groundbreaking in any way. Wait for them to finish the game before you buy it.

Ignoring the numerous bugs and SEVERE balance problems (its early access) the game is worse for trying to be both a D:OS game and a Baldur's Gate sequel. It doesn't work. It comes off as a watered down blend of the two that doesn't do justice to the mechanics of either. I don't see this being fixed as it would most likely require an entire rewrite to do so. As an aside... why does every enemy down to the weakest goblin have a bag full of grenade weapons and near infinite throwing range? Picking even the smallest fight in this game feels like you were attack by a battleship.

It starts out incredibly high fantasy overpowered with giant ships flying around. It STARTS that way. It leaves itself nowhere to go from there. After the intro, nothing feels even remotely important. They put all the party members you can acquire on the front cover of the game. In other words, this game leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination in a genre that is all about leaving something to the imagination. Mystery: zero. Intrigue: zero. Desire to keep playing: zero. I didn't finish what they have there so far. Something went seriously wrong here.

.....keep sitting. This is both my first review here on GoG and the first game I've had refunded. It's not got anything to do with the price (only that now I'll use it for something else) but everything to do with the *feel* of this. Yes it's early access, yes I didn't play it very much but regardless of both this isn't for me, someone who played the originals when they first came out. It could be the AD&D ruleset (which is very dumbed down from what I'm used to), it could be the rather curiously chosen overbright graphics style, it could be exceedingly off putting expostion voice over that happens in cut scenes that describes what you character is thinking/feeling (instead of leaving it up to the player to imagine, like a good RPG), it could be the lazy writing in the first few minutes of Act I whereby all the party members have exactly the same motivation (that of the player themselves) to "venture forth". It could be those things, but nothing, but nothing about it felt "right" about it, and yes, they are big shoes to fill and well, perhaps when the dust settles this will turn out to be one franchise that should not have been prodded back to life, time will tell.

I've played this for almost 40 hours now and I've found myself vacillating between confusion, frustration, boredom, and moments of excitement and amazement. I don't find the story and characters particularly compelling. While choices do affect the story in consequential ways that are pretty cool to see--I restarted the game multiple times to see how well this worked--it can also be very confusing if you don't have certain characters in your party at the right time, as important scripted sequences simply fail to occur. The story is also quite overwhelming at first. Within the first 10 minutes of the game, you encounter aliens, dragons, demons, inter-dimensional portals, elves, castles... it feels like Lord of the Rings crashed into Guardians of the Galaxy. And unlike games like Dragon Age and Pillars of Eternity, which take all kinds of pains to carefully introduce you to their world, here I feel like I was dropped into the 15th movie of a cinematic franchise with no clue about what was happening, or why I was supposed to care. The way this game approaches romance is also strangely transactional; it feels like virtual sex is just another reward for progressing the story, which is terribly uninteresting. Mechanically, the game is overwhelming and confusing for newcomers to D&D like me, and the tutorials don't help much. Luck also plays *far* too big a role in this game. Requiring players to constantly save-scum in order to enjoy the game is simply bad design. I also frequently found myself trying to do things that simply didn't work out, and felt like I was playing a game of "what did the designers want me to do here" instead of inventing my own solutions based on a consistent, predictable set of mechanics.