Baldur's Gate 3

- No alaigment system. - Combat is TB instead of RTwP. - Combat is dead slow. - Balancing is a mess, e.g. overuse of ground effects. - Party limit is 4 instead of 6, like in a f***ing SNES game. - There are far less companions than in any BioWare RPG... - ... and most of them are generic & stereotypical. - You will lose all but four companions after act 1. (Same s**t as in DOS1+2.) - Facial expressions are worse than in early versions of MEA. - The past tense narration breaks immersion. - Absurd gameplay mechanics are breaking immersion as well: Jumping around like the Hulk, kicking huge bears back 5m with a wizard that has 9 strength, etc. - Other immersion breakers like teleporting to a fixed camp on rest instead of resting right there in the dungeon. (If you can teleport, why bother walking through dungeons after all?) - Even more immersion breakers like poorly implemented fog of war enabling you to see what is going on behind a closed door. - No day/night circle. This breaks immersion, too. - Story and plot progression are linear. Dungeons are linear. Everything is linear, forced and plastic. - Bastardized DnD lore: They made the goblins intelligent! And half of them are clerics or wizards! - You roll for everything: Persuasion checks, finding traps, disarming traps, lock picking, etc. This leads to save/load orgies. - Load times are outrageous! - Limited options during character creation: Only use prebuild faces and you can't set height, weight, muscularity, breast size, etc. - There are too many containers in the game, often containing no or crappy items. This wastes the time of completionists. - In general the game is not communicating well with the player. Will I die when jumping so deep? How much damage will I take from walking through this acid puddle? - The game is not BG3, but DOS3 with DnD rules and a (bad) Forgotten Realms skin mod slapped onto it. - The art style, visuals, interface, main menu and character design all scream DOS3 instead of BG3.

As far as the graphics/performance and so on, the game seems to be fine for the early access. With 18 hours in game I only suffered two crashes, and one was during exiting of the game. My problem is not that "it's not like old BG", my problem is that it's too much like Divinity Original Sin. Way too much. I have spend some time not that long ago with DOS-2, and frankly got bored with that. When at every turn I see how this BG3 is more like DOS3 makes me disappointed. As far as the gameplay experience - this just feels too much like I'm back to the last Divinity game. Even plot wise - let's compare - you find yourself on a ship, after someone performed some nasty procedure on you. The ship is under attack by something and you need to fight your way out to the top. Finally as you reach the designated destination, everything crashes. You find yourself on the beach, and can now find back few of companions back from the ship. After few moments you arrive to some sort of civilization. Now your priority is to have your collar removed and escape. Later you find out you are "a choosen one" (Like all your companions) and of course you are absolutely vital to save the world. That's the DOS-2. Now here, well let's not get into details - to avoid any spoilers, but here-and there you do have the feeling of a recycled plot. The combat looks and feel just like DOS, with maybe some different spells and values, but so much of the basic mechanics remain the same. And I'm already feeling tired of this game. Even though it's just part of the full game.

This is a game that warrants a multiple page essay to review it, but the long and short is that an RPG lives and dies on how interesting its world is, and BG3 doesn't really take itself seriously enough to create a consistent world with politics and ideoligies, nor does it interweave its characters in such a way that their motivations become drivers for the plot or the interactions. So you're really left with a game that's a vessel for giving you dnd 5e combat and it's kinda buggy but mostly works, so it's "fine". Whether you like this game can be determined largely on whether you think that shenanigans you can cause in combat, and the weird creatures you'll meet; will carry your engagement through 80 hours of game. I played with 2 other players and we all agreed that it lacked narrative substance, though were at times impressed with what was on display in terms of mechanical depth. With a lot of very good RPGs behind me, this one did not live up to the comparison. Though I am sure it is a defining game for many younger players, and rightfully so. But to me this is just Divinity Original Sin 2: 2.

Baldur's Gate 3 is more of a dating simulator than an adventure game. You know where all of the development money went when developers are coming to you with their hands out whispering promises of epic adventures when all the core gameplay is either broken or missing but all of the romance and sex has been fully fleshed out. The male vampire dude (I am also male) keeps sending me gay vibes and tries to suck my blood while saying that he "doesn't want to hurt me". He always acts like has the hots for me and my rejection seems to only encourage this behavior. There are two women you will encounter that can join your party; an alien-looking lady without a nose that is always demanding things and telling you how terrible you are. The other chick that is the Forgotten Realms equivalent of Captain Marvel: to be a strong woman you have to be an asshole to men. Neither of these are attractive qualities. There is a another party member I have yet to meet but can be seen in the game literature. It's some guy with the succubus grinding on his leg while suckling at his ear. Everyone I've met so far is either a pansy or an asshole. Men always seem to have the hots for me and the women hate me. From what I've read, the next place I get to visit is the Underdark. I'm really looking forward to my upcoming visit to this matriarchal society where I can anticipate being put down as both a human with pale skin and for being male. This game is pushing full on sex before you even reach level 2 like its candy. I feel violated just by playing this game. And every forced romantic moment reads like the writers reaching into my pants for shits and giggles. I wanted the badass high fantasy adventure with all the foul language and inappropriate social norms and misery that trudging around in full plate in all weather conditions under the intense pressure to survive brings to the table. This isn't Baldur's Gate. It's someone's sick romantic love fantasy SJW manifesto parading as an RPG.

I went into this fairly open minded. I loved Baldur's Gate 1/2, and I loved Divinity OS 1/2. What could go wrong? Ignoring the early-access jenk, because that's to be expected, I will focus on the more fundamental properties of the game that I found unpleasant. DnD 5e rules do not mix with Divinity gameplay. The lowest difficulty of this game is unforgiving. One failed dice roll and you're looking at the 45-second load screen for the 4th time in the past half hour. Some combat encounters feel genuine and enjoyable. Other times, you're thrown into impossible situations, with expended spell slots, and no alternative but to hack your way past 12 enemies with a half dead party and no spell slots. Up comes the load screen of "you weren't supposed to do that." once again. No direction, no hints. Just wandering the map, dying and reloading until you've eliminated all alternative paths but the one the developers intended. Brilliant design.