Baldur's Gate 3

Hard to give a midling review among the acclaim, but despite being a fan of both the Baldur's Gate and the Original Sin series, I found the game good but certainly not a classic. The first flaw of this game is that it's "BG3". The game is DOS3 in everything but name and a few fanservice references, be it the with the style, the writing or the mechanics. Also, the original serie was closed and finished, and neither needed nor provided space for a sequel. It means that the link between BG2 and BG3 are tenuous, filled with retcons, some character assassination thrown in, and often invalidating whatever the player could have actually done. All that means that the game would have been actually better by being straight-up a DOS sequel rather than a BG sequel, which seems to have been decided only for the hype (though it seems it was a decision that did pay off...). When it comes to the game as it stands, the writing is good and witty, though often quite a bit too edgy. Characters are nicely done, but often somewhat forgettable and a bit too edgy. The absurdly excessive backgrounds also didn't help, especially with the massive dissonance of them being low-level - one is the (unwilling) best soldier of one of the nine lords of Hell ; another is the literal, bona fide lovers of a straight-up goddess. It makes for pretty contrived stories and seriously hampers the suspension of disbelief. The game does have excellent maps and takes into account your decisions, and react to many of them, so hat off to Larian for this. It's also massive and very ambitious, and manage to not trip too much itself with it. But as with companions, it doesn't mesh very well with itself, with lots of contents that seems crammed into it without really much reason rather than organically coming together, with a main story that... simply isn't very interesting. On the whole, the game is well-done, but somehow soulless and not very immersive. I expected a blast, I ended up with a "meh".

Just like all of Larian's RPGs, it has an amazing first act that makes you think you're playing the best game of all time, and then it quickly starts falling apart the minute the second act starts. Bugged quests, rushed content, railroading you down one path or another while removing lots of the free choice you were spoiled with in prior acts, romances that don't pay off, side quests that never tie up their loose ends, and long encounter gauntlets that are all but rigged against you. 90 hours in and I'm going to set it aside now and wait for the inevitable 'enhanced edition' where they go back and finish up the other 75% of the game.

Title pretty much describes my thoughts on the game. I'm having quite some fun with the game, but it is so far and apart from Dungeons & Dragons it feels like it's a joke. Gog offers all the true D&D games by Bioware, perhaps the chaps over at Larian should have played those before trying to sell us Divinity 3 for Baldur's Gate. The only difference I see between Divinity 2 and this game is the Forgotten Realms setting, which isn't all that obvious anyway.

The first two Acts are very well done and clearly a lot of time and care went into them. The story is immersive and the gameplay fun. Sadly Act 3 and the ending are an absolute trainwreck with side quests that go nowhere and most of your choices throughout the game end up being moot outside a few buffs/temp npcs in the final fight. There is no real epilogue and the quest endings that you get during gameplay are all the closure that you get.

There's really just no excuse for how poorly conceived this game is in so many areas. I'm very unhappy with my purchase as so much of what's going on here is just catastrophically bad. First of all, bugs. There will be bugs. The gameplay experience is _very_ rough because of visual bugs and poor pre-loading. Patch 1 proudly proclaims that it fixes 1000 bugs. That means the game launched with far more than that. This is a Bethesda-tier launch experience, which is horribly ironic since Starfield is a remarkably stable game and boasts only a few very niche bugs. Second, characters. The "Origin" characters, who are the clowns you're going to be made to suffer with for the vast majority of the adventure if you don't know better, are suffering from "tragic" backstories, and by "tragic" I mean they're each kind of an idiot. There are one or two who are decently written and not infuriating to deal with (you get 1 guess who), but mostly they all want you to feel sorry for them suffering the consequences of their own decisions. One thing that all the characters do seem to have in common, though, is that they are all really eager to get in your pants. While I don't have anything in particular against the existence of orgies or bisexual polycules, I'm really not here to play some kind of harem simulation game. Besides, the writing and animations for this game are heinously bad, with all the worst consequences of 3D model interaction like air hugs, ear sniffing, and bizarre facial expressions. If you can't even match Tidus hugging Yuna in FFX when that game was released (checks notes) 22 years ago, don't bother. You're wasting your time. Beyond that, core gameplay? Eliminating the grid does wonders for D&D 5e, and Larian's signature environmental interactions add great depth to an otherwise kinda shallow system. The main story, however, is blatantly unfinished and obscenely short. Maybe if Larian spent less time writing Twilight fanfic this game would have released finished.