Baldur's Gate 3

Almost 20 years ago now a game called The Elder Scrolls III: Oblivion" came out and changed the action RPG genre forever. It solidified the Western style RPG as a console friendly genre, and simplified their mechanics and writing enough for much more mainstream and casual players to enjoy. It is not a bad game at all, it's perfectly fine, but I kinda hated it for what it did to the genre. Baldur's Gate 3 is that game for the CRPG genre, or tactical RPG. Whatever you want to call them. If Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous's mechanics are an algebra problem then BG3's are "1 + 1 = 2." If Pillars of Eternity's writing is Stephen King then BG3's is 50 Shades of Grey. Which is fine! The game is fine! I've put almost 200 hours into it because I want to finish it and it's as long as a winter in Antarctica. The problem isn't the game being bad, the problem is it is being praised as the best thing since sliced bread (as Oblivion was) and it will change the genre forever. I can't help but be worried what that will mean.

The biggest problem for this game is that it claims a state as successor to Baldur's Gate 2. Therefore, it has deliberately woken some expectations to garner interest, which is fine. But you have to deliver on them and sadly this game does not do that. The idea of origin characters per se is not a bad one, but making them also companions is not a good idea. It essentially fills up the rooster of characters with a bunch of main characters. You are essentially punished and mocked for trying to play as "your" character instead of being rewarded for it. How much influence you will have on the character of "their" characters is not known. The background info and traits felt at most cosmetic, but were closer to be non-existent in the game. Essentially it is DOS 3. From the restriction of being allowed only one summon to the inventory, it feels like a little bit of paint was blasted over and then you got the BG3 mechanics and UI. I will add the brutal feeling of discrepancy between what the mechanics shows and what the story tries to tell me. I am a low level character but somehow nothing is out of my range. My level shows me as a mook, but the story tells me I am strong. The story tries to give me a sense of urgency, but I can and do essentially rest after every encounter. Such instances are major immersion breaker. It feels like the developers tried to put in as much Forgotten Realms lore as possible. For BG3 it overall feels in many parts like a brainstorming session out of control. Instead of considering if something makes sense, it feels like the only question asked was, is this cool? If the answer was yes, they put it in. Lastly we have the choices and consequences. As example to illustrate my point there is one big decision and it is majorly skewed in one direction. Instead of it being on a similar level to the decision in BG2 between the Shadow Thieves and the Vampires. One side feels more like an afterthought. It completely lacks polishing and incentive.

The bad reviews on here boil down to two categories: -People who wanted Larian to basically remake BG2 -People who wanted Larian to make another dingy dungeon crawler replete with angst and gravelly vocal tones like what they used to make back in my day (ie, BG2, but in a less specific way). This is GoG. Anything made after 2010 with more than 3 stars is a brilliant game. The game is great, some performance issues due to early access, but solid combat, excellent sound and visual design (hitting something really feels like hitting it), and there is a whole lot of playing around with using the environment (particularly the high ground), ranged combat, and stealth that can be done here that gives it an edge over a traditional isometric RPG. It's made in a similar engine to Divinity OS2, but everything practical works very differently due to it using the D&D 5e ruleset. I am not the biggest fan of the 5e ruleset in general (I prefer 3.5e in D&D), but the rendition is faithful and the turn-based combat gives it a more tactical feel than a traditional RTwP isometric, which lend themselves towards spamming and frequent pausing. The characters are interesting enough in their own rights, but the Early Access doesn't really give them too much room to breathe. There are very few 'stock' characters, particularly your companions, who feel as if they have their own motivations and priorities, and the only thing tying them together is the whole tadpole-in-the-head issue (and your leadership). There is a lot of world reactivity to your actions and you get far more options in problem solving quests, above and beyond what was present in BG2. The setting and plot are more similar to the original BG than BG2, so sorry to the 'dark and dingy' fans. There is no fixed alignment, so you aren't locked into acting a particular way towards NPCs, which adds RP potential. Feel free to be a gnome-hater. In particular, you can be a LOT more capital-E Evil than most RPGs would permit.

Game is an unbalanced mess. The beginning, as usual, will be the most ironed out section of the game. Essentially Act 1 was such a blast playing through, however, the game past that point completely nose dives. The story feels like it doesn't exist. Either you are running around exploring or you are entering into combat which, by the way, the implementation just does not work for this sort of game. I ran into so many encounters where I had to load a previous save or keep loading a save to get myself out of fighting. It just became too tiresome. Kinda lame that failing a speech check more often than not will most liklely turn into a fight with you being punished for it. Furthermore, I am unsure what the idea behind throwing 10 enemies against your 4 party members is, but it got old. It got old really fast. Initially, the camping mechanic seemed pretty cool, until you get to Act 2. Having to long rest after every fight literally throws the tadpole threat out the window. I thought we were slowly transforming to monsters and had to find a cure quickly? I also had to drop the difficulty down to the easiest setting to try to get the game to feel more immersive and even that setting isn't even balanced. Having to rest to recharge your spells and abilities is such a terrible design decision for this game. I can't get over the amount of romance that exists in this game which is a shame because Shadowheart and Wyll are well written characters, both with engaging and interesting quests. But all that is undermined by lust and sexual degeneracy. At one point, my camp just felt like an orgy-in-waitng. I can determine one party members entire fate depending if I'd like to engage a sexual relationship with them or not. Overall, I was looking forward to being immersed by the story and decisions of each character. What I bought was frustrating game design and woke nonsense. By the way, a certain character has the Star of Remphan carved into his face which I thought was hilarious.

This game has an incredible potential, but is constantly marred by puzzling and inexplicable flaws. All the origin characters are incredibly weird: a demon slayer with demonic prosthetics, a renegade noble that became an hero of the Realms after a devilish pact, a vampire, a mage as powerful as Elminster... one of them would be tolerable, but your story gets ALL of them toghether like some kind of circus. And they all start at level 1 anyway, so how does that make sense? I've never seen such a bad character design before. The core pitch (weird power that corrupt) is also straight-up taken from Mask of the Betrayer. There is no continuity with the previous games. BG2 ended with your character dealing with Bhaal's essence somehow, NWN 2 had you absorb Myrkul's remaining essence, yet you have again all the death gods alive. I understand this is a fault of 5th edition, but still it makes the setting absurd and if you add it to the fact that several characters from BG2 were brought back and re-hashed in (despite being 100 years later) the whole story feels annoyingly unoriginal. Save games. Good lord, I don't know why Larians are stuck in 1990 but why is this game lacking the most common autosave options? You spend one hour and half looting a cellar and looking for a vendor, then you abruptly get into a fight and your last savegame was before that all. I don't have much time to play and this gross oversight costs me whole days of progress. But there are also some good things here. Lots of dialogue, several non-standard interactions (even if they all sum up to the same three things: mind reading, speak with animals, speak with dead) and every major quests can be solved in a good or a bad way, occasionally with some extra neutral options too. Your choices do matter and the story, which is pretty long already by itself, lends itself to be replayed for at least a second time. It's a decent game but we're very far from the quality of its predecessors.