Baldur's Gate 3

Larian games are the only ones I've ever felt a need to grab my phone to pass the time during combat. This hasn't changed. The Goblin camp had me reading articles while waiting to hold the hands of every one of my party members and tell them which way they should point their swords. Makes me long for the action of the classics where the enemies and your companions weren't dumber than Alabama. Where you could just control your own PC for the most part and trust our companions to use their strengths on their own, only pausing the game to issue orders to your companions when you needed to. Or turn on all the autopause stuff and play on that extreme, or any where in between. There was a perfect blend of action and turn based combat because we could control the flow as we pleased. In the late 90s. Pretty certain it's too late for me to try and get a refund, but if there were a way for me to gift ownership I'd give this one away. It doesn't disgust me, just bores me. Which is worse.

This game feels like it's still in early access, it has a lot of the same janky problems Divinity original sin HAD before the enhanced edition fixed it, there's quite literally no reason to go back 15 steps for this game and yet somehow larian has managed to achieve that, encounter design somehow made significantly worse from the early access game, you will literally never feel powerful because of this badly done aspect of the game, every level you gain is just another portion of the map you get to explore as before that encounters are just quicksave/quickload fests of RNG rolls that are severely stacked against you, even min maxed builds that abandon immersion for pragmatism will run into quick saving and quick loading a lot during several portions of the game multiclassing and respeccing are introducing a load of jank that are sadly needed because of the encounter designs being so heavily stacked against the player, you will be respeccing all of your companions into their most optimal counterparts, you will be respeccing your cleric from the useless trickster domain into life because you just really need heals when you're fighting against gnolls who at parity level 4 get 3 attacks when your fighter still only get 1, you will find yourself regularly reloading encounters not because they're THAT difficult but because you will need to know exactly how to shift odds in your favor, and that's the best thing you get, odds, the AI is INCREDIBLY CHEESY, using jumps as a min max'd player would in order to maximize their movement, since AI enemies get RIDICULOUS strength levels (think minotaurs etc) their jump range IS ABSOLUTELY NUTS as a result STRATEGY BECOMES WORTHLESS, your backline is always in range, you cannot bring squishy characters hence you want to multiclass a sorlock into fighter at the start simply to get constitution proficiency, this with the level cap just makes for a pretty unfun experience so far feels like early access even post release

Dont get me wrong the Game is a masterpiece in visuals, freedom, voice acting and content. But for me the problems with writing, characters and way too much content i some cases took away the fun from me. At the start of act 3 i was already bored with the game mechanics (youre doing nearly everytime the same during fights) and the chars. also there was too much zoomer-humor in it.. i dont like that really and annoyed me more and more.

Note, I've played all of the original BG games (repeatedly), as well as both D:OS (repeatedly). They were very enjoyable, though BG is definitely dated at this point... Also note that I have just gotten to the ground, and have completed two or three small missions there, so not very far into the game. But BG3 just feels like a real slog to me... the field of view is so small that I feel claustrophobic, it just doesn't zoom out enough for me to feel like I can see the world. The constant dice rolls, which take 3-5 clicks each, *really* break immersion, and they are getting really tedious; I pray that at some point they offer the option of making those automatic and hidden, like all other D&D games do. Combat is rather sloggish too, though it probably is pretty much the same as D:OSn... I've found myself playing for about an hour at a time, then getting bored and doing something else. If there were any other actually enjoyable games out there, that I hadn't already replayed dozens of times over the past couple of years, I probably would never fire this up again... I'm not really sure what I want to have different in this game, but I'm really not enjoying it much...

Would give it a 4.5 if I could but ... Loved Companion stories, quest complexity and interconnection, D&D 5e rules implementation, Trueness of spirit to the original BG & BG2, Visual & Auditory elements. Dissapointed By Inventory management (UI/interaction design is just terrible), Party management (for the love of god, just let me see everyone simultaneously while in camp), End Sequence, Lack of fully custom party support, Bugs in Act 3. So what I loved definitely out-weighted the fairly specific things that I didn't enjoy - probably the greatest of which being the final couple of hours of the game. Avoiding spoilers, there are a lot of bugs with your game decisions and the current effect they have on the end sequence. I would recommend anyone currently at the "Point of no Return" to wait for the first major patch that I expect will fix many things. One companion was also fairly obviously bolted on late in development, and definitely needed more fleshing out, especially given their romance popularity. Overall strongly recommended but with the above caveats!