Baldur's Gate 3

Haven't gotten to the end of the early access story yet, perhaps I never will, that's how depressing it is to play this game. At first glance you get something great in your hand, the graphics are beautiful, the character creation is great, you get to make some impressive looking fantasy creatures, the opening cinematics impress the hell out of you, but then you actually get to control your character and everything falls apart. 1. The controls are janky, you get the move the camera kilometers away from you, allowing you to explore the whole map almost, taking every bit of fun out of exploration. 2. The combat is terrible. There are cases where you get to do nothing for 3-4 consecutive turns besides moving, yet the enemies can run or fly around easily and even get in a hit at the same time. By the time you get your characters close enough to target an enemy with either a melee or ranged attack, you are close to dying. And the worst thing is that your attack might miss after all you have been through. 3. Everything, like exploration, conversation checks, combat, saving throws, are governed by a dice roll, and it is frustrating to see rolling below the target, some of these checks can lead to pretty horrible outcomes and thus you are forced to reload the game every time you fail. 4. And while I only wanted to highlight the issue with the damned dice rolls now I also have to mention the load times. Even on an ultra fast M.2 SSD the loading can take like half a minute. Out of llaying 2 hours of Baldur 3, you are going to spend half an hour checking the loading screens. The whole experience thus far is pretty disappointing. Should the Studio change the combat system to something similar to Dragon Age: Origins, the game could still be saved, but if things are left like this, it will be a shame. The game has potential, the characters and the story is great, but if everything else is not enjoyable, than the rest will not be able to hook you in for hours. Larian pls...

The gameplay options, combat, graphics, sound design, and voice acting are great. Unfortunately, the UX is the worst in the business. Each character has their own inventory, and each character's inventory is overwhelming on its own. There's always way too much on the screen, causing many miss-clicks with varying degrees of consequences. Every character can wear way too many items and has way too many abilities. In actual D&D, you can only wear 3 magical items at a time, preventing you from getting over-powered and keeping things manageable. The inventory has a search function, for Christ's sake. If you need that, then something has gone horribly wrong. The animations are slow, which is greatly compounded compounded by the lack of overworld map travel, too many interactive items on the screen, and the long 30-character battles. Every time I turn on the game, something annoying happens. Maybe the party will notice and run into a trap before I can react (and THEN the game will pause AFTER I triggered the trap, not after the party noticed it). Maybe one campanion will refuse to jump after the rest of the party, requiring me to click on them, separate them from the party, jump manually, then reconnect them to the party. That's 5 clicks just for ONE party member to jump over a chasm. Everything is tediously slow and manual like that, making the whole experience exhausting, like trying to balance a glitchy spread sheet for 3 hours. It doesn't help that there's no pause button. Sometimes friendly NPCs would start combat without me, getting killed before I can join the fight in a good position. The writing is cliched and cheesy. It's fun, I guess, but it takes itself way too seriously, making the overall tone confusing. The music is very cliched as well. It's your typical Western RPG orchestral sountrack, just with some pop added. This could have been one of the greats, but the weak story and the CHORE that it is to play just don't make for a good experience.

It is actually nice, about 7 out of 10. But it is still rare like early access. Tons of bugs. 5 years and such price – and still cannot use ropes and traps disarming kit, get stuck camera and characters, crooky controls, quests random reset, and much much more. But oh yeah can romance everything. If you are looking for decent tactical DnD without romancing bears, better check out Solasta.

It's a big RPG with lots of modern features. It has a ton of replay value but you probably won't keep engaged multiple times as you would with Baldur's Gate or other Forgotten Realms games. It not much like Baldur's Gate. It is a little similar to Divinity: Original Sin. While this could be a good standalone game by itself, I don't recommend it. The characters are not engaging enough compared to the standard of recent RPG's anyway. The graphics range from good to great and it's voiced. However, I found that even with an increased modern presentation, overall this game is less immersive than even games where you can't fully make out character's faces! It just isn't personable enough. The full turn based combat is a big step down from Baldur's Gate's real time with pause and frankly is less strategic and unnecessarily time consuming. The combat system as a whole has an overwhelming number of options but it just feels like you have less control of your characters and more fluff, while the computer is doing most of the work for you. I personally don't care for the story much. It's okay and has a similar tone to some of the Baldur's Gate 2 stories but put simply, it's hard to care about the characters or world as presented. The writing is theme park -like, in the vapid, hyped thrills sense, and not thorough enough to connect you to everything inside. There is a lot to like and a lot to be disappointed in here. But there are also some over the top breaking points if you are on the fence. The inclusion of cgi porn in the romances, the inclusion of the now infamous bestiality, inclusion for inclusion's sake, the lack of legacy class combinations/options from BG1/2, low level cap and underdeveloped character endgame, the combat system completely foreign to Baldur's Gate, and the list goes on. Overall, it's just not Baldur's Gate, not the next best thing, and not worth the time really. Don't expect it to be Baldur's Gate the Third, expect...something different.

Bugs, bugs and another bugs. Quest bugs so very noticable. Would be 60/100 if it shipped without them. Classic Larian style of game. -Frontloaded with good content and second half is rushed and buggy. (Minsc is basicaly there just to be there.) -You hit level cap too soon. -Very easy combat. -Inventory managment - terrible, exacerbated by junk items -Party Managment - terrible, you need to talk to change members, this exacerbates Inventory Managment when you need to get something from NPC who is not in party. You cannot level NPCs who are not in party. - Cannot say much about music as it is very hard to notice when it plays, like it was made not to interfere with voice chat in Co-op, even main theme is kinda weak, especialy when compared to other CRPGs. If I jump twice in quick succesion rest of the party jumps only once, so I have to get them over 1 by 1. This is very annoying. Jump should be automatic if character can jump over. That pressing jump creates some power surge, which just delays the time it takes to jump is cherry on top.