Baldur's Gate 3

My 2023 GOTY. Best modern game I've played in a while.

Crashes on close if cloud save is enable very frequently. Lost multiple honor games due to extremely poor larian cloud saves deleting my local files when an honor mode cloud save fails.

All around a great game, with an engaging story, good writing, an excellent turn-based combat system with tons of options, and great graphics/art/animation. Yes, the story prods you along in one direction (just like a real DM would do) but there's a lot of latitude in the paths you choose. If you play solo and bring on the NPC companions, they are interesting and fun to have along. There's a ton of character possibilities (classes, races, specialty skills, etc.) and magic items to really build unique and varied characters. I started playing D&D around 1982 and then computer RPGs soon thereafter on the Commodore 64 and then PC's. This game ranks up there with the all-time greats like The Bard's Tale, the Ultima series, Wasteland, Fallout 1&2, the SSI AD&D games, and Balder's Gate 1 & 2. Tons of side quests to keep you busy, lots of great combat encounters, plenty of puzzles to solve. This game made me enjoy PC gaming again like the good old days. It also has good replay value. I highly recommend it.

Change the chain system, micromanaging your party is horrendus because of this. Make it more like NWN2, or just like, you know BG!!! Change the party limit to 6 Remove the immersion breaking things like: getting teleported to a fixed camp on rest(wrong time of day, location and biome). just make it instant, and have a camp like DA:O Day cycle, there is no night?? Option for RTWP at the very least. Also it's extremely linear, story is linear, maps are linear. Everything is forced. Make going there optional, dont force it just to get game time up. make everything more skippable. One of the selling points in BG1 and 2 is that you can go straight toward the higest lvl dungon in the start. Now with TB everything takes ages, and having to go though everything every time you play makes it very repetitive. and makes the game alot less replayable.

In and of itself, the game is pretty good. It has good enough graphics, some pretty good implementation and I have found that for early access, it is already quite polished. It is a game worth playing. However, and I am sad to say that I feared this from the early interviews about the game, it is not Baldur's Gate and I am left feeling frustrated about it. It is basically DOS with a slightly different skin. Only four party members at a time is a failure. BG series had six and it radically changes your party cohesion, set up, fun, character interactions etc. BG hit the sweet spot, DOS (and therefore this game) does not. The story so far is not gripping. I still recall th instant interest of the Candlekeep prologue at the beginning of BG. The story was instantly inriguing and starts humbly in order to grow into a great saga. This tries way too hard from the start and in an RPG, starting the story well is critical to immersion. The dice roll for certain actions is interesting but I can live without it to be honest, I'm a bit 50/50. The maps are more limited than I expected, quite linear and lack a feeling of freedom. I do like the jump action though, something that enables characters to reach other areas, that was smart thinking. I'm still getting used to mage and priest casting skills so I will reserve jusdgement on that. The fighting... It's DOS system so it's fine but it is not what I hoped for. At the time the real time system in BG was incredible, it felt clever, realistic and was full of action, spending too much time watching one fight could lead you to unintentionally leaving Minsc to get mauled by a mage... It felt, big, interesting and strategic. I have found the fight scenes in the DOS universe to be quite boring in comparison and sadly BG3 has followed suit. I don't feel fulfilled by this game and can quite happily walk away from it after 30 minutes of playing and forget it exists for a chunk of time before going back to it for another chunk of time.