Baldur's Gate 3

this game has nothing to do with baldurs gate 1 and 2. Baldurs gate is not a setting, the forgotten realms is, so why do it when you clearly look down upon the original games?

I started the playthrough of this game 5 times. I keep coming back, always expecting more, trying new class, and race combinations, hoping for a better experience. The game would be okay, and it looks really great, but usually after about 8-10 hours, I always find myself skipping through the dialogue as I find them boring, together with the story... Maybe I am just too old, but I was looking for the next chapter of Baldur's Gate after 1 and 2, but that I did not find. Completely different feeling, story, and atmosphere. And It's not really Divinity 3 either. I just find this a bit lacking in substance. Like a box of chocolates that look amazing, smell amazing, but the taste is a disappointing "meh..". I also have issues with the game on a moral and political level, but I won't get into that here. You can skip most of those things I believe, if not all.

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.