Baldur's Gate 3

.....keep sitting. This is both my first review here on GoG and the first game I've had refunded. It's not got anything to do with the price (only that now I'll use it for something else) but everything to do with the *feel* of this. Yes it's early access, yes I didn't play it very much but regardless of both this isn't for me, someone who played the originals when they first came out. It could be the AD&D ruleset (which is very dumbed down from what I'm used to), it could be the rather curiously chosen overbright graphics style, it could be exceedingly off putting expostion voice over that happens in cut scenes that describes what you character is thinking/feeling (instead of leaving it up to the player to imagine, like a good RPG), it could be the lazy writing in the first few minutes of Act I whereby all the party members have exactly the same motivation (that of the player themselves) to "venture forth". It could be those things, but nothing, but nothing about it felt "right" about it, and yes, they are big shoes to fill and well, perhaps when the dust settles this will turn out to be one franchise that should not have been prodded back to life, time will tell.

I've played this for almost 40 hours now and I've found myself vacillating between confusion, frustration, boredom, and moments of excitement and amazement. I don't find the story and characters particularly compelling. While choices do affect the story in consequential ways that are pretty cool to see--I restarted the game multiple times to see how well this worked--it can also be very confusing if you don't have certain characters in your party at the right time, as important scripted sequences simply fail to occur. The story is also quite overwhelming at first. Within the first 10 minutes of the game, you encounter aliens, dragons, demons, inter-dimensional portals, elves, castles... it feels like Lord of the Rings crashed into Guardians of the Galaxy. And unlike games like Dragon Age and Pillars of Eternity, which take all kinds of pains to carefully introduce you to their world, here I feel like I was dropped into the 15th movie of a cinematic franchise with no clue about what was happening, or why I was supposed to care. The way this game approaches romance is also strangely transactional; it feels like virtual sex is just another reward for progressing the story, which is terribly uninteresting. Mechanically, the game is overwhelming and confusing for newcomers to D&D like me, and the tutorials don't help much. Luck also plays *far* too big a role in this game. Requiring players to constantly save-scum in order to enjoy the game is simply bad design. I also frequently found myself trying to do things that simply didn't work out, and felt like I was playing a game of "what did the designers want me to do here" instead of inventing my own solutions based on a consistent, predictable set of mechanics.

Это было мое первое знакомство с Larian Studios и они делают просто шикарную игру с тонной контента, я не знаю как можно не заплатить за нее. Пусть каждая вложенная копейка в этот шедевр на время раннего доступа выльется в улучшение будущего контента. Как будет возможность куплю все их игры и сестре или брату тоже их куплю!! P.S: Конечно у меня нет ни сестры, ни брата, но если появятся то точно куплю!

- No alaigment system. - Combat is TB instead of RTwP. - Combat is dead slow. - Balancing is a mess, e.g. overuse of ground effects. - Party limit is 4 instead of 6, like in a f***ing SNES game. - There are far less companions than in any BioWare RPG... - ... and most of them are generic & stereotypical. - You will lose all but four companions after act 1. (Same s**t as in DOS1+2.) - Facial expressions are worse than in early versions of MEA. - The past tense narration breaks immersion. - Absurd gameplay mechanics are breaking immersion as well: Jumping around like the Hulk, kicking huge bears back 5m with a wizard that has 9 strength, etc. - Other immersion breakers like teleporting to a fixed camp on rest instead of resting right there in the dungeon. (If you can teleport, why bother walking through dungeons after all?) - Even more immersion breakers like poorly implemented fog of war enabling you to see what is going on behind a closed door. - No day/night circle. This breaks immersion, too. - Story and plot progression are linear. Dungeons are linear. Everything is linear, forced and plastic. - Bastardized DnD lore: They made the goblins intelligent! And half of them are clerics or wizards! - You roll for everything: Persuasion checks, finding traps, disarming traps, lock picking, etc. This leads to save/load orgies. - Load times are outrageous! - Limited options during character creation: Only use prebuild faces and you can't set height, weight, muscularity, breast size, etc. - There are too many containers in the game, often containing no or crappy items. This wastes the time of completionists. - In general the game is not communicating well with the player. Will I die when jumping so deep? How much damage will I take from walking through this acid puddle? - The game is not BG3, but DOS3 with DnD rules and a (bad) Forgotten Realms skin mod slapped onto it. - The art style, visuals, interface, main menu and character design all scream DOS3 instead of BG3.

As far as the graphics/performance and so on, the game seems to be fine for the early access. With 18 hours in game I only suffered two crashes, and one was during exiting of the game. My problem is not that "it's not like old BG", my problem is that it's too much like Divinity Original Sin. Way too much. I have spend some time not that long ago with DOS-2, and frankly got bored with that. When at every turn I see how this BG3 is more like DOS3 makes me disappointed. As far as the gameplay experience - this just feels too much like I'm back to the last Divinity game. Even plot wise - let's compare - you find yourself on a ship, after someone performed some nasty procedure on you. The ship is under attack by something and you need to fight your way out to the top. Finally as you reach the designated destination, everything crashes. You find yourself on the beach, and can now find back few of companions back from the ship. After few moments you arrive to some sort of civilization. Now your priority is to have your collar removed and escape. Later you find out you are "a choosen one" (Like all your companions) and of course you are absolutely vital to save the world. That's the DOS-2. Now here, well let's not get into details - to avoid any spoilers, but here-and there you do have the feeling of a recycled plot. The combat looks and feel just like DOS, with maybe some different spells and values, but so much of the basic mechanics remain the same. And I'm already feeling tired of this game. Even though it's just part of the full game.