A beautifully designed and beautifully told short story.
The only value this game possesses nowadays is sentimental value. I understand those who have fallen in love with it in the nineties, when there was nothing better. But now everything is better. Classic Angry Birds are better; they offer more tension(!), more colourful characters and better dialogues. Well, I might have exaggerated with the latter, but most importantly, Baldur's Gate visuals can only be regarded as laughable in 2023. My wizard casting spells looked like pixels shooting pixels at other pixels. Character creator is awful. You will not create a casting character without deep knowledge of the (old) rule book or without copying ready builds prepared by fans online. It's not what I call creating Your character. The tutorial is so boring I wanted to kill myself. It is not impossible that I have actually killed myself. So if you do not want the same happening to you, please, watch some walkthrough clips online, before you start the game. If you can live with those graphics... fine.. you have been warned.
The game is no longer playable due to terribly outdated graphics. Its place is in a games museum. Perhaps in a honourable spot, if so many people love it.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion were such a disaster (with its horrible open world full of repetitive locations and idiotic side quests leading you astray to a point where you didn't know what you did and why you did it) that I vowed to not touch anything from that series again. But 16 years have passed, there is nothing interesting to play at the moment and 12 pounds seemed to be a no-brainer for 'The Winner of more than 200 Game of the Year Awards'... Really?? How on earth did Skyrim get any award at all? Was there no other game in the competition that year? The graphics are archaic. It feels like a game from the XX century. Character creator is ridiculous; the Elves look like geckos from Mars, humans like Neanderthals and Khajiits like paedophiles in costumes at a children party. A depressing world coloured in a nursery with three greyish pencils. Inventory a total mess. User interface incredibly user-unfriendly. Perks tree dreadful to navigate with no interesting perks. Dialogues feel like a trap you have fallen into. Fighting system atrocious. It is like waving a stick in between ghosts. Ponderous moving from one corner of the map to another makes the plot irrelevant. I was bored after five hours, forced myself to play another five, and another five... Can anyone honestly say that game is fantastic? Don't waste your life on it! Don't waste your life! Don't waste your life!
UPDATED REVIEW I awarded them three stars initially, deducting one star for a mute protagonist and one for Dungeons and Dragons background, but I have played that Early Access a few times since that time, after patch 7, patch 8 and patch 9. Each time I had to start from the beginning and that was the best part of it, because only then I realized how massive this game was. Replayability is unparalleled by anything I have seen. Pretty much every goal can be achieved in different ways. The world is visually very attractive; voice over is of theatre quality; the companions have their charm (and follies); camp followers (like Volo or Halsin) are so lively that you regret they are not your companions; and NPCs are often brilliant. Lump the Enlightened is a star, but even such irrelevant characters as for example, Abdirak or Spike are just fun. Imagine that, depending on your actions, you may never ever talk to any of them. Obviously, we do not know the final product and everything can turn into a disaster, but the Early Access itself is better than the entire other similar games. It is beautiful, it is funny, it is entertaining. Nothing more you can expect from a game. INITIAL REVIEW This may be the best game of its kind you ever played... if you can live with a mute protagonist and are not repulsed by Dungeons and Dragons dice roll based system. Larian Studios made a step forward from Divinity Original Sin 2 and finally you can see your companions face to face, when you talk to them. The immersion is so much better. They were close to creating the best game of the genre ever, but they failed. First, your main character is mute. (This could theoretically change.) Second, they have used an overexploited, cumbersome and irritating Dungeons and Dragons system with all its horrible dice rolls, boring ability checks, nightmarish inventory, long rests, slow fights and the same skills and spells you knew for years. Mute character. You may say, there are many good games with mute characters. But there are also very good games with voice over. If you character is not voiced over, you relegate yourself to the second division, before the game even starts. Here, the protagonists look like pantomime villains, which is especially embarrassing in so-called romantic scenes. But it gets worse. Their dialogues are mute, but they mumble to themselves when exploring the world. It feels and sounds like watching a youtuber presenting the gameplay. Stupid half-sentences like: 'Let's see what's there', 'Perhaps something here', 'Hope it's something interesting' mumbled with no emotions. Poor. The system. Honestly, the only reason Dungeons and Dragons work as a table top game is that there is nothing better; there should be no place for that in a modern video game. Fights are brutally slow (got much better after patch 8!), with time offer nothing more than clicking same icons and with hit points ranging from 1 to 12 or 4 to 40 plus innumerable misses, they can theoretically take minutes or hours. Now the good stuff. This is role-playing at its best. The plot seems to be fine so far. A bit of sci-fi vibe added in the prologue to a dull old fantasy world. Interactions with companions, so far, brilliant. The characters are more and more interesting with time. Their stories more attractive. And the best thing, you cannot flatter them all to make them friends, because what you do and say will be approved by some and disapproved by others at the same time. So you just need to decide who you are and to play your role. Yes, playing your role is what role-playing is about. There is plenty of details in every small plot and everything can go slightly differently each time you try (that unfortunately, you will not notice unless you repeat the same quest). Nice visuals and sounds. Great acting and voice over of your companions and of many side characters.
