Dont pay attention to the reviews, a good chunk is just spaztic baldurs gate fans crying about how they cant watch their game play itself anymore. Maybe its time to take off those nostalgia glasses and admit that the original baldurs gate 1 and 2 were not that great and just let a competent studio take a crack at it.
The game is taking good shape, i have very high expectations for Larian with what there is on offer
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.
The worst game I ever played in my life, I started as sorc and I had trouble beating enemies even on the easiest difficulty because I wanted only a story and I couldn't even get that, never finished it, what a waste of time and money on my part.
There's about 100 other reviews that hit the nail on the head, so I'm just going to add my two cents and dip out. I'm waiting on my refund now, because this is legally false advertising. Larian advertised an EARLY ACCESS TITLE, meaning a FINISHED game that is ready for release, and well past the stages of beta testing. That is NOT what this title is. BG3 is riddled with bugs, glitches, astoundingly bad coding and optimization, and that's before we get to the fact that more than 70% of the advertised features ARE DISABLED DURING EARLY ACCESS. Holy shit, this even beat out Beamdog for "how to piss all over your audience".
- Saves are bugged and crash when you try to load them. Auto save, manual save, doesn't matter, if you EVER turn your game off, you are starting over from character creation, because you will not be able to load that save.
- The mouse pointer isn't even coded right, I regularly have to point about 2 centemeters (I FUCKING MEASURED IT) to the RIGHT of anything to interact with it, and that's before the issues with the buggy controls.
- Pathing is utterly borked, I've clicked an area then watched my entire party run INTO fire, then turn around and run out, then back into it, while the pathing line shows them walking AROUND the fire.
- Visual glitches abound. Characters sometimes have fully functioning faces that show great expression, or they talk and their head physically freezes in one space, separates from their necks, and then crashes the game on you. Fire is often about 3 steps off where it visually appears to be, bodies ragdoll then expand to block the screen, and loading anything, EVEN QUICK TRAVEL, causes a black screen and crashes the game.
Don't even pre order this. This THING is spitting in the face of customers, and we should never be okay with it. You advertise a finished game, it better be FINISHED, not a LITERAL BETA TEST. Honestly, I'm not even sure I'm going to buy this game when the full release comes, I'm so tired of this shit.
