Far too early to speak on this with any authority, but some early thoughts:

• As with Divinity: Original Sin 2 the potential for roleplay immediately crumbles if not playing as an origin character. Especially damning since they are all locked into a specific class and race except for the Dark Urge.

• Dialogue options being marked by skill checks and background tags deflates them. It would be more fitting for certain options to have the checks/tags but not convey this to the player until it is time to roll. If I see an option tied to my one-of-like-six background choices, I effectively have to pick it so I can get Inspiration. As for the checks, I can prep the face of the party with Guidance, Charm Person, Friends, what have you. Which itself leads into...

• Despite being a four-member party game, the other three characters might as well not exist for the purposes of dialogue. If you're lucky you'll see one of the origin characters milling about in the background of a conversation, but the person/people I'm playing with are forced to listen and suggest options. So just like with real 5E, it's best to have one person do all the talking since only one person can anyways, further displacing non-faces from the story they are meant to be involved in.

• Origin characters all talk like they're YouTubers, falling into a pillow at the end of a sentence, a permanent vocal sneer tainting each word (except for Gale). There is no space for subtlety in their characterisation either, their MacGuffins and driving purposes laid so bare like the Hello Neighbour devs trying to get MatPat's attention.

• Without a DM to actually intervene, to interpret the players' wishes, anything requiring interpretation is simply gone. Nearly every spell that isn't a very simple effect or damage dealer? Absent. This leaves players with options for what colour of damage they want to do, or what one specific action they might like to take. Creativity spawning from these bounds is incidental, not intentional.

• The worst part of 5E, its combat, is not improved in the slightest here, and if anything is actively worse. One of the great benefits of the tabletop setting is that the numbers are obfuscated. Statblocks need not be adhered to. Players typically don't know the raw numbers of a creature's health or saves unless they clue in through what rolls succeed for saves, or keep a mental tally of damage done before the DM says they are bloodied. The DM has the option of disclosing information, but here the player is forced to know everything. Every resistance. Every hit point. Every stat point. Every ability. Combat cannot be creative as a result because the whole of its confines are known the entire time. You even know the percentage chance you have to hit every spell and attack. It makes it all hideously boring.

• If spells are going to be one and done boring nothingburgers, the least Larian could have done was not have some of them, like Speak with the Dead, be tied to a cutscene that tells me a corpse has nothing to say. I get it, the random goblin body I found probably isn't a font of lore, but do you need to take me into a scripted sequence of my character making a concerned face with their fingers to their temple as I am told for the eighteenth time that it has nothing for me.

• When spells are being learned, there is no indication as to which are rituals and which are not, nor are there options to sort or filter choices. With so few choices maybe it doesn't matter.

• Despite a bevy of supplementary sourcebooks giving players countless options for their characters, you're stuck with primarily the base text. Perhaps it would be unrealistic to wish for every subclass, every spell, every feat, but not knowing this narrow scope beforehand meant my hopes for, for example, a College of Glamour Bard or a Hexblade Warlock were dashed. Without the spells that make those subclasses interesting, however, I suppose they might as well be absent.

• The 'creative solutions' of stacking boxes to climb a wall or shooting a rope holding a rock over someone's head are not creative, they are blatantly intended and serve only to make the player feel smart for being coerced by the devs into a course of action.

• The folks eager to praise Larian for not including DLC seem to have missed the Digital Deluxe upgrade that gives you cosmetics and tangible benefits in the form of the Adventurer's Pouch.

• As touched upon by others, the devs are clearly more invested in giving players the option to make chicks with dicks and dudes with pussies than they are in actual gender representation. This binarism only exacerbates how gendered the characters are. With no body options besides "Femme, Masc, Big Femme, Big Masc" and whether you're shaven and/or circumcised, the inclusion of a Non-Binary option becomes laughable if not insulting. Gender is expressed and experienced in countless ways, but here it comes down to your tits (or lack thereof) and your gonads. No androgynous voice options. No breast sizes. No binders. No gaffs. No packing. The only ways for me to convey to fellow players that my character is anything besides male or female are my outright expression of my gender, to strip myself bare, or hope the incongruity between my femme physique and masc voice impart some notion of gender queering. Maybe this is great for binary trans men and women, but as a non-binary person it comes across as a half-measure that seeks to highlight my exclusion from this world. More cynically, this, alongside Cyberpunk 2077 read as fetishistic, seeing the trans body as something for sexual gratification, rather than just that, a body.

I'll keep playing it, but damn if my eyes aren't drifting towards playing a real CRPG for the first time.

Expressiveness is the quality that defines roleplaying games: they’re judged by how freely players can assert themselves in a reactive space. Players want to convey their personality and make choices, but while these are the obvious core concepts of the genre, Baldur’s Gate 3 has proven to me that they’re not what makes an RPG great. Having the capacity to make decisions is certainly a necessity, but decisions only matter when players care about the outcomes. Choices surround us in every moment of our lives, but most vanish from our minds within seconds for that very reason; they’re so emotionally inconsequential as to be hardly worthy of notice. So, more fundamental than allowing for choice is providing a real adventure in which to make those choices, and defining a journey which has players encountering challenges, learning, changing, and overcoming. This is the critical component which Baldur’s Gate fails to establish, most glaringly from its narrative structure.

(Minor spoilers through act 2)
In the opening cutscene, your character has a mindflayer tadpole inserted into their head, so your call to adventure is getting it out. This is fine in itself, but the game is quick to tell you that there’s no urgency to this task, relieving you of the burden of care. Every quest you receive to accomplish this goal, across the first ~22 hours of gameplay, results in failure where your party just sorta gives up. It takes another ten hours before the main villains are established, a stale group of evil zealots of evil gods who just love being evil, pursuing an agenda which players can't feel meaningfully aligned against. The simplicity of the central narrative gives the impression it’s just supposed to be a foundation for a character-driven story, but the interpersonal aspect is similarly lacking. In what feels like a symptom of the game's long stay in early-access, your companions put their love and trust in you in act 1, before anyone’s had the chance to organically develop relationships or encounter life-changing struggles. Characters don’t have the time and space to have an arc, and you don’t get the chance to express yourself alongside them, you simply skip to the end for an immediate and vacuous payoff. There’s no journey here, you’re simply being presented with scenes from an adventure without actually going on one.

The same can be said for the mechanics, even when they’re lifted from the tabletop game, thanks to a design philosophy where every playstyle is thoroughly accommodated. This seems like a good strategy in a genre where players want to assert themselves, but the refusal to challenge players leaves unique approaches feeling irrelevant. Even with a party led by a Githyanki barbarian, with very little in the way of charisma, intelligence, or skill, there was never a time I couldn’t overcome a situation in an optimal way. I could pick whatever locks I wanted, disarm whatever traps I wanted, circumvent any barrier I wanted; the game never asked me to think ahead or prepare. I didn’t have to be ready with certain spells or proficiencies, it never demanded more than following a clear path. Even if it did, the cheap respecs mean that you’re a maximum of 400 gold away from having a team perfectly suited to the task at hand, and even if you don’t end up using that option, knowing that your choices are so impermanent is a detriment to any feeling of growth.

That’s the key here: growth. My characters leveled up, but I don't feel like they grew. I traveled, but I don’t feel like I went on a journey. I made choices, but I don’t feel like I went in new directions. After a fifty-hour playthrough, all I remember was that I chilled out, ran around some nice maps, and managed my inventory. I spent all that time relaxing well enough, but I didn’t overcome challenge, feel much, or learn anything. All I could confidently state that the game did for me is live up to its basic selling point, of being an adventure I could take at home, a journey where I go nowhere.

After 103 hours of playtime I have finally finished my first playthrough. I played it with two of my friends @Ruffy300 and @djoni1999 and only at the weekend that also explains why it took us 3 almost 4 freaking month to beat it. All of us have never play a CRPG before and even though we always wanted to play DnD we never did. One of the reason why I didn't buy it during early access was that I was really unsure if I would like this kind of game.

But oh boy did I enjoy it. To be honest I noticed that my concerns were pretty much unfounded after the character editor. The editor already demonstrated how many choices you have and me and my friends spend over 2h creating our characters. Even your race and background influences the world around you and how they react to you. One race may has an advantage in one of the goblin camps because this race in particular is seen as strong and the other doesn't has this advantage so you will be attacked immediately. Or you may decide to pick a jewelry because you like shiny objects. But it turns out that this jewelry is dedicated to a specific god and when you talk to Shadowheart about that she will tell you that she is mad/offended because she believes in a different god. These are just small examples of many big and small choices that will influences your game and these decision really make a difference, you feel and see that in the world around you and when you interact with certain characters. But unfortunately that doesn't apply for every race or class. I noticed quickly that some get left in the dirt while other are really strong. I love that all of the NPC's have voices and I know that this is not normal in this genre because it is a lot of work and money for the developers. As someone who hates reading long texts in games, I can say enough how much I appreciate that. It does so much for the immersion but also makes the NPC's feel more real. Shadowheart, for example, is such a well-written character with a fantastic backstory and the relationship which you can develop to here feels natural. Yes I romanced her and probably will always do that in every playthrough and the other which I liked a lot was Astarion even though he was in our party. The only reason why he wasn't is because you only have 4 slots. But I do have to say that once you have finished romancing a character or just finished their quest that character gets pretty lifeless. This means that my interactions with Shadowheart went from very frequent and almost after every battle or quest to almost never. The ending in particular was kinda disappointing, you get maybe one or sentences with the character you've just spent over 100 hours with and then it's over. I know that it would be almost impossible to include so many fleshed out endings for some many characters. But I still think that there could have been a better way to conclude the story with certain characters or give the characters more dialogue options with their favorite characters once they have completed the character specific quest. The thing that I made me laugh the most were the many hilarious moments which I and my friends had with Baldur's Gate 3. Doesn't matter if it's an enemy that my friend used as a weapon, throwing children at enemies or the one barn scene in act 1 (you know which one if you have seen it) which will probably haunt my dreams for the rest of my life. There were still many more moments and overall was the CO-OP fantastic with a few exceptions and I'm glad that it exists. For example sometimes we couldn't switch between party members or it was delayed, often one of us was stuck before or after a cut scene or the fact that the performance of the game wasn't the best while playing with friends. But these were just small details that rarely affected the overall gaming experience. Gameplay mechanics that seem unimportant or small often had an even greater impact on my experience, ice melts and turns into water, armor and your whole body gets bloody after a fight. For me these small details are very important for a great game. A game can be great without them but it often elevates a great game to a masterpiece and yes Baldur's Gate 3 is a Masterpiece and a miracle that it exists like this. The enemy design is also fantastic, one example is the Apostle of Myrkul and the world design in general is very detailed and you have a lot of places to explore, many of which I will probably be explore in my next playthroughs. The fights were a lot of fun once you found out which class you want to play but there are also a few fights which got really annoying due to the fact that the enemies decided to spam certain attacks like Cloud of darkness. The third act seems like them most unfinished act, the performance is bad due to the big city and the loading time is quit long, sometimes the sound was buggy during dialogues and the characters were silent, assets wouldn't load especially in the last big fights or the game decided to place the camera in some strange angles. Even with all of these technical problems and the lack of dialogue options for characters which quest you have finished, I still think that Baldur's Gate 3 is a masterpiece of game and it deserves every praise that it gets. The characters and questlines are fantastic and incredibly well written. There are some many ways of playing the game and you can do almost anything you could think of. This is a game an anomaly, simply because how much content you get,it's just an example of a top tier RPG and one of my favorite games of recent years. I even bought the game twice now, the PC version and the PS5 Deluxe Edition and I can't wait to discover more if this game in my next playthroughs. I can't thank you enough Larian Studios, thank you for creating this game, I will go back and play Divinity: Original Sin 1-2 now. Last but not least thanks to my two friends for playing this masterpiece for over 100 hours with me. I know I was a real pain in the ass every time I pushed you off a cliff or simply hit your summons because I was too stupid to notice who is my ally. It was an honor to experience this game together, THANK YOU

Edit by future me : I do appreciate it a lot that they also added a playable Epilogues.


Games I finished in 2023 Ranked

#2 in my List of Top 5 Games of 2023

[DISCLAIMER: This review didn’t run away from me so much as it sprinted. It is obscenely long, sitting at around 9.4k words after cuts.]

When I wrote my initial review of BG3 I swore that I’d probably just bench the game and come back in a couple years when the inevitable Definitive Edition launched. I was hoping to just put the game out of my mind and go play literally anything else that was installed on my SSD.

But, to tell you the truth, I struggled to uninstall the game. Even after my multiplayer game was put on indefinite hold due to a party member being admitted to hospital (they’re fine now), the game continued to haunt me. Both for reasons I’ll get to shortly, and because continued discussion with my close friends either revealed things I hadn’t considered or brought up new complaints that I agreed with but never really thought about.

Ultimately, though, BG3 haunted me because I had so many questions.

Were things unfinished? Or did I just miss them?
Was the class balance really that awful, or did rolling with Paladin and the default Origin layouts give me the wrong impression?
Did Acts 2 and 3 go too fast, or did I?
Was an Origin playthrough really going to change my mind?
Does the game have a lot of useless loot, or did I just miss it?
How bad is the game’s morality bias in reality?

And so many more. Eventually they ate away at me so hard that I decided to start a Shadowheart run and see how I truly felt about BG3.

To save you a potentially long review: It wasn’t pretty.

I will give Baldur’s Gate 3 praise for one thing, though, and that’s its excellent ability to mask its flaws by pretending to have more options than it actually has. A running theme of my original playthrough was picking an option and thinking “Hmm, I wonder what a lot of those other options did”. In this playthrough, I decided to pick more of them - sometimes via save rerolling.

While I was initially so positive towards the game that I labelled the gameplay as ‘a masterpiece’, repeated exposure and a significant replay have soured my opinion quite significantly.

Hilariously, I finger-wagged Wrath of the Righteous for adding too much yet praised BG3 for its reticence.

Anyway, BG3 has too many options and could’ve done with some significant cuts. No, really. ‘This game has too much’ is going to pop up a lot from here on out.

Yes, WOTR has a lot of superfluous gunk that is best skipped. The problem is that, despite BG3 having significantly less, the ratio of usable:worthless is roughly the same.

Especially on the spell front, my god. There are so many of them, and a startling amount of them are Concentration spells - meaning you can either use only one at a time or casting them will shatter your active spell. This doesn’t affect offensive casters like Warlocks or Evocation Wizards too much, but it utterly crushes defensive/support casters like Druids/Bards/Clerics and ESPECIALLY Paladins, whose primary means of attack (Smite attacks) more-often-than-not will break Concentration. Which is a problem, because even an Oathbreaker Paladin gets an excessive amount of support spells.

You could, for example, cast Shield of Faith. It’s a concentration spell that gives your target +2 to Armour Class. Very nice. Or you could caste Haste, which gives +2 to AC and an extra entire action plus Advantage on Dexterity Throws and doubles your movement speed.

You could also cast Compelled Duel, which forces an enemy to attack only you. Or, you could not waste a Concentration slot and instead cast Command; an extremely versatile spell with a number of options that can do basically the same thing in function but also *isn’t a Concentration spell.

You could use Magic Weapon to buff your weapon and get a significant offensive edge, or you could just use Divine Smite to do basically the same thing in terms of damage output but without breaking Concentration.

This is not a Paladin exclusive problem, either. Woe betide Conjuration Wizards, Clerics, Druids and Bards for their excess of Concentration spells.

I get the intent behind Concentration as a mechanic, it’s ostensibly a means to prevent people simply steamrolling fights by pre-buffing and then walking in with like 6 actions, 45 AC, and a movement speed measured in European countries… Except you can still do this. There are a number of buff spells, many of which are obscenely useful - Longstrider, Enhance Leap, Mirror Image, Feather Fall to name an early game handful - that can easily be cast before a fight for a massive no-catch advantage.
Sure, you could argue that it’s hard to see fights coming on a first run, to which I’d say that the game telegraphs fights very blatantly and anyone who’s even slightly fluent in the unspoken Language of Games will be keyed in immediately. That, and a character only needs a mild investment in Perception to detect ambushes from ten postcodes away.

As an aside: Concentration also feels needlessly restrictive in a game with so few spell slots as it is. Paladins again get hit with this hard, as Divine Smites devour spell slots.

The issue with junk options sadly isn’t restricted to spells.

In my last review, I gassed up BG3’s action economy and praised it for always letting you do something. You can do off the wall shit involving water + lightning, flammable surfaces, improvised melee weapons, throwing loose items in your inventory, shoving, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand it’s all useless.

I try to avoid optimizing the fun out of my games. I was raised on flashy fighters and my teenage fixation was Devil May Cry with a dash of God Hand, so the need to style on enemies is in my blood. But it’s a bit hard not to play optimally in BG3 because the fun options just do paltry damage. Yes it’s cool to batista bomb someone through a barrel, but that does at best 9-12 damage in an entire turn. Even by the end of Act 1, you can do so much better than this.

The addition of Throw, Improvised Melee Weapon and Shove seemed like boons at first, but they’re really not. Throwing a molotov will always be less effective than throwing a Fire Bolt cantrip that most casters can get, for instance. There’s some merit to using Thrown weapons, but we’ll get to the Ranged Issue later.
Improvised Melee Weapon is useless given the incredibly high stat requirement to use it against humanoids, its waning usefulness as early as Act 2, and the paltry damage it does if used with furniture.
And Shove… Fall damage is also utterly pathetic. Shove does have a meagre utility for repositioning enemies, but this is rare considering how much mobility even casual players will come into, and using it for instakills often means losing useful loot.

The real reason ‘improv’ solutions suck, though, is because normal attacks are just too good. Ranged especially. Most martial classes, even the ‘pure’ ones, come with a bow or crossbow proficiency that also confers respectable damage regardless of stats. While Thrown weapons are ostensibly meant to be used as the ranged option for physical damage dealers, they also suck compared to just… shooting the enemy from afar? Or hucking a cantrip. Unless you’re using the Strength Monk Tavern Brawler build, but that build moves so fast that I question your competency if you frequently need to use ranged with it.

As I was typing this review, I considered giving them some praise for the addition of Jump as an action, but then I really thought about it. All jumping added was some okay level design that’s immediately underscored by the buggy pathfinding, and yet another means for melee classes to ignore ranged by just doing a 20 foot leap towards the enemy.

All of this is bad on its own, yes, but the real problems begin to rear their head when it comes to the subject of leveling. In my last review I praised the game for making ‘levels feel meaningful’.

I now realise that was mostly me appreciating the crutch the game handed me as I was feeling out the systems.

Level ups in BG3 rarely feel meaningful, with the rarity being adjusted by classes.

Spellcasters enjoy a relative lack of ‘dead’ levels as they get spells and slots every single level. While levels 11 and 12 are as underwhelming for them as they are for everyone else (due to 11 and 12 being ‘buffer’ levels before level 13, which was not included in BG3), they do at least get some notable new toys to play with. They suck, sure, but it’s something.

Martial classes, however, often see long swathes where they get little more than an action which may or may not be useful, a passive trait that will 80% of the time be too situational to ever pop up, and then the monotony is broken up by a Feat. Again, again, this really hurts Paladins; they get so many Concentration spells that it would perhaps be less egregious if they only got proficiency in a skill and 16 extra HP.

Once the mechanics ‘click’, level ups soon go from being a monumental event to being countdowns for the levels where your build actually comes online. How could they not? In a game where the most boring solution will often reward you with 80 damage per character turn, getting some Always Prepared spells doesn’t mean anything. What good is Faerie Fire when Lae’zel can do at minimum 80 damage before targets can even cloak themselves?

The sole exception to all of this is Monk, a class which embodies another issue I’m going to gripe about at length later on: Content added later in development is so very detached from the rest of the game that it begins to feel like DLC in a Bethesda game which sticks out like a sore thumb.

Monk is obscene. It has numerous possible builds within itself, is one of the few (if not the only) class that can metamorph into something unique via multiclassing, and it also just gets everything. It can have useful spells that swiftly recharge on a short rest, it can get incredible martial actions that’re worth using over basic attacking (in part because they give you an extra basic attack), or they can just straight up become Rogue but better. 9 Open Hand Monk/3 Thief Rogue is one of the few builds I’ve tried that was sincerely fun.

Monk was also the last class added, and no other class has as much unique content or as much depth. The classes in general, actually, are pretty bad on both a gameplay and story front.

I also need to take a moment to gripe about Feats. In Wrath of the Righteous there’s about a hundred or so. Sure, a lot of them are boring and uncreative, but there’s always something you can take to benefit or augment a build. +2 AC when fighting defensively is boring, sure, but it’s something! That’s survivability, right there! Especially if you’re squishy!
BG3, meanwhile, has precious few feats. The vast majority of them benefit melee characters, with only a handful for ranged/magic users and some that are just plain useless. There is no real reason to take ‘Performer’ - which lets you use musical instruments, already a dubiously useful feature that embodies a problem we’ll get to soon. Sure, it gives you +1 Charisma, but you could also take.

[Drum Roll]

ABILITY IMPROVEMENT!

Ability Improvement is the ultimate embodiment of my gripes with BG3’s feats. It’s boring. It’s so boring. It’s the most boring feat in a list of like 20-30 of the most boring feats in the setting.

But it’s good. It’s really good. It’s a two +1s to any stat you want, or a single +2. Given the relatively high starting stats for classes (17 at most), the relative ease of consequence-free stat buffs, and the low level cap for stats (20 via feats, 30 from rewards/tonics), there’s no reason not to take it. Buffing your class stat buffs pretty much everything you can do, and the relatively homogenous builds available to classes means there’s not much reason to not buff the main stat unless you’re doing Strength Monk - again, the only time a class meaningfully deviates from its main draw.

The other feats, in comparison, are just utter faff and feel more like deciding which flavour of Monster Energy you want. Yeah, there’s tons and they all taste different but at the end of the day you’re functionally just choosing between four things: Proficiency in a thing, a linear stat increase, a dubiously useful situational perk, or something that’s just a total no-brainer. To be honest, most classes can get by just using Ability Improvement/Savage Attacker and either Mobile or Alert. That is, in order: +2 to your main stat, Advantage on every attack roll you’ll ever make that cannot be nullified, and either a huge buff to movement speed which is worth more than gold, or Initiative (letting you get off hefty alpha strikes).

Most feats might sound good on paper, but reality tends to crumple that paper up and throw it into a wastebin. Heavy Armor Master, for instance, promises to reduce all non-magical damage by -3 when you’re wearing heavy armor. Sounds great, right? In Act 1, it is!

For about an hour.

BG3’s core issue on the gameplay front is that it’s too rigid in its adherence to DnD 5e. This would not be a problem were it not for how fast the game scales. Much of what is ‘bad’ in BG3 is only bad because it’s in a videogame. -3 damage would be excellent in a lower stakes tabletop campaign where your two worst threats are “some guy named Greg who’s been stealing gnomes from Belfast'' and your DM’s ex-girlfriend whose untreated personality disorder means every diceroll might literally be your last.

But this is not a low stakes tabletop campaign. There are worse threats than Greg, and they frequently hit for double or triple digits. -3 is excellent against an enemy who will only do 10 damage, but in BG3 those stop appearing within about half an hour depending on your playtime.

What’s really infuriating about feats is that there is an abundance of magic items in this game, and even the shittier ones have far more interesting effects that would’ve made for a much better feat lineup. But no, death to pragmatic adaptation I suppose.

I’m gonna take a little break from kvetching about BG3 to point something out, though: This issue with classes and feats isn’t entirely Larian’s fault. It is their fault for blindly adapting 5e with no modifications besides the ones necessary for a videogame, but most of the actual issues lie with the fact that DnD 5e is just unimaginative dogshit which is - to be incredibly mean for a moment - moreso targeted to people whose perception of tabletop games is entirely shaped by Critical Role and funny DM stories on Reddit. I’d compare it to something like Hyrule Warriors, Prison Architect, Forza or Guilty Gear Strive; in theory it should be a good base for people to springboard into better and more thought-out entries within the genre, but in reality people just cling to it and never expand their horizons. And while BG3 does have many of its own issues, a fair share of them are ultimately present because 5e barely makes for a good tabletop system let alone a videogame.

Much of what I’ve said about feats applies to classes, too. You could pick Ranger if you wanted, but do you really want to? Are you really that hellbent on playing Worse Rogue? Oh, you want to pick Paladin instead? Okay, that’s cool… But do you really want to play Worse Fighter? Ah, you want to play Druid instead. Neat and all, but do you really want to play Worse Sorcerer? Bard? Is Worse Wizard really that appealing?

The answer for most people will be ‘yeah’, because this is a roleplaying game and I imagine the vast majority of people pick classes for the aesthetics and personal character flavour. Not me, though, minmaxing is part of the fun for me.

Wizards, Sorcerers and Warlocks get plenty of flavour to make them appealing and viable in their own right - even if Warlock is mostly an Eldritch Blast machine. Albeit, most of this is down to the game’s obscene fixation on magic. It very much wants you to be a caster, it wants you to use some magic even if you’re martial. The problem here is that Cleric, Druid and Bard don’t get much in the way of interesting or viable mechanics. Clerics are essentially just an awkward midpoint between Paladins and Wizards. Druid can shapeshift and Bard subclasses get spells that’re just diet versions of better class’ gimmicks, but that’s it. Their spellbooks are weak and wimpy, to the point that two entire companions (Jaheira and Halsin) kinda suck right out the gate unless reclassed.

Druid in particular sucks thanks to a problem which is multi-layered: Damage types. BG3 has a lot of ‘em; Piercing (divvied up into 3 subcategories), Fire, Lightning, Cold, Thunder, Acid, Poison, Necrotic, Radiant, Force and Psychic. Of these damage types, Fire reigns supreme. There are so many readily available sources of it than any other damage type, it’s scarcely resisted let alone nullified, and spells that deal fire damage are both incredibly convenient and incredibly strong. To a lesser extent, this also goes for lightning and cold.

Acid, Poison and Necrotic are utterly awful. A lot of enemies resist it or are outright immune to it, and their spells are either negligible in terms of damage or extremely costly. It’s the near-persistent resistances and immunities that truly make Druid a pain, though. This is, once again, a problem with the choices made in the adaptation. Larian wanted to tell a certain story with certain setpieces, no problem… At first. They also wanted to include lots of combat stuff from 5e, which meant that what they decided to adapt now had tangible consequences for some characters. Even putting aside Druid’s lackluster spellbook, 2 of its 3 subclasses are focused on dealing primarily Acid and Poison damage, which just makes them a waste.

If you have any familiarity with TTRPGs, you might still be thinking about what I said before: That some things in BG3 are fine for a tabletop session and bad for a videogame.

Anyway, let’s talk about ability checks.

In a standard tabletop session - and indeed, this game’s own multiplayer - characters will have different specialties. Your wizard may be able to bend the world’s magical weave to their whims as though it were an obedient dog, but they probably don’t have the charisma to console a grieving widow. That’s where the party member with the appropriate stats takes the stage. In BG3’s multiplayer, this is entirely intact. I rarely talk to NPCs in my main BG3 MP session because I am Smashman the Barbarian Who Smashes.. Our bard - who has 1 level in Bard and 7 in Warlock - does that for us.

In BG3 singleplayer, this becomes a problem. The Party as an entity will automatically do some things of their own volition; perception/arcana/history/whatever checks will roll concurrently and immediately with no input required. If you need something disarmed or unlocked, the game will automatically make the party member with the highest Sleight of Hand roll for it.

This is all on the overworld, however. In conversations, only the person who initiated can roll. As BG3 is a very Player-centric game, your main character will be the one doing 99% of dialogues, which in turn provides a very annoying issue with proficiency forcing.

BG3 is not a masterfully crafted RPG, or even a competently crafted one, so it lacks what I call “fail-throughs”; situations that can arise from failing a check that are unique in their own way and perhaps even better than succeeding depending on the circumstances. Here, it’s nothing but binary pass/fail checks that either skip some busywork or a fight. If you fail, you’re stuck with busywork and/or a fight. God forbid you have a charismatic character step up to the front, too, because there’s a lot of character specific exchanges in Acts 1 and 2 that you can miss out on. Especially as Shadowheart or the Dark Urge. I find this particularly jarring because it’s a problem that CRPGs solved as early as 1998… With the first Baldur’s Gate.

One thing I regularly castigate BG3 for is its slavish devotion to both tabletops and other, better western RPGs. This, I feel, really makes it clear as day. CRPGs as a genre tend to have a problem wherein Charisma and its associated diplomatic functions are so powerful that taking them is a no-brainer. BG3 is no different.

Unfortunately, BG3 is not confident in doing this. It offers you an absurd amount of outs; Stat-boosting skills which can be cast from a handy menu, no-consequence rerolls that you get by the bucketload, and tons of bonuses and boons all the way to the credits. It is, in many ways, afraid to let you fail.

Early on, you’re introduced to Long Rests. These cost 40 camp supplies, advance the plot sometimes, and restore all of your spell slots/class abilities. A Short Rest can patch you up briefly for free, but you only get two. The game sort of, kinda, maybe implies that long rests should be done sparingly? This is total hogwash though, you can find about 120 camp supplies immediately after the prologue. It is, to me at least, pretty obvious that the abundance of supplies across the entire game is a safety net for people who’re taking their time to learn the combat or just aren’t that great at the game. This is fine, there’s nothing wrong with this.

…Except, on Tactician - which doubles the amount of supplies needed for a long rest - there’s still far too many. Especially for those given to exploration or completionism.

That’s not my actual issue, though.

My actual bone to pick is that the system fucks with the narrative if you’re too good at the game. A bit like Hades, but more insufferable.

Long Rests are good at restoring spell slots, sure. If your party is a monk, fighter, rogue and warlock, then you can get by with short rests. If you’re also decently good at the game, or get lucky with rolls, you can potentially go a long time without using long rests! On my latest run, I only used about three in Act 1.

A very fun fact about Baldur’s Gate 3 is that it’s held together with strings, glue, a bit of prayer and also 4-5 invigilators making sure you don’t peek behind the curtain.

Abstaining from long rests - willfully or not - is a way to peek behind the curtain.

Many narrative events, be they main story related or companion related, are directly tied to long resting. These aren’t just fun side extras, they’re vital to the story being told and the companions within. It’s similar in egregiousness to Hades’ story, wherein you’re punished outright for being better than the game expects. You can, through deliberate or accidental avoidance of long resting, skip a lot of these events.

The game breaks pretty heavily if you do. It’s still clearable, but wow. Companions can skip entire conversations (which are still recorded as happening), Astarion can potentially forget to reveal his vampirism (thus costing him his bite ability), vital scenes involving the parasite can fail to trigger (thus costing you the parasite skill tree), so on and so forth. Even when these do fire, they’re often slammed together in inappropriate ways or delayed by a few real life hours.

Hilariously, you can potentially keep Gale without needing to skill check him into submission, should you choose to kill the refugees and druids. Just don’t rest! It’s easy!

Speaking of slaughtering the refugees and druids, though, it’s possible to stumble into an outcome to the first Big Choice that is either unfinished or was meant to be cut. For context: The first Big Choice of Baldur’s Gate 3 is whether you side with a grove of druids and the refugees seeking shelter, or whether you side with goblins and butcher them. I’ve kvetched about it in my original review, but did you know there’s a third option?

Zevlor and Mol, two tiefling refugees, will allude to stealing the Druids’ sacred idol to disrupt their ritual. Mol even gives it to you as a formal quest. Should you actually do this (ideally via having someone go invisible and nab it), it will trigger a schism and cause the Druids to fight the Tieflings. The Druids will always win, backing the Tieflings into a corner and slaughtering them to the last.

Doing this locks you into a weird Schrodinger’s Murderer scenario. The game flags you as having picked both options at the same time without actually resolving the choice. You still have to trudge over to the Goblin Camp and either deal with the leaders, or “kill” the tiefling camp by… walking in the front door and having Minthara proclaim victory. Interestingly, Halsin even has unique dialogue for this scenario that sadly never gets resolved because he disappears from the game world entirely in this situation.

What’s really interesting though, are the companion reactions. Shadowheart quips that the Grove owes you a great debt for saving them - despite them being dead - while Gale groans about it despite never confronting you or alluding to it elsewhere. Astarion never acknowledges it - or maybe he does? I don’t know. On the run that let me find this outcome, I grew tired of his Stewie Griffin impression and staked him. Wyll runs through some cut content voicelines with Karlach that reveal he was intended to not leave instantly if you slaughtered the Grove.

I bring this up because it is fantastically broken, doubly so if you opt to ‘side’ with Minthara and then immediately kill her, at which point you’re locked into that Schrodinger’s Murderer state I mentioned above. And yet, this is something the game directs you to do. It’s not something I just found while faffing about, it’s a quest Mol gave me. Keep it in mind for when I talk about the story.

First, though, I want to talk about alignment. Like everything, alignment was gutted in 5e and turned into a vestigial system; there for the sake of being there, really. BG3 omits it… as a mechanic.
But it’s still beholden to the ideas of the alignment system. If you have any familiarity with the setting and its alignments, it becomes abundantly clear that they’re still there but invisible, much like engines in Mechwarrior or ammo pickup in Payday 2. Sure, there’s no good or evil meter or even associated stats, but also it’s kind of conspicuous that the only Bronze Dragon is so Lawful Good as to be destructive. Or that Astarion becoming a true vampire very noticeably shifts his alignment out of Neutral. Or that, despite waffling and shuffling around the topic, every mindflayer you encounter meets one or more definitions of Neutral Evil. Or that Shadowheart, follower of a Neutral Evil goddess, gets noticeably and abruptly more selfless after converting to Selune - a Chaotic Good goddess.

There are narrative reasons for these, yes, but they have all the sincerity and grace of a parent insisting their son’s stained school shirt, chewed bottom lip and dilated pupils are due to migraines. It’s such a strange thing to observe after 5e bent over backwards to turn alignment into the kind of atrophied husk that excites some of my puppygirl friends. Especially after having finished a replay of WOTR, a game that challenges the rigidity of alignments in basically every other major scene. Larian probably thinks Prelate Hulrun was right.

Why bring this up?

Because at the end of the day, BG3 doesn’t feel like it was actually made with love for DnD or 5e specifically. Rather, it feels like it was made by people who liked the idea of DnD or maybe their specific DnD experiences, who then went on to make a game which is just a cheap rollercoaster ride for Faerun. A narrow hodgepodge of random elements from the franchise to make people gawk at for 60 hours. In a way, I’d argue that BG3 is made more out of demented DnD fetishism as opposed to any genuine love.

It’s one of those things that only comes up on replays, really. I think the first run is good at making the world feel bigger than it is, especially given the inevitability of you missing something. On subsequent runs, it’s very obviously an A-B-C haunted house ride where you can sometimes vote to go on a detour. There are no real memorable components to the overworld, just attractions. Look, there’s the Absolutist siblings! And the owlbear den! And the goblin village! And Auntie Ethel! And the Raphael bridge! And Gnolls!

But there’s no world. I recently reviewed Factorio, yet it’s this game that feels like a conveyor belt ride. In my last review I took potshots at Act 2 for pretending to have a hazard only to immediately hand you a key to ignoring that hazard, and in hindsight Act 2 is the game just admitting what it is. ‘Here’s a wrecked Land of Fuck, go explore Fuckland and see the sights!’, with the sights primarily being undead/shadow enemies and encounters that’re either tedious boss fights or a succession of dialogue checks. They are, at the very least, better tied to the overall story than in Act 1 or 3. Really, if I say anything about Act 2 is that it’s easily the strongest arc just for making the haunted house attractions actually tie in with the rest of the house. Which honestly gives it better interior design cohesion than my parents.

Act 3 is the worst for this, though, my god. 1 and 2 have the excuse of being in a frontier forest and a blighted hellscape. 3, though rife with cuts and rewrites and bugs, takes place in the Faerun equivalent to Glasgow. And, despite the massively increased population and higher density of NPCs and framerate dives and cut content, it still feels like a haunted house ride. You dart around a tenth of the titular city going from attraction to attraction, ticking off entries in a checklist so bloated that I have to declare it as fetish art when crossing the Canadian border. Not once does the game cast off the rollercoaster shackles.

Something else that’s been bugging me as I both replay BG3 and watch others play is that, honestly, classes aren’t implemented very well in the narrative. Dialogue and actions that should break a Paladin’s oath often don’t, and the usage of generic ‘Paladin’ dialogues for each oath means that your character will almost always be OOC relative to their oath. Even Oathbreakers are OOC, as they can still act as and be treated as a Paladin by everyone not named Raphael. Warlocks can frequently chastise Wyll for how silly he was to accept a Fiend pact with little to no attention given to your hypocrisy. It’s often a coin toss whether or not characters will mention a Druid protagonist even being one when appropriate. If someone mentions a lock or trap in dialogue, take a shot every time they allude to you being a Rogue. You’ll be stone cold sober. Don’t even get me started on Warlock and its vocations.

I normally would not hold developers to such tight standards. Gamedev is tough, I’m not insane enough to think they should account for every contingency or random combination of decisions the player might make. The reason I make an exception for BG3 is because it constantly pretends it’s accounting for things. Part of the hype wave from Early Access was caused by the game having responses for all manner of combinations and the general assumption was that the full release would be the same, but More. So with that in mind, every omission is a bit of a glaring hole, especially as they’re often common-sense omissions - weirder ones get accounted for.

One last addendum (because this segment has expanded 3x its original size since I started) I feel is worth noting is that the original level cap for this game was 10. It was later buffed to 12 to allow spellcasters to get Level 6 spells, but Larian has explained several times that it’d never go any higher because they just didn’t want to deal with the ramifications of 7th level spellcasting or anything above it. “We didn’t want to deal with it” pops up a lot in interviews around this game, which is also vexing considering how much faff the game has.

[I had a segment here about how bad customization was, but honestly it’s just a repeat of my prior gripes in the last interview with an added “I hate how boring the body types are”.]

Okay. 5700 words into this review.

Let’s actually talk about the story, and the characters that inhabit it.

When I first ran through this game, I had a lot of love for the tadpole infestation as a framing device. A lot of my earlier story criticisms were centred around “squandering a good premise later on”. I liked the setup, but the payoffs to said setup were unsatisfying.

Now, coming back to Act 1 several times, I’ve actually come to resent the story for immediately going out of its way to remove all sense of urgency without even pretending there’s anything at stake. Very early on, you are told outright that the tadpole in your brain won’t immediately turn you and thus there’s no real rush whatsoever. Despite vestigial dialogue from Early Access implying that engaging with the tadpole at all will doom you, this is a lie. There are no consequences for using it, and it is indeed just a cool skill tree you can gorge on with no issue or complaints. Lae’zel doesn’t even need to be persuaded to turn a blind eye; you can stand in front of her and ram parasites into your skull while she stares at you glaikit and uncaring.

This isn’t an issue exclusive to the tadpoles. Even in Act 1, you will be told an annoying amount of times that the Druids are this close to shutting off the grove and that you REALLY need to hurry before they succeed in their ritual. Naturally, you can take all the time you like. Even as you learn of a pending Goblin invasion, so long as you don’t speak to Minthara you can just meander around at your own pace. Characters are constantly urging you to focus on things; Raphael warns you not to meander, your companions beg you to hurry up and do their specific thing, NPCs give you quests and go “oh it is SO urgent people are DYING it’s almost OVER you are our LAST HOPE” only to exit dialogue and stiffly walk away while you pinch their healing potions with Astarion.

Now, I need to lay my cards out here: I like time limits, and I think completionism is a venereal disease. I think the real strength of videogames is that they offer experiences that other artforms literally cannot replicate, and a huge part of this is due to some games simply not letting you ‘see everything’ on a first run.

I don’t think BG3 would actually benefit from hard or soft time limits, though. Rather, I take hefty umbrage with the game constantly pretending to have any sort of urgency or time limit only to clap its hands and lead you down a trail of Side Shit. It’s telling that you can acquire a ring from a sidequest that’s meant to assuage symptoms of tadpole infection only to find out that it confers a small buff instead.

WHICH IS A PERFECT TIME TO TALK ABOUT EARLY ACCESS AGAIN!

I really need you, the viewer, to understand how much of a different game BG3 was before they bowed to complaints and made a worse version of DA:O, and I’ll start with that bloody ring.

As I’ve mentioned before, the Early Access version of BG3 was a much different, darker beast. Using the tadpole was an in-game taboo, would royally piss off your companions, and subtly accelerated your descent into becoming a squid. But there was a way to make it fuck off: A ring. The same ring you get that now confers a small buff. It required a short and at-the-time annoying sidequest, but it made that tadpole shut up and made the dream visitor fuck right off until you removed it.
That it was diluted so heavily in the full release (to the point where pursuing the sidequest actually enhances your tadpole powers) is indicative of this game’s massive tone shift, but it’s not quite as indicative as *Wyll.

Wyll in BG3’s release version is the noble son of Duke Ravengard. He is a kind and morally upstanding man who took a Warlock pact that massively fucked him over, but he’s still good in spite of it. He is the goodest of good companions. Mizora, his patron, is just a terrible creature all around with all the redeeming traits of the average Serbian war criminal given that she groomed a teenager into accepting a Warlock pact.

Wyll in BG3’s EA version wasn’t even a Ravengard. He was hinted to be an Eltan, and his dad was a rogue. While he was still the ‘Blade of Frontiers’, conversing with him and exposing him to Goblins made it clear that he harboured an intense darkness in his soul and was a bit too proud of himself. When faced with noncompliant Goblins he immediately resorted to torture, and had no qualms about hurting an innocent man for information. He saw himself as Robin Hood, but veered into The Punisher territory… But there was also an undercurrent of longing to his desire to find Mizora. Despite being his abuser (more intensely, since EA implied she’d sexually assaulted him) and openly scorning her, it was never clear if he actually did hate her.

Unfortunately Larian made the mistake of asking CRPG fans to empathise with a morally complex black man and thus they whined for years that he was “boring” (despite being, imo, the most interesting EA companion besides Gale), so they rewrote him entirely and gave him a new VA and didn’t even have the fucking care to give him as much dialogue as the other companions, so now he feels worse than even the non-Origin characters or Karlach - who only existed late in the game’s lifespan. I bring this up specifically because EA Wyll and EA Astarion were essentially the same character concept; men who affected a front that crumpled under duress and revealed a murky, complex interior. Wyll’s story just progressed in EA while Astarion’s didn’t.

In the middle of writing this segment, which was going to touch on how launch BG3 is painfully split between trying to be a dark fantasy story and trying to be ‘Dragon Age With Cocks’, Larian dumped out Patch 5, which among other things adds an actual epilogue and a way to recruit Minthara without carrying out a small-scale ethnic cleansing. The content present in both of these confirmed to me that Larian have opted to embrace Bioware’s legacy wholeheartedly, by treating their own work as a terminally unserious dating sim for 20-30 somethings who laugh at Virtual Youtuber fans but treat Astarion as though he were an actual person they know.

It’s an excellent jumping off point for my criticisms about tone, though. Marketing itself as a Dark Fantasy Epic gives me certain expectations and while I’ll praise them for avoiding the addiction to sexual assault which is omnipresent in American/West European Dark Fantasy, I have to dock them points for not actually making a Dark Fantasy story. Yes, the game is very gorey and a lot of sidequest characters get royally dicked over, but this is ultimately a story about a party of mostly heroic individuals out to slay an inarguable bad guy who is out to control all reality. Along the way, you can hit a button every now and then to do a dickish thing for no justifiable reason than “the option was there”.

If you’ve played BG3, think of your least favourite party member. Maybe it’s Shadowheart, with her initial snootiness and wishy washy morals? Maybe it’s Lae’zel, with her refusal to lick your character’s boots and penchant for dickheadedness? Maybe it’s Gale, with his emotional manipulation and habit of lovebombing people?

Whoever they are: They were better in EA simply by way of having worse character traits. The release version comes with a distinct sanding-down of everyone to make them more palatable to the Dragon Age crowd. Which, given how DA fans continue to talk about Morrigan to this day, isn’t entirely unreasonable. The end result though is that the party are, as a collective, insufferably good. Besides Minthara - who is very obviously your Lawful Evil rep - every single party member is ‘good at heart’, or just outright good.

The option is there to make some of them worse, of course, but as I alluded to in my last review and up above there often isn’t any justifiable reason for it. It’s debatably a worse case of protagonist-centric morality than the titles this game is blatantly ripping off. At least Dragon Age 2 bothered to provide reasons why you might turn Anders into a crazed zealot or Isabela into an amoral, selfish thief. Here, the choice is always “follow the logical conclusion of the character’s arc” or “hit the bad guy button”.

None of this would be an issue if each NPC’s worst traits were still present. Barring some leftover EA dialogue and early Act 1, everyone just softens up unless you hit the bad guy button.

I also need to take a moment to natter about how boring the companions are, having seen their arcs to completion around 5-6 times at this point. Call me reductive if you wish, but every Origin character is someone whose life growing up was defined by abuse (sexual, emotional, institutional, whatever) and whose personalities at game start are defined by grooming (for romance, for sex, for control, as part of a militaristic caste society, by a literal demon, etc). The resolution to these characters is always either them getting over it - with only your help, naturally - or becoming a dickhead.

The only material difference, besides (imo) cosmetic differences in dialogue is that Astarion gets significantly more Everything than everyone, which is best exemplified by the Dark Urge

I was hoping to put the Astarion favouritism off until nearer the end, but again the recent update put him at the forefront of dev time, quality and quantity so I am bloodsworn to kvetch. Most of what I’m going to say applies to Shadowheart too, but to a much lesser degree because she’s a woman and you know how fantasy fans are.

Astarion gets an unusual amount of shilling by the devs, to the point where it gets exhausting. He has the most indepth romance, he has the most interactions with the Dark Urge, he has the most dialogue, the most interjections, the most indepth companion questline - with the most outcomes - and is generally just given so much more than everyone else. In updates, he is always the focus. “You can kiss Astarion on demand” got more attention from Larian themselves than “Minthara, an entire companion, now works properly”. Hell, the old BG3 poster used to have every companion dispersed evenly and now it’s got him at the forefront. He’s also the only dex-specced party member in the game, so you’re stuck with him unless you want a Hireling.

I wouldn’t normally take umbrage with character shilling because, let’s be honest for a second, posterboys are exceptionally useful marketing tools and most big releases have one for sanity’s sake. My actual issue comes from the sheer neglect everyone else gets. Wyll, a companion who’s been around since very early access, has less dialogue than Karlach - a character who didn’t at all exist until earlier this year. Everyone else just has less than Astarion, which is impressive given that it’s Shadowheart who the narrative drops on you. I’ve noticed that a lot of this game’s most vehement defenders tend to point to Astarion’s story (which is just “sexual assault is bad… when it happens to men c:”) as proof that the narrative is high art while conspicuously ignoring the rest of the game’s narrative contents.

In a way, it amazes me that Larian managed to speedrun the Star Wars Pitfall - wherein a series starts off with a vivid and interesting cast of characters only to cross the event horizon and end up revolving around 2-3 (Skywalker/Kenobi) in the end. In EA, BG3 was a game about a party of fucked up people with a deep ugliness in their soul sat opposite all the beauty, and in the full release BG3 is a game with Astarion and some other people in it.

Also… This may strike some viewers as cold, but I don’t particularly care about the way sexual assault and trauma are depicted in Astarion’s questline. Both because all of the abuse is thrown up in one big box named “abuse”, and because the writers clearly think the players are fucking morons which results in several scenes where either Astarion or the Narrator tells you outright the exact ways in which his trauma affects him.
This in itself is not unrealistic; as heartbreaking as it is, the most damaged people I know don’t want for self-awareness and could probably deliver much the same exposition.
In writing, though, it often comes off as what I said before: The writers assuming players are morons. Which is doubly strange given Gale (my favourite companion) is a whole other beast, and the results of his grooming by a literal goddess are often present yet not explicitly commented upon. He’ll even deny it in the rare moments you do bring it up.

It’s all very… “Young adult novel tackling abuse”. Every time I see the ‘good’ climax to Astarion’s story where he declares that he’s “so much more than [Cazador] made him” and then stabs his abuser to death before sobbing, I wince a little at how juvenile it is. In the past it was ambiguous as to whether murdering Cazador actually helped, but sure enough the new epilogues confirm it ‘fixes’ him. Nauseating, I tell you.

I mentioned that Gale was my favourite companion and that’s primarily because he hits on the same notes, they’re just handled with grace. Gale is a deeply traumatized man who was groomed and taken as a consort by a literal goddess. A goddess who enabled his worst tendencies until they bore actual consequences, and then cut ties with him for both of their sakes.
He presents a jovial and jolly front, but said front comes with a habit for compliments-as-manipulation and guilt tripping because it turns out being well-read does not make up for serious arrested development.
Peer beneath the veil and you find a man who has a genuine, sincere belief that his death will be a net positive for the world, yet despite this emptiness and resignment to his fate he still nurses a nuclear anger towards his abuser and anyone like her that can be set off if pushed properly. His apparent ‘ego’ is also a front, because in truth he believes his only notable trait is his intellect and magical prowess; they’re the core of his entire self. Without them, what is he?

There’s a moment in Act 2 that’s incredibly easy to miss due to that act’s general pacing issues where he’s just outright depressed. When you poke him for a conversation, the first thing he apologises for? Not being the erudite and verbose speaker he usually is. It’s heartbreaking.

Most of that is just inferred, by the way. Unlike Astarion, Gale has precious few scenes that really expand on his character and I had to really dig to get some of them. That many of them were bugged and didn’t appear until patches 3 and 4 didn't help. Minthara is great too, but the developers are hellbent on leaving her unfinished so I can’t even go into an expository rant about her.

I’m going to take a brief break from dunking on the game to talk about a good part - though it is in service to dunking all the same.

Act 2 is fucking phenomenal. I’d say it’s the only solid part of the game’s story. There’s a solid villain with defined motives and an actual personality, a strong supporting cast, minibosses who act as narrative mirrors to the big bad, and several companion quests (Except Wyll, sorry) reveal their full stakes here. The studio’s art designers worked overtime for each of its various environments, deftly alternating between oppressive deathcult fortresses and regal yet foreboding enclaves with plenty of rotted quasi-medieval structures in between before eventually capping off in a horrific dungeon made of meat. While I’m still not too fond of the Shadow-Cursed Lands as an area to navigate, I think the entire thing is of infinitely superior construction to the acts it’s sandwiched between.
Special shoutout to Act 2 if you’re playing as Shadowheart, which is perhaps the only time in the game where the potential of Origin Characters as a game mechanic is ever realized. Dialogue changes constantly and your interactions with the major NPCs are often radically shifted to account for your character’s role and heritage. Shame it doesn’t last.

Act 2’s biggest flaw, sadly, is that its mere existence makes two already bad acts look even worse. With the primary exception of Act 3’s intro and final two hours, most of BG3’s plot in Acts 1 and 3 only occurs sporadically. It is a series of diversions, fetch quests and camp rests until Plot, and Act 2 really pulls back the curtain on this because the plot is progressing constantly. It’s difficult to wander around Act 2 and not advance the story.
The foundation of this criticism stems from BG3’s obsession with absolute faff. Taking a leaf out of DA: Inquisition’s book, a lot of sidequests and side areas are either contextless fights or an intro to painfully unfunny writing. XP in this game stands for both Experience and Excruciating Pain from yet another Whedonesque gag sequence. Normally I’d excuse this because the game gives you gear for suffering, but so much gear is caster-specific that my martial addicted self usually bins it.

There’s a conspiracy theory that Dark Urge - who starts as a Sorcerer by default - was the main character and ‘Tav’ did not exist, which is probably not true but is believable with how much gear is caster specific. If you are a punchman or a Barbarian, eat shit.

And the Dark Urge itself… Truthfully, I like it so much that I do wish it was the only option and that Origins were unplayable. The DU story is a tale of someone wracked with a violent compulsion that haunts them no matter what. If they fight it, it is a story of fighting tooth and nail to stop said compulsion as it grows in power, eventually threatening to make the DU lash out and kill their loved ones. If they succumb, it’s a story of a demented madman building a throne of murder from the bones of reality, for they are a Bhaalspawn and that is their birthright.
DU is, to my surprise, a surprisingly captivating tale because of this. There’s a lot more weight given to some moments, and parts of the game which are usually dead air are instead filled with advancements of the DU’s personal plot. Successfully fighting it and making it to the end feels earned, in part because it’s the only good-aligned path in BG3 which is infinitely harder than the evil path.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand nobody really responds to it. DU, much like the other companions, just doesn’t get as much unique dialogue as it should. As expected, Astarion is the only character to really get into conversations about the DU, with everyone else only really giving brief interjections or casual camp chats. In the good route you are literally murdered stone dead and brought back, and nobody reacts to it. It feels grotesquely incomplete, which is a disservice to BG3’s most interesting aspect.

Throughout this review I’ve alluded to “the plot” or “the story” and I’m sad to announce that there just isn’t that much to discuss on that front. The party get infected with mind flayer tadpoles, are manipulated by a rogue mind flayer, get told to wrest control of an Elderbain from the Dead Three’s Chosen, and then decide what to do with said brain once it breaks free. I am of course being reductive, but only slightly; the meat of this game’s ‘story’ is the companion quests and side stuff. Attempt to do the plot with Hirelings and it peels back just how empty the game is.
And, really, I think having the final villain be the Elderbrain is a bit too straightforward for a game that pretends to have depth with its various ‘twists’. Doubly so considering the Chosen are miles ahead of the brain in terms of writing, managing to deftly straddle the line between “big bad you absolutely must kill” and “sympathetic failure who has reasons for being like this”. Which gives the game more depth than Final Fantasy XIV, I guess.

The story can be made somewhat more palatable by picking an Origin, because it at least hoists some unique scenes on you as a means to let you play out a character's arc however you wish. This is, sadly, the only way to give Wyll or Karlach any depth, and I'm not about to award points for the game encouraging you to make up the good writing in your head - though it certainly worked on a lot of people.

I am nearly ten thousand words into this review, and the entire time I've been waiting for a moment to posit the "What is Baldur's Gate 3 about?" question to myself. Staring down at the last few paragraphs, I realize I don't even know. So deep are the narrative changes and so sloppy is the EA/Launch welding that I can't even speculate with certainty.

As we near the end, I do want to say that the voice acting is the game’s best aspect. Besides Neil Newbon (I’m sorry. He sounds like Stewie Griffin. I will not budge.) everyone else sounds fantastic. It says a lot that the main cast have relatively few works under their belt yet are managing to go toe-to-toe with legendary voice actors JK Simmons and Jason Isaacs, with the gap in quality being about a hair’s width. Sure, it’s really fucking annoying that the game has a cutscene for EVERY dialogue even if it’s incidental NPC one-offs, but at least it’s nice to listen to everyone. Shout out to Maggie Robertson for managing to make every line out of Orin’s voice sound hornier than even I could imagine. You rock.

Ultimately, this game’s ambitions hurt it the most. There is a vast mountain of cut content for this game, much of which was being shown off and played by the developers as late as three weeks pre-release. Endless rewrites, mechanical changes and changing staff are obvious in the patchwork, ramshackle product that released in August of this year. There is a clear attempt to make a modern epic on display here. To call this game a rough gem would be acknowledging that it is still a gem, and that’s not praise I’m willing to offer even faintly.
Towards the back of my 200~ hours in this game, I began thinking of something I read years ago while talking about Three Kingdoms China. I think it’s from Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’?

There’s a limit to how far something can travel before it needs more maintenance, food and water than it can transport. This goes for animals, humans, and software too.

Baldur’s Gate 3 needed either more money, staff and resources than Larian had, or more realistic ambitions. The foundation required to support their ambitions just wasn’t there.

This game has already won a ton of awards, and will likely win even more in the coming year. For many people, it’ll be their first experience with Dark Fantasy and their views on the genre will be coloured by it. It’ll take five or so years for critical retrospectives to exist without getting shouted down by manic Astarion fans. Even now, all over social media, excitable gamers hold it aloft as an example of what games “should be”, and executives will nod their head and agree. It is, after all, the AAA way to launch unfinished and fix it later.

I have no satisfactory ending for this review. Which, given what game I'm reviewing, is apt.

[POST-SCRIPT STUFF STARTS HERE]

After posting this review, I lay down to rest my ancient back and primordial eyes, and I had a thought.

This game has problems with sex, Asian people and trans people.

Just to rattle them off without a script or proofreading:

1) Sex is treated weirdly, like Bioware's attitude but worse. It is a reward, something you get from engaging in the uncomfortably transactional romances or from doing sidequests. Alternatively, it's treated as a kink in and of itself, and that people who have it are freaky, which is very obvious with both Minthara and the fucking incest twins. Lastly, it tends to pop up as a punchline but in a very annoying way where it's the only punchline. There is genuinely an encounter early on where the '''joke''' is "haha look! Ugly people fucking!"

2) There just aren't any important Asian characters in this game, with the most prominent being a one dimensional baddy who is ultimately irrelevant outside of Astarion's questline and the rest being NPCs with one or two lines of dialogue. It really sticks out, especially given the undeserved praise this game is getting for representation. Hell, the Black characters aren't treated any better; Wyll is a non-factor thanks to Larian gutting him to appease whiners, and his dad is another man's plot token. Neither of them have any agency within the story, with Wyll always putting the fate of his dad in your hands. The playable cast is so fucking white too, my god.

3) Much of what I said up above applies to trans people, essentially confirming what I said last time. There are only a handful of trans NPCs, and there are no body options so if you decide to be a trans woman you're stuck with bolted on tits, and trans male characters are stuck looking buff as fuck because everyone in this game shares one of 4 body types. Sure, you could use one of the other body types, but faces are sex-based and there's an aggravating lack of sliders there's no real option besides femininity or masculinity. Fun! There's one major trans NPC who appears in Shadowheart's quest, but that's really it for trans people in Faerun.

I don't think I'm going to forget this game for a very long time. If at all.

As someone who's never really played CRPGs this game was barely on my radar right up to its release. I kept forgetting what it was and innately rejecting it as something that would be too hard to get into and demand so much time that I'd never get around to finishing it. I don't remember exactly what it was that finally sold me on trying it, but once my interest was piqued I was thoroughly "in" - (honestly, might've been an interview with the Larian head in the FPS Podcast)

I want to keep this one "short" so I won't be going into much detail, but this game is insane. The fact every conversation is mocapped adds so much to the immersion, and the writing and performances are thoroughly excellent to boot. The world designs and mechanics allow for heaps of creative freedom, so much so that the previous "obvious" GOTY contender for this year has (imo) been given a run for its money. Tears of the Kingdom looked to have it on lock, in large part due to it's player freedom... I can't believe Larian came along in the same year to one-up them in this regard, but perhaps the coveted title isn't as in-the-bag as once thought. [Especially considering the slew of flaws TOTK brought with it from BOTW... hell I still haven't finished it lol]

Anyway! I adore this game, it's been forever since I got so lost that 12-15 hours could pass without me noticing, and that's what this game has been giving me almost every day for around a month now. I'm already excited to replay it and take different paths because - while I did follow every quest as far as I could without committing to conflicting ones - I know damn well there are countless hours of content, encounters and characters that I didn't see. I'm also eager to play with a controller and see how different the third person perspective is.

To include a gripe, the biggest downside of the game is either the combat being pretty brutal at times if you're not prepared or familiar with strategies that can be game-changing (protip: you can heal multiple people with splashed potions, and if you stand on fire all you have to do is drop the pot, it's free!) In spite of this, the combat was still one of my favourite parts because there's always so much you can do and once you find your method, it's amazing.

Second point: Silent protagonist.. The narrator is amazing and I love her, and the custom MC's voicelines for certain things are a nice touch, but there are some conversations that feel kinda weird having your response just be clicking the line without audio, or watching yourself pull a face instead of saying anything. Small issue that I got used to quickly but yeah, kinda weird. I wonder if playing as the Legacy characters negates this 🤔

That's it! I've rambled enough, if you're interested please give this game a shot, yes it's long but the majority of it is also optional and you could always do things the quick and easy way if you prefer. If you can't tell this is my current GOTY, which is insane because I'll have gotten a Final Fantasy, a Resident Evil and Alan Wake 2 this year (jury's still out on that last one 👀)

Hope you've all been well, quick shoutout to Paranormasight while I'm here. Idk if I'll bother reviewing but play it blind, it's really good! Have a good September folks, next review will be God knows what. I'm onto Sea of Stars and Starfield next. Thanks for reading!😌


P.S. Quick addendum I've heard people say Act 3 is bloated but I think it's just more dense and has a lot of quest conclusions and bigger encounters and all that. Also heard people say the ending is sudden but they must've gotten less satisfying ones because mine felt very well paced. The only things it didn't immediately address either aren't important or could easily be DLC follow-ups.

I have put off re-reviewing this for months. Partly because I dont have the words to express the hold this game has over me, and partly because every time I start thinking about it I get too excited. I havent felt this way about something in a long time, likely since I was a girl in the height of my infatuation with Ace Attorney.

This game is just absolutely astounding, from all angles. There is nothing it does poorly and nothing I would change. I didnt really understand the draw of roleplaying till now, which was the downfall of my first experience, but it is absolutely incredible the things you can learn about yourself pretending to be someone else. Thats not something I can say about any other game, ever. And I can only feel just so grateful, because it's given me so much joy over the past 3 months. Its barely left my mind at all, which feels like an issue at times. I dont know if I'll have an experience like that ever again, after all I created the perfect character and ran through the campaign as him, twice. More or less doing the same thing because I just enjoyed what I had made so much. It grieves me that I kind of have to let go of it, its one of those games that was painful to finish because I just got so attached. It feels like mine, and its one of those autistic things where I cant stand it when anyone else brings it up cause you and I definitley dont see it the way, like a dog hyperaggressive over its food. Specifically dark urge, which feels like it was tailor made for me. Its all so special and I care about it very, very much.

Everyone who worked on bg3 is immensely talented. It's kind of staggering just how talented everyone is. There is not a single voice actor that preformed poorly or out of place, the text is immaculate, nearly every single decision one could make is neatly planned for and has a script. It is just perfect and I could marvel at it forever, cause it really is a feat of human accomplishment to me. The driving force behind my love for this game though is of course the cast. I adore absolutely everyone (minus you Minthara I will always kill you and take your clothes), there are so few games that manage to pull it off, that take you through a journey so long and so profound that you feel a sense of family. Withers' after party is the perfect amalgamation of all this, the joy I felt seeing everyone happy, finally grtting to live their lives was unmatched. Going through the letters of the people you met along the way and seeing that theyre all alright. Astarion specifically holds special meaning to me but I cant talk about that I get too protective. It never fails to make me tear up thinking about it and always makes me feel so grateful that this is in the world and that I got to experience it.

Immensely love all my friends and Scratch and Owlbear and that one weird ox I didnt get to see in act 3 because it glitched out. I will think about you all forever, an autistic girl's promise

After about 100-ish accumulated hours, I think I've had my fill on Baldur's Gate 3. Some of that is just how much I'm able to tolerate the sort of loosely content-driven nature of the western-developed open world RPG -- which BG3 isn't necessarily open world, I actually really love how tightly designed its overworld maps are, but unfortunately it does happen to share many of the same pitfalls that tend to wear me down in those games like endless vendor trash and dogshit inventory management. But I also feel like there's something missing from the game itself that would elevate the experience to something truly incredible, and I can't quite put my finger on what that could be.

Maybe it's that the game's narrative feels somewhat devoid of meaning or message; it feels like a means to an end for the developers and writers to get to the important combat set pieces. But even then I can respect how difficult that can be to implement in a game that's largely about fulfilling personal fantasies through diverse and emergent gameplay. On the other hand, Larian has kinda compromised true freedom for a facade of sorts, dialogue trees are bland and the dialogue pacing itself can feel jerky and awkward -- and I say this having not played the game as the Dark Urge, so maybe that could potentially alleviate this little peeve of mine -- but it doesn't feel like there's enough functional variance to make that feel more understandable.

I love the party members, but it's disappointing how rarely they ever play off each other. I get that there's so many variables at play that they can't reasonably have a conversation ready for every set of characters in every situation, but even just having banter at the campsite would've gone a long way. The vast majority of the game's dialogue is the game talking at you, but even then it rarely even feels like a conversation. The whole romance aspect is probably the most revelatory of all though: I'm just really, really not a fan of how western RPGs (and a few non-western RPGs like modern Fire Emblem and Persona) implement romance as this utilitarian content thing. I think the only time I've walked away from a modern game with player character romance options somewhat fulfilled was Judy's romance in Cyberpunk 2077 (and even that had its issues, like the "sex" scene that felt like they just stole animations from a Second Life NSFW server). Anyways, my point is kinda just, in the pursuit of making a world where they want you to go about things in your own way, they've created an entire framework that exists purely for the player at all times -- even within the facets of the game that should feel more human.

And before I let this whole thing run away as purely negative, which has not been my intention at all, because ultimately I think very highly of the game and there is A LOT that I do love about Baldur's Gate 3: the main party has cool and distinctive designs, the music (while a bit safe) is always pleasant and appropriately utilized, like I said earlier the scope of the world and the design of its maps are how I wish more modern devs would handle the scale of their games instead of just big open maps, I really enjoy the combat even if the 5e power scaling kinda hurts the pacing more than it helps it, the game is gorgeous on the whole, and I think the voice acting is pretty fuckin' great! The entire package of Baldur's Gate 3 is undeniably incredible; it's a landmark title and it honestly deserved getting so many GOTY awards (though personally I just found 2023 to be lacking in amazing experiences, mostly being a deluge of decent to good titles, and Baldur's Gate 3 was the real standout for me).

But, I think it also has illuminated a lot of Larian's weaknesses if their other games hadn't done so already, and Larian being able to address those or not in future titles is gonna be the deciding factor on if they become the next BioWare/Bethesda (in a bad way). Like, they seem to have solid writers, but the structure of the game just does none of that narrative justice. Dialogue is exhausting and annoying for the most part, more CRPG devs need to do the Disco Elysium thing of putting it in an easily readable sidebar. If what I've heard about Dark Urge origin is to be trusted, it makes me want to see them do something more focused on a specific character framework instead of spreading themselves thin with seven origin characters and a blank slate -- say what you will about the Mass Effect trilogy, particularly its politics lol, but having a singular character anchored into the world was clearly economically effective (in terms of development resources and probably money) for the scale of each project, and effective at allowing the player to roleplay meaningfully at the cost of freedom. Or just lean harder into that freedom aspect, make the dialogue a more meaningful part of the experience, and not just feeling like the part of the game where you have to eat your vegetables before getting back to the good stuff (i.e. murdering all the bad guys on the map).

Maybe I'm talking out of my ass, but I'm at least speaking for what I am personally craving from one of these RPGs. It was a bit frustrating how close BG3 came to satiating this feeling I've been left with post-Mass Effect 3 disappointment, but ultimately BG3 didn't really stick the landing for me and that has kinda sucked, especially when I think it's otherwise a pretty fun experience. Also like, at least allow me to have Karlach, Shadowheart, and Lae'zel be in a relationship if you want the game to be hinged on this design theme of indulgent, hedonistic freedom. Not sure if that's a real complaint or if I'm just trying to find an excuse to bring up gay things in my reviews like usual, I just want to see them all hold hands or something, all these party members very clearly want to kiss each other and Larian won't let them... I don't even really want a romance when I'm playing as Tav (cuz like I said the romance feels so empty when it's just a game talking at nothing lol) I want to see the actual characters be happy with each other!! Idk let Astarion make out with Gale or something, if these people really are so horny, they should canonically be fucking each other too or something, man.

Kinda lost the thread here, but uh, what's something inflammatory I can end this on. Oh, how about: Baldur's Gate 3 is the first game I've ever played that makes content-driven media seem good actually. Hm, too back-handed and maybe not even true. Baldur's Gate 3 is the Chrono Trigger of CRPGS? Not sure what that means tbh. Let's just take a little of both: Baldur's Gate 3 is simultaneously the best Dragon Age game and the best Elder Scrolls game released in the past 15 years. It's also somehow less racist than Mass Effect? Idk man, maybe I should've played Planescape: Torment instead.

Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate. What is there to say about Baldur's Gate? Quite a lot considering everyones playthroughs seem to wildly differ. Mine in particular must of been comparably disorganized, considering not only have I never played a crpg before but I have also never interacted with D&D in the slightest. I was drawn to the game first and foremost by its roleplaying and strong sense of character it develops for each of its cast members. I still say this is the shining part of the game for me, the amount of written and voice acted dialogue is insane and it definitely helps that both these things are pulled off incredibly. I cant remember an rpg I've played where I didnt dislike at least one party member, but they're all so diverse and painstakingly crafted that its hard to not have fun with them.

I enjoy the roleplaying so much that I really just wish i could explore that aspect of the game without the combat. This is tied to one of two distinctive flaws I think Baldurs Gate 3 has. Not the actual combat itself, the actual gameplay is very very fun and well thought out. There are so many strategies you can work out and the game does a good job of making most encounters unique; both in map design and the enemy's skillset. But its so slow. Its so slow. I akin it to waiting in line for a rollercoaster, it takes that long for it to be my turn. The turns themselves are slow but it doesnt help that Larian cant help themselves and, after Act 1, seem to become obsessed with spawning in 40 trash mobs to combat your 4 playable units. Some enemy turns felt like they took a better part of 20 minutes to get through. Thats where the well crafted combat starts falling apart in my eyes, those fights where its you vs 30 things are just too long and too tedious not to be annoying. The span of status effects in this game can be quite fun but if you wait 10 minutes for it to actually be your turn and some dickhead casts flee on you- forget it. It becomes way too annoying and it burns me out. Easy mode is not easy enough, I just want to look at the dialogue options....

On the topic of roleplaying is where my second criticism lies. This game is very sexual. Thats fine, I love breasts and ass and cunt ect ect. But for a game that is so determined to have every character come up and request to sleep with you, I find it weird that theres no option to set your sexual orientation. I could take it a step forward and say I wish every party unit had a set sexuality- but for now I really wish my obviously lesbian charcter would stop getting forced into romance cutscenes with men. It is confusing too, because it must be annoying for the majority of straight men who play this to have guys like Halsin abruptly declare his love for their character, so I'm not sure why this isnt a feature. It would be a pretty easy box to check off for certain events not to trigger. I doubt this will be added but it would make the game much less uncomfortable to play.

Those are my complaints but I feel like I'm really downplaying how magical and fun this game was to go through. It is a rare game that is worth 60 dollars, I dont think anyone can undermine the sheer amount of effort and passion this must of taken to put together. For my first crpg I feel like the tutorial was kind of bad- but if you can work past it it's definitely a very solid place to start. It was very addicting and I feel gratified to have played it.

Now, some notes that didnt really fit in with the other subjects.... Act 1 and most of Act 3 are so much fun to explore and play around in but Act 2 is awful. I hate Act 2 with all my heart. There are about 3 interesting encounters in that area and thats it. Fuck the Shar temple I HATE it. No more puzzles.

I wish owlbear and Scratch had more points of interaction! Theyre so cute and sweet, I wish they had their own stories like everyone else. I stopped getting cutscenes for them after the underdark very early on, so I wish there was more I could play around with there.

Also on that note: I feel like the companions quests have either very weird pacing or (more likely) i missed a lot of flavor dialogue. Specifically, I feel like I missed out on a lot of romance specific things with Shadowheart and im not really sure why. I am the most interested in this so it really confuses me why there seemed to be so little altered when you're in a relationship. I know the dialogue exists so Im confused why I never came across it in my playthrough... a bit disappointing.

On the note of disappointment: why the hell can I pick what type of vulva I have if I never get to SEE it in use? I had sand sex with Shadowheart and I only did get to see boobs. I didnt expect a full on animated sex fuck sequence, but a little touching? A bit of body? During Shadowheart's scene my character just kind of sat on her and they started kissing and fade to black. Everyone in this god damn game wants to fuck everything and everyone and the sex scenes come across as vapid. And, while I had the option to hire a prostitute, I only got to have it once... that also ties in with my complaint that I wish there was more extra scenes and choices added in to the romance options, but all that to say it was kind of underwhelming.

The end in general was also kind of underwhelming and depressing. Only Lae'rel got to have a fleshed out goodbye, everyone else was just nothing. Astarion's (for his good route) was just incredibly sad. I was hoping for a cutscene showing us all celebrating together and a special epilogue with Shadowheart but it was, again, very abrupt and empty. To have such a dramatic buildup and then a let down of an ending is a bit crushing. Not to mind that that's the reward I get for beating that awful awful final boss.

That was a lot of complaining but I do actually love this game, dont get me wrong. In the wide span of things I FORGOT ABOUT KARLACH- what the fuck why is obtaining her directly connected to whether or not a single tiefling dies in the grove regardless of who you sided with. I didnt even know how to play the game at this point, nonetheless how to properly gauge how to make an optimal decision. I was trying to help the tieflings to the best of my knowledge by taking out the druid leader... the tieflings themselves had no issue with this seeing as how they threw a huge party in my name. Karlach's dialogue seemed to be set up negating siding with the tieflings and almost just assuming you went with the druids, seeing as how she called me a murderer of her people for no reason and how I couldnt properly respond. I never got to meet her character all for the actions of someone else, its definitely stupid and I hate her now.

I will try again: I do love this game a lot. In the wide span of things it definitely feels like a genuine feat of human accomplishment. This is what it looks like for a game to have a loving dev team and all the time and resources in the world?...needless to say it will be hard to top this in the future. I love Scratch and owlbear and Shadowheart and all my friends, even Astarion who hated me for most of my run. I will play again when a mod comes out that lets me skip the combat. And also, always remember to never stab your vampire companions even if they steal blood from you. That is a blatantly bad decision (uri...). Shoutout to Hilda for helping me find a clown's body parts for 3 days straight. That's all, goodbye.

Bleh. This is the most bleh crpg I've bothered to finish. Crazy production values it might have, but to what end?

The implementation of 5th edition here is slow and clunky, and incredibly unforgiving, even on the lowest difficulty. Sure, it's tactically interesting, but combat takes forever and is filled with tons of tiny little annoyances, and honestly far too swingy for a modern AAA game. Even Troika's Temple of Elemental Evil, which sports a very similar combat system (though it's 3.5 instead of 5) feels faster, though it suffers from many of the same issues regarding clunk. Even rolling skills in dialogue is slow as hell, even when you skip the main part of the animation it's just leagues slower than any other game I've played. The dice rolling animation is cute the first time but my god does it drag on the 500th time.

One thing ToEE didn't suffer from that this does, though, is camera issues! The camera's kinda goofy. When you zoom in, it tries to pull behind your character a bit (or just provide a cinematic viewpoint), but when you zoom out it angles flatter, to be a tactical camera. It only zooms out so far though, and just loves to get stuck on the multileveled terrain battlefields, which are a good idea in concept but really just feel annoying, partially because of this camera.

The world is beautifully realized, but feels a bit off, at least from my idea of the forgotten realms. It's been Larianized, I guess? No matter how serious things got, there was just this undercurrent of lightheartedness. Not as bad as their other games, but still not great. The maps don't really draw you in any direction, which made my pass through the underdark feel pretty aimless. It's got a bit of that quest-marker driven map design in it, I guess.

Finally, the story is interesting. Not as a narrative, it's pretty weak, but as an exercise in making a story that adapts to your players. That's the real strength here, right? The game lets you take many different paths through the story, and even story-critical moments are wildly variable. That's a lot of work to build, and it worked out, but not really to the benefit of the story. Player agency is crazy high, but as such the story feels meaningless, just a set of events you go through. The companion stories are a bit better, their issue is kind of a Marvelly quippy writing style (though again, less so than previous games of Larian's).

I've probably been a bit over-mean in this review, so lemme list some things I liked: Being able to go into turn based mode at any time, following multiple sidequest threads in Baldur's Gate (the city), the Gauntlet of Shar dungeon (minus the trials), most of the story beats around ketheric thorm. It's a well made game, it's just horribly uneven and imo hampered by some large issues

It just felt like an exercise in recreating the experience of playing 5e at the table, with a little bit less math and a story that, while free, still can't match the adaptability of a GM or something. It's a frustrating, often unbalanced game, and although it occasionally falls into stride (the city of baldur's gate was fun, though not really well split up) I finished the game glad it was over, with the feeling that nothing here really meant anything, no matter how pretty it looked or free it felt.

Just play fucking 5e

CUIDADO COM SPOILER!!!!!!!!!

Cara, falar sobre Baldur's Gate 3 é até um pouco difícil, porque para mim foi a minha maior surpresa de 2023 e talvez a maior surpresa que eu já tive com um jogo em toda minha vida. Já tinha ouvido falar em Baldur's Gate, mas era o jogo RPG de mesa, eu não fazia ideia que existia os jogo eletrônicos o Baldur's Gate 1 e Baldur's Gate 2, e do nada estava acompanhando alguns canais no YouTube de games e vi sobre o BG3, mas eu apenas ignorei porque nunca curti muito jogos de turnos, tirando Pokémon. Mas o hype foi tão grande, muitos amigos meus comentando sobre o jogo, que aí eu resolvi dá uma chance e meus amigos… que jogo.

Serio, BG3 é algo meio inexplicável, já tentei jogar outros jogos por turnos, mas esse foi diferente, não era chato, era, na verdade, muito massa e bastante divertido, o começo de jogo foi um pouco estranho para mim, mas com umas 2h de gameplay acabei aprendendo muita coisa, mesmo tendo 0 noção de jogos como estes e nunca nem ter tocado em RPG de mesa, acabei aprendendo as mecânicas rapidamente.

Eventualmente o jogador acaba encontrando os outros personagens jogáveis que são maravilhosos, o Astarion, o Gale, a ShadowHeart e todos os outros, todos muito bem atuados e bem desenvolvidos, meu favorito acabou sendo a Karlach, simplesmente a melhor personagem do jogo.
Em questão da história principal, as sidequests, a ambientação, as músicas, os NPCs, a exploração, tudo é muito bem feito e feito com bastante amor, você consegue perceber. Mas algo que me impressionou muito foram as escolhas, para mim o melhor jogo com escolhas que impactavam realmente o jogo era The Witcher 3, até eu conhecer esse jogo... cara, a cada escolha meu coração batia mais devagar, a mecânica de rodar os dados para ver se aqui que queremos decerto é ótima, e muito agoniante também, mas é bem feita, e suas escolhas tem um impacto grande, tão grande que pode mudar totalmente a sua história dentro do jogo, isso é perfeito.

Mas como nenhum jogo é perfeito, eu amei de coração a experiência que tive com BG3, 120 horas muito bem investidas, mas o jogo tem alguns probleminhas, o primeiro dele são os bugs, que tem bastante e eu sofri bastante com eles, inclusive na lua final, contra a Absoluta, meu jogo simplesmente parou, a IA dos inimigos não estava funcionando e eu tive que da Load, bizarro demais, aí vai uma dica, sempre fique salvando seu jogo quando sentir que algo importante vai acontecer, porque às vezes dá umas bugada loucas.
Outra coisa que não me agradou foi a entrada da Jaheira e do Minsc, não que eles sejam ruins, mas acho que eles entram tardiamente no jogo, acho que eles deveriam entrar no máximo até a metade do ato 2, isso que incomodou um pouco.
E por último, as lutas contra os chefes, principalmente contra a Orin e Gortash, que sinceramente achei bem fracas, acho que faltou uma música melhor, uma luta mais emocionante, faltou algo que, por outro lado, na luta contra o Raphael...meu amigo que luta bela do caralho, que trilha sonora foda, que mecânica, o desenvolvimento do próprio Raphael foi muito bem feito, coisa eu a Orin teve, mas não teve uma boa luta, e o Gortash coitado não teve nada de bom.
Mas enfim, no todo para mim é um jogo muito bem feito que amei jogar, obrigado Larian pelo excelente trabalho, mereceu demais ser o jogo do ano e os caras tão metendo o pau para resolver os problemas do jogo e os bugs, espero que saia alguma DLC porque mesmo jogando tantas horas fiquei com o gostinho de quero mais 🥵. É isso, valeu quem leu até aqui, um forte abraço.

"Graças a você, não haverá nenhum império ilitide, nem a tirania dos deuses da morte. Vocês salvaram Baldur's Gate!"

Sério, fica difícil segurar as emoções ao escrever um comentário sobre Baldur's Gate 3 logo após finalizar sua aventura. Foi de um jogo que eu parei no meio por motivos banais, a um dos jogos da minha vida. De 0 a 100.

A aventura, as escolhas, as personagens, os ambientes, os diálogos, as batalhas - todas essas e muitas outras facetas de BG3 são inesquecíveis, te fazem aumentar o carinho por ele a cada hora jogada, e olhe que nem fiz nem metade do que é possível. Não vou me delongar, até porque já é conhecida a perfeição que é BG3, o qual me fez sentir o mesmo que o final de Senhor dos Aneis, que algo marcante em minha vida se concluiu.

Aprendi muitas lições com Baldurs. Ele me relembrou que eu nunca devo desistir da luta (e como pensei), a não duvidar de boas pessoas apesar de sua casca exterior aparentar o contrário (te amo, Lula Molusco, obrigado por tudo), que seu amor pode vir de um lugar totalmente inesperado (é nóis, Gamora, digo.. Lae’zel), ou mesmo que seu melhor amigo possa ser uma pessoa que antes você tinha fortes desavenças (te mamo, Astarion). Enfim, muitos ensinamentos para a vida.

Olha, esse jogo me pegou de verdade, e fico muito feliz que tenha recebido tanto reconhecimento não só pelas premiações, mas também pelo público no geral. Obrigado mesmo, Larian Studios. Continuem por aí, afinal, como me disse o próprio Astarion:

"Não é bem um Adeus, eu diria que é um... até mais tarde, meu bem".

Nota Final: 98/100 - Nunca me esquecerei dessa aventura 💜

Joguei em 2023 - Meus favoritos

Not particularly enamored with this one although I can certainly understand why many are, since it allows for those kinds of conversations that frequently feel impossible in 2023, the kind where you and your friends or coworkers come together to talk for hours about the choices you made at a particular juncture and what happens if you pick option C instead of option B, you know what I mean - conversations that are much rarer when a modern game's sense of mystery can be completely dispelled within 10 hours by front page reddit posts and scores of "articles" reducing each dialogue prompt to Baldur's Gate 3: How To Get THE BEST Companion Cutscenes. The #general chat in my Discord server has people I haven't spoken to in years coming out of the woodwork to talk about the results of character creation, about the companions they've romanced and killed, about all the ways their characters lost an eye, and they all seem pretty content with the breadth of discoveries that this game enables.

For my first 20 hours, I was basically the same - there's a lot of fun to be had in poking around these early areas with the horniest party of all time (despite that fact) and chatting with rats, cats, and dead guys. In these early chapters the game best supports my preferred playstyle: a big circuitous route around the map, looking at everything as I drive past but only stopping to drink deeply from a select few side stories. Push further into the main story, though, and find yourself woefully underleveled because you grew tired of these fights 10 hours ago. It's never so difficult as to completely block you from progressing, but it's easy to feel that your punishment for not seeking out each and every side quest is being forced to initiate every fight from the (admittedly cumbersome) stealth or spend the whole fight herding enemies into a big circle so you can use your Level 3 AOE Spell of choice to meme the encounters until they're finished. I have no experience with D&D or this particular ruleset aside from other video games, but the adherence to such a system and its limits are obvious when you spend forty hours playing this game just to unlock a single cast of a spell that these developers would've given you immediately in their last game. It's a pace that works pretty well for weekly tabletop adventures with a group of IRL friends, but feels a bit too slow and unrewarding when I'm sitting alone, staring at a menu of unappetizing "roll advantage"/"create difficult terrain" spells as a reward for my once-nightly level-up.

What's kept me playing are the settings and companions - the mind flayers are arguably the least interesting part of this whole deal, so while it sucks that the main plot so prominently revolves around them, the side quests are generally well-crafted enough that one or two of them would be a satisfying enough adventure to fill the entire night on their own. I do wish that the companions would Talk Normally for five minutes but they've done well enough in telling some of the companion stories (Gale is a particular standout) that they can create genuinely affecting moments if you look in the right places. Not all of them are told so well, and some of the companions feel deeply artificial as a result, but generally speaking I can understand why a player might recruit any given companion not named Lae'zel to their party. For the most part, I'm also fond of the party chatter - every once in a while you'll get a nice bit of banter that feels like the result of actual role-playing with friends, whether it's a joke or a short flavorful exchange revealing how two companions interact or a story that fleshes out someone's background. It's not as personal as it could be if it were your real friends bantering with you, but it's a fun approximation and it's deployed tastefully.

Ultimately my grade for the experience is a big ol' shrug and the word "Sure?" written exactly like so. I think the lipstick looks fantastic even if it fails to produce miracles for the pig that is 5th edition rules, with its awkward magic system and glacial level progression and a litany of boring buffs. Compared to the average person I'd be considered a "hater" of Divinity Original Sin 2 but it felt so colorful compared to this! I love killing bosses by shoving them into a pit as much as the next guy, but much of this experience feels like the developers are skillfully wringing every drop of charisma that they can from the source material and hoping that the player doesn't notice that "the chill druid left and now the mean druid is being mean, go fetch the chill druid" feels a little trite. I'll be doing my best to hit the end credits, but if I don't make it, know that I'm probably out there starting a new save on Tyranny instead.

It's everything you've heard. And more.

When looking at the RPG genre, most people will agree that the best aspects are, well, the roleplaying. Being able to create your own character and be immersed into a fully realised world is the truest form of the escapism that video games can provide us.

And while Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't invent some magic new system that will "change RPGs forever", it instead decides to focus on making sure the delivery of that immersion is as polished yet still vast as a Dungeons and Dragons game can be within the limits of video games.

I get that it isn't for everyone. D&D isn't for everyone and that's okay, if you are reading this and you didn't enjoy it then that is okay. But the quality of content here is indisputable and it is absolutely worth trying out at least once. Larian has poured so much love into this and you can see it in the voice acting, the music, the combat, and every little small detail that you'll miss initially which reignites your desire for another playthrough.

I could talk about the almost frightening freedom.
I could talk about the way he's reactive to the point of blowing your mind.
I couk talk about the roleplay, combat system and the masterful game design.
And I could talk about the amazing exploration and the unparalled sense of adventure.

(I could even talk about act 3 which is almost broken, sorry guys, just telling the truth )

But you know what?
Forget all this. The game Isn't awesome because of all that.

Above all else, Baldur's Gate 3 is the fruit of the passion and love of an entire team that has dedicated body and soul to successifully capture the magic of video games. A milestone that deserves to be celebrated for years to come. Thank you, Larian.

Existem jogos que furam a bolha, existem jogos que ultrapassam todos os limites nos quais estariam inseridos, existem jogos que definem seu gênero com maestria, e não há melhor maneira de definir o que é um Role Playing Game se não com Baldur's Gate 3 como exemplo.

É espantoso o quão primoroso é Baldur's Gate 3 em tudo que se propõe a fazer, desde as camadas mais simples de jogabilidade à construção de seu universo e evolução de todos os seus personagens, que são estupidamente bem trabalhados e complexos.

Em pouquíssimo tempo, você se encontrará completamente imerso. E o mais interessante é que é possível resumir uma experiência tão rica em uma única palavra: Liberdade.

A liberdade de ir e vir aonde bem entender, escrevendo e moldando a sua própria história, do seu próprio jeito, no seu próprio ritmo. São inúmeras possibilidades.

A liberdade como objetivo nas histórias individuais de cada um dos companheiros, que possuem mutuamente amarras em suas histórias que os tornam reféns de seus problemas do passado.

A liberdade de alterar completamente o estilo visual e de combate a qualquer momento, com muitas e muitas combinações diferentes e divertidas. No meu caso, comecei o jogo como feiticeiro, mas na metade em diante resolvi me tornar um guerreiro, e acabei como um cavaleiro das trevas que usa magias de necromancia.

Todo esse conjunto culmina no que pra mim se tornou um dos jogos da minha vida. Baldur's Gate 3 é sublime, recomendável até mesmo para quem não suporta jogos por turno. Baldur's Gate 3 é um dos melhores RPG's da história, se não o melhor.

I have grown more attached to Shadowheart than I have to most people in my actual life and the fact that she's not real depresses me immensely.

Oh, the game? It's great!

The amount of ambition on display from Larian Studios here is absolutely staggering, to the point that it's actually surprising just how much of it pays off. The characters are all incredibly interesting, well-rounded and fantastically written and voice-acted. The gameplay kept me engaged for the most part, and despite my general dislike of turn-based action it was pretty easy for me to get to grips with it.

The story is great and there's enough side-quests off the beaten path that I feel like BG3 is well worth paying full price for. I went through the game at a fairly brisk pace and clocked up 85 hours in the end. If you were willing to explore different ways of playing the game (including the unique Dark Urge path) then you could easily lose hundreds of hours to it.

Sadly a few issues prevented me from giving BG3 full marks. The game's third act can be very overwhelming at first, and it can be difficult to know what to do and where to go without losing certain content. Some side quests feel unfinished, like Larian ran out of time before they could flesh them out properly. That's not to mention that a lot of the stories of your fellow companions, so beautifully developed in the first two acts, tend to fizzle out. Once you complete their personal quests they stop being the fully fleshed out characters they were and end up just being sorta... there.

There were also a few annoying bugs riddled throughout; characters sometimes being unable to jump, textures not loading properly or being stretchy, enemies taking almost a full minute to decide what they wanted to do in a turn. Nothing game-breaking but they added up.

I don't regret any of the time I spent playing this - in fact, as someone with absolutely no prior experience with anything D&D-related this has actually made me want to get into it more, whether that's through other video games or actually playing it with other people. Of course, for that I actually need to find some friends first...

P.S. I don’t care if the ‘Party Limit Begone’ mod is ‘cheating’, nothing feels better than running around the city with my merry band of ten adventurers. The easier combat is secondary to not having to miss out on any companion-specific dialogue with NPCs.

Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 are my favorite games of all time, so when I saw the first trailer for Baldur’s Gate 3, I was beyond excited. I knew it was going to be a little different, as the story in the original games is pretty well wrapped up with nowhere to go narratively, but Black Isle had plans for a third entry (The Black Hound), so I figured things would be able to be worked out. I was also completely geeking out because I absolutely love Mind Flayers. They were terrifying in Baldur’s Gate 2, and there was a whole cut/unfinished subplot with a Mind Flayer colony in Athkatla that just brimmed with potential on how they could connect the dots here. One of my DND group’s favorite dungeons we ever ran was a giant library in the astral plane that had been taken over by a singular Mind Flayer that I tortured them with through manipulation, stealth, cunning, and pitting them against each other over 12 hours. By the end of it, they were deathly afraid of him and hated his guts. It was fantastic. I was really ready to love this game…and I tried so hard, but I just don’t.

Turns out, it was a bad idea to make the new 5th Edition game Baldur’s Gate 3. There is a fantastic skeleton here with interesting characters and fun locations, but as a huge fan of the early games, I can’t help but feel like it’s significantly held back by what Wizards of the Coast did to the Baldur’s Gate canon. BG3 isn’t a sequel to Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 - it’s a sequel to the WotC canon of Baldur’s Gate, and it’s done very poorly. Some of the characters that appear are completely divorced from their characters in the originals, as if the person writing them had no idea of their motivations or any understanding of who these people are. I don’t know whether to blame that on Wizards for the terrible choices regarding canon, or to blame Larian for the awful characterization, but it drove me insane. I realize I might sound like a whiny old-head, but it is just such a strange choice to make a sequel based on a game when you can’t actually adhere to the plot of that game.

The legacy characters aren’t the only strange moments of Baldur’s Gate 3’s writing unfortunately, as it struggles to maintain a foundation between being grounded in the Forgotten Realms setting while wanting to tell a grandiose story. At the beginning of the game, I recruited three companions - one that was incredibly fearsome fighting Demons in the Blood War, another was such a powerful mage that he actually had an intimate relationship with the Goddess of Magic herself, and the last one was sent on a mission to retrieve an incredibly powerful and rare artifact from a race of other dimensional beings. They’re also level 1 and we’re fighting goblins. This type of narrative/world disconnect continues on throughout the rest of the game and I constantly felt out of place and just at odds with the game’s representation of the Forgotten Realms.

For a game that is effusively praised for player freedom - don’t get me wrong there is a ton of it - it does itself no favors with regards to pacing. In particular, Act 2 is paced in such a way that players easily can find themselves locked out of almost all the Act’s content if they simply explore the area, which is the exact opposite of how Act 1 encouraged gameplay. When Act 3 rolls around, BG3 again flips things around and gives a giant sandbox city to run around it, all the while dumping quests on you that beg to be solved with urgency. There isn’t inherently anything wrong in this approach, but because the pacing isn’t consistent across the game, it can be very overwhelming and disorienting.

This disorienting feeling carries over to companion quests and the rest system as well, as the game seems to discourage you from long resting too often, but in order to continue companion quests, long rests at camp are necessary. I actually missed an entire companion questline because I did not rest enough in Act 2, and it wasn’t until late game that I realized the game does actually have a cue to tell you to rest. Every time a party member complains about being tired, a new conversation or cutscene is available at camp. Otherwise, the resting mechanic makes a nice balance between the original games’ dungeon rest-a-thons, and the fear of running out of resources in combat.

Encounters and combat were something I personally was worried about, as I’m much more a fan of the Real Time with Pause system, but I actually think Larian did a great job implementing 5e into crpg format. Most of the time, combat feels engaging and quick due to the encounter and level design, and the environment takes a much bigger stage than it ever did in the older games. Later on, the encounters do seem to fall off regarding intentionality and then it can be frustrating when there are just too many enemies and allies for things to go quickly. In the later stages of the game, Larian also becomes obsessed with placing trap after trap, which just makes things tedious in this engine. Traps are a classic part of DND dungeon design, but throwing 6 of the same DC trap in a room does not make a good dungeon. Honestly, this is true for the game at large. Act 1 in all of its Early Access polished glory is wonderful in pacing, encounter design, world detail, and narrative beats, however the whole thing starts to fall apart as the game goes on and then all of the little, minor things that were overlooked as nitpicks start to become giant thorns.

While the combat system mostly does a good job, it does lack polish with basic functionality. There were so many times that I clicked to attack an enemy, was told “too far, can’t reach,” and then I moved my character manually in range and was able to attack. There were entire battles where certain enemies just stood still for their turn, wasting 10-20 seconds without doing anything. There were times in which I got stuck with one character fighting six by himself because the pathing for the other character broke while jumping, and they couldn’t join combat until forced because they were stuck in a different spot. There were many times where I was told I could not see the enemy, only to swivel the camera around to find that character has a perfect line of sight on the enemy, but just can’t attack because the game says no. After 50-plus hours, all of that began to wear me down, and the experience just felt clunky. Apart from those minor things, I also started to hit real bugs like companions talking to me about events that haven’t happened yet, doors not loading, people popping into cutscenes, among others.

It is highly ironic that Baldur’s Gate 3 has gotten so much praise from people pitting it against other AAA releases that were deemed broken, as if the game does not have its share of cracks and broken bits as well. Ultimately, there is a good game here that I’m sure will grow and be ironed out as a “Definitive Edition” arrives, but for me the entire experience was disappointing and lacking. Baldur’s Gate 3 nails the upfront presentation with cinematic style, but what lies beneath is mediocrity.

the games master (or dungeon master) has long been one of the most fascinating roles one can play in any game - be it video, table, or sport. a blend of one-person theatre, moderation, improvisational comedy, and game design, with the emphasis on these roles and others besides shifting from person to person, from table to table, it's a truly unique position, and it's perhaps the key thing that makes computer role-playing fundamentally different from tabletop role-playing, even if you're still playing with friends. when a game is your dungeon master, it becomes non-negotiable, unwavering, utterly fastidious, and miserly in its rule-keeping. this is not always a problem if the rules are strong enough - i'm not especially interested in playing a game of Go with a referee who's cool with me eating the opponent's pieces when they aren't looking, except maybe as a one-off - but when the rules are not strong enough, it leaves me craving the human hand of a DM who will gently massage the systems behind the scenes to ensure everyone involved is having fun. and in Fifth Edition, the rules are, assuredly, not Strong Enough.

Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons is, bluntly, a poor TTRPG that demands a level of simulationist interest that would bore a 40K player (quick question, has anyone who has ever played 5E ever gave a shit about the carry weight of currency? did you even know that the gold you're carrying around has a weight that you're supposed to manage?) as support to a tactical game that is as shallow as it is torturously prolonged, capped by a social game that is functionally nonexistent. D&D is content to coast by on its cultural ubiquity and the fact that almost all of its player base barely even really knows that other TTRPGs exist, sailing the seas of mediocrity on a boat that starts to sink if you set foot in it for more than a few minutes. it is possible to play wonderful games in D&D, but I have yet to hear of - or be part of - one that was wonderful because it was D&D - rather, they are invariably good in spite of D&D, and always require some degree of selective memory or active rejection over many of the game's outrageously numerous rules.

given this perspective, it's perhaps not surprising that i am not enormously enthused by larian studios' Baldur's Gate III, a game that attempts to faithfully adapt the 5E rules to the broad framework of the studio's last game, Divinity: Original Sin II. but even with that in mind, i find myself genuinely shocked at how unbelievably boring BG3 is.

as the soothsayers on the mount foretold would occur the instant Larian proudly announced their design intentions, marrying 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons to Divinity Original Sin 2's combat completely hamstrings the latter: the genuinely expressive and reactive toolkit of that game is filtered through a dull interpretation of the most stock spells of 5E, making this less a game of setting up a simple rube goldberg machine to defeat an encounter, and more about tediously playing out the motions of early-game dnd in a world your imagination cannot penetrate.

here's the trick to being a DM: let the players do the hard work. if they come up with a crazy scheme that you never imagined that just might work... who's to say it can't? you and the players are telling this story together, after all. if they want to say what happens next, let them. if they ask if there is a chandelier to swing on, say yes. constraining yourself to a number of set solutions you devise and hope the players find is only making the game less interesting for everyone involved. when the world exists only in your heads, it expands at the speed of thought. anything is possible.

while baldur's gate 3 is a more permissible dungeon master than some games, it remains a prisoner of the imaginations of it's designer. and this is hardly a fair critique to make of a video game, i know...except when it's playing with a ruleset explicitly designed with a lackadaisical, easygoing dungeon master in mind. damning as it might be to say, the easiest way to see the failings of 5E as a set of rules is to play by them, and BG3 offers you no choice but to do so, but without even some crucial features like Ready Actions that narrow it's tactical space even more. original sin 2 nobly wrestled with this thanks to an expansive spell set mostly based on reactions and creating situations, and one wherein you could be doing powerful things very quickly. 5E has so little of this, by comparison, especially in the miserable early levels. all you have is some of the weakest tactical combat in table gaming. and explosive red barrels, of course.

the designers are clearly aware of the reduced capability for the player to interact with the environment, and have accordingly given most major encounters one big object to interact with and defeat enemies with, be it one of the aforementioned red barrels, or a giant rock suspended by a rope above where two men are standing, etcetera. this is, definitionally, reactivity in action, i suppose, but is about as intellectually engaging as putting square pegs in square holes: there's a reason we don't hold a party for every first-person shooter with an explosive barrel in it, why are we holding a party for this one?

it certainly can't be the early-game writing. while certainly I'm gratified that BG3 is less outwardly annoying and in-poor-taste as Divinity 2's edgelord parade, it's seemingly forgotten to replace it with much of anything. BG3's player character must surely be one of the most boring in the entire genre, with nary a hint of personality escaping their suffocatingly matter-of-fact dialogue options, that only on occasion dare to be so bold as to allow the player to be...slightly rude or sarcastic. there's never going to be a CRPG that allows for as much reactivity and input as a dungeon master of flesh and blood, but even within those expectations, BG3 falls utterly flat. so much of the appeal of this genre, to me, is in creating a guy that you can rotate around in your head. but baldur's gate 3 is the kind of DM that is only interested in a PC for the Numbers on their character sheet: the actual Character of the Player Character ceases to be once you complete their creation, and let them loose from your imagination into the confining reality of BG3's world.

(incidentally, BG3 joins CyberPunk 2077 in the prestigious world of 'Games With Character Creators That Give Me Chaser Vibes' with their insistence on embodying transness exclusively via mixing-and-matching voice and genitals on a series of binary traditionally attractive male or female body types. i genuinely appreciate the ability to play as a non-binary character: i don't appreciate the unavoidably fetishistic nature of prioritizing genital customization over any actual input on everyday trans presentation, like binders, top surgery, or even an androgynous voice or two)

with only a solid day's of gameplay under my belt, i can't in good conscience claim to have the full scope of the game's companions, i can at least say that the first impressions they make fall within tiresome cliches we've all had our fill of, i think. or have we? have you?

this is my conundrum with baldur's gate 3. i truly do not think the game is remarkable in any meaningful way: it is not awful but it is a very bog-standard CRPG with a little more messing with the set dressing than is typical for the genre. it is narratively, and mechanically, rote. i have only spent a few hours with it, and already, i am tired of it. just as i am tired of dungeons & dragons.

but maybe you aren't. maybe you haven't played baldur's gate 1 or 2, maybe you haven't played darklands or torment, maybe you haven't played arcanum or underrail. maybe you haven't played pillars of eternity or tyranny. maybe you're someone who got into D&D via Critical Role's explosion, someone who has never played a CRPG quite like this before, and are being introduced to an entire sub-genre with the first true 5E-based CRPG. maybe you still think jokes about Bards fucking Dragons are really funny. i say this with true sincerity (well, maybe not the last one, which was a little mean, and for which i apologize): i am genuinely delighted, on some level, to see a CRPG get this popular. while i truly cannot explain the swathes of industry veterans giving into astonishment on a scale undreamed of with this game, i also know that d&d is much, much bigger than it was when i was first enthralled by dragon age: origins, a game with a similarly rote plot, and still captured by heart and imagination, and that if this is your introduction to the magic of CRPGs, i can see why you give into astonishment. because crpgs can be astonishing.

but i would like for it, and D&D as a whole, to remain an introduction, to not consume the entire conception of the hobby, as D&D has. i am sincerely and genuinely disappointed with the total lack of apprehension the wider critical scene of games has for BG3, given its connection to Wizards of the Coast, a deeply evil company that, just today, admitted to using AI art in the latest D&D sourcebook. i am uninterested in contributing to the breathless hype of an IP owned by a company uninterested in the basic humanity of art and it's creation. not when there are so many other games out there.

you can stay in plato's cave, for a while. you can stay there forever if you want, dungeon crawling up and down the sword coast. but you can also leave that cave, and come into my other cave, slightly next door, where i can tell you about blades in the dark and pentiment. they're really very very cool.

as for me? i turned the game off when i reached a point whereupon, after noticing an obvious trap, i snuck around the skeletons lying in wait to attack and reached the treasure...whereupon the treasure chest spoke to me and told me to fuck off until i had killed the skeletons. fuck off, BG3. why should i bother trying to navigate your encounters creatively when you're going to just say that it doesn't work like that? I've played with dungeon masters like this before, and they aren't good ones. they're the kind of ones who wonder why they can't seem to hold a group together for more than a couple of sessions.

maybe i'll return to BG3, but if i do, it'll only be in multiplayer. with friends, and possibly a drink or two. but if me and three friends are committing to a possible 120-hour RPG...why not just take it a little bit further and just play some actual Tabletop? Why not play something that isn't Dungeons & Dragons? Why not play with a dungeon master that won't be such a spoilsport?

Baldur’s Gate 3 is incapable of escaping comparison to fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons, and it clearly doesn’t want to try. It aestheticizes the act of rolling dice, offers cosmetic skins for when rolling them, and the d20 polyhedron is a core part of its narrative’s iconography. It aims to capture the Dungeons And Dragons Experience, something heavily informed by Critical Role, Community episodes, and broad parodies as much as it aims to capture the 5e player’s handbook.

5e works to take a genre renowned for fiddliness, sand off the rough edges to lower the skill floor even if it harms the ceiling, market it as a beginner-friendly experience even if it lacks common features for any other modern game on the market and has lacking systematization for non-combat sequences, use its unique market position to have eye-catching production values that no other game can attest to, and then have the canny and luck to release right in the middle of a massive upsurge of interest in tabletop roleplay. This, coincidentally, perfectly describes Baldur’s Gate 3 as well.

No game in this genre has had this much effort put into filmic direction and realistic visuals since Dragon Age Origins, and its focus on high-quality cutscenes, voice acting, and motion capture is exactly what was needed to make it sell Elden Ring numbers. Twitter artists’ attention spans have been caught by it in the same personality-altering ways as Mihoyo games and Final Fantasy XIV, which is the true mark of a culturally significant work. Doing mocap for every NPC in the game speaks to its unparalleled ambition and production scope.

Mechanically, the game attempts to offer systemic interactions uncommon to the genre. A confession: I could never get into Divinity Original Sin or its sequel and thus struggle to directly compare its execution. On its own merit, the implementation suffers because of how stifling 5e’s action economy is. Taking two standard actions to throw a barrel and ignite it in a game with a four-man party limit is very rarely the most effective use of a turn, and magic takes forever to start creating interesting environmental effects, by which point it is probably a better use of time to turn one cast Haste on the cracked-out martial class of choice and let them solo the encounter instead.

Martial classes get changes from the 5e PHB which are highly appreciated - general rebalances make some subclasses more compelling, weapon proficiency now grants combat maneuvers with each weapon type that replenish on short rest which allow for debuffs, area-of-effects, and crowd control in ways that are pretty logical for each weapon type, and the oodles of magic items synergize incredibly well with oft-neglected playstyles. An open hand monk with a three-level dip in Thief for the extra bonus action can crack 300 damage per turn by endgame, and if one has, say, a decade of Pathfinder brainrot, that’s deeply satisfying in ways not offered by the uninspiring feat and class feature list.

It’s inherited from the tabletop game, but it’s still disappointing how guided and on-rails character building feels. Feats are hard to come by and are in direct competition with ability score increases, which creates incredible opportunity costs for efforts to go gimmicky. Being guided towards picking one, maybe two build-defining feats and dumping others into ASI feels really bad, and multiclassing means losing out further and subsisting entirely off of choiceless class features or every-so-often subclass bonuses (and 80% of subclasses either have linear progression or are just picking spells with extra steps).

The lack of flavor is reflected in non-combat dialogue choices, which focus on the act of decision-making as a substitute for roleplay. Actual dialogue options are bland, simplistic, and any personality is pre-defined from the player’s chosen origin or class. The focus on full mocap, as much as it means there are truly excellent performances (shoutouts to Astarion), means individual conversations run short and utilitarian. Dialogue often lacks distinct character voice (Astarion and Lae’zel exempted), it instead gaining its sparkle from behavioral tics, quivers in the voice, or sweeping body language. Each line is usually just a short sentence or two, and conversations rarely run for too long.

Similarly, quests are often binary and offer few chances to meaningfully tinker with inputs, outputs, or outcomes, or are obscenely frustrating in the lack of consideration for alternate paths. The quest chain that defines Act 1, a crisis between goblins, druids, and refugees caught in the middle, outright resists any method of play that is not “go to druids, get quest to go to camp, go talk to goblins, kill them where they stand, teleport back to applause.” Narratively, siding with the goblins immediately loses two party members from the player’s ranks and has literally zero in-character justification past moustache-twirling villainy. There is no way to make the tieflings flee ahead of the assault, and they try to kill the PC for suggesting it. Interrupting the druid ritual similarly has no real effect on the outcome. Playing both sides and luring Minthara out into the open grants the player a harder fight with more at risk and less roleplay reason to do it. In the third act, the narrator (assumedly playing the role of game master) drops the artifice several times to clearly explain the binary choice at play and suggest there is no other route, which is, put politely, advice no GM should ever take.

This sense of railroading and resistance to straying from the beaten path is omnipresent, and further hindered by its frankly godawful approach to ability checks. Here is where the fetishization of dice comes to the fore: it outright ignores how 5e is supposed to be played solely to introduce more randomness. The Dungeon Master’s Guide (and 5e’s director) states to use passive checks for rolls that aren’t player-initiated - passive checks working by simply adding ten to the player’s proficiency bonus and deterministically answering whether they succeed. This allows the GM to conceal rolls, a valuable tool, but equally so it being non-random is important. Player’s skill choices and ability spreads affect the outcome when they’re operating on autopilot, not their luck. This is in contrast to ability checks, which are high-stakes and player-initiated.

The d20 is an inherently insanely random and swingy die, and even skilled player characters are often at risk of failure. This is exciting in a tabletop game, where failure can have unintended consequences. 5e’s DMG (and its director) knows that failure despite extensive investment can be frustrating, however, and explicitly rules that critical failures and successes should not exist when rolling ability checks. Literally none of these rulings operate as such in BG3. Passive checks don’t exist; everything is rolled. Critical failures and critical successes both apply to ability checks, and success/failure is either strictly binary (either losing out on quest progression or getting sent into combat, or getting exactly what is desired or and/or avoiding combat) or entirely superfluous (a lengthy series of ability checks in its climax has literally zero difference between success or failure in terms of animations, dialogue, outcomes, bonuses, or penalties).

It is a mantra of most actual play and most dungeon mastering guides, regardless of systems, to have the dice serve to amplify stakes but not define the game - only let the dice come out when the outcome is meaningfully uncertain, and when what is being rolled is clearly defined. There is a place for it, and systematizing uncertainty is a key part of what separates TTRPG from improvised narrative (check out Amber Diceless Roleplaying, though!). However, it defining all aspects of player expression is equally poor in execution - it smudges out roleplay, character building, and simple fun to have a high-level master of the craft still muck up something completely mundane - unless there is a factor in the scene to add tension, which rarely occurs in this game.

This is further compounded by the game embracing save-scumming. Unlike many, many other games in the CRPG space (and obviously unlike TTRPG, which is beholden to linear time) the player can quicksave and quickload at any point in dialogue, including on the ability check menu. The only thing stopping them from constant, eternal success is a belief that failure is interesting (it almost never is) or respect for their own time (an assumption challenged by the game’s mammoth length).

This is a sizable pacebreaker, but it’s mitigable by offering the game respect it doesn’t earn. By far one of the most frustrating and runtime-bloating occurrences is inventory management, a symptom of rough edges and ill-conceived QoL decisions colliding messily. Party member inventories are individualized, and logically are taken with them when dismissed. The player can send items to camp at any time (except for the final dungeon, for some reason, despite there being no reason to ever manage your inventory by that point?) and can similarly teleport to camp at almost any time.

These systems interlink to create a system that is fiddly (individual party members may overcap their inventory at any time, necessitating shuffling and sending to camp, and searching the inventory (an already-onerous task due to poor UX and lacking categorization) does not display items from the inventories of camped PCs) but also entirely superfluous (being able to visit camp at almost any time means the player can swap out party members or access their storage equally at almost any time). It lacks any actual difficult decisionmaking about what to bring, as combat-affecting items like scrolls, potions, and grenades weigh fractions of a pound while the limit even for STR-dumping characters is somewhere around eighty.

This has the side effect of completely eroding the feeling of camp as an actual space that inhabits the world, instead coming across as Fable 3’s inventory dimension. Despite its accessibility and lack of immersion, there is no way to quickly dismiss or replace party members past individually walking to each one (which can take 15+ seconds on larger camp maps) and mashing through dialogue. The low party limit means that there is incentive to do this a lot just to play the game and advance quests, but the completely RNG environmental skill checks means there is a want or need to swap people out for another reroll after all the WIS people in the party chunked a perception or survival save, the presence of locked doors potentially incentivizes a pocket Astarion to teleport in, jimmy a trap, and teleport away, and the ever-present horror of realizing the wrong person has a desired item and the player will thus have to cycle through everybody’s inventories one-by-one until it turns up.

The game is obviously not lacking in redeeming value - as a set of encounters it is unreal. Every single fight in the game has a unique compounding factor, and the infrequent instances when enemies are reused it is in very different compositions and contexts. The acting direction really is good, and Astarion might ultimately unseat Daeran as a new favorite in the CRPG canon of prissy assholes who prove that negging really does work. Some quests are enjoyable, even if many ultimately disappoint or get their conclusion swallowed up in the sea of bugs and inconsistent writing that is Act 3.

What it excels at, notably, has little to do with tabletop roleplay (unless your table has trained thespians) and rarely happens in CRPGs. This speaks to its broad appeal, but more notably gets at the heart of the matter: the commercial ideal Dungeons And Dragons Experience is not actually how almost any tabletop game, 5e or not, is played or performed. It is defined by secondary experience via podcasts and television episodes and broad parodies. This, more than anything, is what Larian offers: the ability to play a game that your favorite voice actors play, or to get the Dungeons And Dragons Experience when you’re not in a position to get a group going. It offers the idealized and aestheticized vision of it, even when that idealization makes the game outright worse.

After 1050 quick saves (I have 2GBs of save folder...) and 60 hours in my own world (and I can't even count the hours I have in my friends' worlds), I could not continue playing this game. It is great and all and I am glad that this game got so many awards, and I strongly believe this will cause a positive change in the gaming industry.
The reason why I could not continue is that I played this game so much in a month. Also, in my own save I have modded it to highlight every item in the world, so I gathered everything and finished every quest along the way. I was in the middle of Act 2 quests and swept half the act 2 world. This also caused me to quit the game as I was overwhelmed with collecting everything rather than enjoying the game but I have a syndrome called "I-must-do-everything-or-I-feel-like-I-am-missing-out".
I strongly believe I will give this game another shot in about a few years?... Maybe?

it has come to my attention that Astarion is basically a tumblr sexyman who women think is very hot but i'd like to clarify: i am NOT like the other girls. Astarion should NOT be dominant, dangerous, or powerfully sexy. Astarion, to me, isn't a character whose appeal is having a really cut physique and an overwhelmingly domineering presence - he SHOULD be reading Garfield comics in the dentist's waiting room because he forgot to charge his phone the night before, he should be doing sketch comedy that never takes off, he should be saving memes of Spongebob being 'cunty' onto his phone, he should be begging to eat pussy politely, and he should be singing along to broadway musicals in the shower.

Note: This review hasn't aged well because I decided to do a re-review to reassess the game, so I no longer stand by much of the praise given here.

Two disclaimers before I continue this review

1) I am going to compare this to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous an incredible amount, as they’re both CRPG adapting a TTRPG that share similarities but also core differences worth discussing. If this grates on you, quit now. Divinity: Original Sin 2 will also come up with regularity.

2) This game is VERY buggy and VERY unfinished. A lot of what I say here may end up ageing like shit. Honestly, I don’t normally bring up technical issues when reviewing newer games, but BG3’s are BAD and notable.

It is a shame that Backloggd does not have two separate entries for ‘Baldur’s Gate 3: The Game’ and ‘Baldur’s Gate 3: The Story’. Meaning that I, unfortunately, have to do two fundamentally different reviews. I wish this weren’t the case, that there wasn’t such a canyon-wide gap between the two halves of this game. It’d be easier if they were both good, or both bad.

I’ll get the good out of the way first.

On the gameplay front, BG3 is a masterpiece. Its immediate competition is Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (which I also reviewed), both of them being adaptations of a popular TTRPG format that opt for accuracy over simplification. Whereas WOTR went for an all-in approach, BG3 is far more conservative with its choices. In lieu of adding the kitchen sink, it merely yoinks things it considers meaningful or useful.
This is most obvious in how it approaches buff spells. WOTR simply added nearly everything a class had in terms of spellbook, which meant some classes often ended up with an obscene amount of buff spells that were all but mandatory later on. BG3, however, only adapts some buff spells, which is impressive given 5E already cut down on them. The few buff spells that remain are primarily ‘Concentration’ spells - meaning you can only have one at a time.

This is a twofold benefit: Combat stats are scaled back and more manageable, lacking WOTR’s insane 40 AC demon enemies, and buffs are no longer mandatory - just useful. Similarly, it’s infinitely harder to make a non-starter build; with less overall buffs and a fair allocation of prepared spells/spell slots, there’s always something to cast. The same applies to non-magical classes and their unique resources.

If you’ve come here from DOS2, it’s worth stating: The armour system and action points are gone. Here, we use armour class (a stat that influences dice rolls to hit you) and actions (main, bonus, movement).

And I gotta say, the action economy is excellent. It was far, far too common for characters - martial ones especially - to have turns where all they did was move in both DOS2 and WOTR. BG3 heaps options on you, which primarily benefit martial characters. Throwing things is now a viable option, and the entire class of Thrown weapons scales obscenely well, preventing ‘dead’ turns.

Hell, just the sheer presence of the Throw, Improvised Weapon and Shove actions add so much depth to the combat’s tactical layer.

Throwing a bottle of water and shocking it is a great idea for AoE damage, using someone as a melee weapon to force them prone will open them up to devastating attacks from your party rogue, shoving enemies to their death is a strategy that works right up until the end of the game. Really, this game’s combat excels precisely because it allows for the kind of off-the-wall scrabbling actions that occurs in real tabletop RPGs. Sure, you can minmax, but it’s much more fun to kill an enemy by repeatedly batista bombing them through furniture. It helps that the game is rife with grenade-type items to throw at enemies.

Lastly, levels feel meaningful in this game. Even something as simple as ONE level 2/3/4/5/6 slot feels like a significant option, and feats especially can drag some builds into relevancy - especially for Barbarians. Well… This one isn’t so cut and dry. Progression feels great until levels 11 and 12. The original level cap in early access was 10, and it really shows here. For most classes/subclasses, it’s better to just take a two level dip into something else unless you’re HELLBENT on seeing your main class to 12. For melee classes especially, there’s little reason to go beyond level 10 since a two level dip into Fighter gives you an entire extra action.

And… The no-catch good is over. Let’s start complaining.

The actual actions one can take are exciting, but the source of them - the classes - aren’t. This is mostly on the developers, as they insisted that the game would only adapt things from DnD 5E’s base. So no sourcebooks or modules, all vanilla. Now, I’m no DnD guru, but even to me it’s obvious that Warlock and Bard suffer from not having access to Tasha's Cauldron of Everything or Xanathar’s Guide to Everything stuff.

The companion Wyll shows up really early. He’s a warlock brandishing a rapier and the title ‘Blade of Frontiers’. So you might think he’s a Hexblade, right?

Nope. No melee cantrips like Booming Blade, and Hexblade isn’t even implemented. He’s a Fiend Warlock, and like all Warlocks his endgame in this game is spamming Eldritch Blast.

Classes in BG3 aren’t mechanically interesting, they’re just picking a variation on the same flavour. Sure, there’s some class-unique mechanics but the vast majority of them are, again, variations on a theme. Sure, Monk doesn’t have spell slots and instead has ‘ki points’ but for all intents and purposes you’re just casting spells. Most casters draw from the same spellbook with a few differences, Bard/Ranger/Rogue are essentially the same class with some minor variations, and all martial classes except Fighter are ‘gimped Fighter’ once their resource runs out.

In the end, you’re honestly just picking one of three categories or Monk, and which roleplay flavour you want. We’ll get to that can of worms when I discuss the story, however.

Hell, even character customization feels barebones. There’s a total lack of eye shape/nose/eyebrow/whatever options. There are only preset faces you slap makeup/hair/extras on and then adjust the colours of.
Last little note, but the Feat selection is AWFUL. A lot of them are entirely near-entirely useless, while others are so strong that not taking them is stupid even if you’re a hardcore roleplayer. Seriously, the +2 to any stat from Ability Improvement is MONUMENTAL.
As a bridge between story and gameplay, though, we have to talk about ability checks, and two specific spells.

When faced with a dialogue or thieving check in this game, you roll a dice. It’s meant to mimic the tabletop, that good ol ‘roll charisma to fuck the dragon’ shit.

There’s just one problem. One teensy tiny problem.

These rolls are completely superfluous.

Early on, Shadowheart and some of your other companions can learn Guidance, which is a 1d4 bonus to a roll. You also start getting Inspirations, which let you reroll a failed check. On top of this, spells like Charm Person and Thaumaturgy start popping up, allowing you to stack an obscene amount of bonuses to rolls. Barring a Nat 1 crit fail, past a certain point in Act 1 it was obscenely rare for me to fail a check.

And… That didn’t matter either. Many checks will either let you progress normally, or not matter anyway. Taking some cues from immersive sims, a lot of quests can be advanced by just snooping around and clicking everything that the Highlight key… well, highlights. I don’t inherently hate ‘failure as progression’, it’s something I think Disco Elysium nailed, but this game? Nah, it just doesn’t hit.

Compounding this are three spells: Speak with Dead, Detect Thoughts and Speak with Animals. Narratively, they are cheat codes. All three allow you to gleam vital information for progression and the overall story, and carry no downsides beyond Speak With Dead having a strict requirement on corpse integrity. Sure, some of the dialogues are funny, but they’re so straightforward that it’s honestly kind of sad. Granted, the real downside is that Speak With Dead has a cutscene involved even if the corpse has nothing to say, which is AGONIZING when you’re probing corpses after a long and intense fight.

As for the actual story… First, let’s talk about TTRPGs. While some minmaxing nerds like to view TTRPGs as the ultimate evolution of combat systems where they can grind their players down unless the players are hardcore munchkins, the actual point of the medium is to make a character - good at some things, bad at others, potentially with baggage that colours how they interact with the world and other players - and roleplay them in a party setting.

And… You just can’t do this unless you pick an Origin character, with a decidedly preset class and appearance - except the Dark Urge. Custom characters can be fully customized, sure, and even have a Background option! But unlike other games, your background is pretty much irrelevant. If it confers any new dialogue, I haven’t found it. You have no chance to define a character background, and all your dialogue ignores the topic entirely. Sure, there are class and racial options, but many of these are just diversionary set dressing and they also stop appearing as much outside of Act 1 - which is a problem we REALLY have to talk about later.

The potential for roleplay as a custom character just isn’t there, a problem shared by its predecessor. You can try to stick to an alignment or ideals (though the alignment system was nuked) but you’re not really a character, you’re a class.
You may be thinking ‘Well, at least picking a custom character will let me get lots of companion NPC dialogue, right?’

And the answer is… Yesn’t. Yes, you’ll have the full suite of companions available in camp without occupying one of them yourself, but if you expect them to chime in with the frequency of Bioware companions then you have another thing coming. It’s rare for even one Origin character to chime in during a topic, having two or three would be beyond belief had I not seen it - once. I can’t help but wonder if the game is bugged, and only allowing one character to chime in even when others feasibly should. The end result is that adventuring with a party of Origins and a party of Hirelings (mute NPCs meant to fill a slot) doesn’t feel all that different besides some on-field quips.

This specific gripe might seem like a strange thing to open with, but I promise you it’s a canary in the coal mine.

Let’s talk about Act 1, IMO the game’s best act and also the setting for the entire Early Access period.

Act 1 has had YEARS of polish, and it shows. It is the only time where the game is what it pretends to be. It is incredibly reactive, possessing dialogue and outcomes for so many possibilities. The Druids who’re racist against Tieflings have dialogue for being a Druid, being a Tiefling and being both, as do other NPCs. Every little thing you can be or do has an appropriate reaction, from the obvious (Goblins afraid of Drow will let a Drow player character walk by without the need to roll a dice) to the outlandish (Killing Astarion, resurrecting him and then trying to fuck him or killing and reviving Gale three times). There’s still enough mystery to be enticing, and your companions’ stories are just opening up.

It’s great!

I love it!

It’s also rife with obvious cuts from Early Access!

This is an odd thing to bring up, because… Hey, they could fix it in the inevitable Definitive Edition, right? And most of the playerbase won’t even know because they didn’t play the EA version. But… It’s jarring. It’s really really jarring.

In Early Access, the tone of this game was decidedly dark. You had a tadpole in your head that was actively egging you to use it, using a seductive form to coo suggestions into your ear. Your companions were at odds with one another, you, and their own tadpole which was influencing them in different ways. That tadpole in your head would grow stronger, more dangerous and more assertive if you used it. Companions would castigate you for feeding it, and even using it to subjugate some goblins fed it.

Even Wyll from before was a different character; a folk hero struggling with the rage he feels towards goblins for slaughtering his village and the unfortunate love he felt towards his abuser.

In the full game, this is all gone. The tadpole is a relative non-entity, used only for telepathy. Using it is consequence free, and there’s a standard Videogame Skill Tree to upgrade it - which also has no consequences. All the strife and struggle is omitted, Wyll is just a nice guy struggling because his patron is a dick, and the entire tone is very… Bioware.

Especially with regards to morality. ‘Evil’ in this game is laughable, just an utter joke. Being good rewards you with a mountain of tadpole upgrades, loot, allies, money and opportunities to make things easier. Being evil uh… Sometimes gives you rewards, most of which are infinitely worse than being good. Perhaps the reason Larian omitted a morality meter is because your only options are “lawful good”, “chaotic good”, “true neutral” and “chaotic evil”. Stupid evil, more like. At least WOTR had the sense to include stupid good options. Every ‘evil’ choice is petty, spiteful, and needlessly dickish. There aren’t even any flavourful dialogue options to justify it as, say, you being desperate to get the tadpole out. You’re just being a cunt.

Act 1, again, emphasises this. The ‘good’ path is to expel an invading force, convince a shadowy cabal to leave innocents in peace, and rescue a spiritual leader from captivity.

The evil path involves killing refugees, children and natives of the land. And then having to kill the invading force anyway. But hey, at least you get an unfinished and buggy companion who kinda sucks by virtue of being a gimped Fighter (Paladin)! Except she’s not even ‘the evil companion’ while in your recruitment she’s simply pragmatic and understanding of extreme actions. They do try to explain it, but the explanation exists in a vacuum using a mechanic that other characters are party to, and contrasts pretty heavily with them.

It’s very Bioware. I bring Bioware up a lot because the original BG games were made by them, and they’d go on to make works rife with obnoxious tropes, shit politics, tonal disconnect and blatant character/route select forcing. BG3, unfortunately, only omits the shit politics. This is a Dragon Age game through and through, with the fascist-leanings and antisemitism filed off. It even has that brief pause in dialogue while the game scans your save for event flags. ‘Dragon Age without the awful American-centric politics’ is an easy sell for some, but not for me.

There’s a quest in Act 1, near the end, about a minute’s walk from the gate to Act 2. You approach a burning town, and are told that some people are inside. If you rush in and brave the fire, one of the people you just saved offers you a quest.

If you stand still and let her die, another NPC walks up to you and goes “Oh, that sucks. Anyway, here’s a quest for you.”

This is a minor thing to fixate on, but it’s emblematic of the wider problem:

Consequences don’t exist in this game.

You may think I’m being excessively mean, considering I’m only discussing Act 1, but this is a game wide problem. Baldur’s Gate 3 seems to believe that ‘consequences’ means ‘characters bring up your actions in dialogue’. Which is neat, but there’s problems here:

Obviously, these are not actual consequences. Actual consequences in BG3 tend to be immediate, and cleanly marked. Tellingly, most negative consequences come from picking dialogue lower on the list, with the good/safe options being up at the top. Not how I thought top/bottom discourse would manifest in 2023, but alas. Jokes aside, there aren’t really any long-lasting consequences.

You can straight up murder an NPC in Act 1, and when they return in Act 3 they’re merely a little irritated with you before starting a fight. If you don’t, they’re not irritated with you.

They then start a fight.

Even the tadpole is of no consequence, as using it religiously only elicits approving or disapproving dialogue from certain NPCs. Your skill tree is locked off early on, but you can still acquire that juicy upgrade in Act 3 even if you’ve spent the entire game calling the NPC who offers it a soyboy beta cuck. As you might have guessed it, all that changes is dialogue. Not even taking that super upgrade invokes any meaningful consequences beyond making you look like shit.

Now, looping back: Here’s the thing about Act 1, right. It’s still good, it’s the peak of this game. Even with all the obvious cuts and rewrites and shitty morality and blah blah blah. It’s good, okay?

But Act 2 isn’t. It’s really not. It nearly made me quit, in fact.

Pathfinder WOTR and DOS2 both excelled here, having Act 2 be the point where the game truly opens up and its scale becomes readily apparent. BG3, however, crushes the scale. It primarily takes place in a blighted hellscape, where the player is required to carry a light at all times for fear of being subs- Haha no just kidding, this only applies for like five minutes before you get a magic lantern that nullifies the mechanic.

With the mechanical despair nullified, you’re now free to walk through, uh… A blighted hellscape with barely any NPCs to interact with, the same 3-4 enemy types, a crushing lack of landmarks and barely any content. Or you can go to the mountain pass, which serves no purpose other than to progress someone’s questline and foreshadow a sidequest in an Act 1 area that you can revisit. It’s so empty that I actually assumed I’d just missed stuff, but no. It really is tiny.

So in the main area, all you can do is wander around and gorge yourself on like… An hour or two’s worth of content? The bulk of the area is made up of a dungeon that would be fine at the endgame but is FAR too lengthy for the halfway point and especially in relation to how utterly barren the rest of the act is. Act 2’s actual climax is shorter than that dungeon, for reference, despite containing its own dungeon. That certain events can make the finale go even faster does not help.

Perhaps what makes Act 2 feel duller than the rest is that there’s very little going on with your companions for the most part. Shadowheart’s questline occupies the bulk of the companion screentime, with Lae’zel getting a brief but missable dungeon at the very start and Gale’s storyline making a modicum of progress after a camp event. Other than that, though, everyone is… Static? It’s strange. Characters like Wyll, Astarion and Karlach will hit you with some sense of urgency, a goal that needs tending to now, only to kind of just sit there while you meander about the miserylands.

And, on the topic of Lae’zel’s dungeon, it very clearly illustrates this game’s relationship to both consequences and player choice.

Immediately, Lae’zel is placed in a situation where the game will tell you repeatedly that she’s going to die. You can make a choice here, but it impacts neither your relation with NPCs in the dungeon, or Lae’zel herself. She cannot die. You’re just picking flavour again. The road is linear, and you will walk it the way Larian demanded.

Following this, you’re placed in a meeting with a leading member of the Githyanki species. Here, the game compounds my complaints about the consequences only being ‘instant’, alongside a healthy dosage of linearity.

You can mouth off to this character and immediately die for pissing them off. Or… You can pick any of the other options. I’m gonna get into some light spoilers here, but the character demands you kill your dream guardian.

You can agree, carry it out, and the guardian will live anyway. You and the party then become enemies of the Githyanki people.You can agree, back out, and the guardian lives. You then become an enemy of the Githyanki people. You can disagree, and become an enemy of the Githyanki people. You can refuse to even start dialogue, then turn around and leave. At which point… You become an enemy of the Githyanki people.

This isn’t the first time this issue pops up, it’s just the most indicative of how this game feels about letting the player meaningfully influence the narrative. As early as Act 1, you’re offered an incredible amount of ‘options’ that don’t actually matter what, you will never remove the tadpole and you will always make an enemy of the goblins. In Act 2, you will always be an enemy of both the Githyanki and the Cult. You can make other, more minor choices, but these are ultimately just for roleplay flavour. It doesn’t actually matter whether you scorn certain deities, leave the miseryland coated in misery, genocide the few allies you have available or just murderhobo everyone in Act 1 and 2.

Why?

Because Act 3 is basically a different game entirely.

Well, I’ll admit I’m being slightly unfair to it. Act 3 is where a lot of companion quest lines actually climax, where a lot of side quests you’ve been doing all game show off and help you out. It’s the point where you arrive in the titular city, and get embroiled in the local politics that will help end the game.

But there is a disconnect between it and the rest of the game, even when it’s deliberately calling back to itself.

For starters, regardless of how you treat your companions, their quests will pop up so long as they’re present. This isn’t too jarring for characters like Karlach or Wyll, but even more guarded characters like Shadowheart and Astarion will urge you to push on with their quest - potentially ignoring that you’ve spent the entire game either neglecting them or outright bullying them.

Within these quests lies yet more of the game’s problems with morality. In fact, Act 3 is rife with it.

Your choices are, in the end, do something that’s a common sense good option or be a petty and spiteful chaotic evil asshole who does bad things with all the same forethought of a cat slapping a cup off of a counter. There’s surprisingly little room for nuance, you either do the good thing or the terrible no-good thing. This is particularly apparent in Astarion’s questline, where you can either convince him to do the thing he’s spent all game craving OR you can turn him into what Twitter and Tumblr thought he would be in pre-release.

If you’ve ever played Dragon Age: Inquisition, the companion quests are much the same here. You get a nice, good option that is never a challenge because if it has a skill check it’s very low (barring one exception), plus it’s at the top where all the good is. Or you can just be a dick and make things worse for everyone by picking the bottom option. Do you remember Iron Bull’s quest, where you can either convince him to be a free man or have him continue to serve a quasi-Spartan fascist empire? This game pulls the same shit.

Secondly, you may recall that I gassed up Act 1 for having lots of reactive dialogue and race/class/subclass specific dialogue. Well, it begins to slowly dry up in Acts 2 and 3. Basically nobody gave a shit that I was a drow or a Paladin after leaving Act 1, and I got more options for my Fighter subclass than I did Paladin. It’s so strange, to see the game’s multiple creation options just cease to matter entirely.

For a moment, though, let’s focus on the sidequests.

Because they also don’t mean shit.

My go-to example for this is a questline I’m going to call ‘The Race War’. The Race War is mentioned early on, and you can save a few key players involved in it. If you save them all, The Race War begins in earnest. BUT, because you saved a specific gnome, you can avert the worst outcome and mend the ideological differences, while still getting your objective cleared.

One problem, though.

You don’t actually have to do any of this. Mending the difference is possible no matter what, and the overarching goal of The Race War is achievable even if everyone from Act 1 and 2 fell to your Eldritch Blast spam. Sure, doing it the ‘right’ way is easier and has less punishing checks (or checks hands down), but this is redundant due to how obscene the bonuses to checks become later on.

You might be looking at my gripes and scowling, thinking ‘Mira, this is a roleplaying game. It’s wrong to approach it from a minmax angle’.

And you’re right. Truth be told, I approached the game from a roleplay angle, at first. With games like these I typically prefer to roleplay even if it hurts me. My Paladin did not allow Astarion to pickpocket, did their best to save innocents, refused the tadpole, obeyed the law and all that jazz. I even gave them a little Oathbreaker arc in Act 2.

The problem, at least for me, is how the game felt as though it was going out of its way to laugh at me for doing this. Abstaining from a lot of what the game dangles in front of you feels like self-gimping, because there are no consequences for engaging with it. Pickpocketing is easy gold, not a soul gives a shit if you let unnamed civilians die, the tadpole is just a skill tree with little bearing on the outcome of the story, and the law is easily supplanted. I managed to avoid truly min maxing on my first run, but I’m not sure I’ll resist the second time. Coupled with how difficult it is to actually roleplay narratively unless you pick an Origin character, and it’s kind of maddening to consider how this game was marketed.

Now, to tie the last few complaints together, let’s talk about the word ‘arbitrary’. To be arbitrary is to defy any system, rule or reasoning in favour of personal whims and impulses. In law, this would manifest as a judge making a decision in the moment rather than basing it off of legal precedent, past cases or the jury’s counsel.

In BG3, it manifests as morality-based dialogue options being available no matter what.

I never thought I would ever say this, but this game needed an alignment system or alignment locks. WOTR having it and locking dialogue off that would be ‘out of character’ was a genius idea.

It is so utterly jarring that, even when a game lets me console someone and be their confidant as they talk about their emotional & abuse AND lets me be a holy god-fearing Paladin, it still gives me the option to make them suffer. There are so, so, so many opportunities for even good characters to backstab people for no reason, with no option to justify it. Even to characters you’re romancing. Perhaps these were added to sell you the illusion of choice, but they just seem ridiculous. There’s one in particularly that you can only get by picking the goody two-shoes path in the first place!

Romances… God, I didn’t want to talk about them but I think I have to at this point.

A pretty common criticism of Bioware romances is that they essentially boil down to you sexually harassing someone until they give in and fall for you. Cullen’s in DA:I stands out; for as much as I hate the character, his romance is you harassing a drug addict until he becomes dependent on you.

BG3 decides to be forward-thinking by having some characters sexually harass you instead. Lae’zel and Gale especially.


I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t mind Lae’zel coming onto me because I wanted her anyway, but it doesn’t take much brainstorming to understand how someone might see her dialogue as either a thinly veiled rape threat or just deeply uncomfortable. If you don’t find her sexual aggression - or her - endearing then it must come off as being cornered. Though, mercifully, she does back off.

And Gale… At first, I thought Gale being a clingy ‘nice guy’ with a penchant for emotional manipulation and compliment bombing was a deliberate commentary on how the leading white men in Bioware games tend to act. But as time went on, and he got a bit more incel-y, I noticed that my dialogue options for dealing with him were either “Yes, we are bonded for life, you are the best person ever” OR telling him to kill himself. I realised that even if his horrible elements are intended, the developers certainly want you to like him.

Both of these characters are very easy to earn the love of, even if you laugh at their plights. The romances in general aren’t great, mostly just you treating people with decency until they fall in love with you. These aren’t really romances, they’re trauma bonds. You can’t even buy your beloved flowers or something, and this is one thing Dragon Age got right! If you’ve ever been around trans puppygirls it’s like corralling a party of them.

It’s really weird coming from Pathfinder WOTR, and I think it’s a problem of timescale. BG3 takes place over a nebulous time period, like a few weeks at least, whereas WOTR takes place over a potentially years-long crusade. So while WOTR allows romances to slowly bloom and take form, in BG3 they kinda just spring up. Hell, even Dragon Age 2 averted this by having it take place over years.

Romance is a little obnoxious, but few things are as bad as the polyamory ‘representation’.

So, I’m gonna bitch at length about how the game made me feel as both a trans person and a polyamorous person. You can scroll down, it’s just pure vitriolic kvetching.

Ahem.

Holy fuck. What is wrong with the writers?

Marketing the game and going ‘hee ho some party members will be poly :)’ only to offer utterly dogshit options is such a kick in the gut. And in terms of sheer offensiveness, this game made me feel worse about being poly than DA:I made me feel about being a lesbian or another thing I won’t mention here.

You can only be poly with Halsin and one other party member. Halsin explicitly states that he’s poly because he’s spent so much time in the animal world that he’s given up on monogamy. Whether it’s intended or not, the message here is “Halsin is poly because he’s an alien”. And the two party members he’s compatible with - Shadowheart and Astarion - are both explicitly and implicitly stated to be ‘super kinky’, with the further implication that polyamory is a kink to them.
Every other party member reacts viscerally to the idea of polyamory, browbeating you into picking ‘them or me’ or in some extreme cases just dumping you outright. It felt terrible, emotionally impactful for all the wrong reasons. Either the writers were using them as a mouthpiece to yell at poly people, or they didn’t consult any poly people at all and thought this was okay. The end result is awful all the same, and it actually soured my opinion of every character involved out of spite. That many party members consider engaging in an incestuous threesome to be less abhorrent than loving two people just compounds it. Truly, this is the worst poly rep I’ve ever seen in my life.

As for trans rep… Eesh. On the sexuality front the game is great, every romance is bi and same-sex couples appear with regularity, either mentioned in passing or shown outright. It’s great, gold star, no complaints. But when it comes to transness, there’s a pretty big problem. There are no trans companions, and barely any trans NPCs. So far, in my 105~ hours of playtime, I’ve ran into two NPCs who might’ve been trans (as they used ‘male’ voices on the ‘femme’ body). One of them was a minor NPC standing in a bank that I only knew of via posts from friends, and another was a shapeshifting doppelganger that tries to slaughter you.

Sure, the player can be trans in any flavour, or nonbinary, but in light of how scarce trans people are… This doesn’t feel like representation, it feels like fetishization. While bodies are not labelled ‘male’ or ‘female’, the ‘masc’ and ‘femme’ bodies have entirely different faces available. Femme bodies struggle to be distinctly masculine or even just butch, while masculine bodies are perhaps excessively masc unless you pick the slightly androgynous elves. More focus seems to have been placed on letting you be a “chick with a dick” or a “boy with a pussy”, which is only further compounded by a startling lack of body options. ‘Tis incredibly telling that all the femme bodies have decently-sized tits that you cannot adjust at all, and even the twinkiest masc body has some musculature.

It sucks. It is entirely possible to play the game as the only trans person in Faerun. One of the Hirelings is non-binary, I suppose, but an entirely mute doll meant to fill a party slot for murderhobos is hardly a character let alone representation. There was a drag queen coded character, I guess…? Alas, while the game is delightfully not heteronormative, it’s so cisnormative it hurts.

Back to the story, and specifically my criticism of Act 3 feeling disconnected. A pretty significant part of this is that, for all intents and purposes, the plot ends up being hijacked by two new characters. One of whom had token references in prior arcs, and one functionally appears out of nowhere. Some argue that the presence of these characters was foreshadowed, and I can’t really agree. A loading screen tooltip and one optional scene having some barely noticeable Bhaal iconography don’t really constitute foreshadowing. Sure, Big Bad 1 is mentioned a few times by a companion, but Big Bad 2 feels like… I don’t know. As if the devs looked at the first two games and inserted something familiar. Or they were just THAT hype to work with Lady Dimitrescu.

But just in terms of tone Act 3 feels like a whole other game. It is obnoxiously in love with its own sense of humour, with many of the opening diversions being near-entirely comedic in nature. The interesting elements, like the titular city struggling with a refugee crisis, are instead put on hold for a carnival, bad and kinda insensitive jokes about sex workers, having sex with twins and other such tripe. It tapers off once you’re in the actual city, but it’s incredibly jarring given how hard the stakes are in this Act.

Which is, in all hilarity, the same issue that befell DOS2. Like that game, BG3 does not respect its own stakes. Act 3 is a slower paced, almost casual experience where you jaunt between landmarks in the city for Designated Stuff Happening moments and probe NPCs who either have nothing to say or are throwing another quest in your journal. Most of these quests, too, are just kinda worthless. Acts 1 and 2 are far more reticent and creative with their sidequests, less-is-more and all that. 3 has… A lot, and they’re not very good. Calling half of them fetch quests would not be unwarranted.

The other half are, essentially, main quests in disguise. You’re given a few broad goals and these side quests guide you towards them. This isn’t bad, most of my favourite CRPGs do this. It’s literally the entire first half of New Vegas, for instance. But man, this game’s not-side quests are kind of exhausting, with a lot of them being either fetch quests with lots of dialogue (summoning horrific memories of FFXIV) or long dungeons that get tiring as you approach later levels. That it’s impossible to tell whether they’re truly optional or whether they’re your only option doesn’t help.

This is also where the cuts start being obvious. Like, glaringly. Larian showed off the city’s Upper City district as late as June but it’s just gone. A plot-important confrontation happens within an hour of the act starting, in a location deeply unfitting for what’s actually occurring. It’s even sequestered off in a separate, unoptimized cell. You’re then half-heartedly shunted out into the Lower City, which is expansive yes but nowhere near as big or ‘living and breathing’ as Larian made it out to be.

Characters sometimes appear and talk as if they lived through a quest that does not exist, which makes some plotlines feel like watching a film with some chapters cut, really apparent when Lae’zel is around. Astarion’s personal plot progresses way too fast and gets too much faux-gravitas, which in turn betrays the cut content associated with the other NPC involved in the story. I’ll admit, it’s strange that Astarion’s constantly-mentioned big bad is less important to the story than a guy Karlach mentions a couple times in Act 1. But again, story cuts. Hell, the game’s only true late-game companion will dump about two acts worth of chats on you, as if he was meant to appear earlier.
If you dig deep into companion chats, a lot of them mention either a history with Baldur’s Gate or people they know/knew there, but most of this comes to nothing. This is especially prominent with Wyll, a character who absolutely should have more of a connection to the city but barely says anything.

But most importantly, the titular city just feels kinda barren. It’s really obvious where Stuff will happen despite the density, and the size feels like it serves no purpose other than to tank my framerate due to all the moving NPCs. Act 1 and 2 were mostly empty spaces with designated event areas to poke around, and 3 is no different. It just pretends it isn’t. Act 3 makes it apparent that the game just isn’t finished, because if the Lower City feels so empty then how bad was the Upper City going to be?

And, in terms of the main plot… It honestly kind of stalls here? It boils down to little more than two questlines to get macguffin and then a confrontation with the Big Bad. There’s not much of an investigation because important characters will just exposit anything you might be missing to you, and the prior act answered a lot of things definitively - too definitively, one could say.
In particular, a lot of plot points are just painfully obvious if you’re familiar with either DnD fluff or you’re keenly attuned to how adaptations tend to present information from the source material. It does not take a great, keen mind to understand what the true big bad actually is, given that the game all but beats you over the head with certain imagery. I unfortunately had the plot clocked by the middle of Act 2, but I was still insistent that Larian would surprise me.

They did not.

There wasn’t much catharsis in pushing through BG3’s third act. I wish I could say more, but I don’t want to spoil this entire game. Honestly? It was mostly frustration. Frustration at the game for pulling the ol’ Larian upscale and making some fights a slog, frustration at the story for running out of steam, frustration at the writers for half-assing so much but keeping tons of comedic diversions, frustration at how the romance was handled, frustration at how little consequences there actually were, and…

Frustration with the Origin companions.

Yeah. Sorry, I’m just not that invested in these people. They’re way, way too Bioware for me. Besides Karlach (a very obviously late addition), they kind of exist just to Have A Point about something. Like the natural conclusion of “remove everything that’s just artistic flair” discourse. While they do comment on things in line with their alleged alignment, it’s rare to talk to them about things that aren’t story-relevant. Fuck sake, even Cullen was willing to talk to you about how he got cucked. And he sucks!

In place of broad personalities, they exist to ruminate on radicalization, self-determination, cycles of abuse, the price of altruism, the hubris of academics, and the pitfalls of religious zealotry. Beyond that though, they’re very one-dimensional. Being funny and having fetishes is nice, but the mere fact it’s obscenely difficult to get party members to leave of their own accord (barring three instant losses in Act 1 - hey, there’s those instant consequences again). Even DOS2’s companions had more depth than this, and character writing was not that game’s strong point. Hell, I’m gonna be extreme here: The Witcher 3 was better about this, and I fucking hate that game.

Also, as an aside: Astarion’s quest is neat but as a character he’s just R18 Sebille from DOS2. It’s really obvious in the resolutions.

Karlach is the exception, but for as much as I like her she does feel as though she was added as a reaction to people complaining about how evil-aligned the party was in early access. She is just a golden retriever in a tiefling body, and yet she was added even after they made everyone more polite and less contentious.

That’s kind of this game’s core issue, actually. It is obvious, at least from my point of view, that Larian tapered down a lot of this game’s darker and more contentious elements for fear of alienating people - yet I STILL see people bitch that Shadowheart, the adorable puppy girl, is too mean for them. I can’t help but wonder why they did it: Was it truly to avoid alienating normals? Were the rewrites that massive? Did they have a change of direction? I don’t know.

But, I don’t know. I like them despite everything - except Gale. They’re frustratingly shallow, but the points they exist to serve are where this game’s writing shines on the intended path. They’re all excellently voiced too, everyone in the game is yeah but the companions put their everything into it. I can’t fucking believe the guy who voiced Zeon - the worst Xenoblade 3 guest party member - is voicing a character like Astarion. I’ll give them sincere credit, they nailed it. This game’s acting in general is very theater, which is a nice break from the grim mumbled boredom that most western games have fallen into, or the clarity-first-personality-second acting that’s made a lot of contemporary animanga adaptations feel stilted and wooden. A lot of major side characters - Raphael and Mizora especially - are just treasures. Some of the best in class. Even when this game was boring, I sat through the dialogue for entertainment value.

Except in one instance, where the game doubled down on something I hate.

Look, I’ll just say it outright: This game kinda hates the original games even though it’s eager to retread old ground. Returning characters have a horrible time, with some of the best character writing from Throne of Bhaal getting mercilessly stepped on. Without spoiling it too deep, ToB’s best companion has their arc belittled and made fun of to the viewer, for no other reason than to force a connection between BG2 and BG3. Larian promised that the game would have ‘connections’ to justify this game being called BG3 and the game genuinely would’ve been better off without them. They are hamfisted, unwanted and needlessly spiteful towards the source material.

In the instance I alluded to, BG3 took such a steaming dump on Throne of Bhaal that I actually mashed through the dialogue out of sheer disgust. It’s bad, so bad. Bringing along a certain companion hangs a lampshade on how bad it is, but it’s fleeting. I hate saying this, but that scene well and truly should not have been in the game.

Sigh, look. I know I’ve been harsh on the game for the entire duration of this review so far, but I really did enjoy it in Act 1 and most of 2, plus the gameplay is a treasure. There’s a reason the score isn’t as low as you’d think. It’s a blast in multiplayer too, particularly if your party members - and you - are stupid as fuck.

It’s just such a mess. I didn’t even get into the lackluster ending, unfinished epilogue, my gripes with how loot works, the bad economy, or the BUGS! Copious bugs! Softlocks, quests not progressing, crashes, freezes, missing NPCs, rolls not applying bonuses, bugs bugs BUGS.

I hope this review ages like shit. I really do. I hope Larian release a Definitive Edition or something that makes most of this moot, but I think some of my complaints will always exist.

This is a game people gassed up for not being ‘like other AAA games’. And yet, it is incomplete on release, is a technical mess, has lots of unfinished/dead end content, and the devs have promised to fix/add to it later.

It is, unfortunately, not special as far as modern AAA games go. It’s not special as far as CRPGs go either.

It's just another in a long line of Bioware games.