Baldur's Gate 3 é simplesmente a obra de arte máxima do Rpg Ocidental.

Sim, é isso aí que você leu mesmo, é difícil pensar em pontos negativos de uma obra que não apenas é o Magnum Opus de um estúdio que sempre mostrou muito potencial, a Larian Studios, como também faz a proeza de melhorar uma das obras mais Espetaculares da história do Rpg, Baldur's Gate 2.

Sinceramente falando, eu não consigo descrever direito tudo o que esse jogo é, e tudo o que ele trás consigo também. Saiba apenas de uma coisa, se você Ama Rpgs Ocidentais, principalmente os de tabuleiro, e os eletrônicos com camera de cima, Saiba que esse jogo, pra você, é simplesmente INDISPENSAVÉL.

Ele está pra Rpgs ocidentais, nesse estilo em especifico, como Vampiro a mascara, e D&D estão pra Rpgs de tabuleiro. Assim como Tes V: Skyrim e Tes III: Morrowind estão pra Rpgs em primeira pessoa. Tipo Elden Ring pra Rpgs Souls Like, Ou FF VII e Dragon Quest estão para JRpgs, até como The Witcher 3 está para Rpgs simplificados.

Acho que deu pra entender o quanto eu recomendo esse jogo, o bixinho se tornou meu sexto jogo favorito (-_-).

Senhoras e Senhores, se vocês gostam de Rpgs, por favor, JOGUEM Baldur's Gate 3, ele é fantástico. 10/10 ou 5/5

>A truly epic tale in the forgotten realms with rich character depth
>Endless permutations of choices and consequences in the story
>Simple turn-based combat where creative combos and experiments are fun and have impact
>Beautiful art assets, soundtrack, and level design that heighten the gameplay
>Full controller support
>4 player co-op
>No Paid DLC or MTX Shop
>not a predatory casino full of culdesacs, time-sinks, or gameplay systems designed to "drive engagement"

Larian delivers exactly what consumers used to and should continue to expect from a $60 title

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an inspiring rpg that shows up its competitors and manages to be even better than Divinity 2 in almost every way. Just when I thought crpgs weren’t really my thing, Larian pull me right back in - when something is done with this level of execution and passion, its hard not to be drawn to it as a fan of games, fantasy settings or role playing games in general.

What really sets Baldur’s Gate 3 apart is meticulous attention to world and character building detail as well as total dedication to player immersion & agency. The autonomy this game allows is like nothing else to date, you can approach just about any situation in so many ways that I constantly felt in control and able to shape my own story. Even the most simple decisions can have an unsuspected level of nuance to them to the point that it occasionally made me question my own instincts and understanding of game tendencies and language. Now that is an achievement. This is the most successful translation of the experience of playing traditional tabletop rpgs ever, notably that of d&d and pathfinder.

The presentation and quality of life features in BG3 are executed so pristinely, with very functional, accessible menus that are able to present massive amounts of information in a way that feels understandable. Skills, items, character info, maps and equipment are all laid out in very clear sections, of which many can be filtered and organised at the click of a button. The more tedious aspects of d&d are automated or otherwise streamlined and the video game format accounts for all of your passive skills and stats automatically, removing a whole layer of complexity. My favourite aspect of this is the simple act of rolling dice, creating exactly the same feeling of anticipation as in real life rpgs and very clearly showing which bonuses you could add to boost your result or reroll a failed check. There’s strategy even to this simple practice and it creates scenarios of its own through luck - being forced to run with a critical fail or landing a crit success on a roll that would otherwise be impossible is great every time. Failure and flaw is imperative to an exciting and relatable story and BG3 fully accounts for this, making it a core facet of its gameplay and narrative. Characters coasting through a story with 0 challenges, obstacles or burdens would be shit (though I must say I feel like I optimised the game a whole lot and rarely ever managed to fail checks, I think its partly down to inspiration being so generous.)
On top of this the presentation and visuals are gorgeous, the interface is slick, clean and colour coded beautifully and character models are so full of life and personality.

The characters themselves are excellent albeit not as good as in divinity 2 in my personal opinion. They are, for the most part, all lovable and fun but there’s nobody that hit quite the same as the red prince or lohse. I do think that there is an overabundance of human or human-like characters, its a nitpick but in a genre littered with various races (especially when you go beyond just base d&d) I was slightly disappointed at the party representation that we got. Same could be said for classes infact, a bard, paladin or artificer (we literally have the steel watch) could have gone so hard, but alas, custom player characters will do. My favourites are Lae’Zel, Gale & Karlach, when other party members were not needed, these were my mainstays. Aside from having unique personalities, quirks and preferences, what really shone for me are the voice acting performances which are fucking excellent. Even the most basic lines of dialogue in response to spotting things on the road or casting spells are delivered so evocatively and passionately. With only the rarest of exceptions, I never felt like it was trying too hard either. In tense or powerful moments of character development, such as Karlach’s bursts of rage or Gale’s existential rumination, I was always captured by the emotion oozing from each performance, outstanding stuff. I will not say too much more to try and avoid spoilers but Lae’Zel gave me by far the biggest goosebumps in this regard and the absolute commitment to her character by the writers & by her actress are a treat, a slice of melted chocolate gateu, delicious.

So, all in all, some exceptional moments spawned from this, be they preordained story beats, being forced to make tough decisions or moments that spawned entirely out of my own adventures and use of the systems. Speaking of the systems, what a remarkably intelligent thing they are, creating some crazy scenarios and brilliant substories - for example, using mage hand to toss a scroll of misty step to a trapped dwarf surrounded by explosive mushrooms, finding hilarious ways to cause aoe damage or fling enemies off cliffs and of course, charming the weak-willed and talking your way out of situations in some weird and wonderful ways. My only small gripe is that a lot of scenarios are surprisingly black or white in morality - do you join this evil guy doing evil shit or do you not? There are a LOT of random evil npcs and an asshole abundance in BG3, resulting in me pretty much slicing my way through the game, but hey, its all XP!
The main story of the game is definitely above average and more than serviceable, but I think its the character stories and side quests that truly shine, which granted, are more or less always tied to the main story in one way or another anyway.

Oh and my god are these characters horny or what, I swear every main character wanted to fuck me at one point or another, some so early into the game that i’m like, I hardly know you lol! Not a complaint though, the moments are still earned most of the time and sometimes characters just wanna fuck because they feel like it (or because they are obsessed by your scent, goddamn Lae’Zel you can’t get enough of this dwarf stink huh).

Another immense achievement that must have been an insane amount of work by Larian, the budget increase from their last game must have been huge but that’s not to take away from the merit of this team as amazing creators. You gotta hand it to them that this is something else and I can easily overlook any minor technical faults or glitches in the game - I did walk in midair for a few seconds and fall to my death at one point though, which gave me a big laugh. Round of drinks on me Larian, what a game!!

This game genuinely feels like you just walked out of a session with one of the best DM's you've ever met.

The amount of options you have is incredible, and the creativity available to you with which you can approach combat situations (or avoid them entirely with a silver tongue!) just keeps blowing me away.
Act 2 is where this game really started to grow on me, where (if I recall correctly, atleast!) you can avoid literally every single optional boss through doing dialogue properly in some RIDICULOUSLY unique ways. It's so much fun, and it's the major reason it feels like such an authentic and fantastic DnD experience; it really just feels like a DM playing along with the astoundingly bizarre ways you're trying to dodge rough fights.

I could go on for hours about what I love about this game dude, oh my god. The world's gorgeous and ridiculously alive, the cast is FANTASTIC and the writing is, as a result, such a treat.
Gameplay's really solid and grounded; beautiful adaption of 5E in that regard, and the soundtrack is absolutely beautiful too.

I wanna go a bit more in depth about the cast especially because, god dude. They're so good. I love ALL these goobers. Some of em are definitely coarse at first, but once you peel back the layers you start to realize why they are the way they are - and how they develop from that by spending time away from the toxic environments they're used to is wonderful.
Autonomy is the major means of doing so, and I appreciate the way that's handled so much. Shadowheart's my favorite example of this; sometimes things will straight up get worse if you butt in too much and start guiding her in choices she has to make.
You gotta depend on your allies, trust them to do the right thing - and in doing so, you'll realize they've come a long, long way since the start of their journey. It's so fucking good. Genuinely so proud of their development, it's all really satisfying.

There's still some flaws here and there - Act 3 can definitely get a bit buggy at times, but with how ridiculously expansive this game is that's honestly to be expected, and with how ridiculously fun this game is it hardly impacted my enjoyment at all despite some surprisingly big ramifications on my playthrough.
I've heard critiques about how the ending is a bit slim, but if you've properly followed a character's arc through their personal quests and camp dialogue you've got more than enough of an idea of how they'll deal with the aftermath, so I didn't really feel like it had to be anything bombastic. It works just fine with everything you know at that point, IMO!

I'm already thinking of what I want to do in my second playthrough. There's SO much possible divergences from my first playthrough, and so many checks to hopefully not fail this time. And I don't think I'll be getting tired of it anytime soon!

when i first saw the reviews coming out that this game was "clean and flawless" i knew none of the reviewers had actually played this (or any larian game) to the end - in fact, if larian had indeed managed to make a "clean" game, i'd probably not play it, for it would mean the original devs had been replaced by shapeshifting ghouls

for the record, gameplay wise this is more of a divinity original sin 3 than it is a baldurs gate - no one will ever complain about this, as it is better, so i took it upon myself just to make sure we dont forget

the plot is like... okay... but it feels a lot like it only exists to make character writing happen, which i guess is pretty much what d&d is, so you can take that however you want - in a vacuum looking at just the "main plot" it is kinda ass in many ways though

a larian game also means the first 20 hours will by far be the most enjoyable because you have yet to curse your save with the weight of a trillion bugged items, unfinishable quests, deadend state npcs and missed triggers, and this is totally fine as your autistic minmaxxing cheevohunting completionist brain is forced to come to terms with the fact that the perfect playthrough isnt really possible

the amount of people into astarion is extremely alarming - personally i caused him great grief whenever i was able to (this is considered lawful good). dont try to defend him either, i wont cast speak to animals to understand you losers

this is about as good as D:OS2 - as dirty as ever, made in belgium - crooked dice, combat bugs and everything else you could want from a larian crpg

120 horas investido nesse jogo. Eu que tenho fugido de jogos que consomem tanto tempo assim. Me senti puxado pra dentro do jogo com tamanha qualidade e densidade do mundo e suas interaçoes.

Passaram 120 horas e passaram rapido. Eu ainda quero mais conteudo, conhecer novos personagens. Colocar meu personagem em mais aventuras. é incrivel o tanto que esse jogo aumentou o paramentro pra jogos de nova geraçao, se eu ja nao aguentava mais ver a formula da ubisoft. Hoje ela ja me da nojo. Gastei centenas de horas com Ac Odyssey, Valhalla - admito que teve seus pontos fortes mas o sentimento de tempo perdido e de conteudo massante eu nao cheguei de sentir com o Baldur´s Gate 3. - Virou meu baldur gate favorito - Superou o Baldur gate 2 que eu tenho umas 250 horas compartilhadas em dois saves -

Entao se for pra gastar tantos horas assim da sua vida, que seja com magnifico.


E diga-se de passagem, conciliar trabalho, namoro, estudo com Jogar algo tao massivo assim é loucura. Eu sei la quantas horas nao cabei dormindo menos so pra ir dormir mais tarde jogando e acordando mais cedo pra dar tempo de jogar mais. É o sentimento que todo gamer ama e infelizmente, é uma pequena porcentagem de jogos que possibilitam isso.

I don't know if disappointing is even a sufficient enough word to describe this game. Meandering, dull, and within an uninteresting world with characters I could not possibly care less about, Baldur's Gate III is a master at pushing no boundaries at all.

The first two acts were a total slog with very little to show for themselves. With no notable settlements to speak of and a sparsely dotted map of weak theme park attractions, the first section of the game felt like a dungeon crawl through a pile of wood shavings. There was nothing there, and the most interesting part was the entire Grove segment being broken in split-screen multiplayer through huge glitches that ruined flags for the entire rest of the game. Act 2 was no better than the first, having a somehow even more dull environment than the first and a horrid curse mechanic which also broke in splitscreen due to the game's flags seemingly not setting themselves correctly. There was nobody of interest to talk to, the quests were nonexistent, and most of the intrigue that lied within it hoped desperately that the player would give a shit about Shadowheart specifically.

Act 3 finally picked things up a bit, but by this point I was so tired of the game that I had to start taking extended breaks between sessions. It finally had actual NPCs to talk to, actual quests to do, more interesting encounters and environments, and (gasp!) a personality. Still, with so many of the quests boiling down to going into a dungeon and fighting a big boss to complete a major questline, it became tiring by the end. Even so, I do find it funny that the best part of Baldur's Gate III was in fact the city of Baldur's Gate. It wasn't too terribly interesting overall, though, which I think shows a lot how awful the world and mechanics are.

I'm sure everyone has already gone on and on about how 5E D&D clearly does not translate well to a video game and relies extremely heavily on a DM to even work properly, so I won't retread that ground. While any larger combat scenario can be a chore in any CRPG or TTRPG, I found that they were particularly bad in this game because of just how uncreative and monotonous things work particularly because of the lack of a DM. The game's clearest semblance of 'challenge' was throwing arbitrary low time limits and having enemies spam stun/movement cancel magic, showcasing a complete lack of design space on the system's front when broken down into a digital simulator like this. It would not surprise me if in actual tabletop 5E that's the most challenge a DM can provide without straight up making things up and fudging a lot, either.

The combat taking forever and the sheer amount of it wound up adding to what was already a bloated runtime. This run clocked in at somewhere between 90 and 100 hours and it felt like tons of it was combat filler; I say filler particularly because the low level cap of 12 was reached very early into the third act with a ton of exp being wasted afterward across the rest of the game. It doesn't help that the game has difficulty parsing between targets for actions, leading to stealing from, examining things near, or pissing off NPCs constantly when using a controller (which you HAVE TO for splitscreen). This brought about far more fights than was necessary, and despite my charisma stat of 16 or so it seemed that bribes never got anyone to back down from aggro either. Seemingly pointless mechanics like that are found all over the game, none adding anything at all but bloat and bother.

I guess I can at least say that the game tends to look quite nice, at least when it's not in the most boring environments ever conceived. I've criticized the Souls games for having uninteresting locales and environments which you have to already be a fan to appreciate, but I feel almost silly for that sort of critique after playing this game. Things in this game are well constructed as models and textures but add nothing and mean nothing; flora is thrown around haphazardly, the camera is always zoomed out enough that the high res textures on smaller items are never seen and thus waste resources, and the environments the devs poured time into were drab and lacked meaningful tone. Of course, character models tended to look pretty good here, but I can't even comment that much on it because of just how limited and repetitive they can be as well.

I played as a dragonborn in this game as for personal reasons I don't and can't play as humanish ancestries such as elves or humans or dwarves. It's brought me to be more watchful of when fantasy or sci-fi media overcentralizes around that sort of human-type species aesthetic. I didn't, however, have to look hard at all at BG3 to notice the lack of less humanish stuff throughout almost its entire runtime. It rubbed me the wrong way that in such an allegedly diverse world there are seemingly no representatives of orcs and dragonborn, for example, except for in the inner city. Very... interesting. I got the impression that orcs and dragonborn in general were something of an afterthought in this game, as the lack of them and the lack of any attention to detail on clothing and narration for dragonborn was pretty noticeable at all times. The customization for them in particular was a joke, having almost no headgear available and most armor clipping badly on them as well.

The character builder in this game was weirdly shoddy too, all things considered. In particular, the limited scale tones and patterns, a lack of size options, and the limited yet allegedly pointful gender- and sex-related options were headscratchers immediately. There are only two body types and they both feel off and not fully figured out, and there's a distinct lack of face options for seemingly anyone at all.

I also found it pretty odd how there were genital options to pick despite them never actually coming into play; it came across as more of a marketing stunt than anything else, and at most maybe a dogwhistle to pretend the game was doing anything groundbreaking for trans folks too. As a bit of a personal remark I also thought it was weird how dragonborn genitalia were more or less exactly like everyone else's in terms of general form rather than appearing more reptilian e.g. a cloaca or genital slit or something of the like. It was just kinda bizarre. I guess the short of the last couple paragraphs, random genital shit aside, is that the character builder is more limited than it could (and should) be and even the marketed parts are flimsy if held up to any scrutiny.

Regardless, the customization in-game is shoddy just as much. Dyes don't really feel intuitive at all and the game's insistence on crappy context menus in place of dedicated interfaces for mechanics like dyes make using them a chore. As mentioned before a lot of the armor clips despite the game only having two body types, and vanity slots don't really exist either for some reason. You can only choose between a camp 'pajama' option and your actual armor, and you can't even choose to wear a hat or gloves while wearing the former either. The menu for equipping weapons and rings also seems broken, overwriting your main-handed weapon and ring rather than autofilling an empty space where possible. It resembled the equally messed up radial menus, which add to themselves and restructure themselves with little rhyme or reason on top of having poor customization options. I haven't even gotten into class customization yet, either -- there are so many dead levels in the game that it's hilarious, with even some 'capstone' levels giving nothing but a mandatory stat boost and HP increase.

Splitscreen is a nightmare in this game and I wish more people talked about it. If you played this game in local co-op up until the most recent patch, almost everything in the game was broken and buggy with constant visual bugs coming up as well. Before an early fix came, we were flashbanged by extremely bright lighting bugs as well as rainbow hues sitting all over everything like a filter. As funny as it was, it made the experience pretty awful. Even beyond graphics, though, the game's already unfinished flag systems seemed to get tripped up even further by local multiplayer, with us finishing the game with a number of quests left 'unfinished' in the journal despite very clearly having ended or moved through on their intended tracks. Some story NPC dialogue even reflected the broken flags, too, ruining what little immersion remained. I'm not sure if it's just a splitscreen thing or a thing in the game in general but it felt as if stealthy characters are constantly punished by the game by having sight lines/cones be bugged out and incorrect, by taking away actions upon ambushing, and by making bribes literally never work in case you do get caught. It's just bizarre and made my first-ever rogue feel like shit.

I don't think I need to elaborate too much on characters as (at least from their previous game) they don't seem to be Larian's strong suit. I don't mind, really, though with how overly talkative every party member is I wish they were more interesting or at least likeable. Random NPCs steal the show maybe once every ten hours, which I would say is a pretty bad rate considering how often they show up even as fodder.

It probably doesn't help the narrative or characters that the world of the Forgotten Realms kinda sucks. Nothing about the world struck me as particularly inspired or even fun -- I've been avoiding drawing too many comparisons to Divinity, but Larian are clearly capable of making fun worlds even if the deep lore type stuff isn't really up to snuff. This is not the case for BG3, and I would imagine the D&D (and thus FR since D&D doesn't seem to care about any other setting much nowadays) brand is what brought us here. I already didn't really care much about the setting when I played 5E years ago, but my table tended to at least use the lore and world minimally in favor of letting our characters and adventures shine through without a focus on setting.

Baldur's Gate III dunks you into its setting constantly, but it's such a bland one that it feels like you're being dunked into a pool of slightly dirty pool water rather than anything with flavor or depth. Everything is bog standard eurofantasy but with no good hooks and while holding a mild sense of 'you don't belong here' I could feel throughout it all. As a result, I found it hard to internalize anything the game threw at me even though I literally already knew a decent chunk of lore from playing D&D years ago. I do not give a shit about the pantheon in this game, I don't care that all the party members have world-saving or king-slaying or godhood-seeking personal quests, and I don't need to know about the inner politics of Baldur's Gate as a city when they have absolutely no bearing on any choices or story elements the game has to offer. It isn't like you have to deeply tie absolutely everything into the world, but there's a clear disconnect between what the game is and what it has sitting in it that's hard to shake. The closest thing to an actual tie is that the origin characters' uninteresting stories are steeped in lore, but their questlines don't actually come up all that often at all in practice. They just have set stopping points per act every dozen hours or so. The lack of personality and weight the world has as itself leads the setting to feel closer to set dressing than anything else, and not even good set dressing.

This lack of depth is apparent in every facet of the game, wearing a facade of intrigue but truly having nothing at all but a weak plastic kiddy pool of meaningful content. It could spew all the esoteric names and histories it wanted to through random books, but with ties only to the tabletop world and none at all to what was actually in the dozens of GB of data on my SSD, it didn't add anything at all. I've said numerous times in this review already that some things didn't 'add anything' to the game, and this is more or less what I mean: Baldur's Gate III brings us a barebones RPG limited by D&D's barely functional tabletop system and even more so by its genuinely shitty main world.

Larian's strengths - creating more tactical and silly RPGs which try to take advantage of being video games - CANNOT show here. It isn't just that they don't, it's that they can't. Divinity: Original Sin 2, for example, had a ton of setup options and build options baked just into its base combat mechanics alone, let alone the more minute mechanics like warping between pyramids or splitting up the party for further prep. This has nothing resembling that sort of strategic depth at all, instead just giving a very rigid set of rules with almost no toys to play with and quickly leading the player to find dominant strategies to trivialize all combat that isn't made specifically to fuck them over (e.g. stun spam as mentioned earlier). I feel bad for the devs in that they not only had to work on a soulless and anti-ambitious product like this for years but also that this will likely impact their reputation and image for the foreseeable future as D&D goes further and further mainstream.

Things I enjoy going mainstream and subsequently screwing over the devs isn't really new to me. I think the most relevant example is Hades, a game which went through almost the exact same fandom cycle of this one. I don't think it's inherently a bad thing for a smaller company to find a huge audience, no, but what bothers me far more in this case than in that of Hades is that Larian at this point is likely going to have some trouble with weighing an IP they don't own against those that they do, especially if they wind up growing as a company and can't afford to do smaller projects. Will Larian just be the Baldur's Gate company now like how Supergiant became the Hades company? I don't know, but experience points to 'yes'. I really hope that won't be the case. D&D in general has reached a mainstream point that it's possible Hasbro/WotC might branch out to give the IP to other companies and leave Larian alone, but that's probably just wishful thinking. As it is the brand might just grow and grow and grow until it becomes the sole representative of TTRPGs in the public consciousness (as if it hadn't already!), and from there I've got no idea where that'll go. This paragraph's becoming something of a personal ramble, so I'll move on.

I haven't really touched on it enough but this game reeks of pushing for mass appeal in ways I wonder about in terms of levels of corporate involvement. Le heckin good doggo is in game and is adorably obedient as a little achievement-grabbing trophy to you, its human owner. You can go to the brothel, how wild! Maybe they do anal, and that B-D-S-N stuff, whoooa how out there! And you can make a funny 'both is good' meme to celebrate cisnormative expressions of bisexuality you identify with by getting with these Exotic Ebony Dark Elves! And DUDE, bards FUCK a lot because they have charisma! They're so weird and horny and love to lay the dragon instead of slay the dragon! You have plenty of opportunities to make that hilarious joke too! And look at those cute-and-stupid little kobolds and goblins! They're so dumb and inferior to us, the civilized species. Good thing the game doesn't let you play as them. Glad the party members aren't anything like those either, but then again it'd be pretty dope to have a big dumb himbo orc or a cool badass dragonborn to fuck use in the party.

Mean mockery aside, the game constantly felt like it was trying to remain perfectly within the bounds of what is considered as 'normal' as possible. Anything 'deviant' in general in the game is presented weirdly black-and-white and nothing is really questioned. It's bland and thoughtless, and all of the things made fun of in the paragraph above feel like stuff that is meant to attract specific subsets of the main wide audience the game rather than representing the subjects of that commentary in good faith. The pushed romances, the lack of diversity in party members for said romances, the performative yet disappointingly stagnant trans-supportive measures, and the weirdly conservative feeling of a lot of the dialogue... all of it congealed together into a mass of slop being shoveled into the mouths of people who don't want to care about what they consume as long as it smells good enough.

That isn't to say the people who enjoy this game are some uncultured philistine heads-in-the-sand types or something, of course. One can like what they like and the many many things that bother me about this game could be someone else's dream. What I mean to say more is that this game (like Hades before it) presents this uncomfortable sense of complacency among the masses where enjoyment of the arts is bound solely to what feels good in the moment and nothing beyond that. It isn't like simply feeling out art is shitty either, but for that to be all people do en masse brings about the stagnation games like these embody. Maybe that means this game (and again, Hades) will serve as a suitable representative of some amount of nerd culture in the here and now, like a truly valuable time capsule, but I don't think that that perceived future value is enough to make me feel like this is any better or any more than what it is.

I'm not a fan of Baldur's Gate III. I at least had a little fun because it was a co-op game, so the 100 hours don't feel totally wasted, but it definitely isn't a game I want to think about anymore. Unfortunately, though, there's no chance the game won't be discussed constantly everywhere online and off in gaming circles at least until the Game Awards come by and give it or AC6 or Starfield the GotY prize. Until then I'll just keep my head low, I guess. I wouldn't really recommend this game even to the target audience, honestly, because as a game it's still broken in many ways and is genuinely boring as hell at parts even for those I've spoken to who are fans of it. It's just not really worth it. It's just bad enough to not be fun but not quite bad enough to make one want to hop off of it, striking an uncomfortably shitty balance remedied only by co-op.

But hey, it's not all doom and gloom. There's a silver lining. I know you've been waiting the whole review wondering if I'd acknowledge this element of the game, and now I will:

Yes, you can pet the dog in Baldur's Gate III!

Once every few years, there's a game that completely takes over my life. Its all I can think about, its all I want to give my time to. This year, Tears of the Kingdom was the closest thing to that, until Baldurs Gate 3. I expected a great game, sure, especially after Divinity: OS 2, but this was something else.

I don't think BG3 does anything "new", but it dials up everything we know about RPGs by 100x. The bar has never been higher. I have never felt more immersed in a world and its inhabitants, never felt like my decisions actually mattered in the end, never experienced true freedom of choice, than in Baldurs Gate 3. I am in awe of what this game has achieved and the depth contained in this one adventure. I can't wait for an enhanced edition or expansion so I can experience it all over again.

Over four months of on and off playing, Steam says I finished the game with 144 hours clocked in and I'm finally finished with Baldur's Gate 3. Even though I don't agree with the popular conscious this is going to be a gateway into the next revolutionary RPG (Player choice and a game with vocal range and performances for nearly every bit of dialogue you encounter is not innovative.) one thing I can say with confidence is this is probably the independent game with the biggest budget I've seen in recent time perhaps even ever. You'd find it hard to believe a RPG with the much scope and ambition was originally crowdfunded. They did exactly what they promised to deliver on. This is 5e Dungeons and Dragons for people who don't have the time or friends to actually sink into tabletop sessions. Even though I don't really like how character classes function in this version compared to 1 and 2.5e (Warlocks especially. I loathe whenever I have to use Wyll for combat encounters) Larian did try their best to make it viable. Maybe it's because I was able to make the Custom Origin character I wanted to build around when I started but despite my issues like with how slow and excessive the downtime is between turns is, I was still able to enjoy slowing working my way towards a decent kit by the end of Act 1 to a building fairly powerful characters but the time I was two-thirds into Act 3.

Speaking of Act 3, I can't help but feel like this was kind of unfinished. The fact one of this game's recent patches added in epilogues only reinforces my point further. For how overwhelming the amount of side content and expositions are laid upon you which lead to my burnout around October, a lot of them really just end up being kill quests or companion questlines that just end abruptly until it's time for the final dungeon. I want to say I'm underwhelmed but the ending I got felt so bittersweet I honestly couldn't help but grin by the time the end credits rolled.

Albeit this is still one of the better games I played this year. Dark Urge replay when definitive edition drops next year will save me. My ass is not touching the Original Sin duology for at least 2 years minimum. I don't know how many 80+ hour RPGs I have left in me and I haven't even gotten around to finishing Starfield yet.

Also, I just beat this game on December 24th so I pretty much altered the fate of the world right before Christmas :) Happy Holidays everyone!

Baldur's Gate 3
(Finished on 9/29/23)

Usually whenever I open up to the start of the year I don't entirely know what I'll be playing throughout the months to come. After all, there's a bunch of games that just drop on a dime with little to no warning nowadays. Usually I have about 5 games that are certain to come out and I just scrounge around and see what looks good as the months go by. Here, with Baldur's Gate, is a weird cross section between a game I had known about for sometime but didn't think about how it was fully releasing this year nor did I really think I'd be getting my hands into it. Lo and behold I begin correspondence with someone for a few months and they, on top of a few podcasts, bring its release date up in conversation and suddenly the idea of getting it felt like a good opportunity. And here I thought I was gonna check out Starfield as my game for that August... shudder. My expectations were pretty moderate but I was pleased that the game offered a breadth of customizability and intrigue from the start, so as to keep me hooked and continuing to play. Prior to this I had played a couple of hours of Divinity II, longing for a DND experience without the need to set up or rely on everyones' schedules to align perfectly. While I enjoyed my time with D2OS, it didn't really get sucked in like I did here, probably in part to the overwhelming amount of discourse at the moment, but also the near immediate critical uproar upon release convinced me to start it up once it dropped and follow through in finishing it.

For my run I decided to play as a half-orc Monk, with the folk hero background. I had recalled one of only a few runs of TTRPG I'd ever played where my preferred class of Monk had just ran up to a first boss and ended up comboing a string of good dice rolls in one turn, tearing the fiend in half. It felt glorious having my character ostensibly run up and style on a boss in a game that feels so magic heavy. I loved it! Here I was hoping to rekindle some energy of that and, as I'll explain later I got something a bit different than what I had in mind. Here we have the first and perhaps largest dissonance between the gamified ttrpg vs the tabletop-ified rpg(?). Imagination is a wonderful mechanic, so little effort and so little cost but it's hard to share the sentiment. I do wish I had chosen a different background as you soon meet another character in solo play that has the same Folk Hero background that I had. On the one hand this meant any chance to get 'Inspirations' as a folk hero meant I got two points just because I had Wyll in the party, but on the other hand it just didn't feel as unique.

Currently this game is receiving the utmost critical and commercial success, praise from all ends and its looking to be a lot of people's GOTY, including mine if we're not counting remasters (thanks Katamari) or expansions (thanks Xenoblade). While I feel this is a solid contender I did want to point out I think this is far from a perfect game and I do think there's a lot of ironing out that needs to be done, but what's presented is still a strong release for this year. I think the cast overall is incredibly fun, and you get more winners, at least in one aspect, than duds. I think the expressive ways to customize your characters both original and the builds you can do with your party members can lead to interesting builds. The ease in which you can recustomize and rebuild your party is very appreciated, and I took advantage of it pretty early on (went way of the four elements and switched quickly to Way of the Open Hand, good change). The game looks really nice and you get to see a lot of really neat locales throughout your journey (although I never did go back and check out the githyanki creche area). The amount of detail put into 95% of the game's interactions is stunning to say the least and several times I was glad to see the game took account of certain actions I had taken several play sessions prior. I was always glad to see my character's backstory, race or class have unique dialogue and it even helped me gain access a few times. The amount of details regarding every element of the environment during battles is staggering, with many details probably still not found or well known yet.

I think the idea of relationships with your party is pretty fun overall and I think the game does an alright job fleshing out your characters throughout the adventure. It’s a bit hard to judge at the moment as I’ve only really experienced one and maybe a half relationships the game allowed. Sorry to say I went basic mode and romanced Shadowheart, however I did find her questline to be the most intriguing. I did NOT have sex at all during the act 1 party however the rest of the relationship progressed pretty naturally. Only slightly odd given how fast certain characters’ approval will max out compared to the ‘questline’ requirements needed to progress romances forward. Just a weird disconnect I had with the games’ romance system.

It’s also very weird just how seemingly flexible much of the party relationships can be, on the one hand I can understand the going ons behind the machine -to a certain extent- but then I read up on other people's experiences regarding certain variables or understandings of certain characters that differed from mine and I tilted my head a bit. I kept seeing impressions of Shadowheart being someone that strictly preferred a more monogamous relationship, yet late in the game when asked by Halsin if I wished to pursue anything romantic I kinda humored him and said 'yeah lemme ask shadowheart', I saved my game just in case something went awry, but when I asked she seemed to have been easygoing about the idea, even kinda curious. I was floored! Here I was extremely late into the game, pretty deep into the SH relationship and maybe I had maintained such a healthy understanding of each other that she was supportive of me humoring Halsin as a bit.

What I will say is i think the usage of the whole "X approves!" mechanic can look really stupid in certain situations. It didn't bother me too much but on occasion an event would play out that would just tilt my head as to why certain acts would proc a disapprove. In one instance, my team was coming up on an assisination in progress- our culprit monologuing to his paralyzed victim, blade to the epidermis of their neck. Before the assassin can finish the deed I was given three options :
1)<Monk> Something, something i cant remember but you reveal yourself
2)<Stealth> Keep to the shadows…
3) <Half Orc> You're a coward.
Picking the 2nd option gains disapproval from Karlach and Wyll -both of whom were present in my party- seemingly because my option just wasn't...bombastic enough? These points end up being minor in the long run but I had Machiavelli over my shoulder throughout some of these encounters considering how petty some of these disapprovals might be. Astarion disapproving of certain acts feels a bit more natural, he's a pompous silver tongued rogue so trying to act high and mighty runs counter to his desire to. But what, does sneaking up on someone just bore Karlach that much? Does Wyll need me to announce my presence to every meddler in tow? This guy has dimension door shoes! We need to catch him off guard!!

Alright I will say this game was already battings pretty high and I was pretty elated throughout most of it, but there was always one thing nagging over the back of my shoulder and I was never sure what- but after 120 hours I think it's fine to materialize that complaint:
I don't know if I like the combat system. Or if its just hiccups regarding 5E in general. or if its just Act 3 fights that are hammering this nail into my head. Man I don’t know, I just got really tired of fights by the end of this game.
Throughout the game I felt kinda rude doing this, but I figured I should compare its moment to moment gameplay with that of Fallout New Vegas and Disco Elysium, two of my and assuredly many others favorite WRPGs. What I lack in what feels like some petty originality I'll try and make up for in some form of critical comparison, if you may forgive me. One of the things I appreciated most about both of these games is its consistent and in games like Fallout New Vegas, almost insistent chance to try and talk your way out of given combat encounters. If you've played FNV pretty thoroughly and are of a high enough level it feels almost impossible to not have maxed out one of the few skills needed to talk the legion out of invading the west. Maybe it decreases the stakes or the dramatic tension that you can talk down a guy just by saying his trade lines are gonna be fucked if he expands territory any more than he already has, but to me I think its a fitting way to conclude a game that was already so talkative and so skill check intensive. Disco runs a more similar path to Baldur's gate by having most of its skills be dice rolls altered by your boons and banes. The main difference is that Disco does an excellent job namely for having 0 combat outside of tense standoff moments. I think this also does a great job in characterizing our prenamed and predetermined character Harrier by having us, the player, feel like some kind of a trickster god in our failures and our insistence to keep failing- as there's very few ways to truly 'lose' in Disco Elysium. Most outs in DE involve you deliberately choosing options that might cause your self destruction. Hell even in events with constant health or morale hits you can continue to spam your medicines mid-dialogue just to keep yourself as alive as necessary. What I'm trying to get at here is that whenever I am in combat in this game I feel less like a tactician or a player character or even some god and more like I've been dragged along by whatever the game's predetermined choices have in store, and unlike FNV where I feel as thought the game offers a variety of outs for major fights, there's a lot of times the game wants it to be this epic battle of varying satisfaction; and unlike Disco Elysium there's a very real chance to die often, these dice rolls mean everything and you just have to live with whatever the dice give you. While I don't think the dice do a bad job at giving you a fair fight, it is very easy to get frustrated whenever you have a good shot at targeting something and just end up whiffing it.
It reminds me a lot of fire emblem (I say this to myself a lot whenever I play a video game, I hope I never say this again in a game that isnt fire emblem or fire emblem adjacent, please message me if I betray my wishes in future reviews)
Overall I think the combat is completely manageable and there's a lot more interesting encounters in the first two acts. However, I can't help but think that the third act really drops the ball in a lot of these encounters. There's not 1 nor 2 but 3 different encounters that have the same build up, descending into a circular arena where the boss is surrounded by cronies (maybe a 4th i haven't done every 3rd act sidequest). These fights range in difficulty but when they get bad- man did I wanna throw something.

(Sorry the next few paragraphs are just me ranting about certain encounters maybe you had an easier time with these, Orin bugged on my run but I know others had a way worse time with her)

The worst in my case was Viconia, namely because there's just 20 other dudes surrounding you. This is the main thing that frustrated me about a lot of the late game encounters, it just felt like there were so many encounters where the main difficulty was that you had to deal with a group of enemies if not 4 times your squad size, than only somewhat smaller but with more 'elite' opponents that are harder to handle or have a lot of spells at their disposal. Not helped that it feels like good dungeon design would ask that you deal with certain smaller encounters that prep you as to what's to come, maybe have enemies that mostly deal with Necrotic damage to let you know hey you might want Necrotic resistance. They actually do this a few times like when you're about to fight Orin or Gortash. In the - Viconia fight nah you get allowed in and dont have too much of an idea as to what she's capable of and will Blight one of your party members instantly, all the while you get drowned in a sea of darkness.
This and the Gondian questline where you have to sneak into the backroom of a factory and find plans regarding a submersible, but afaik you have no idea that there's supposed to be a clue about the questline back there? And if you head in normally you have to fight several guards, the gondian slaves and the last few mechs roaming around? And if you do get to that submersible you have to go on a rescue mission where you have 4 turns to rescue several hostages (rest in peace duke ravengard I didn't care, sorry Wyll), go back to the factory and then deal with the same enemies one last time but the Gondians now rebel against the masters and are....useful 10% of the time. Hell, most NPCs in this game are only good half the time aside from a few recurring characters. For the most part this wouldn't be too bad but this encounter got really obnoxious as the higher ups in this fight will begin activating signals that detonate the collars around the slaves' necks both in this room and for anyone that was working in the room prior. This got to be pretty obnoxious in any case where the Gondians DID decide to be useful and attacked these higher ups but were so far away that none of my allies could get over to the signal uninterrupted before the signal went off (that or the staircase got so crowded my member literally couldn't reach it).

This is how a lot of the fights in the last act feel, not literally but there's always just 1 aspect that complicates things for the worst and I just wonder why all of these were lined up in the last 10% of the game. For comparison, Act 2 had a pretty interesting build up as there's three major fights in the town outside the Moonrise Towers, each of which had their own manner of fighting but also their own way to beat them through skill checks. It's fun! I'll admit to cheesing the tollmaster a bit as she was my last, but I did fight and lose to Thisobold (the bartender) and I naturally beat the surgeon- mostly because I accidentally started the encounter as Astarion and had a way better persuasion proficiency. The second of this group, Thisobald is probably my favorite encounter in the game, both as a fight and as a gauntlet of several skill checks. Just a few rounds of drinks and maybe a few constitution saves and I made the dude kill himself.

Lastly I did wanna just touch on some general QoL stuff that I ran into that I think could be easily fixed/touched up on now that games are just living things now so I didn't wanna hark too much on these points.

-Namely I wish it was easier to manage your members back at the camp- it got incredibly tedious switching between two party members throughout the later half of the game. For a large part of the game I had Astarion/Karlach/Shadowheart on deck but rarely took any of them out until the end of Act 2 when I was told to put Wyll back in for one section. He had been severely neglected for most of the game so he got back 5 levels or so and seeing that massive upgrade I was able to understand what tools in his kit to focus on, making him a much more potent fighter in one sweep than whatever stealth build I was trying to mold. So, I kept Wyll on for my main team. However! Astarion is hands down the best lockpicker, and this game loves give you locks to pick, well above the usual 20. Act 3 is also the point in the game where combat becomes MUCH more frequent and large scale. Act 3 constantly had me going back to camp, talking to Wyll, going to Astarion, unlocking something that seemed important, going back to camp talking to Astarion, and then re-talking to Wyll to get him back and each time I just thought "why can't I just do this from the main map"

-Also why can you just attack empty spaces? I guess if you wanna be a hot shot and guess where invisible enemies are, the game will allow it but I was always pretty frustrated whenever I clicked around an enemy too fast and clicked on an empty space a foot away from them to attack.

-Would it kill for maybe a few more levels? I hit level cap way earlier than I’d like.

-Why does Act 1 not end at the Grove party? Why does it persist into the whole Underdark area? Act 2 feels way shorter than 1 or 3.

-I also don't know what the weird missing exp issue is? It's hard to explain but the game keeps track of what I guess is 'lost' exp as a result of either a party member dying or not being present in the party to gain the exp from quests, kills etc. However because of this you might have party members in your party throughout the entire game (I basically just kept Karlach and Shadowheart on deck since getting them) with way less exp than others. To remedy this you just tell them to leave the team for a minute and when you ask them to come back, they regain that exp. Thankfully it's that simple but it was such a weird thing to encounter.

These aren’t the biggest of issues and hell some of these might be fixed over time or hell! maybe its something i missed! I was gonna complain about how there’s no multi select in the inventory but it was shift click the entire time. Sometimes I’m just stupid.

Baldur's Gate 3 is an excellent showcase to Larian's commitment and critical eye as to how to make a wrp 'video' g as similar to a real game of '5e DND' as it can get, while having the presentation to boot and the gameplay fine tuned throughout. It's an easy recommendation but I did have some hangups by the end of the game that kept it from becoming an all-timer like some of my other favorite WRPGs. Maybe with time and a more focused build I can fully indulge myself in what the game has again, but by the end of my first playthrough I had drank what felt like twice than enough.

Baldur's Gate 3 is not a new or innovative game. What it represents is a specific kind of RPG that we use to get fairly often and games of its ilk are extremely rare these days.

In that way, it's a breath of fresh air to finally have an RPG with real depth, progression systems, decision making, and exploration.

The cast is straight up some of the best that's ever been in an RPG of this profile. While the main narrative is serviceable, it mostly serves as setting for the excellent character writing.

The immersive sim elements that made the Divinity: Original Sin games so brain teasing and addicting remain and are emboldened by legitimately good RPG combat and class design.

Having my build that I theorycrafted before even starting the game "activate" was a true moment of bliss.

The comments made about this game being polished to a sheen are likely from people who have not reached Act 3 where the game begins to crumble under its ambition. The amount of content cut from Act 3 causes many quests and NPCs who you have spent the better part of 70+ hours building on are likely to fall apart. As someone who played the game when it first released as an early access title years ago, I can tell you that Act 3 is still in an early access state.

The ending is unsatisfying and its clear that this is an unfinished game. However, I would much rather have a game that shoots for the stars but struggles to reach its ideal vision than one without a pulse altogether.

If this is supposed to be solo D&D experience, maybe it's a bit fitting that the ending hours are cobbled together and barely work, just like when your dungeon master throws together an end to a D&D campaign that people stopped showing up for.

We need more games like Baldur's Gate 3 and we needed them yesterday. Also, the definitive edition next year gonna bang frfr.

I'm not going to lie; I wasn't anticipating this game at all. Somehow, it came out of nowhere and has become my favorite game of the year. This game blew me away. I felt a deep connection with the characters and the narrative. There are so many great characters that I couldn't decide which one to romance. Laezel, Astarion, Karlach, and Shadowheart were my favorites, each with their own compelling stories woven into the main narrative.

I invested over 180 hours into this game, and even by the end, I wanted more. The three Acts that this game offers felt like almost a trilogy of games in terms of the sheer amount of content packed into each act. I was genuinely impressed with the scale, depth, and freedom this game gave you.

On top of all that, there's multiplayer, and I've been having a blast playing with friends. It's a whole other experience to have.

i was worried that this would be divinity: original sin 3 more than it would be a true successor to baldur's gate II (not that more div:os2 would be a bad thing at all, really) but it does a suitably good job of living up to the originals' legacy while incorporating the polish and production value of some of the genre's more recent successful entries. 5e is a mixed bag, but the game pushes past (most) of the system's frustrating qualities. it's great. (i've also seen porn that is less horny than this game. some of the shit larian pulls in this is absolutely wild and I'm surprised they were able to get away without an AO rating. i deep throated a tentacle????)

anyway the camp f* slur vampire is funnier than every single bioware npc combined

Baldur's Deflate 3

It's been a long time coming and it's finally came, for Bun B Weepboop to get his shot at the game and the results are... well... we beat it? Last year was filled with a plethora of large-scale video game releases and unfortunately a finite amount of time to play them. In my quest to play as many GOTY nominees and new titles as I could, I had to prioritize games based upon the feasibility of completing them within a certain time frame and their general approach of play. In deciding how I wanted to tackle the year, this led myself to selecting long RPG's like Final Fantasy XVI and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom in lieu of other nominees like Marvel's Spiderman 2 and the relevant Baldur's Gate 3. I dodged Baldur's Gate largely because of the time investment necessary and my life embarking on an increasingly busier schedule, but a large part of my avoidance came down to the fact that it is a Larian Studios CRPG. I'd previously put thirty or forty hours into Divinity Original Sin 2 to milquetoast results, the game was fun to play with friends but its open-ended quest design and generally uninteresting world and narrative failed to pull me in. With Baldur's Gate 3 finally on sale and a new year on the horizon, I purchased it with the intent to play it as soon as I returned to my home and computer following a vacation.

Just about everyone I know fell head over heels with this game, either because they were D&D heads and had finally gotten their video game manifestation of the years playing the legendary tabletop IP, or because they found the near infinite possibilities of exploration and quest-solving attractive. I lent my ear to each of these people and their affinity towards BG3, happy for them to get the lengthy RPG it seemed forever wanted by the gaming world, but thinking I would personally never touch the game. I asked and listened to each one my friends and peers about the who's, what's, when's, and why's of why Baldur's Gate 3 was so good before I ever thought about my purchase. The common answers melted down to the lengthy involved questlines, rich world with decades of lore attached, a complicated D&D combat and world traversal mechanic, and a narrative ever so mysterious. Going into it, this was quite attractive for the most part, despite gaming as a genre having been fairly in depth and mechanically significant since the advent of the new millennia, it's felt like we've been continuously chasing a title in which our choices sincerely mattered and the agency of us within a fantasy world was paramount. If only this legitimately held true in Baldur's Gate... more to come on that later.

I'll start with what I liked about the game, and maybe that will diverge into my issues and qualms with it as well, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. One of the many things I didn't like about Divinity Original Sin 2 (DOS2) was its heightened level of ambiguity in quest design and locations. The journal, or attempt at one, within the game would say things along the like of "Well we talked to a wizard, wizards know magic, maybe somewhere on this island there is a wizard who likes magic a lot" and that would be your clue to find a magic spell to continue upon your journey, without an indication of where specifically to go. Of course this is a slight hyperbole but it was a microcosm of a challenge I had with narrative direction in Larian's previous large scale effort. In BG3 I largely didn't have that issue, as there was a "show on map" option for many of the questlines, all of which seemed to quickly update for new direction once new information was discovered along the journey. I've ranted and raved about quest marker design and the general lack of knowing where to go in games quite often in my reviews thus far, and I have to give credit to Larian for understanding the QoL this brings to BG3. I don't have the wherewithal anymore to exhaustingly read each note or follow each fine word of dialogue as to my next movements within the story, that would be unfair to the average gamer and attention span within the 21st century. What I do have is the ability to recollect summarized information and work with general hints as to where to move next, and BG3 did a fairly good jo overall with that.

Outside of that, there were a few items in which I was generally impressed with BG3 and greatly surprised about going into it. Majorly was the effort put into making the characters of the game complicated and fleshed out against the lukewarm and mostly uninteresting narrative at hand. Each character within your party, should you recruit them (of which I successfully did with each able NPC,) is vastly different and has their own motivations to move through the world and story of Baldur's Gate. Your interactions and conversation with Karlach will forever and always be different than they are with Astarion, and likewise with Gale, Shadowheart, etc... Though I had significant issues with the way a majority of these plotlines resolve, I have to give the staff at Larian some serious credit for crafting the stories of your constituents and making them relevant all the way until the end of the title. In an RPG, the motivations behind your party members to continue along the journey with the main character is integral for creating a believable and striking story. Even in some of my favorite titles of all time, the mark here is missed (cough Final Fantasy cough,) but BG3 was able to tie in the cast with the story. For the most part this was a success, and this is tough to do without divulging spoilers, but one of my most significant gripes with this game was the actual difference you make in their lives upon the completion of the game. Though I felt like the characters were intricately written and different from one another, each with their own needs and values that applied to defeating the big bad and moving on with their lives, I couldn't help to care for just about any of them.

In an effort to be unique, I felt like certain party members were different just for the sake of being different and had no legitimate value to care for. Like Gale is cool and all, and his plight of being an effective walking bomb is tragic, but what does he really do in conversation or in act throughout the entire 90 hour+ runtime for me to care about? Shadowheart's questline involves a deep and serious conversation about her faith and life up until the events of BG3, but why does that matter to me? Again, Wyll's character dilemma involves a binding contract with a devil that it is up to me and the gang to resolve... but why? And why does everything have to be an ultimatum? This felt like a cheap narrative mechanic that the majority of successful western RPG's I enjoy do not use. It's fine to have a tragic ending, it's okay to have characters die, but when you understand that each of the cast members within BG3 are going to have some tragic ultimatum at the end of their respective questlines, that becomes tired. I look at Mass Effect for example, another party based western RPG that I consider to be amongst my holy trinity (ME3, RDR2, and The Witcher 3,) which sees Commander Shepard and the Boys take on galactic big bads with the fate of the universe on the line. Your party members from game to game have their respective tragedies and relevance to the survival of the Normandy and galaxy, but they don't all involve some frustrating stipulation you have to grapple with at the end. One of my major gripes with BG3 is thus, resolving most of these questlines involves a sacrifice or impactful decision that doesn't feel necessary for the story of the game, rather just for emotional shock value. I cared about characters like Karlach, Astarion (sort of,) and Shart, but did I care about them enough to make the grand decision they are asking about? The answer resoundingly was no. In essence I felt like BG3 attempted to make the resolution of these questlines filled with a faux sense of gravity, and I'm not a fan of that.

You have a lot of scenes take place in camp with this cast in the first and second acts of the game, just for them to completely disappear in the third. I wasn't a fan of this rug pull as it personally felt like they ran out of ideas to make the in-between moments of BG3 interesting and focused on the players self-investigation of the end of the story.

I think a part of this manifested in the romance of the game, something that just about all my BG3 "super-fan" friends were quite into. Part of the fun in open-world/zone RPG's in which you control the avatar or social relationships of is choosing which of the games cast members you want to link up with. Now, I didn't really care about anyone in BG3 to that degree, as mentioned above most of the cast greatly waned on me in terms of care and motive, but I did try to pursue one for the why not of it all. This didn't work out, despite playing their storyline to perfection and pursuing their questline in the best of their interest, with max intrapersonal affinity, all because I missed a scene in Act 1. Now imagine I'm trying to move along the story and complete this game some forty hours later and can't move on with their relationship because of some error I didn't even know I didn't make in the first act. This more than anything felt cheap, as the game had not made any gravity of said moment clear down the line and did not indicate to me that I had missed anything. Several characters within the story approached my avatar for a relationship even though I didn't embark on this massive journey for them, and it had me pondering why this was so complex, and for what reason? Other RPG's made these romance and relationship checks much more cut and dry, and it worked far better in those scenarios. I hope the reader sees this moreso as a qualm with the lack of clarity in relaying plot/story checks to the player than anything else.


I've spoken on it a little before too, but the narrative of this game, something I thought would be the strong point of a near 100 hour experience, was genuinely unimpressive. It relies on a fairly tired fantasy trope in a world I as the player was wildly unfamiliar with. The story simply felt like something I was working towards, and not working with. The narrative at no point rather than the closing scenes of each act, felt like something I was actively involved in. There was no real attempt at worldbuilding, rather just letting you interact and converse with the denizens of the land about the respective plights within each act. I don't know, maybe as a Final Fantasy Fan (I hate that alliteration,) I'm a little spoiled about worldbuilding, but outside of the city of Baldur's Gate itself, do you really ever feel like you truly belong or understand the world of this title? My answer to that rhetorical is no. Even in a game like FFX, a short little cinematic of Tidus and the Blitzboys in Zanarkand gives you enough inference upon how the world is within that game. Beginning BG3 in a crashing Nautiloid with some vagrants who would inevitably become your party members, and no real hub world until the last act made me impartial to the world at large. Sure you have some inns and rests along the way, and a camp to call home but... it never felt to me like a place where I could see myself living in (in a fantasy setting.) Environmental buy in is something that matters to me a lot in a title like this, something that the aforementioned Witcher 3 knocked out of the park, going a mile to make the world Geralt takes on the Wild Hunt in feel like it’s a place he needs to defend and call home. In Baldur's Gate 3, in conjunction with the abrupt beginning of the game, I felt like I was rushed into a world I did not know, and simply had to pursue a big bad that was dead set on the destruction of a city I had never been to and did not care for. My plea throughout the ultimate act of BG3 to Larian Studios was to please make me care about this game, please make me care about these characters, please make me care about this world. The onus of buy-in should not be imparted upon the player, rather demonstrated by the game, and that I personally feel like BG3 missed out on by a country mile.

Another qualm I had with BG3 was the fact that I generally am not a fan of D&D, and not for the lack of trying. Now you may say, you idiot why are you playing a long winded narrative set in the historic world of D&D that utilizes D&D mechanics if you don't like D&D? I would reply with, well shut up! But, what comes with that is an unfamiliarity and general annoyance with the way the non-lore aspects of that IP are set up. To begin, every single aspect of this game is a dice roll... and I understand the reasoning behind that as I have played multiple campaigns of D&D, there is a nuance to discovery, speech, and combat that relies upon the chance of dice. Of course your character's intrinsic stats player a role in the success rate of these encounters, but largely you are at the mercy of chance. I dislike this... a lot, it makes for a bad video game experience. Is it true to form for the tabletop version of this IP? Yes! Do I like having to roll a dice for things like opening a chest that has two apples and a rotted herring? No! Do I like having to roll the dice because I'm trying to convince a talking cat to roll over on its paws? No! Do I like having to intimidate and persuade on a dice roll just to simply convince someone they smell funny? Also no. Of course those are probably all made up scenarios, but a general pull on the plight I had in the minutiae of BG3's over-reliance on dice rolls. For this reason combat was also aggressively annoying, every hit no matter how close or logical relied upon another series of hidden dice rolls. You had your chance to hit, the chance for the enemy to retort, the chance for an opportunity attack, the chance for a saving throw, the chance for this, the chance for that... it made for some seemingly unending fights with an over-reliance on re-loads, lest you wish to take the brunt of being burnt by RNG. I may be a little burnt after playing several Fire Emblem titles within the last year, in which the simple majority in an accuracy chart meant that you were likely to hit your opponent for full damage, but in BG3 with a 90% chance or greater likelihood to hit, I missed a frustratingly large amount. I legitimately never felt confident in my attacks, be it melee or at range, and again I understand this is true to D&D but man, it also felt true to a rather lukewarm combat experience.

To further the conversation about combat and a foreign experience with the inner trappings of D&D's long running history, I take issue with the fact that Larian did not feel it necessary to simplify or explain just about any of the mechanics of combat and status effects within the game. I hope you know what all the status effects do and how they combine, I hope you are privy to the advantages and weaknesses of spells and cantrips already, because this will not be tutorialized in the slightest for the player. I've joked before with my brother and friends about the tutorial section of Persona 5 and how it effectively lasts the first fifty hours of the >100 hour experience, but you know what it does do? Adequately explain the workings of another storied franchise and its involved mechanics and submechanics. Baldur's Gate has even more going on in the way that strengths, weaknesses, spells, counter-spells, and all the like interact, and it does almost zero to explain this to the player. Of course, should you have enough time to rival that of twenty year WoW vets to read every subtext of items and spells and their effects, you might know, but to the average joe these will go largely unexplained through the runtime of the game. Combine a obfuscated combat system with the "Oops-All-Enemies" nature of this game and you're in for a largely aggravating time. There were too many fights to count that started with the enemies of BG3 outnumbering your party four or more to one. This isn't the worst... in theory until you remember everyone has to act once before your turn relapses. I was in one of the last fights of the game just now and spent most of my time on the app formerly known as twitter, talking to a group of pals rather than having my hands on the keyboard ready to counteract whoever I was in combat with, because it took that long. This was uniform throughout an unfortunately long period of the game, outnumbered and outgunned, fighting powerful bosses that had their own unexplained gimmicks solved best by google and re-loaded trial and error rather than by working through the games motions. I get that its true to D&D to have fights in which the player is greatly disadvantaged in number and in locale, but as I mentioned above it really just makes for a gameplay experience most foul. I get why the narrative would want me to be locked in with a boss who has more than 600 hp and a cohort of demonic followers fighting at his behest, but is it fun? The answer reluctantly is no. This happened time and time again with slight variation, and I felt like what began as an enriching open-world experienced eventually led to a frustrating rehash of mechanics I disliked, over and over again.

Miscellaneous complaints to round this review out revolve around silent protagonism, a plethora of crashes and performance issues, and the abhorrent long rest mechanic. I chuckled a little too often at the emotionally heavy moments within the game in which a motivation speech was needed, or my character was having a heart to shadow-heart, only for my avatar to nod and say dialogue through text. I get that there's a lot of dialogue necessary in a game like this, and Larian likely wanted to truly convey that our avatar was an extension of ourselves... but to me it just felt like I was playing a boneless NPC. I did not feel like I mattered at all within the story, I was simply a vehicle for the plot. I did not understand my code of ethics, did I even have any? I couldn't grasp why anyone would consider me to be their leader or friend, I'd never even said a word. Baldur's Gate simply did not do a good job, in my humblest opinion, of making you the player character feel like a worthwhile member of your party. You could ask yourself "Who really is the main character" and I don't know if there's an answer.

In the end, I can't recommend Baldur's Gate 3 to anyone who values a strong narrative, freetime, or a game worth playing. It was pretty, I didn't want to put it down, but it eventually became a frustrating gameplay experience in a world I found largely uninteresting.

I fell into a burning ring of fire
I went down, down, down
And the flames went higher
And it burns, burns, burns
The ring of fire

this was my first approach to Baldur's Gate and I was a little scared I wasn't going to enjoy it much or be very confused throughout the game, but I was wrong. I enjoyed this game so much I kept hoping for it to never end! took me 90-100 hours of playtime since I wanted to explore as much as I could and grow friendships with different NPCs, and it was so worth it I'd do it again. definitely my 2023 GOTY and i recommed everyone to play this game for how good and how big its replayability value is!

sure it can be a little buggy here and there, especially between act 2 and 3 but it wasn't a big deal that stopped me from playing the game, and some of those bugs were kinda fun, I'm sure the devs are taking notice as they're slowly patching so much stuff. big thumbs up for me <: !!

Baldur's Gate 3 is an amazing CRPG.
However, I do think it is a little over-hyped and doesn't compare to BG2 which is still my favorite in the series. Let's start with my negatives:
- The plot has major pacing issues in Act 3
- Battles can take an eternity and sometimes some enemies just take a lot of time to do anything. I still vastly prefer the old battle system from BG1 and 2 that played more like a RTS sometimes.
- Some romance-related dialogues are very weird. Sometimes the game feels like a love parade or something, literally anyone in your party wants to bang you at some time in the story. It feels completely forced.

The positives, however, outshine the negatives:
- Stunning amount of freedom. In dialogues, in battles, in the overworld.
- Great visuals and amazing cut scenes for a CRPG
- Decent performance on the Steam Deck (Act 3 is a little sloppy)
- Top-notch voice acting
- Engaging plot, especially in Act 1 and 2
- Tons of tactical approaches in battles

After 80 hours and nearly a month of playing, I'm happy to say Baldur's Gate 3 is one of my favorite games of all time.

This is easily one of the most immersive RPGs I've ever played, filled with so many fun and varied dialogue choices, battles, combat, honestly just everything. 5E is a pretty fun system for a game like this and especially near the end I felt like there was a lot of cool strategy to be had, and I loved gathering new equipment and making my party totally badass.

The companions are so well written, I love pretty much every single one and while not all of them are immediately likable from the start and some have opposing viewpoints, they're all so fun and well-acted and I enjoyed talking to all of them (My party at the end of the game was Karlach, Gale, and Shadowheart but I did most of the character quests).

The villians in this game are quite good as well and I really enjoy the way they all tie together and even into some of the companion storylines, with some incredibly memorable boss fights and mechanics even if some of them were a bit easy.

The only thing I don't really like about this game is how initially horny the companions are ,but I feel like once you tell them to screw off the game gets much less extreme. I feel like the way this game handles romance could be a lot tighter, but I personally don't do much with romance in RPGs so I just say "No thank you" and move on.

Act 3 also has some noticeably buggy stuff as well as some cut content, but I still think what we got was excellent and I felt very happy with the ending of the game, the final 3 or 4 hours is absolutely awesome.

I also loved how most of the returning characters from the original games were handled, I felt like other than one, they were pretty respectful to the older games and I loved having Minsc and Jaheira back in the fray.

I'm hoping we get to see some expanded content, with a bit of cut content restored as well as maybe some extra companions (lack of shorty companions makes me very sad!!! I would also appreciate one or two more evil companions.) But overall I'm extremely happy with Baldur's Gate 3 and I will be revisiting it over it's updates for many many more playthroughs!

10 Miniature Giant Space Hamsters/10

I want to preface this by saying that through the first 2 acts this game was in contention with octopath traveler 2 for GOTY. Act 3 is probably the singular worst experience I've had with a game like this.

After hours of buggy quests, questionable storylines/challenges, and losing up to 8 hours of savefile progress after my game crashed and my saves became incompatible I can't even truly recommend this game.
It will suck you in and I mean I cannot truly be upset about around 70 hours of great entertainment. Just beware that as it stands the third act is somewhat unplayable unless you are fortunate enough to dodge all the bugs I've encountered.

Disclaimer: This is for the first 2 acts of the game. I did almost everything in those first two acts that was available to me. I chose wait to play act 3 till it gets fixed, so this review is for the first two acts.


Wow. This is genuinely one of the best games I have ever played. As stupid as this sounds and as overused this comparison is, this feels like a yeezus moment. Something so far ahead compared to everything else, where it just blows your mind on how much effort and time was spent on it. If I could describe this game in 1 word it would be Beeg, very very beeg. Before playing this I was on a gaming rut for about a year, where all I really wanted to play was the same old multiplayer games and nothing else, this completley changed that.

To start actually talking about what makes the game great I'll touch on the story. I fucking hate fantasy. I can probably count on 2 hands the pieces of media that are in the fantasy genre that I enjoy, and I need an extra finger for Baldur's gate 3. So to say this setting and world not only intrigued me, but fascinated me and pulled me in, is a feat of it's own. Every character here feels so fleshed out, and reacts accordingly to your actions. What elevates the story from really good to amazing is the amount of dynamism in the story. Your own story can be entirely different from someone else's, depending on what you do both dialogue wise and gameplay wise. Wether that be killing a certain character, romancing a certain character, stealing from someone, it all affects the narrative, in both minor and major ways.


Before I touch on gameplay, I do want to shout some other things out. First of all, the visuals are fantastic. Amazing facial models, world design is spectacular, the different clothes for each character are fantastic. Also, the sound is amazing. The voice acting has so much weight and emotion, something you very rarely see in games. The music is great, and the sound design is very crisp. The side quests are also fantastic, I would honestly compare them to Witcher 3 side quests in their depth.


However, what makes this game what it is is the gameplay. Nothing compares to this in terms of gameplay. The last time I played a game where I fucked around and experimented this much was MGS 5, and with all respect to that game, the options available there pail in comparison to Baldur's gate. I haven't encountered something I wasn't able to do in this game. I would recommend for anyone playing this to change their mindset specifically for this game. Video games have conditioned us to think "there's no way THIS is possible so I won't try it" and this should not be how you think when you play this game. Where do I start? Maybe the fantastic combat, which also I HATE turn based combat, and the amount of fun I had with the combat here was astonishing. I personally played as a rogue assassin, and while in the earlier game my friend who had chosen a wizard was more successful in terms of combat, in the late game it payed off for me when I was one shotting enemies without being detected. The intractability and experimentation that I mentioned earlier is carried over to the combat with things varying from throwing a water bottle on the ground then using a shock spell to make the entire floor a trap, to stuffing a backpack full of explosives and then throwing it at a group of enemies making a mini nuke. There are so many other things you can do but I suggest for anyone reading this to try stuff for themselves and not read online about what you can do, cause every time I discovered something new(which was very often)it blew my mind. Outside of combat, exploring and talking to different people was super enjoyable. I was a sneaky little rogue as mentioned earlier so I was always trying to pickpocket people, which sometimes landed me in hot water.

I do not remember a time in my playthrough where I did not enjoy the game. In terms of flaws, aside from act 3 which I cannot talk about, I don't really remember any. No real bugs or glitches, no annoying moments. The one thing I would maybe point to are the boss fights. They aren't terrible but aren't amazing either, most of them just feel like a fairly standard fight.


In conclusion, this is the best game of the year, it would be the best game of the decade so far if not for factorio, and one of the best games of all time. Doesn't matter if you like RPGS or don't, you need to play this game.

This is a really cool RPG that I unfortunately will be stepping away from and play again on PC.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is an interesting and unique experience. I most definitely can see the appeal to this game but I won’t lie to anyone and more importantly to myself that I wasn’t exactly having the time of my life with this RPG. I want to start off with the dice rolling system. And I’m going going to be straight forward and say that I absolutely hated this system. I really just couldn’t enjoy this game having to rely A LOT on luck. I get the design of this game is supposed to resemble a board game but for a video game I just don’t feel like it worked all that well. Most of the time I felt like the odds were purposely against me and really couldn’t stand it. That especially went for combat since it felt like I struggled to make progress. For choices, it overall wasn’t a big deal but man I would honestly stop playing sometimes just because I got so frustrated. Combat itself isn’t that bad but I feel like the dice rolling system is just a big takeaway for fun for me. Other than that what I did love about combat is the way you can approach combat. I went with a wizard build and I loved all the of magic I could use. And of course the many characters you meet along your journey all have a build of their own in which you should most definitely take advantage of. For instance you can take advantage of environmental hazards like using explosive barrels or destroying the support of a wooden platform to drop enemies to take fall damage. Baldur’s Gate 3 handles combat very well a deserves recognition for it especially for the anyone that loves it with the only downside being that you have to be lucky. Other than that I truly love the rest of this game. Exploration is truly special in Baldur’s Gate 3. You explore some incredible dungeons and caves with VARIOUS different paths. You find all sorts of really cool loot and and secrets that you can obviously miss. Baldur’s Gate 3 SCREAMS “use the the best of what you got” and I appreciate that. I also just love the amount of detail in these environments. I feel like it could’ve been very basic but I the developers were passionate at making this world believable and stunning. And the art style is amazing. I love all the art you can see in loading screens and cutscenes. And easily one of the best aspects of this game are the choices you can make. Each and every last choice feels VERY significant. I never felt like there wasn’t a choice that didn’t matter, and better yet your actions matter as well. It really does feel like there’s endless possibilities and that gives LOTS of replay value for this game. I also just love the side quests, they were so great that they didn’t really feel like side quests because they fit in so well with the main story.

The story is very epic. It has a slow and basic start but when you get to Act 2 the story insanely good. I love all the characters that you meet. You can get along with them if you so choose which also make this RPG incredible. I love how your choices can give your serious consequences that can break the relationships you make with characters. Better yet you can actually use character and leave them for dead. I’m amazed by that since there were characters that I couldn’t get on my team simply because I didn’t know better. Baldur’s Gate 3 does great on have realism with it story telling. And of course you can get romantic with a lot of these characters which I definitely recommend. The story and writing for each character is fantastic and I never really got bored. And that’s all I can really say for the time being since I didn’t finish the story.

Larian Studios deserves all the love and praise they get for Baldur’s Gate 3. I wouldn’t even be surprised if they win GOTY with this one and I can accept that. But honestly I just couldn’t have and even better time due to the fact that I struggled a lot and got pretty stressed during combat especially since it can take time. I’m sure people can say it’s a skill issue and perhaps that’s true. But nonetheless my point is just couldn’t always have the fun the way I wanted and it got to a point where just felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. I felt like I lost a lot of time and time is just not something I have the liberty of nowadays. For the time being, I will be letting go of this game and come back to replay later, which is shocking to me because I almost NEVER shelve games. I will one day rewrite this review once I have the time to replay and will restart the game once I get a better PC.