A huge game that maintains a pretty consistent average quality of "pretty good" up until act 3 where everything breaks. Wyll and his dad become glitchy lobotomites and even if they worked as intended I'd take some issue with the way his quest is written. And for how "pretty good" pretty much every combat encounter in the game is, the haunted house is a bafflingly bad bit of design. The quest it's connected to is also one of the worst in the game.
Now that I think about it, BG3 starts off showing one of Larian's best qualities but that too falls off near the end. The Original Sin games had basically no "filler" combat encounters. Every fight felt significant, varied and had an at least mildly interesting in-world reason to be there. No random wilderness goblin fights or anything like that. In BG3's third act that too changes, and many of the fights felt fairly easy or even like a bit of a chore.
Still, it's undeniable that the first act is fantastic. It's the best bit of low level virtual DND since Baldur's Gate 1 and probably surpasses it. Act 2 is a bit annoying in execution, but I love how it feels dangerous and very different from the other two with its unique mechanic. There's also lot of imagination put into many of the third act's quests and areas that feel like someone's DND campaign notes in shiny AAA video game form (when they work right). The writing is generally "pretty good", but the way it's presented is fantastic for an RPG of this size – the great voice acting and full motion capture for EVERY SINGLE BIT of what must be hundreds of hours of NPC dialogue is an insane feat. The combat, too, is as "pretty good" as a combat system based on 5e is ever going to be. Basically, despite the bugs 3 Baldur's 3 Gate is a "pretty good" game and it'll probably be a great one once the bugfixes roll out.
Now that I think about it, BG3 starts off showing one of Larian's best qualities but that too falls off near the end. The Original Sin games had basically no "filler" combat encounters. Every fight felt significant, varied and had an at least mildly interesting in-world reason to be there. No random wilderness goblin fights or anything like that. In BG3's third act that too changes, and many of the fights felt fairly easy or even like a bit of a chore.
Still, it's undeniable that the first act is fantastic. It's the best bit of low level virtual DND since Baldur's Gate 1 and probably surpasses it. Act 2 is a bit annoying in execution, but I love how it feels dangerous and very different from the other two with its unique mechanic. There's also lot of imagination put into many of the third act's quests and areas that feel like someone's DND campaign notes in shiny AAA video game form (when they work right). The writing is generally "pretty good", but the way it's presented is fantastic for an RPG of this size – the great voice acting and full motion capture for EVERY SINGLE BIT of what must be hundreds of hours of NPC dialogue is an insane feat. The combat, too, is as "pretty good" as a combat system based on 5e is ever going to be. Basically, despite the bugs 3 Baldur's 3 Gate is a "pretty good" game and it'll probably be a great one once the bugfixes roll out.