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!