Note: This review hasn't aged well because I decided to do a re-review to reassess the game, so I no longer stand by much of the praise given here.
Two disclaimers before I continue this review
1) I am going to compare this to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous an incredible amount, as they’re both CRPG adapting a TTRPG that share similarities but also core differences worth discussing. If this grates on you, quit now. Divinity: Original Sin 2 will also come up with regularity.
2) This game is VERY buggy and VERY unfinished. A lot of what I say here may end up ageing like shit. Honestly, I don’t normally bring up technical issues when reviewing newer games, but BG3’s are BAD and notable.
It is a shame that Backloggd does not have two separate entries for ‘Baldur’s Gate 3: The Game’ and ‘Baldur’s Gate 3: The Story’. Meaning that I, unfortunately, have to do two fundamentally different reviews. I wish this weren’t the case, that there wasn’t such a canyon-wide gap between the two halves of this game. It’d be easier if they were both good, or both bad.
I’ll get the good out of the way first.
On the gameplay front, BG3 is a masterpiece. Its immediate competition is Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (which I also reviewed), both of them being adaptations of a popular TTRPG format that opt for accuracy over simplification. Whereas WOTR went for an all-in approach, BG3 is far more conservative with its choices. In lieu of adding the kitchen sink, it merely yoinks things it considers meaningful or useful.
This is most obvious in how it approaches buff spells. WOTR simply added nearly everything a class had in terms of spellbook, which meant some classes often ended up with an obscene amount of buff spells that were all but mandatory later on. BG3, however, only adapts some buff spells, which is impressive given 5E already cut down on them. The few buff spells that remain are primarily ‘Concentration’ spells - meaning you can only have one at a time.
This is a twofold benefit: Combat stats are scaled back and more manageable, lacking WOTR’s insane 40 AC demon enemies, and buffs are no longer mandatory - just useful. Similarly, it’s infinitely harder to make a non-starter build; with less overall buffs and a fair allocation of prepared spells/spell slots, there’s always something to cast. The same applies to non-magical classes and their unique resources.
If you’ve come here from DOS2, it’s worth stating: The armour system and action points are gone. Here, we use armour class (a stat that influences dice rolls to hit you) and actions (main, bonus, movement).
And I gotta say, the action economy is excellent. It was far, far too common for characters - martial ones especially - to have turns where all they did was move in both DOS2 and WOTR. BG3 heaps options on you, which primarily benefit martial characters. Throwing things is now a viable option, and the entire class of Thrown weapons scales obscenely well, preventing ‘dead’ turns.
Hell, just the sheer presence of the Throw, Improvised Weapon and Shove actions add so much depth to the combat’s tactical layer.
Throwing a bottle of water and shocking it is a great idea for AoE damage, using someone as a melee weapon to force them prone will open them up to devastating attacks from your party rogue, shoving enemies to their death is a strategy that works right up until the end of the game. Really, this game’s combat excels precisely because it allows for the kind of off-the-wall scrabbling actions that occurs in real tabletop RPGs. Sure, you can minmax, but it’s much more fun to kill an enemy by repeatedly batista bombing them through furniture. It helps that the game is rife with grenade-type items to throw at enemies.
Lastly, levels feel meaningful in this game. Even something as simple as ONE level 2/3/4/5/6 slot feels like a significant option, and feats especially can drag some builds into relevancy - especially for Barbarians. Well… This one isn’t so cut and dry. Progression feels great until levels 11 and 12. The original level cap in early access was 10, and it really shows here. For most classes/subclasses, it’s better to just take a two level dip into something else unless you’re HELLBENT on seeing your main class to 12. For melee classes especially, there’s little reason to go beyond level 10 since a two level dip into Fighter gives you an entire extra action.
And… The no-catch good is over. Let’s start complaining.
The actual actions one can take are exciting, but the source of them - the classes - aren’t. This is mostly on the developers, as they insisted that the game would only adapt things from DnD 5E’s base. So no sourcebooks or modules, all vanilla. Now, I’m no DnD guru, but even to me it’s obvious that Warlock and Bard suffer from not having access to Tasha's Cauldron of Everything or Xanathar’s Guide to Everything stuff.
The companion Wyll shows up really early. He’s a warlock brandishing a rapier and the title ‘Blade of Frontiers’. So you might think he’s a Hexblade, right?
Nope. No melee cantrips like Booming Blade, and Hexblade isn’t even implemented. He’s a Fiend Warlock, and like all Warlocks his endgame in this game is spamming Eldritch Blast.
Classes in BG3 aren’t mechanically interesting, they’re just picking a variation on the same flavour. Sure, there’s some class-unique mechanics but the vast majority of them are, again, variations on a theme. Sure, Monk doesn’t have spell slots and instead has ‘ki points’ but for all intents and purposes you’re just casting spells. Most casters draw from the same spellbook with a few differences, Bard/Ranger/Rogue are essentially the same class with some minor variations, and all martial classes except Fighter are ‘gimped Fighter’ once their resource runs out.
In the end, you’re honestly just picking one of three categories or Monk, and which roleplay flavour you want. We’ll get to that can of worms when I discuss the story, however.
Hell, even character customization feels barebones. There’s a total lack of eye shape/nose/eyebrow/whatever options. There are only preset faces you slap makeup/hair/extras on and then adjust the colours of.
Last little note, but the Feat selection is AWFUL. A lot of them are entirely near-entirely useless, while others are so strong that not taking them is stupid even if you’re a hardcore roleplayer. Seriously, the +2 to any stat from Ability Improvement is MONUMENTAL.
As a bridge between story and gameplay, though, we have to talk about ability checks, and two specific spells.
When faced with a dialogue or thieving check in this game, you roll a dice. It’s meant to mimic the tabletop, that good ol ‘roll charisma to fuck the dragon’ shit.
There’s just one problem. One teensy tiny problem.
These rolls are completely superfluous.
Early on, Shadowheart and some of your other companions can learn Guidance, which is a 1d4 bonus to a roll. You also start getting Inspirations, which let you reroll a failed check. On top of this, spells like Charm Person and Thaumaturgy start popping up, allowing you to stack an obscene amount of bonuses to rolls. Barring a Nat 1 crit fail, past a certain point in Act 1 it was obscenely rare for me to fail a check.
And… That didn’t matter either. Many checks will either let you progress normally, or not matter anyway. Taking some cues from immersive sims, a lot of quests can be advanced by just snooping around and clicking everything that the Highlight key… well, highlights. I don’t inherently hate ‘failure as progression’, it’s something I think Disco Elysium nailed, but this game? Nah, it just doesn’t hit.
Compounding this are three spells: Speak with Dead, Detect Thoughts and Speak with Animals. Narratively, they are cheat codes. All three allow you to gleam vital information for progression and the overall story, and carry no downsides beyond Speak With Dead having a strict requirement on corpse integrity. Sure, some of the dialogues are funny, but they’re so straightforward that it’s honestly kind of sad. Granted, the real downside is that Speak With Dead has a cutscene involved even if the corpse has nothing to say, which is AGONIZING when you’re probing corpses after a long and intense fight.
As for the actual story… First, let’s talk about TTRPGs. While some minmaxing nerds like to view TTRPGs as the ultimate evolution of combat systems where they can grind their players down unless the players are hardcore munchkins, the actual point of the medium is to make a character - good at some things, bad at others, potentially with baggage that colours how they interact with the world and other players - and roleplay them in a party setting.
And… You just can’t do this unless you pick an Origin character, with a decidedly preset class and appearance - except the Dark Urge. Custom characters can be fully customized, sure, and even have a Background option! But unlike other games, your background is pretty much irrelevant. If it confers any new dialogue, I haven’t found it. You have no chance to define a character background, and all your dialogue ignores the topic entirely. Sure, there are class and racial options, but many of these are just diversionary set dressing and they also stop appearing as much outside of Act 1 - which is a problem we REALLY have to talk about later.
The potential for roleplay as a custom character just isn’t there, a problem shared by its predecessor. You can try to stick to an alignment or ideals (though the alignment system was nuked) but you’re not really a character, you’re a class.
You may be thinking ‘Well, at least picking a custom character will let me get lots of companion NPC dialogue, right?’
And the answer is… Yesn’t. Yes, you’ll have the full suite of companions available in camp without occupying one of them yourself, but if you expect them to chime in with the frequency of Bioware companions then you have another thing coming. It’s rare for even one Origin character to chime in during a topic, having two or three would be beyond belief had I not seen it - once. I can’t help but wonder if the game is bugged, and only allowing one character to chime in even when others feasibly should. The end result is that adventuring with a party of Origins and a party of Hirelings (mute NPCs meant to fill a slot) doesn’t feel all that different besides some on-field quips.
This specific gripe might seem like a strange thing to open with, but I promise you it’s a canary in the coal mine.
Let’s talk about Act 1, IMO the game’s best act and also the setting for the entire Early Access period.
Act 1 has had YEARS of polish, and it shows. It is the only time where the game is what it pretends to be. It is incredibly reactive, possessing dialogue and outcomes for so many possibilities. The Druids who’re racist against Tieflings have dialogue for being a Druid, being a Tiefling and being both, as do other NPCs. Every little thing you can be or do has an appropriate reaction, from the obvious (Goblins afraid of Drow will let a Drow player character walk by without the need to roll a dice) to the outlandish (Killing Astarion, resurrecting him and then trying to fuck him or killing and reviving Gale three times). There’s still enough mystery to be enticing, and your companions’ stories are just opening up.
It’s great!
I love it!
It’s also rife with obvious cuts from Early Access!
This is an odd thing to bring up, because… Hey, they could fix it in the inevitable Definitive Edition, right? And most of the playerbase won’t even know because they didn’t play the EA version. But… It’s jarring. It’s really really jarring.
In Early Access, the tone of this game was decidedly dark. You had a tadpole in your head that was actively egging you to use it, using a seductive form to coo suggestions into your ear. Your companions were at odds with one another, you, and their own tadpole which was influencing them in different ways. That tadpole in your head would grow stronger, more dangerous and more assertive if you used it. Companions would castigate you for feeding it, and even using it to subjugate some goblins fed it.
Even Wyll from before was a different character; a folk hero struggling with the rage he feels towards goblins for slaughtering his village and the unfortunate love he felt towards his abuser.
In the full game, this is all gone. The tadpole is a relative non-entity, used only for telepathy. Using it is consequence free, and there’s a standard Videogame Skill Tree to upgrade it - which also has no consequences. All the strife and struggle is omitted, Wyll is just a nice guy struggling because his patron is a dick, and the entire tone is very… Bioware.
Especially with regards to morality. ‘Evil’ in this game is laughable, just an utter joke. Being good rewards you with a mountain of tadpole upgrades, loot, allies, money and opportunities to make things easier. Being evil uh… Sometimes gives you rewards, most of which are infinitely worse than being good. Perhaps the reason Larian omitted a morality meter is because your only options are “lawful good”, “chaotic good”, “true neutral” and “chaotic evil”. Stupid evil, more like. At least WOTR had the sense to include stupid good options. Every ‘evil’ choice is petty, spiteful, and needlessly dickish. There aren’t even any flavourful dialogue options to justify it as, say, you being desperate to get the tadpole out. You’re just being a cunt.
Act 1, again, emphasises this. The ‘good’ path is to expel an invading force, convince a shadowy cabal to leave innocents in peace, and rescue a spiritual leader from captivity.
The evil path involves killing refugees, children and natives of the land. And then having to kill the invading force anyway. But hey, at least you get an unfinished and buggy companion who kinda sucks by virtue of being a gimped Fighter (Paladin)! Except she’s not even ‘the evil companion’ while in your recruitment she’s simply pragmatic and understanding of extreme actions. They do try to explain it, but the explanation exists in a vacuum using a mechanic that other characters are party to, and contrasts pretty heavily with them.
It’s very Bioware. I bring Bioware up a lot because the original BG games were made by them, and they’d go on to make works rife with obnoxious tropes, shit politics, tonal disconnect and blatant character/route select forcing. BG3, unfortunately, only omits the shit politics. This is a Dragon Age game through and through, with the fascist-leanings and antisemitism filed off. It even has that brief pause in dialogue while the game scans your save for event flags. ‘Dragon Age without the awful American-centric politics’ is an easy sell for some, but not for me.
There’s a quest in Act 1, near the end, about a minute’s walk from the gate to Act 2. You approach a burning town, and are told that some people are inside. If you rush in and brave the fire, one of the people you just saved offers you a quest.
If you stand still and let her die, another NPC walks up to you and goes “Oh, that sucks. Anyway, here’s a quest for you.”
This is a minor thing to fixate on, but it’s emblematic of the wider problem:
Consequences don’t exist in this game.
You may think I’m being excessively mean, considering I’m only discussing Act 1, but this is a game wide problem. Baldur’s Gate 3 seems to believe that ‘consequences’ means ‘characters bring up your actions in dialogue’. Which is neat, but there’s problems here:
Obviously, these are not actual consequences. Actual consequences in BG3 tend to be immediate, and cleanly marked. Tellingly, most negative consequences come from picking dialogue lower on the list, with the good/safe options being up at the top. Not how I thought top/bottom discourse would manifest in 2023, but alas. Jokes aside, there aren’t really any long-lasting consequences.
You can straight up murder an NPC in Act 1, and when they return in Act 3 they’re merely a little irritated with you before starting a fight. If you don’t, they’re not irritated with you.
They then start a fight.
Even the tadpole is of no consequence, as using it religiously only elicits approving or disapproving dialogue from certain NPCs. Your skill tree is locked off early on, but you can still acquire that juicy upgrade in Act 3 even if you’ve spent the entire game calling the NPC who offers it a soyboy beta cuck. As you might have guessed it, all that changes is dialogue. Not even taking that super upgrade invokes any meaningful consequences beyond making you look like shit.
Now, looping back: Here’s the thing about Act 1, right. It’s still good, it’s the peak of this game. Even with all the obvious cuts and rewrites and shitty morality and blah blah blah. It’s good, okay?
But Act 2 isn’t. It’s really not. It nearly made me quit, in fact.
Pathfinder WOTR and DOS2 both excelled here, having Act 2 be the point where the game truly opens up and its scale becomes readily apparent. BG3, however, crushes the scale. It primarily takes place in a blighted hellscape, where the player is required to carry a light at all times for fear of being subs- Haha no just kidding, this only applies for like five minutes before you get a magic lantern that nullifies the mechanic.
With the mechanical despair nullified, you’re now free to walk through, uh… A blighted hellscape with barely any NPCs to interact with, the same 3-4 enemy types, a crushing lack of landmarks and barely any content. Or you can go to the mountain pass, which serves no purpose other than to progress someone’s questline and foreshadow a sidequest in an Act 1 area that you can revisit. It’s so empty that I actually assumed I’d just missed stuff, but no. It really is tiny.
So in the main area, all you can do is wander around and gorge yourself on like… An hour or two’s worth of content? The bulk of the area is made up of a dungeon that would be fine at the endgame but is FAR too lengthy for the halfway point and especially in relation to how utterly barren the rest of the act is. Act 2’s actual climax is shorter than that dungeon, for reference, despite containing its own dungeon. That certain events can make the finale go even faster does not help.
Perhaps what makes Act 2 feel duller than the rest is that there’s very little going on with your companions for the most part. Shadowheart’s questline occupies the bulk of the companion screentime, with Lae’zel getting a brief but missable dungeon at the very start and Gale’s storyline making a modicum of progress after a camp event. Other than that, though, everyone is… Static? It’s strange. Characters like Wyll, Astarion and Karlach will hit you with some sense of urgency, a goal that needs tending to now, only to kind of just sit there while you meander about the miserylands.
And, on the topic of Lae’zel’s dungeon, it very clearly illustrates this game’s relationship to both consequences and player choice.
Immediately, Lae’zel is placed in a situation where the game will tell you repeatedly that she’s going to die. You can make a choice here, but it impacts neither your relation with NPCs in the dungeon, or Lae’zel herself. She cannot die. You’re just picking flavour again. The road is linear, and you will walk it the way Larian demanded.
Following this, you’re placed in a meeting with a leading member of the Githyanki species. Here, the game compounds my complaints about the consequences only being ‘instant’, alongside a healthy dosage of linearity.
You can mouth off to this character and immediately die for pissing them off. Or… You can pick any of the other options. I’m gonna get into some light spoilers here, but the character demands you kill your dream guardian.
You can agree, carry it out, and the guardian will live anyway. You and the party then become enemies of the Githyanki people.You can agree, back out, and the guardian lives. You then become an enemy of the Githyanki people. You can disagree, and become an enemy of the Githyanki people. You can refuse to even start dialogue, then turn around and leave. At which point… You become an enemy of the Githyanki people.
This isn’t the first time this issue pops up, it’s just the most indicative of how this game feels about letting the player meaningfully influence the narrative. As early as Act 1, you’re offered an incredible amount of ‘options’ that don’t actually matter what, you will never remove the tadpole and you will always make an enemy of the goblins. In Act 2, you will always be an enemy of both the Githyanki and the Cult. You can make other, more minor choices, but these are ultimately just for roleplay flavour. It doesn’t actually matter whether you scorn certain deities, leave the miseryland coated in misery, genocide the few allies you have available or just murderhobo everyone in Act 1 and 2.
Why?
Because Act 3 is basically a different game entirely.
Well, I’ll admit I’m being slightly unfair to it. Act 3 is where a lot of companion quest lines actually climax, where a lot of side quests you’ve been doing all game show off and help you out. It’s the point where you arrive in the titular city, and get embroiled in the local politics that will help end the game.
But there is a disconnect between it and the rest of the game, even when it’s deliberately calling back to itself.
For starters, regardless of how you treat your companions, their quests will pop up so long as they’re present. This isn’t too jarring for characters like Karlach or Wyll, but even more guarded characters like Shadowheart and Astarion will urge you to push on with their quest - potentially ignoring that you’ve spent the entire game either neglecting them or outright bullying them.
Within these quests lies yet more of the game’s problems with morality. In fact, Act 3 is rife with it.
Your choices are, in the end, do something that’s a common sense good option or be a petty and spiteful chaotic evil asshole who does bad things with all the same forethought of a cat slapping a cup off of a counter. There’s surprisingly little room for nuance, you either do the good thing or the terrible no-good thing. This is particularly apparent in Astarion’s questline, where you can either convince him to do the thing he’s spent all game craving OR you can turn him into what Twitter and Tumblr thought he would be in pre-release.
If you’ve ever played Dragon Age: Inquisition, the companion quests are much the same here. You get a nice, good option that is never a challenge because if it has a skill check it’s very low (barring one exception), plus it’s at the top where all the good is. Or you can just be a dick and make things worse for everyone by picking the bottom option. Do you remember Iron Bull’s quest, where you can either convince him to be a free man or have him continue to serve a quasi-Spartan fascist empire? This game pulls the same shit.
Secondly, you may recall that I gassed up Act 1 for having lots of reactive dialogue and race/class/subclass specific dialogue. Well, it begins to slowly dry up in Acts 2 and 3. Basically nobody gave a shit that I was a drow or a Paladin after leaving Act 1, and I got more options for my Fighter subclass than I did Paladin. It’s so strange, to see the game’s multiple creation options just cease to matter entirely.
For a moment, though, let’s focus on the sidequests.
Because they also don’t mean shit.
My go-to example for this is a questline I’m going to call ‘The Race War’. The Race War is mentioned early on, and you can save a few key players involved in it. If you save them all, The Race War begins in earnest. BUT, because you saved a specific gnome, you can avert the worst outcome and mend the ideological differences, while still getting your objective cleared.
One problem, though.
You don’t actually have to do any of this. Mending the difference is possible no matter what, and the overarching goal of The Race War is achievable even if everyone from Act 1 and 2 fell to your Eldritch Blast spam. Sure, doing it the ‘right’ way is easier and has less punishing checks (or checks hands down), but this is redundant due to how obscene the bonuses to checks become later on.
You might be looking at my gripes and scowling, thinking ‘Mira, this is a roleplaying game. It’s wrong to approach it from a minmax angle’.
And you’re right. Truth be told, I approached the game from a roleplay angle, at first. With games like these I typically prefer to roleplay even if it hurts me. My Paladin did not allow Astarion to pickpocket, did their best to save innocents, refused the tadpole, obeyed the law and all that jazz. I even gave them a little Oathbreaker arc in Act 2.
The problem, at least for me, is how the game felt as though it was going out of its way to laugh at me for doing this. Abstaining from a lot of what the game dangles in front of you feels like self-gimping, because there are no consequences for engaging with it. Pickpocketing is easy gold, not a soul gives a shit if you let unnamed civilians die, the tadpole is just a skill tree with little bearing on the outcome of the story, and the law is easily supplanted. I managed to avoid truly min maxing on my first run, but I’m not sure I’ll resist the second time. Coupled with how difficult it is to actually roleplay narratively unless you pick an Origin character, and it’s kind of maddening to consider how this game was marketed.
Now, to tie the last few complaints together, let’s talk about the word ‘arbitrary’. To be arbitrary is to defy any system, rule or reasoning in favour of personal whims and impulses. In law, this would manifest as a judge making a decision in the moment rather than basing it off of legal precedent, past cases or the jury’s counsel.
In BG3, it manifests as morality-based dialogue options being available no matter what.
I never thought I would ever say this, but this game needed an alignment system or alignment locks. WOTR having it and locking dialogue off that would be ‘out of character’ was a genius idea.
It is so utterly jarring that, even when a game lets me console someone and be their confidant as they talk about their emotional & abuse AND lets me be a holy god-fearing Paladin, it still gives me the option to make them suffer. There are so, so, so many opportunities for even good characters to backstab people for no reason, with no option to justify it. Even to characters you’re romancing. Perhaps these were added to sell you the illusion of choice, but they just seem ridiculous. There’s one in particularly that you can only get by picking the goody two-shoes path in the first place!
Romances… God, I didn’t want to talk about them but I think I have to at this point.
A pretty common criticism of Bioware romances is that they essentially boil down to you sexually harassing someone until they give in and fall for you. Cullen’s in DA:I stands out; for as much as I hate the character, his romance is you harassing a drug addict until he becomes dependent on you.
BG3 decides to be forward-thinking by having some characters sexually harass you instead. Lae’zel and Gale especially.
I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t mind Lae’zel coming onto me because I wanted her anyway, but it doesn’t take much brainstorming to understand how someone might see her dialogue as either a thinly veiled rape threat or just deeply uncomfortable. If you don’t find her sexual aggression - or her - endearing then it must come off as being cornered. Though, mercifully, she does back off.
And Gale… At first, I thought Gale being a clingy ‘nice guy’ with a penchant for emotional manipulation and compliment bombing was a deliberate commentary on how the leading white men in Bioware games tend to act. But as time went on, and he got a bit more incel-y, I noticed that my dialogue options for dealing with him were either “Yes, we are bonded for life, you are the best person ever” OR telling him to kill himself. I realised that even if his horrible elements are intended, the developers certainly want you to like him.
Both of these characters are very easy to earn the love of, even if you laugh at their plights. The romances in general aren’t great, mostly just you treating people with decency until they fall in love with you. These aren’t really romances, they’re trauma bonds. You can’t even buy your beloved flowers or something, and this is one thing Dragon Age got right! If you’ve ever been around trans puppygirls it’s like corralling a party of them.
It’s really weird coming from Pathfinder WOTR, and I think it’s a problem of timescale. BG3 takes place over a nebulous time period, like a few weeks at least, whereas WOTR takes place over a potentially years-long crusade. So while WOTR allows romances to slowly bloom and take form, in BG3 they kinda just spring up. Hell, even Dragon Age 2 averted this by having it take place over years.
Romance is a little obnoxious, but few things are as bad as the polyamory ‘representation’.
So, I’m gonna bitch at length about how the game made me feel as both a trans person and a polyamorous person. You can scroll down, it’s just pure vitriolic kvetching.
Ahem.
Holy fuck. What is wrong with the writers?
Marketing the game and going ‘hee ho some party members will be poly :)’ only to offer utterly dogshit options is such a kick in the gut. And in terms of sheer offensiveness, this game made me feel worse about being poly than DA:I made me feel about being a lesbian or another thing I won’t mention here.
You can only be poly with Halsin and one other party member. Halsin explicitly states that he’s poly because he’s spent so much time in the animal world that he’s given up on monogamy. Whether it’s intended or not, the message here is “Halsin is poly because he’s an alien”. And the two party members he’s compatible with - Shadowheart and Astarion - are both explicitly and implicitly stated to be ‘super kinky’, with the further implication that polyamory is a kink to them.
Every other party member reacts viscerally to the idea of polyamory, browbeating you into picking ‘them or me’ or in some extreme cases just dumping you outright. It felt terrible, emotionally impactful for all the wrong reasons. Either the writers were using them as a mouthpiece to yell at poly people, or they didn’t consult any poly people at all and thought this was okay. The end result is awful all the same, and it actually soured my opinion of every character involved out of spite. That many party members consider engaging in an incestuous threesome to be less abhorrent than loving two people just compounds it. Truly, this is the worst poly rep I’ve ever seen in my life.
As for trans rep… Eesh. On the sexuality front the game is great, every romance is bi and same-sex couples appear with regularity, either mentioned in passing or shown outright. It’s great, gold star, no complaints. But when it comes to transness, there’s a pretty big problem. There are no trans companions, and barely any trans NPCs. So far, in my 105~ hours of playtime, I’ve ran into two NPCs who might’ve been trans (as they used ‘male’ voices on the ‘femme’ body). One of them was a minor NPC standing in a bank that I only knew of via posts from friends, and another was a shapeshifting doppelganger that tries to slaughter you.
Sure, the player can be trans in any flavour, or nonbinary, but in light of how scarce trans people are… This doesn’t feel like representation, it feels like fetishization. While bodies are not labelled ‘male’ or ‘female’, the ‘masc’ and ‘femme’ bodies have entirely different faces available. Femme bodies struggle to be distinctly masculine or even just butch, while masculine bodies are perhaps excessively masc unless you pick the slightly androgynous elves. More focus seems to have been placed on letting you be a “chick with a dick” or a “boy with a pussy”, which is only further compounded by a startling lack of body options. ‘Tis incredibly telling that all the femme bodies have decently-sized tits that you cannot adjust at all, and even the twinkiest masc body has some musculature.
It sucks. It is entirely possible to play the game as the only trans person in Faerun. One of the Hirelings is non-binary, I suppose, but an entirely mute doll meant to fill a party slot for murderhobos is hardly a character let alone representation. There was a drag queen coded character, I guess…? Alas, while the game is delightfully not heteronormative, it’s so cisnormative it hurts.
Back to the story, and specifically my criticism of Act 3 feeling disconnected. A pretty significant part of this is that, for all intents and purposes, the plot ends up being hijacked by two new characters. One of whom had token references in prior arcs, and one functionally appears out of nowhere. Some argue that the presence of these characters was foreshadowed, and I can’t really agree. A loading screen tooltip and one optional scene having some barely noticeable Bhaal iconography don’t really constitute foreshadowing. Sure, Big Bad 1 is mentioned a few times by a companion, but Big Bad 2 feels like… I don’t know. As if the devs looked at the first two games and inserted something familiar. Or they were just THAT hype to work with Lady Dimitrescu.
But just in terms of tone Act 3 feels like a whole other game. It is obnoxiously in love with its own sense of humour, with many of the opening diversions being near-entirely comedic in nature. The interesting elements, like the titular city struggling with a refugee crisis, are instead put on hold for a carnival, bad and kinda insensitive jokes about sex workers, having sex with twins and other such tripe. It tapers off once you’re in the actual city, but it’s incredibly jarring given how hard the stakes are in this Act.
Which is, in all hilarity, the same issue that befell DOS2. Like that game, BG3 does not respect its own stakes. Act 3 is a slower paced, almost casual experience where you jaunt between landmarks in the city for Designated Stuff Happening moments and probe NPCs who either have nothing to say or are throwing another quest in your journal. Most of these quests, too, are just kinda worthless. Acts 1 and 2 are far more reticent and creative with their sidequests, less-is-more and all that. 3 has… A lot, and they’re not very good. Calling half of them fetch quests would not be unwarranted.
The other half are, essentially, main quests in disguise. You’re given a few broad goals and these side quests guide you towards them. This isn’t bad, most of my favourite CRPGs do this. It’s literally the entire first half of New Vegas, for instance. But man, this game’s not-side quests are kind of exhausting, with a lot of them being either fetch quests with lots of dialogue (summoning horrific memories of FFXIV) or long dungeons that get tiring as you approach later levels. That it’s impossible to tell whether they’re truly optional or whether they’re your only option doesn’t help.
This is also where the cuts start being obvious. Like, glaringly. Larian showed off the city’s Upper City district as late as June but it’s just gone. A plot-important confrontation happens within an hour of the act starting, in a location deeply unfitting for what’s actually occurring. It’s even sequestered off in a separate, unoptimized cell. You’re then half-heartedly shunted out into the Lower City, which is expansive yes but nowhere near as big or ‘living and breathing’ as Larian made it out to be.
Characters sometimes appear and talk as if they lived through a quest that does not exist, which makes some plotlines feel like watching a film with some chapters cut, really apparent when Lae’zel is around. Astarion’s personal plot progresses way too fast and gets too much faux-gravitas, which in turn betrays the cut content associated with the other NPC involved in the story. I’ll admit, it’s strange that Astarion’s constantly-mentioned big bad is less important to the story than a guy Karlach mentions a couple times in Act 1. But again, story cuts. Hell, the game’s only true late-game companion will dump about two acts worth of chats on you, as if he was meant to appear earlier.
If you dig deep into companion chats, a lot of them mention either a history with Baldur’s Gate or people they know/knew there, but most of this comes to nothing. This is especially prominent with Wyll, a character who absolutely should have more of a connection to the city but barely says anything.
But most importantly, the titular city just feels kinda barren. It’s really obvious where Stuff will happen despite the density, and the size feels like it serves no purpose other than to tank my framerate due to all the moving NPCs. Act 1 and 2 were mostly empty spaces with designated event areas to poke around, and 3 is no different. It just pretends it isn’t. Act 3 makes it apparent that the game just isn’t finished, because if the Lower City feels so empty then how bad was the Upper City going to be?
And, in terms of the main plot… It honestly kind of stalls here? It boils down to little more than two questlines to get macguffin and then a confrontation with the Big Bad. There’s not much of an investigation because important characters will just exposit anything you might be missing to you, and the prior act answered a lot of things definitively - too definitively, one could say.
In particular, a lot of plot points are just painfully obvious if you’re familiar with either DnD fluff or you’re keenly attuned to how adaptations tend to present information from the source material. It does not take a great, keen mind to understand what the true big bad actually is, given that the game all but beats you over the head with certain imagery. I unfortunately had the plot clocked by the middle of Act 2, but I was still insistent that Larian would surprise me.
They did not.
There wasn’t much catharsis in pushing through BG3’s third act. I wish I could say more, but I don’t want to spoil this entire game. Honestly? It was mostly frustration. Frustration at the game for pulling the ol’ Larian upscale and making some fights a slog, frustration at the story for running out of steam, frustration at the writers for half-assing so much but keeping tons of comedic diversions, frustration at how the romance was handled, frustration at how little consequences there actually were, and…
Frustration with the Origin companions.
Yeah. Sorry, I’m just not that invested in these people. They’re way, way too Bioware for me. Besides Karlach (a very obviously late addition), they kind of exist just to Have A Point about something. Like the natural conclusion of “remove everything that’s just artistic flair” discourse. While they do comment on things in line with their alleged alignment, it’s rare to talk to them about things that aren’t story-relevant. Fuck sake, even Cullen was willing to talk to you about how he got cucked. And he sucks!
In place of broad personalities, they exist to ruminate on radicalization, self-determination, cycles of abuse, the price of altruism, the hubris of academics, and the pitfalls of religious zealotry. Beyond that though, they’re very one-dimensional. Being funny and having fetishes is nice, but the mere fact it’s obscenely difficult to get party members to leave of their own accord (barring three instant losses in Act 1 - hey, there’s those instant consequences again). Even DOS2’s companions had more depth than this, and character writing was not that game’s strong point. Hell, I’m gonna be extreme here: The Witcher 3 was better about this, and I fucking hate that game.
Also, as an aside: Astarion’s quest is neat but as a character he’s just R18 Sebille from DOS2. It’s really obvious in the resolutions.
Karlach is the exception, but for as much as I like her she does feel as though she was added as a reaction to people complaining about how evil-aligned the party was in early access. She is just a golden retriever in a tiefling body, and yet she was added even after they made everyone more polite and less contentious.
That’s kind of this game’s core issue, actually. It is obvious, at least from my point of view, that Larian tapered down a lot of this game’s darker and more contentious elements for fear of alienating people - yet I STILL see people bitch that Shadowheart, the adorable puppy girl, is too mean for them. I can’t help but wonder why they did it: Was it truly to avoid alienating normals? Were the rewrites that massive? Did they have a change of direction? I don’t know.
But, I don’t know. I like them despite everything - except Gale. They’re frustratingly shallow, but the points they exist to serve are where this game’s writing shines on the intended path. They’re all excellently voiced too, everyone in the game is yeah but the companions put their everything into it. I can’t fucking believe the guy who voiced Zeon - the worst Xenoblade 3 guest party member - is voicing a character like Astarion. I’ll give them sincere credit, they nailed it. This game’s acting in general is very theater, which is a nice break from the grim mumbled boredom that most western games have fallen into, or the clarity-first-personality-second acting that’s made a lot of contemporary animanga adaptations feel stilted and wooden. A lot of major side characters - Raphael and Mizora especially - are just treasures. Some of the best in class. Even when this game was boring, I sat through the dialogue for entertainment value.
Except in one instance, where the game doubled down on something I hate.
Look, I’ll just say it outright: This game kinda hates the original games even though it’s eager to retread old ground. Returning characters have a horrible time, with some of the best character writing from Throne of Bhaal getting mercilessly stepped on. Without spoiling it too deep, ToB’s best companion has their arc belittled and made fun of to the viewer, for no other reason than to force a connection between BG2 and BG3. Larian promised that the game would have ‘connections’ to justify this game being called BG3 and the game genuinely would’ve been better off without them. They are hamfisted, unwanted and needlessly spiteful towards the source material.
In the instance I alluded to, BG3 took such a steaming dump on Throne of Bhaal that I actually mashed through the dialogue out of sheer disgust. It’s bad, so bad. Bringing along a certain companion hangs a lampshade on how bad it is, but it’s fleeting. I hate saying this, but that scene well and truly should not have been in the game.
Sigh, look. I know I’ve been harsh on the game for the entire duration of this review so far, but I really did enjoy it in Act 1 and most of 2, plus the gameplay is a treasure. There’s a reason the score isn’t as low as you’d think. It’s a blast in multiplayer too, particularly if your party members - and you - are stupid as fuck.
It’s just such a mess. I didn’t even get into the lackluster ending, unfinished epilogue, my gripes with how loot works, the bad economy, or the BUGS! Copious bugs! Softlocks, quests not progressing, crashes, freezes, missing NPCs, rolls not applying bonuses, bugs bugs BUGS.
I hope this review ages like shit. I really do. I hope Larian release a Definitive Edition or something that makes most of this moot, but I think some of my complaints will always exist.
This is a game people gassed up for not being ‘like other AAA games’. And yet, it is incomplete on release, is a technical mess, has lots of unfinished/dead end content, and the devs have promised to fix/add to it later.
It is, unfortunately, not special as far as modern AAA games go. It’s not special as far as CRPGs go either.
It's just another in a long line of Bioware games.
Two disclaimers before I continue this review
1) I am going to compare this to Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous an incredible amount, as they’re both CRPG adapting a TTRPG that share similarities but also core differences worth discussing. If this grates on you, quit now. Divinity: Original Sin 2 will also come up with regularity.
2) This game is VERY buggy and VERY unfinished. A lot of what I say here may end up ageing like shit. Honestly, I don’t normally bring up technical issues when reviewing newer games, but BG3’s are BAD and notable.
It is a shame that Backloggd does not have two separate entries for ‘Baldur’s Gate 3: The Game’ and ‘Baldur’s Gate 3: The Story’. Meaning that I, unfortunately, have to do two fundamentally different reviews. I wish this weren’t the case, that there wasn’t such a canyon-wide gap between the two halves of this game. It’d be easier if they were both good, or both bad.
I’ll get the good out of the way first.
On the gameplay front, BG3 is a masterpiece. Its immediate competition is Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (which I also reviewed), both of them being adaptations of a popular TTRPG format that opt for accuracy over simplification. Whereas WOTR went for an all-in approach, BG3 is far more conservative with its choices. In lieu of adding the kitchen sink, it merely yoinks things it considers meaningful or useful.
This is most obvious in how it approaches buff spells. WOTR simply added nearly everything a class had in terms of spellbook, which meant some classes often ended up with an obscene amount of buff spells that were all but mandatory later on. BG3, however, only adapts some buff spells, which is impressive given 5E already cut down on them. The few buff spells that remain are primarily ‘Concentration’ spells - meaning you can only have one at a time.
This is a twofold benefit: Combat stats are scaled back and more manageable, lacking WOTR’s insane 40 AC demon enemies, and buffs are no longer mandatory - just useful. Similarly, it’s infinitely harder to make a non-starter build; with less overall buffs and a fair allocation of prepared spells/spell slots, there’s always something to cast. The same applies to non-magical classes and their unique resources.
If you’ve come here from DOS2, it’s worth stating: The armour system and action points are gone. Here, we use armour class (a stat that influences dice rolls to hit you) and actions (main, bonus, movement).
And I gotta say, the action economy is excellent. It was far, far too common for characters - martial ones especially - to have turns where all they did was move in both DOS2 and WOTR. BG3 heaps options on you, which primarily benefit martial characters. Throwing things is now a viable option, and the entire class of Thrown weapons scales obscenely well, preventing ‘dead’ turns.
Hell, just the sheer presence of the Throw, Improvised Weapon and Shove actions add so much depth to the combat’s tactical layer.
Throwing a bottle of water and shocking it is a great idea for AoE damage, using someone as a melee weapon to force them prone will open them up to devastating attacks from your party rogue, shoving enemies to their death is a strategy that works right up until the end of the game. Really, this game’s combat excels precisely because it allows for the kind of off-the-wall scrabbling actions that occurs in real tabletop RPGs. Sure, you can minmax, but it’s much more fun to kill an enemy by repeatedly batista bombing them through furniture. It helps that the game is rife with grenade-type items to throw at enemies.
Lastly, levels feel meaningful in this game. Even something as simple as ONE level 2/3/4/5/6 slot feels like a significant option, and feats especially can drag some builds into relevancy - especially for Barbarians. Well… This one isn’t so cut and dry. Progression feels great until levels 11 and 12. The original level cap in early access was 10, and it really shows here. For most classes/subclasses, it’s better to just take a two level dip into something else unless you’re HELLBENT on seeing your main class to 12. For melee classes especially, there’s little reason to go beyond level 10 since a two level dip into Fighter gives you an entire extra action.
And… The no-catch good is over. Let’s start complaining.
The actual actions one can take are exciting, but the source of them - the classes - aren’t. This is mostly on the developers, as they insisted that the game would only adapt things from DnD 5E’s base. So no sourcebooks or modules, all vanilla. Now, I’m no DnD guru, but even to me it’s obvious that Warlock and Bard suffer from not having access to Tasha's Cauldron of Everything or Xanathar’s Guide to Everything stuff.
The companion Wyll shows up really early. He’s a warlock brandishing a rapier and the title ‘Blade of Frontiers’. So you might think he’s a Hexblade, right?
Nope. No melee cantrips like Booming Blade, and Hexblade isn’t even implemented. He’s a Fiend Warlock, and like all Warlocks his endgame in this game is spamming Eldritch Blast.
Classes in BG3 aren’t mechanically interesting, they’re just picking a variation on the same flavour. Sure, there’s some class-unique mechanics but the vast majority of them are, again, variations on a theme. Sure, Monk doesn’t have spell slots and instead has ‘ki points’ but for all intents and purposes you’re just casting spells. Most casters draw from the same spellbook with a few differences, Bard/Ranger/Rogue are essentially the same class with some minor variations, and all martial classes except Fighter are ‘gimped Fighter’ once their resource runs out.
In the end, you’re honestly just picking one of three categories or Monk, and which roleplay flavour you want. We’ll get to that can of worms when I discuss the story, however.
Hell, even character customization feels barebones. There’s a total lack of eye shape/nose/eyebrow/whatever options. There are only preset faces you slap makeup/hair/extras on and then adjust the colours of.
Last little note, but the Feat selection is AWFUL. A lot of them are entirely near-entirely useless, while others are so strong that not taking them is stupid even if you’re a hardcore roleplayer. Seriously, the +2 to any stat from Ability Improvement is MONUMENTAL.
As a bridge between story and gameplay, though, we have to talk about ability checks, and two specific spells.
When faced with a dialogue or thieving check in this game, you roll a dice. It’s meant to mimic the tabletop, that good ol ‘roll charisma to fuck the dragon’ shit.
There’s just one problem. One teensy tiny problem.
These rolls are completely superfluous.
Early on, Shadowheart and some of your other companions can learn Guidance, which is a 1d4 bonus to a roll. You also start getting Inspirations, which let you reroll a failed check. On top of this, spells like Charm Person and Thaumaturgy start popping up, allowing you to stack an obscene amount of bonuses to rolls. Barring a Nat 1 crit fail, past a certain point in Act 1 it was obscenely rare for me to fail a check.
And… That didn’t matter either. Many checks will either let you progress normally, or not matter anyway. Taking some cues from immersive sims, a lot of quests can be advanced by just snooping around and clicking everything that the Highlight key… well, highlights. I don’t inherently hate ‘failure as progression’, it’s something I think Disco Elysium nailed, but this game? Nah, it just doesn’t hit.
Compounding this are three spells: Speak with Dead, Detect Thoughts and Speak with Animals. Narratively, they are cheat codes. All three allow you to gleam vital information for progression and the overall story, and carry no downsides beyond Speak With Dead having a strict requirement on corpse integrity. Sure, some of the dialogues are funny, but they’re so straightforward that it’s honestly kind of sad. Granted, the real downside is that Speak With Dead has a cutscene involved even if the corpse has nothing to say, which is AGONIZING when you’re probing corpses after a long and intense fight.
As for the actual story… First, let’s talk about TTRPGs. While some minmaxing nerds like to view TTRPGs as the ultimate evolution of combat systems where they can grind their players down unless the players are hardcore munchkins, the actual point of the medium is to make a character - good at some things, bad at others, potentially with baggage that colours how they interact with the world and other players - and roleplay them in a party setting.
And… You just can’t do this unless you pick an Origin character, with a decidedly preset class and appearance - except the Dark Urge. Custom characters can be fully customized, sure, and even have a Background option! But unlike other games, your background is pretty much irrelevant. If it confers any new dialogue, I haven’t found it. You have no chance to define a character background, and all your dialogue ignores the topic entirely. Sure, there are class and racial options, but many of these are just diversionary set dressing and they also stop appearing as much outside of Act 1 - which is a problem we REALLY have to talk about later.
The potential for roleplay as a custom character just isn’t there, a problem shared by its predecessor. You can try to stick to an alignment or ideals (though the alignment system was nuked) but you’re not really a character, you’re a class.
You may be thinking ‘Well, at least picking a custom character will let me get lots of companion NPC dialogue, right?’
And the answer is… Yesn’t. Yes, you’ll have the full suite of companions available in camp without occupying one of them yourself, but if you expect them to chime in with the frequency of Bioware companions then you have another thing coming. It’s rare for even one Origin character to chime in during a topic, having two or three would be beyond belief had I not seen it - once. I can’t help but wonder if the game is bugged, and only allowing one character to chime in even when others feasibly should. The end result is that adventuring with a party of Origins and a party of Hirelings (mute NPCs meant to fill a slot) doesn’t feel all that different besides some on-field quips.
This specific gripe might seem like a strange thing to open with, but I promise you it’s a canary in the coal mine.
Let’s talk about Act 1, IMO the game’s best act and also the setting for the entire Early Access period.
Act 1 has had YEARS of polish, and it shows. It is the only time where the game is what it pretends to be. It is incredibly reactive, possessing dialogue and outcomes for so many possibilities. The Druids who’re racist against Tieflings have dialogue for being a Druid, being a Tiefling and being both, as do other NPCs. Every little thing you can be or do has an appropriate reaction, from the obvious (Goblins afraid of Drow will let a Drow player character walk by without the need to roll a dice) to the outlandish (Killing Astarion, resurrecting him and then trying to fuck him or killing and reviving Gale three times). There’s still enough mystery to be enticing, and your companions’ stories are just opening up.
It’s great!
I love it!
It’s also rife with obvious cuts from Early Access!
This is an odd thing to bring up, because… Hey, they could fix it in the inevitable Definitive Edition, right? And most of the playerbase won’t even know because they didn’t play the EA version. But… It’s jarring. It’s really really jarring.
In Early Access, the tone of this game was decidedly dark. You had a tadpole in your head that was actively egging you to use it, using a seductive form to coo suggestions into your ear. Your companions were at odds with one another, you, and their own tadpole which was influencing them in different ways. That tadpole in your head would grow stronger, more dangerous and more assertive if you used it. Companions would castigate you for feeding it, and even using it to subjugate some goblins fed it.
Even Wyll from before was a different character; a folk hero struggling with the rage he feels towards goblins for slaughtering his village and the unfortunate love he felt towards his abuser.
In the full game, this is all gone. The tadpole is a relative non-entity, used only for telepathy. Using it is consequence free, and there’s a standard Videogame Skill Tree to upgrade it - which also has no consequences. All the strife and struggle is omitted, Wyll is just a nice guy struggling because his patron is a dick, and the entire tone is very… Bioware.
Especially with regards to morality. ‘Evil’ in this game is laughable, just an utter joke. Being good rewards you with a mountain of tadpole upgrades, loot, allies, money and opportunities to make things easier. Being evil uh… Sometimes gives you rewards, most of which are infinitely worse than being good. Perhaps the reason Larian omitted a morality meter is because your only options are “lawful good”, “chaotic good”, “true neutral” and “chaotic evil”. Stupid evil, more like. At least WOTR had the sense to include stupid good options. Every ‘evil’ choice is petty, spiteful, and needlessly dickish. There aren’t even any flavourful dialogue options to justify it as, say, you being desperate to get the tadpole out. You’re just being a cunt.
Act 1, again, emphasises this. The ‘good’ path is to expel an invading force, convince a shadowy cabal to leave innocents in peace, and rescue a spiritual leader from captivity.
The evil path involves killing refugees, children and natives of the land. And then having to kill the invading force anyway. But hey, at least you get an unfinished and buggy companion who kinda sucks by virtue of being a gimped Fighter (Paladin)! Except she’s not even ‘the evil companion’ while in your recruitment she’s simply pragmatic and understanding of extreme actions. They do try to explain it, but the explanation exists in a vacuum using a mechanic that other characters are party to, and contrasts pretty heavily with them.
It’s very Bioware. I bring Bioware up a lot because the original BG games were made by them, and they’d go on to make works rife with obnoxious tropes, shit politics, tonal disconnect and blatant character/route select forcing. BG3, unfortunately, only omits the shit politics. This is a Dragon Age game through and through, with the fascist-leanings and antisemitism filed off. It even has that brief pause in dialogue while the game scans your save for event flags. ‘Dragon Age without the awful American-centric politics’ is an easy sell for some, but not for me.
There’s a quest in Act 1, near the end, about a minute’s walk from the gate to Act 2. You approach a burning town, and are told that some people are inside. If you rush in and brave the fire, one of the people you just saved offers you a quest.
If you stand still and let her die, another NPC walks up to you and goes “Oh, that sucks. Anyway, here’s a quest for you.”
This is a minor thing to fixate on, but it’s emblematic of the wider problem:
Consequences don’t exist in this game.
You may think I’m being excessively mean, considering I’m only discussing Act 1, but this is a game wide problem. Baldur’s Gate 3 seems to believe that ‘consequences’ means ‘characters bring up your actions in dialogue’. Which is neat, but there’s problems here:
Obviously, these are not actual consequences. Actual consequences in BG3 tend to be immediate, and cleanly marked. Tellingly, most negative consequences come from picking dialogue lower on the list, with the good/safe options being up at the top. Not how I thought top/bottom discourse would manifest in 2023, but alas. Jokes aside, there aren’t really any long-lasting consequences.
You can straight up murder an NPC in Act 1, and when they return in Act 3 they’re merely a little irritated with you before starting a fight. If you don’t, they’re not irritated with you.
They then start a fight.
Even the tadpole is of no consequence, as using it religiously only elicits approving or disapproving dialogue from certain NPCs. Your skill tree is locked off early on, but you can still acquire that juicy upgrade in Act 3 even if you’ve spent the entire game calling the NPC who offers it a soyboy beta cuck. As you might have guessed it, all that changes is dialogue. Not even taking that super upgrade invokes any meaningful consequences beyond making you look like shit.
Now, looping back: Here’s the thing about Act 1, right. It’s still good, it’s the peak of this game. Even with all the obvious cuts and rewrites and shitty morality and blah blah blah. It’s good, okay?
But Act 2 isn’t. It’s really not. It nearly made me quit, in fact.
Pathfinder WOTR and DOS2 both excelled here, having Act 2 be the point where the game truly opens up and its scale becomes readily apparent. BG3, however, crushes the scale. It primarily takes place in a blighted hellscape, where the player is required to carry a light at all times for fear of being subs- Haha no just kidding, this only applies for like five minutes before you get a magic lantern that nullifies the mechanic.
With the mechanical despair nullified, you’re now free to walk through, uh… A blighted hellscape with barely any NPCs to interact with, the same 3-4 enemy types, a crushing lack of landmarks and barely any content. Or you can go to the mountain pass, which serves no purpose other than to progress someone’s questline and foreshadow a sidequest in an Act 1 area that you can revisit. It’s so empty that I actually assumed I’d just missed stuff, but no. It really is tiny.
So in the main area, all you can do is wander around and gorge yourself on like… An hour or two’s worth of content? The bulk of the area is made up of a dungeon that would be fine at the endgame but is FAR too lengthy for the halfway point and especially in relation to how utterly barren the rest of the act is. Act 2’s actual climax is shorter than that dungeon, for reference, despite containing its own dungeon. That certain events can make the finale go even faster does not help.
Perhaps what makes Act 2 feel duller than the rest is that there’s very little going on with your companions for the most part. Shadowheart’s questline occupies the bulk of the companion screentime, with Lae’zel getting a brief but missable dungeon at the very start and Gale’s storyline making a modicum of progress after a camp event. Other than that, though, everyone is… Static? It’s strange. Characters like Wyll, Astarion and Karlach will hit you with some sense of urgency, a goal that needs tending to now, only to kind of just sit there while you meander about the miserylands.
And, on the topic of Lae’zel’s dungeon, it very clearly illustrates this game’s relationship to both consequences and player choice.
Immediately, Lae’zel is placed in a situation where the game will tell you repeatedly that she’s going to die. You can make a choice here, but it impacts neither your relation with NPCs in the dungeon, or Lae’zel herself. She cannot die. You’re just picking flavour again. The road is linear, and you will walk it the way Larian demanded.
Following this, you’re placed in a meeting with a leading member of the Githyanki species. Here, the game compounds my complaints about the consequences only being ‘instant’, alongside a healthy dosage of linearity.
You can mouth off to this character and immediately die for pissing them off. Or… You can pick any of the other options. I’m gonna get into some light spoilers here, but the character demands you kill your dream guardian.
You can agree, carry it out, and the guardian will live anyway. You and the party then become enemies of the Githyanki people.You can agree, back out, and the guardian lives. You then become an enemy of the Githyanki people. You can disagree, and become an enemy of the Githyanki people. You can refuse to even start dialogue, then turn around and leave. At which point… You become an enemy of the Githyanki people.
This isn’t the first time this issue pops up, it’s just the most indicative of how this game feels about letting the player meaningfully influence the narrative. As early as Act 1, you’re offered an incredible amount of ‘options’ that don’t actually matter what, you will never remove the tadpole and you will always make an enemy of the goblins. In Act 2, you will always be an enemy of both the Githyanki and the Cult. You can make other, more minor choices, but these are ultimately just for roleplay flavour. It doesn’t actually matter whether you scorn certain deities, leave the miseryland coated in misery, genocide the few allies you have available or just murderhobo everyone in Act 1 and 2.
Why?
Because Act 3 is basically a different game entirely.
Well, I’ll admit I’m being slightly unfair to it. Act 3 is where a lot of companion quest lines actually climax, where a lot of side quests you’ve been doing all game show off and help you out. It’s the point where you arrive in the titular city, and get embroiled in the local politics that will help end the game.
But there is a disconnect between it and the rest of the game, even when it’s deliberately calling back to itself.
For starters, regardless of how you treat your companions, their quests will pop up so long as they’re present. This isn’t too jarring for characters like Karlach or Wyll, but even more guarded characters like Shadowheart and Astarion will urge you to push on with their quest - potentially ignoring that you’ve spent the entire game either neglecting them or outright bullying them.
Within these quests lies yet more of the game’s problems with morality. In fact, Act 3 is rife with it.
Your choices are, in the end, do something that’s a common sense good option or be a petty and spiteful chaotic evil asshole who does bad things with all the same forethought of a cat slapping a cup off of a counter. There’s surprisingly little room for nuance, you either do the good thing or the terrible no-good thing. This is particularly apparent in Astarion’s questline, where you can either convince him to do the thing he’s spent all game craving OR you can turn him into what Twitter and Tumblr thought he would be in pre-release.
If you’ve ever played Dragon Age: Inquisition, the companion quests are much the same here. You get a nice, good option that is never a challenge because if it has a skill check it’s very low (barring one exception), plus it’s at the top where all the good is. Or you can just be a dick and make things worse for everyone by picking the bottom option. Do you remember Iron Bull’s quest, where you can either convince him to be a free man or have him continue to serve a quasi-Spartan fascist empire? This game pulls the same shit.
Secondly, you may recall that I gassed up Act 1 for having lots of reactive dialogue and race/class/subclass specific dialogue. Well, it begins to slowly dry up in Acts 2 and 3. Basically nobody gave a shit that I was a drow or a Paladin after leaving Act 1, and I got more options for my Fighter subclass than I did Paladin. It’s so strange, to see the game’s multiple creation options just cease to matter entirely.
For a moment, though, let’s focus on the sidequests.
Because they also don’t mean shit.
My go-to example for this is a questline I’m going to call ‘The Race War’. The Race War is mentioned early on, and you can save a few key players involved in it. If you save them all, The Race War begins in earnest. BUT, because you saved a specific gnome, you can avert the worst outcome and mend the ideological differences, while still getting your objective cleared.
One problem, though.
You don’t actually have to do any of this. Mending the difference is possible no matter what, and the overarching goal of The Race War is achievable even if everyone from Act 1 and 2 fell to your Eldritch Blast spam. Sure, doing it the ‘right’ way is easier and has less punishing checks (or checks hands down), but this is redundant due to how obscene the bonuses to checks become later on.
You might be looking at my gripes and scowling, thinking ‘Mira, this is a roleplaying game. It’s wrong to approach it from a minmax angle’.
And you’re right. Truth be told, I approached the game from a roleplay angle, at first. With games like these I typically prefer to roleplay even if it hurts me. My Paladin did not allow Astarion to pickpocket, did their best to save innocents, refused the tadpole, obeyed the law and all that jazz. I even gave them a little Oathbreaker arc in Act 2.
The problem, at least for me, is how the game felt as though it was going out of its way to laugh at me for doing this. Abstaining from a lot of what the game dangles in front of you feels like self-gimping, because there are no consequences for engaging with it. Pickpocketing is easy gold, not a soul gives a shit if you let unnamed civilians die, the tadpole is just a skill tree with little bearing on the outcome of the story, and the law is easily supplanted. I managed to avoid truly min maxing on my first run, but I’m not sure I’ll resist the second time. Coupled with how difficult it is to actually roleplay narratively unless you pick an Origin character, and it’s kind of maddening to consider how this game was marketed.
Now, to tie the last few complaints together, let’s talk about the word ‘arbitrary’. To be arbitrary is to defy any system, rule or reasoning in favour of personal whims and impulses. In law, this would manifest as a judge making a decision in the moment rather than basing it off of legal precedent, past cases or the jury’s counsel.
In BG3, it manifests as morality-based dialogue options being available no matter what.
I never thought I would ever say this, but this game needed an alignment system or alignment locks. WOTR having it and locking dialogue off that would be ‘out of character’ was a genius idea.
It is so utterly jarring that, even when a game lets me console someone and be their confidant as they talk about their emotional & abuse AND lets me be a holy god-fearing Paladin, it still gives me the option to make them suffer. There are so, so, so many opportunities for even good characters to backstab people for no reason, with no option to justify it. Even to characters you’re romancing. Perhaps these were added to sell you the illusion of choice, but they just seem ridiculous. There’s one in particularly that you can only get by picking the goody two-shoes path in the first place!
Romances… God, I didn’t want to talk about them but I think I have to at this point.
A pretty common criticism of Bioware romances is that they essentially boil down to you sexually harassing someone until they give in and fall for you. Cullen’s in DA:I stands out; for as much as I hate the character, his romance is you harassing a drug addict until he becomes dependent on you.
BG3 decides to be forward-thinking by having some characters sexually harass you instead. Lae’zel and Gale especially.
I’ll be honest and say that I didn’t mind Lae’zel coming onto me because I wanted her anyway, but it doesn’t take much brainstorming to understand how someone might see her dialogue as either a thinly veiled rape threat or just deeply uncomfortable. If you don’t find her sexual aggression - or her - endearing then it must come off as being cornered. Though, mercifully, she does back off.
And Gale… At first, I thought Gale being a clingy ‘nice guy’ with a penchant for emotional manipulation and compliment bombing was a deliberate commentary on how the leading white men in Bioware games tend to act. But as time went on, and he got a bit more incel-y, I noticed that my dialogue options for dealing with him were either “Yes, we are bonded for life, you are the best person ever” OR telling him to kill himself. I realised that even if his horrible elements are intended, the developers certainly want you to like him.
Both of these characters are very easy to earn the love of, even if you laugh at their plights. The romances in general aren’t great, mostly just you treating people with decency until they fall in love with you. These aren’t really romances, they’re trauma bonds. You can’t even buy your beloved flowers or something, and this is one thing Dragon Age got right! If you’ve ever been around trans puppygirls it’s like corralling a party of them.
It’s really weird coming from Pathfinder WOTR, and I think it’s a problem of timescale. BG3 takes place over a nebulous time period, like a few weeks at least, whereas WOTR takes place over a potentially years-long crusade. So while WOTR allows romances to slowly bloom and take form, in BG3 they kinda just spring up. Hell, even Dragon Age 2 averted this by having it take place over years.
Romance is a little obnoxious, but few things are as bad as the polyamory ‘representation’.
So, I’m gonna bitch at length about how the game made me feel as both a trans person and a polyamorous person. You can scroll down, it’s just pure vitriolic kvetching.
Ahem.
Holy fuck. What is wrong with the writers?
Marketing the game and going ‘hee ho some party members will be poly :)’ only to offer utterly dogshit options is such a kick in the gut. And in terms of sheer offensiveness, this game made me feel worse about being poly than DA:I made me feel about being a lesbian or another thing I won’t mention here.
You can only be poly with Halsin and one other party member. Halsin explicitly states that he’s poly because he’s spent so much time in the animal world that he’s given up on monogamy. Whether it’s intended or not, the message here is “Halsin is poly because he’s an alien”. And the two party members he’s compatible with - Shadowheart and Astarion - are both explicitly and implicitly stated to be ‘super kinky’, with the further implication that polyamory is a kink to them.
Every other party member reacts viscerally to the idea of polyamory, browbeating you into picking ‘them or me’ or in some extreme cases just dumping you outright. It felt terrible, emotionally impactful for all the wrong reasons. Either the writers were using them as a mouthpiece to yell at poly people, or they didn’t consult any poly people at all and thought this was okay. The end result is awful all the same, and it actually soured my opinion of every character involved out of spite. That many party members consider engaging in an incestuous threesome to be less abhorrent than loving two people just compounds it. Truly, this is the worst poly rep I’ve ever seen in my life.
As for trans rep… Eesh. On the sexuality front the game is great, every romance is bi and same-sex couples appear with regularity, either mentioned in passing or shown outright. It’s great, gold star, no complaints. But when it comes to transness, there’s a pretty big problem. There are no trans companions, and barely any trans NPCs. So far, in my 105~ hours of playtime, I’ve ran into two NPCs who might’ve been trans (as they used ‘male’ voices on the ‘femme’ body). One of them was a minor NPC standing in a bank that I only knew of via posts from friends, and another was a shapeshifting doppelganger that tries to slaughter you.
Sure, the player can be trans in any flavour, or nonbinary, but in light of how scarce trans people are… This doesn’t feel like representation, it feels like fetishization. While bodies are not labelled ‘male’ or ‘female’, the ‘masc’ and ‘femme’ bodies have entirely different faces available. Femme bodies struggle to be distinctly masculine or even just butch, while masculine bodies are perhaps excessively masc unless you pick the slightly androgynous elves. More focus seems to have been placed on letting you be a “chick with a dick” or a “boy with a pussy”, which is only further compounded by a startling lack of body options. ‘Tis incredibly telling that all the femme bodies have decently-sized tits that you cannot adjust at all, and even the twinkiest masc body has some musculature.
It sucks. It is entirely possible to play the game as the only trans person in Faerun. One of the Hirelings is non-binary, I suppose, but an entirely mute doll meant to fill a party slot for murderhobos is hardly a character let alone representation. There was a drag queen coded character, I guess…? Alas, while the game is delightfully not heteronormative, it’s so cisnormative it hurts.
Back to the story, and specifically my criticism of Act 3 feeling disconnected. A pretty significant part of this is that, for all intents and purposes, the plot ends up being hijacked by two new characters. One of whom had token references in prior arcs, and one functionally appears out of nowhere. Some argue that the presence of these characters was foreshadowed, and I can’t really agree. A loading screen tooltip and one optional scene having some barely noticeable Bhaal iconography don’t really constitute foreshadowing. Sure, Big Bad 1 is mentioned a few times by a companion, but Big Bad 2 feels like… I don’t know. As if the devs looked at the first two games and inserted something familiar. Or they were just THAT hype to work with Lady Dimitrescu.
But just in terms of tone Act 3 feels like a whole other game. It is obnoxiously in love with its own sense of humour, with many of the opening diversions being near-entirely comedic in nature. The interesting elements, like the titular city struggling with a refugee crisis, are instead put on hold for a carnival, bad and kinda insensitive jokes about sex workers, having sex with twins and other such tripe. It tapers off once you’re in the actual city, but it’s incredibly jarring given how hard the stakes are in this Act.
Which is, in all hilarity, the same issue that befell DOS2. Like that game, BG3 does not respect its own stakes. Act 3 is a slower paced, almost casual experience where you jaunt between landmarks in the city for Designated Stuff Happening moments and probe NPCs who either have nothing to say or are throwing another quest in your journal. Most of these quests, too, are just kinda worthless. Acts 1 and 2 are far more reticent and creative with their sidequests, less-is-more and all that. 3 has… A lot, and they’re not very good. Calling half of them fetch quests would not be unwarranted.
The other half are, essentially, main quests in disguise. You’re given a few broad goals and these side quests guide you towards them. This isn’t bad, most of my favourite CRPGs do this. It’s literally the entire first half of New Vegas, for instance. But man, this game’s not-side quests are kind of exhausting, with a lot of them being either fetch quests with lots of dialogue (summoning horrific memories of FFXIV) or long dungeons that get tiring as you approach later levels. That it’s impossible to tell whether they’re truly optional or whether they’re your only option doesn’t help.
This is also where the cuts start being obvious. Like, glaringly. Larian showed off the city’s Upper City district as late as June but it’s just gone. A plot-important confrontation happens within an hour of the act starting, in a location deeply unfitting for what’s actually occurring. It’s even sequestered off in a separate, unoptimized cell. You’re then half-heartedly shunted out into the Lower City, which is expansive yes but nowhere near as big or ‘living and breathing’ as Larian made it out to be.
Characters sometimes appear and talk as if they lived through a quest that does not exist, which makes some plotlines feel like watching a film with some chapters cut, really apparent when Lae’zel is around. Astarion’s personal plot progresses way too fast and gets too much faux-gravitas, which in turn betrays the cut content associated with the other NPC involved in the story. I’ll admit, it’s strange that Astarion’s constantly-mentioned big bad is less important to the story than a guy Karlach mentions a couple times in Act 1. But again, story cuts. Hell, the game’s only true late-game companion will dump about two acts worth of chats on you, as if he was meant to appear earlier.
If you dig deep into companion chats, a lot of them mention either a history with Baldur’s Gate or people they know/knew there, but most of this comes to nothing. This is especially prominent with Wyll, a character who absolutely should have more of a connection to the city but barely says anything.
But most importantly, the titular city just feels kinda barren. It’s really obvious where Stuff will happen despite the density, and the size feels like it serves no purpose other than to tank my framerate due to all the moving NPCs. Act 1 and 2 were mostly empty spaces with designated event areas to poke around, and 3 is no different. It just pretends it isn’t. Act 3 makes it apparent that the game just isn’t finished, because if the Lower City feels so empty then how bad was the Upper City going to be?
And, in terms of the main plot… It honestly kind of stalls here? It boils down to little more than two questlines to get macguffin and then a confrontation with the Big Bad. There’s not much of an investigation because important characters will just exposit anything you might be missing to you, and the prior act answered a lot of things definitively - too definitively, one could say.
In particular, a lot of plot points are just painfully obvious if you’re familiar with either DnD fluff or you’re keenly attuned to how adaptations tend to present information from the source material. It does not take a great, keen mind to understand what the true big bad actually is, given that the game all but beats you over the head with certain imagery. I unfortunately had the plot clocked by the middle of Act 2, but I was still insistent that Larian would surprise me.
They did not.
There wasn’t much catharsis in pushing through BG3’s third act. I wish I could say more, but I don’t want to spoil this entire game. Honestly? It was mostly frustration. Frustration at the game for pulling the ol’ Larian upscale and making some fights a slog, frustration at the story for running out of steam, frustration at the writers for half-assing so much but keeping tons of comedic diversions, frustration at how the romance was handled, frustration at how little consequences there actually were, and…
Frustration with the Origin companions.
Yeah. Sorry, I’m just not that invested in these people. They’re way, way too Bioware for me. Besides Karlach (a very obviously late addition), they kind of exist just to Have A Point about something. Like the natural conclusion of “remove everything that’s just artistic flair” discourse. While they do comment on things in line with their alleged alignment, it’s rare to talk to them about things that aren’t story-relevant. Fuck sake, even Cullen was willing to talk to you about how he got cucked. And he sucks!
In place of broad personalities, they exist to ruminate on radicalization, self-determination, cycles of abuse, the price of altruism, the hubris of academics, and the pitfalls of religious zealotry. Beyond that though, they’re very one-dimensional. Being funny and having fetishes is nice, but the mere fact it’s obscenely difficult to get party members to leave of their own accord (barring three instant losses in Act 1 - hey, there’s those instant consequences again). Even DOS2’s companions had more depth than this, and character writing was not that game’s strong point. Hell, I’m gonna be extreme here: The Witcher 3 was better about this, and I fucking hate that game.
Also, as an aside: Astarion’s quest is neat but as a character he’s just R18 Sebille from DOS2. It’s really obvious in the resolutions.
Karlach is the exception, but for as much as I like her she does feel as though she was added as a reaction to people complaining about how evil-aligned the party was in early access. She is just a golden retriever in a tiefling body, and yet she was added even after they made everyone more polite and less contentious.
That’s kind of this game’s core issue, actually. It is obvious, at least from my point of view, that Larian tapered down a lot of this game’s darker and more contentious elements for fear of alienating people - yet I STILL see people bitch that Shadowheart, the adorable puppy girl, is too mean for them. I can’t help but wonder why they did it: Was it truly to avoid alienating normals? Were the rewrites that massive? Did they have a change of direction? I don’t know.
But, I don’t know. I like them despite everything - except Gale. They’re frustratingly shallow, but the points they exist to serve are where this game’s writing shines on the intended path. They’re all excellently voiced too, everyone in the game is yeah but the companions put their everything into it. I can’t fucking believe the guy who voiced Zeon - the worst Xenoblade 3 guest party member - is voicing a character like Astarion. I’ll give them sincere credit, they nailed it. This game’s acting in general is very theater, which is a nice break from the grim mumbled boredom that most western games have fallen into, or the clarity-first-personality-second acting that’s made a lot of contemporary animanga adaptations feel stilted and wooden. A lot of major side characters - Raphael and Mizora especially - are just treasures. Some of the best in class. Even when this game was boring, I sat through the dialogue for entertainment value.
Except in one instance, where the game doubled down on something I hate.
Look, I’ll just say it outright: This game kinda hates the original games even though it’s eager to retread old ground. Returning characters have a horrible time, with some of the best character writing from Throne of Bhaal getting mercilessly stepped on. Without spoiling it too deep, ToB’s best companion has their arc belittled and made fun of to the viewer, for no other reason than to force a connection between BG2 and BG3. Larian promised that the game would have ‘connections’ to justify this game being called BG3 and the game genuinely would’ve been better off without them. They are hamfisted, unwanted and needlessly spiteful towards the source material.
In the instance I alluded to, BG3 took such a steaming dump on Throne of Bhaal that I actually mashed through the dialogue out of sheer disgust. It’s bad, so bad. Bringing along a certain companion hangs a lampshade on how bad it is, but it’s fleeting. I hate saying this, but that scene well and truly should not have been in the game.
Sigh, look. I know I’ve been harsh on the game for the entire duration of this review so far, but I really did enjoy it in Act 1 and most of 2, plus the gameplay is a treasure. There’s a reason the score isn’t as low as you’d think. It’s a blast in multiplayer too, particularly if your party members - and you - are stupid as fuck.
It’s just such a mess. I didn’t even get into the lackluster ending, unfinished epilogue, my gripes with how loot works, the bad economy, or the BUGS! Copious bugs! Softlocks, quests not progressing, crashes, freezes, missing NPCs, rolls not applying bonuses, bugs bugs BUGS.
I hope this review ages like shit. I really do. I hope Larian release a Definitive Edition or something that makes most of this moot, but I think some of my complaints will always exist.
This is a game people gassed up for not being ‘like other AAA games’. And yet, it is incomplete on release, is a technical mess, has lots of unfinished/dead end content, and the devs have promised to fix/add to it later.
It is, unfortunately, not special as far as modern AAA games go. It’s not special as far as CRPGs go either.
It's just another in a long line of Bioware games.
6 Comments
@Dreamboat It sucks really hard considering ToB is where a lot of the old games' strongest writing is. ToB is so good that it was the entire reason I wholeheartedly threw myself into Dragon Age and was willing to give Bioware blind faith in their fantasy writing. Sure that was a mistake but like, really Larian? This is how you treat it? By just undoing the best bits and rubbing the player's nose in it?
I actually found [Act 2 Female Companion] and [Act 3 Male Companion] acknowledging it just made it worse. The devs were clearly aware of what they were doing.
I actually found [Act 2 Female Companion] and [Act 3 Male Companion] acknowledging it just made it worse. The devs were clearly aware of what they were doing.
Didn't know about EA Wyll and overall tone. Wish they kept that.
I had just completely lost interest in finishing BG3 towards the end of Act 3. I think the characters and the gameplay were pretty incredible for the most part, but eventually the feeling of no stakes kinda caught up to me. Plus yeah, the bugs are just embarrassing at times, funny how people praise Larian for being the good studio when the last two games they made were unfinished and had to be patched/updated to hell and back.
Great review. Thanks for not being a self-indulgent contrarian. Wish you luck
Great review. Thanks for not being a self-indulgent contrarian. Wish you luck
@Kujin What's really bad about the game is that despite me having written this at the end of launch month - nearly two entire months ago - the bugs are still pretty gamebreaking.
I was in the middle of doing a re-review to really hammer in a lot of criticisms I have about this game's issues with stakes, character writing, creative cowardice and relatively boring class mechanics buuuuuuuuuuuuuuut that Dark Urge playthrough stalled because a good half of Act 1 just broke, and I was in a schrodinger's cat state where I both had and hadn't carried out a genocide.
The game is a fucking trainwreck, I might just edit the review to say "GO PLAY DRAGON AGE ORIGINS IT'S THE SAME GAME".
I was in the middle of doing a re-review to really hammer in a lot of criticisms I have about this game's issues with stakes, character writing, creative cowardice and relatively boring class mechanics buuuuuuuuuuuuuuut that Dark Urge playthrough stalled because a good half of Act 1 just broke, and I was in a schrodinger's cat state where I both had and hadn't carried out a genocide.
The game is a fucking trainwreck, I might just edit the review to say "GO PLAY DRAGON AGE ORIGINS IT'S THE SAME GAME".
@MiraMiraOTW well this Cullen guy does seem intriguing lol
Dreamboat
8 months ago