This review contains spoilers
I don't think I've ever been less engaged in a story. The game starts with giving you a goal of getting your eye-worm taken care of, making it seem like a very time sensitive goal. I was immediately hooked, but just as quickly the game goes out of its way to assure you actually this isn't something you can fix, and there's no threat should you take your time. You then spend the entirety of act 1 getting into situations where an NPC offers to help you cure your eye. But I've already been told by my godly protector gnome it's impossible to fix by any traditional means. Further compounded by meeting a very powerful witch who couldn't help at all. Following those scenes up by some random guy I found offering to stab my eye out with a needle to fix me would be comical - If not for how exhausting it is for every single story beat to just end in the guaranteed failure I already knew it would end up as before I even started the quest. At NO point in act 1 did I feel like anything I did was going anywhere, and every major "quest" ends with me standing in an empty room wondering why I did any of that and how it connects in any way to anything. Ironically despite Act 1 having the most work put into it, I found it to be the most unbearable part of the game. I honestly don't see where all the years of early access went into here. The game as a whole feels very small to me, genuinely no clue how people are spending 80+ hours in each act.
The ambition comes from stuff like the game being entirely ok with you locking yourself out of major content. It doesn't strictly railroad you through pre-written quests. Which is cool to see from a mainsream RPG after modern Bethesda stamped everything remotely interesting out of the genre over a decade ago. And this approach obviously balloons the scale of production up tremendously just because of how many alternative voice lines and routes they have to record and code and the routes that branch off that, etc.. But it feels like misplaced effort in this case. Yeah cool there's 40 hours of alternative dialogue in act 1 alone but is any of it in service of an engaging narrative? And a lot of quests end up feeling pretty railroaded despite this effort anyway. And furthermore it doesn't even feel immersive in its presentation. For as much of a wonder as this game apparently is from an ambition level, dialogue is still very Fallout 3. Changing a character's mind is as easy as picking change their mind (Persuasion) and getting a lucky roll. The person you're talking to will go from swearing on their god they've followed with every waking moment of their life that they're going to do something, only for you to hit them with a short, unvoiced, one sentence You stop that and their next dialogue will have them do a full 180. I feel like the extra effort to have your player character fully voiced, with alternate takes depending on your roll, could have gone a long way.
As a DND experience this feels like the worlds most hands off DM. No fun flourishes or extra detail. No rolling a 1 on a charisma check and getting an embarassing character interaction where you try to lean against a wall and smooth talk someone only to voice crack, stumble your words, and trip over your own legs. Anything DND related is presented extremely dry, mechanical, and bare bones. Clashing with the detailed graphics they went for that feel at odds with how NOT detailed anything else is. Not much here we haven't seen countless times already by (imo) much worse gaming companies.
The group you're travelling with feels very robotic and are rarely truly present as characters in what's currently going on. Talking to them at almost any point will bring up complete non-sequitur discussions. Going deeper into the relationships angle is functionally just stopping the game to engage with the worlds simplest visual novel dating sim. At most you'll occasionally have popups saying "X character approves" if they like a decision you made. Otherwise BG3 is a weirdly roundabout way to launch a mediocre porn game. Oog oog you can customize your benis oog oog why don't the devs customize an actual video game instead? Speaking of, the character creator is shockingly bare bones just like the rest of the game. I appreciate some of the progressive options but ultimately the creator is too limited to create anything either fun or immersive. Frankly had more fun seeing all the different hairstyles and faces for each body type in even something like Pikmin 4's small scale custom character. But I digress.
It's hard to feel like you're anything but a band of high school drama club jerks who feel absolutely nothing when ending the lives of people for no reason whatsoever 'cuz they've all got main character syndrome. Extending to practically every NPC from every corner of the map who has any kind of event going on. Every story I've personally experienced or heard told to me has just been people murdering or attempting to murder someone or getting themselves killed. The whole game you're just meeting one-off characters and they say and do nothing of any consequence and they may or may not die but you have no motivation or attachment to any of them at any point either way anyway. At no point do I feel like I'm deep in the web of a gripping narrative who's story beats I control. I'm not on the edge of my seat feeling the NEED to come back and play more to see how things unfold. There's nothing to unfold, every questline is unbelievably small scale and even heading into act 3 I still don't know what my motivation as the main character is supposed to even be. I'm going through the motions for no reason other than everyone else seems to love this game and it's so big technically speaking so I MUST be missing something. But the more I dig the more baffled I am. The more quests I do the more unsure of why I'm playing. Not just in a "This is boring why am I playing" way... But inserting myself into the world and trying to roleplay, I constantly find myself asking "WHAT AM I DOING AND FOR WHAT REASON??"! And it's not because I'm roaming around an empty world with nothing to do. I just think the writing wants you to meet it 80% of the way there. It wants you to be so inherently invested that it can just present major character moments or world-shattering events with almost no natural buildup or motivation and get away with it. As soon as it became clear the eye worm wasn't a driving force narratively I fell off and was never presented with another narrative to even follow. I feel like I'm watching a mediocre road trip movie and wacky, disjointed hijinx ensue at points and for some reason they wanted to force an R rating by throwing in some awkward swearing and sex scenes out of nowhere? No connective tissue or cohesion between any aspect when it comes to the storytelling.
The most coherent scenes with your party is when they introduce their totally devious secrets, or have some occasional in-fighting. In every scenario I just respond how I naturally would, which is to say, "stop trying to kill each other!". So much of the writing following the main party feels like they need you to be either inherently interested, or needlessly argumentative to get anything out of it. But like I said responding with what's for me, rational and normal, leads to them going "oh cool thanks crisis averted" and that's that....idk you could say I'm playing wrong and not exploring dialogue but their stories imo are not as interesting as they want you to think they are. And roleplaying as someone besides a hyper-aggressive brute leads to you being a fence sitter who has no real input beyond saying "For the love of God stop killing each other" And that's not all too immersive anyway considering you'll spend tens of hours slaughtering people for any minute reason anyway even if you're trying your best to talk your way out of conflict. Any remotely important event you'll always have the option to talk to every party member one at a time about it, but none of the events were anything I cared about enough to hear everyone's thoughts. So here I am 25 hours into the game still being given the option of seeing what everyone thinks of having a vampire in the team while I'm literally standing in some mystical magic end of the world godlike realm. Everything you can grill people on feels so small and meaningless and not relevant to anything so I just...don't. And I don't know why I would...? And I'm usually the kind of person who sits there for 3 minutes really psychoanalyzing a character or situation stressing over what's the best dialogue choice in games where it probably doesn't even matter that much. Here though outcomes are all too predictable, and practically demands you save scum if you don't want to just murder everyone anyway. Never felt like digging into dialogue and really thinking about what I say gave me more valuable info or anything. I was just engaging with it for the sake of trying to meet the game halfway but that can only take you so far. And that's not to say the dialogue doesn't effect much, dialogue is basically where all the work was put in. I convinced this guy to slay like 10 of his followers so the fight with him becomes a 4v1 instead of a 4v11. Went from a 10 minute long endeavor that I ended up losing anyway, to an effortless 3 minute stomp. All just because my dice roll on dialogue was lucky the second time. So yeah dialogue is important but it struggles to manifest into immersive storytelling instead of just "Do you fight this person or not".
Speaking of fights, holding it all together together, is a combat system so slow it makes Final Fantasy 1 look like Kingdom Hearts 2. Some of the most grueling and unengaging battles I've ever seen. Not that there isn't any difficulty, personally I've struggled quite a lot not gonna lie. But I genuinely have a hard time finding room for much strategy. I know for a fact someone who's really into it could prove me wrong and say Oh using this big brain strat I can effortlessly win any encounter in 3 turns or less on the hardest difficulty But from my experience, waiting a full minute and a half for it to be my turn again...Then my moveset is attack once for 7 damage and maybe move 10 feet...There's not a whole lot to experiment with. The fighter class feels like the only one that's growing. By level 6 I'm doing heavy damage with each attack, and getting 4-6 attacks in every turn. With the ability to give myself a better heal than even my dedicated healer who's the same level. Meanwhile my Rogue of the same level gets to do either 4 damage...Or if I go through the extra effort to put him in a sneaky spot, he'll do a crit strike that'll do at BEST RNG, 80% of what ONE of my average mindless fighter attacks are doing. And that's his entire turn. Just feels like everyone but the fighters are so half baked, literally the more fighters I put in the team the less I struggle. They do the most damage, have the most health, have the most actions, can wear the most effective armor... I can't talk for all the classes of course but the ones presented to me through the main roster make me feel obnoxiously underleveled even though it's not that kind of RPG at all. And as I mentioned, it's dreadfully slow. Especially when it's struggling to function properly and someone attacks, and it takes the game like 10 seconds to calculate how much damage it needs to do, that happens occasionally. I swear the only reason this game is so long is because they've devized the slowest battle system known to man.
I thought maybe act 2 would pick up for me as I was getting more of a personal mission. Like I was given a setup and a clear goal to reach. I then walked for 40 seconds, did a boring dungeon and an annoying boss fight, and that's kind of it. Best part of the game so far. The only time a logical series of events occurred. I understand there's apparently another 50 hours of content I missed but I can't pretend like I care. This is the closest to engaged I ever got and I don't think roaming around desperately trying to find something that speaks to me will do anything but make me resent the game even more. I haven't gotten into act 3 at all yet and maybe I will. I just figured now's a good time to get my thoughts out while the game's still remotely relevant. Given what others have said I doubt act 3 is gonna change my mind on anything, and I already wasn't having the most polished glitch free experience to begin with.
Small anecdote, but I really tried to come at act 1 from different angles to see if making different choices would make me feel better about my impressions of the world and how much control I really had. For example came up on 2 guys harassing an old lady who apparently took their sister. I told them to put their weapons down and be reasonable (they weren't even holding weapons but whatever) They then decided to fight me to the death and then the old lady reveals she was actually lying to them and DOES have their sister, and it was just an overall downer. I wanted to try and save her brothers. Long story short after exhausting every route this quest can go on I find there's no way to actually change anything. If you side with the brothers the old lady disappears and they die to forest traps even if you went ahead and disabled them all ahead of time. If you initially side with the old lady but then slay her in the battle that ensues, well the 2 brothers will still want to fight you to the death because words speak louder than actions in this game. Found one person on Reddit who managed to find some incredibly specific esoteric way to get to the next part of the quest without them dying, but the brothers are merely in a bugged out state where they want to fight you on sight but still think they're talking to a (now not there) old lady. And their survival is of course never mentioned because the game expects to strictly railroad everything to one outcome. Apparently in Early Access there was a way to prevent them from getting themselves killed but despite how long Act 1 was worked on seems they had to scale back so hard that the entire point of the game had to be gutted. I know this doesn't represent the ENTIRETY game necessarily, there is routes so drastically different that you can even miss out on major party members joining you. But I can't say I found most quests to have much meaningfully different outcomes narratively depending on my actions. Closest thing is that you can trigger a war in the druid camp, or get around causing that in a large variety of ways. Outside of that I was consistently just left disappointed with how little my input really mattered. If I liked the railroaded story that would be one thing but I was so tired with how repetitive every encounter was I was desperate to take control.
So yeah tldr story goes nowhere, roleplay appeal ends as soon as you don't want to just murder people at every corner, most content lacks cohesion or motivation, party members are sloppily integrated, the soundtrack is incredibly generic, fairly buggy and at times has major performance hickups for seemingly no reason, dialogue options are bethesda-esque, combat system's the most boring combat in the history of video games, classes feel poorly balanced, the romance options feel out of place, I don't really like any of the characters, the animation is often too stiff and lifeless to allow the voice performances to really flourish, the Ui is clunky, the controls can be janky.... I honestly hated this so much it made me go back and try Baldur's Gate 1 for the first time ever. 4 hours in I'm having a blast with it, total opposite experience. This is a completely overproduced butchering of the original game. You can't just spend 4 years recording dialogue and have it come out to a good game. In the effort to faithfully deliver an adaptation of a freeform tabletop game based on spontaneous alterations to the script and/or player freedom...They met the limitations of Video games as a medium and didn't really do anything to get around that fact. Even with taking what in my eyes is a very simplistic approach to alternate routes (Mostly just do you murder someone or not, with a boatload of the illusion of choice) it took 6 years to put together. Modern demands for a major triple A game make it incredibly unrealistic to expect anything I actually value from games like this to make it in. BG3 is more respectable than a lot of its contemporaries but still falls to the exact same traps. Modern Western RPGs absolutely LOVE wasting years of dev time on the wrong things.
The ambition comes from stuff like the game being entirely ok with you locking yourself out of major content. It doesn't strictly railroad you through pre-written quests. Which is cool to see from a mainsream RPG after modern Bethesda stamped everything remotely interesting out of the genre over a decade ago. And this approach obviously balloons the scale of production up tremendously just because of how many alternative voice lines and routes they have to record and code and the routes that branch off that, etc.. But it feels like misplaced effort in this case. Yeah cool there's 40 hours of alternative dialogue in act 1 alone but is any of it in service of an engaging narrative? And a lot of quests end up feeling pretty railroaded despite this effort anyway. And furthermore it doesn't even feel immersive in its presentation. For as much of a wonder as this game apparently is from an ambition level, dialogue is still very Fallout 3. Changing a character's mind is as easy as picking change their mind (Persuasion) and getting a lucky roll. The person you're talking to will go from swearing on their god they've followed with every waking moment of their life that they're going to do something, only for you to hit them with a short, unvoiced, one sentence You stop that and their next dialogue will have them do a full 180. I feel like the extra effort to have your player character fully voiced, with alternate takes depending on your roll, could have gone a long way.
As a DND experience this feels like the worlds most hands off DM. No fun flourishes or extra detail. No rolling a 1 on a charisma check and getting an embarassing character interaction where you try to lean against a wall and smooth talk someone only to voice crack, stumble your words, and trip over your own legs. Anything DND related is presented extremely dry, mechanical, and bare bones. Clashing with the detailed graphics they went for that feel at odds with how NOT detailed anything else is. Not much here we haven't seen countless times already by (imo) much worse gaming companies.
The group you're travelling with feels very robotic and are rarely truly present as characters in what's currently going on. Talking to them at almost any point will bring up complete non-sequitur discussions. Going deeper into the relationships angle is functionally just stopping the game to engage with the worlds simplest visual novel dating sim. At most you'll occasionally have popups saying "X character approves" if they like a decision you made. Otherwise BG3 is a weirdly roundabout way to launch a mediocre porn game. Oog oog you can customize your benis oog oog why don't the devs customize an actual video game instead? Speaking of, the character creator is shockingly bare bones just like the rest of the game. I appreciate some of the progressive options but ultimately the creator is too limited to create anything either fun or immersive. Frankly had more fun seeing all the different hairstyles and faces for each body type in even something like Pikmin 4's small scale custom character. But I digress.
It's hard to feel like you're anything but a band of high school drama club jerks who feel absolutely nothing when ending the lives of people for no reason whatsoever 'cuz they've all got main character syndrome. Extending to practically every NPC from every corner of the map who has any kind of event going on. Every story I've personally experienced or heard told to me has just been people murdering or attempting to murder someone or getting themselves killed. The whole game you're just meeting one-off characters and they say and do nothing of any consequence and they may or may not die but you have no motivation or attachment to any of them at any point either way anyway. At no point do I feel like I'm deep in the web of a gripping narrative who's story beats I control. I'm not on the edge of my seat feeling the NEED to come back and play more to see how things unfold. There's nothing to unfold, every questline is unbelievably small scale and even heading into act 3 I still don't know what my motivation as the main character is supposed to even be. I'm going through the motions for no reason other than everyone else seems to love this game and it's so big technically speaking so I MUST be missing something. But the more I dig the more baffled I am. The more quests I do the more unsure of why I'm playing. Not just in a "This is boring why am I playing" way... But inserting myself into the world and trying to roleplay, I constantly find myself asking "WHAT AM I DOING AND FOR WHAT REASON??"! And it's not because I'm roaming around an empty world with nothing to do. I just think the writing wants you to meet it 80% of the way there. It wants you to be so inherently invested that it can just present major character moments or world-shattering events with almost no natural buildup or motivation and get away with it. As soon as it became clear the eye worm wasn't a driving force narratively I fell off and was never presented with another narrative to even follow. I feel like I'm watching a mediocre road trip movie and wacky, disjointed hijinx ensue at points and for some reason they wanted to force an R rating by throwing in some awkward swearing and sex scenes out of nowhere? No connective tissue or cohesion between any aspect when it comes to the storytelling.
The most coherent scenes with your party is when they introduce their totally devious secrets, or have some occasional in-fighting. In every scenario I just respond how I naturally would, which is to say, "stop trying to kill each other!". So much of the writing following the main party feels like they need you to be either inherently interested, or needlessly argumentative to get anything out of it. But like I said responding with what's for me, rational and normal, leads to them going "oh cool thanks crisis averted" and that's that....idk you could say I'm playing wrong and not exploring dialogue but their stories imo are not as interesting as they want you to think they are. And roleplaying as someone besides a hyper-aggressive brute leads to you being a fence sitter who has no real input beyond saying "For the love of God stop killing each other" And that's not all too immersive anyway considering you'll spend tens of hours slaughtering people for any minute reason anyway even if you're trying your best to talk your way out of conflict. Any remotely important event you'll always have the option to talk to every party member one at a time about it, but none of the events were anything I cared about enough to hear everyone's thoughts. So here I am 25 hours into the game still being given the option of seeing what everyone thinks of having a vampire in the team while I'm literally standing in some mystical magic end of the world godlike realm. Everything you can grill people on feels so small and meaningless and not relevant to anything so I just...don't. And I don't know why I would...? And I'm usually the kind of person who sits there for 3 minutes really psychoanalyzing a character or situation stressing over what's the best dialogue choice in games where it probably doesn't even matter that much. Here though outcomes are all too predictable, and practically demands you save scum if you don't want to just murder everyone anyway. Never felt like digging into dialogue and really thinking about what I say gave me more valuable info or anything. I was just engaging with it for the sake of trying to meet the game halfway but that can only take you so far. And that's not to say the dialogue doesn't effect much, dialogue is basically where all the work was put in. I convinced this guy to slay like 10 of his followers so the fight with him becomes a 4v1 instead of a 4v11. Went from a 10 minute long endeavor that I ended up losing anyway, to an effortless 3 minute stomp. All just because my dice roll on dialogue was lucky the second time. So yeah dialogue is important but it struggles to manifest into immersive storytelling instead of just "Do you fight this person or not".
Speaking of fights, holding it all together together, is a combat system so slow it makes Final Fantasy 1 look like Kingdom Hearts 2. Some of the most grueling and unengaging battles I've ever seen. Not that there isn't any difficulty, personally I've struggled quite a lot not gonna lie. But I genuinely have a hard time finding room for much strategy. I know for a fact someone who's really into it could prove me wrong and say Oh using this big brain strat I can effortlessly win any encounter in 3 turns or less on the hardest difficulty But from my experience, waiting a full minute and a half for it to be my turn again...Then my moveset is attack once for 7 damage and maybe move 10 feet...There's not a whole lot to experiment with. The fighter class feels like the only one that's growing. By level 6 I'm doing heavy damage with each attack, and getting 4-6 attacks in every turn. With the ability to give myself a better heal than even my dedicated healer who's the same level. Meanwhile my Rogue of the same level gets to do either 4 damage...Or if I go through the extra effort to put him in a sneaky spot, he'll do a crit strike that'll do at BEST RNG, 80% of what ONE of my average mindless fighter attacks are doing. And that's his entire turn. Just feels like everyone but the fighters are so half baked, literally the more fighters I put in the team the less I struggle. They do the most damage, have the most health, have the most actions, can wear the most effective armor... I can't talk for all the classes of course but the ones presented to me through the main roster make me feel obnoxiously underleveled even though it's not that kind of RPG at all. And as I mentioned, it's dreadfully slow. Especially when it's struggling to function properly and someone attacks, and it takes the game like 10 seconds to calculate how much damage it needs to do, that happens occasionally. I swear the only reason this game is so long is because they've devized the slowest battle system known to man.
I thought maybe act 2 would pick up for me as I was getting more of a personal mission. Like I was given a setup and a clear goal to reach. I then walked for 40 seconds, did a boring dungeon and an annoying boss fight, and that's kind of it. Best part of the game so far. The only time a logical series of events occurred. I understand there's apparently another 50 hours of content I missed but I can't pretend like I care. This is the closest to engaged I ever got and I don't think roaming around desperately trying to find something that speaks to me will do anything but make me resent the game even more. I haven't gotten into act 3 at all yet and maybe I will. I just figured now's a good time to get my thoughts out while the game's still remotely relevant. Given what others have said I doubt act 3 is gonna change my mind on anything, and I already wasn't having the most polished glitch free experience to begin with.
Small anecdote, but I really tried to come at act 1 from different angles to see if making different choices would make me feel better about my impressions of the world and how much control I really had. For example came up on 2 guys harassing an old lady who apparently took their sister. I told them to put their weapons down and be reasonable (they weren't even holding weapons but whatever) They then decided to fight me to the death and then the old lady reveals she was actually lying to them and DOES have their sister, and it was just an overall downer. I wanted to try and save her brothers. Long story short after exhausting every route this quest can go on I find there's no way to actually change anything. If you side with the brothers the old lady disappears and they die to forest traps even if you went ahead and disabled them all ahead of time. If you initially side with the old lady but then slay her in the battle that ensues, well the 2 brothers will still want to fight you to the death because words speak louder than actions in this game. Found one person on Reddit who managed to find some incredibly specific esoteric way to get to the next part of the quest without them dying, but the brothers are merely in a bugged out state where they want to fight you on sight but still think they're talking to a (now not there) old lady. And their survival is of course never mentioned because the game expects to strictly railroad everything to one outcome. Apparently in Early Access there was a way to prevent them from getting themselves killed but despite how long Act 1 was worked on seems they had to scale back so hard that the entire point of the game had to be gutted. I know this doesn't represent the ENTIRETY game necessarily, there is routes so drastically different that you can even miss out on major party members joining you. But I can't say I found most quests to have much meaningfully different outcomes narratively depending on my actions. Closest thing is that you can trigger a war in the druid camp, or get around causing that in a large variety of ways. Outside of that I was consistently just left disappointed with how little my input really mattered. If I liked the railroaded story that would be one thing but I was so tired with how repetitive every encounter was I was desperate to take control.
So yeah tldr story goes nowhere, roleplay appeal ends as soon as you don't want to just murder people at every corner, most content lacks cohesion or motivation, party members are sloppily integrated, the soundtrack is incredibly generic, fairly buggy and at times has major performance hickups for seemingly no reason, dialogue options are bethesda-esque, combat system's the most boring combat in the history of video games, classes feel poorly balanced, the romance options feel out of place, I don't really like any of the characters, the animation is often too stiff and lifeless to allow the voice performances to really flourish, the Ui is clunky, the controls can be janky.... I honestly hated this so much it made me go back and try Baldur's Gate 1 for the first time ever. 4 hours in I'm having a blast with it, total opposite experience. This is a completely overproduced butchering of the original game. You can't just spend 4 years recording dialogue and have it come out to a good game. In the effort to faithfully deliver an adaptation of a freeform tabletop game based on spontaneous alterations to the script and/or player freedom...They met the limitations of Video games as a medium and didn't really do anything to get around that fact. Even with taking what in my eyes is a very simplistic approach to alternate routes (Mostly just do you murder someone or not, with a boatload of the illusion of choice) it took 6 years to put together. Modern demands for a major triple A game make it incredibly unrealistic to expect anything I actually value from games like this to make it in. BG3 is more respectable than a lot of its contemporaries but still falls to the exact same traps. Modern Western RPGs absolutely LOVE wasting years of dev time on the wrong things.