Baldur's Gate 3
(Finished on 9/29/23)
Usually whenever I open up to the start of the year I don't entirely know what I'll be playing throughout the months to come. After all, there's a bunch of games that just drop on a dime with little to no warning nowadays. Usually I have about 5 games that are certain to come out and I just scrounge around and see what looks good as the months go by. Here, with Baldur's Gate, is a weird cross section between a game I had known about for sometime but didn't think about how it was fully releasing this year nor did I really think I'd be getting my hands into it. Lo and behold I begin correspondence with someone for a few months and they, on top of a few podcasts, bring its release date up in conversation and suddenly the idea of getting it felt like a good opportunity. And here I thought I was gonna check out Starfield as my game for that August... shudder. My expectations were pretty moderate but I was pleased that the game offered a breadth of customizability and intrigue from the start, so as to keep me hooked and continuing to play. Prior to this I had played a couple of hours of Divinity II, longing for a DND experience without the need to set up or rely on everyones' schedules to align perfectly. While I enjoyed my time with D2OS, it didn't really get sucked in like I did here, probably in part to the overwhelming amount of discourse at the moment, but also the near immediate critical uproar upon release convinced me to start it up once it dropped and follow through in finishing it.
For my run I decided to play as a half-orc Monk, with the folk hero background. I had recalled one of only a few runs of TTRPG I'd ever played where my preferred class of Monk had just ran up to a first boss and ended up comboing a string of good dice rolls in one turn, tearing the fiend in half. It felt glorious having my character ostensibly run up and style on a boss in a game that feels so magic heavy. I loved it! Here I was hoping to rekindle some energy of that and, as I'll explain later I got something a bit different than what I had in mind. Here we have the first and perhaps largest dissonance between the gamified ttrpg vs the tabletop-ified rpg(?). Imagination is a wonderful mechanic, so little effort and so little cost but it's hard to share the sentiment. I do wish I had chosen a different background as you soon meet another character in solo play that has the same Folk Hero background that I had. On the one hand this meant any chance to get 'Inspirations' as a folk hero meant I got two points just because I had Wyll in the party, but on the other hand it just didn't feel as unique.
Currently this game is receiving the utmost critical and commercial success, praise from all ends and its looking to be a lot of people's GOTY, including mine if we're not counting remasters (thanks Katamari) or expansions (thanks Xenoblade). While I feel this is a solid contender I did want to point out I think this is far from a perfect game and I do think there's a lot of ironing out that needs to be done, but what's presented is still a strong release for this year. I think the cast overall is incredibly fun, and you get more winners, at least in one aspect, than duds. I think the expressive ways to customize your characters both original and the builds you can do with your party members can lead to interesting builds. The ease in which you can recustomize and rebuild your party is very appreciated, and I took advantage of it pretty early on (went way of the four elements and switched quickly to Way of the Open Hand, good change). The game looks really nice and you get to see a lot of really neat locales throughout your journey (although I never did go back and check out the githyanki creche area). The amount of detail put into 95% of the game's interactions is stunning to say the least and several times I was glad to see the game took account of certain actions I had taken several play sessions prior. I was always glad to see my character's backstory, race or class have unique dialogue and it even helped me gain access a few times. The amount of details regarding every element of the environment during battles is staggering, with many details probably still not found or well known yet.
I think the idea of relationships with your party is pretty fun overall and I think the game does an alright job fleshing out your characters throughout the adventure. It’s a bit hard to judge at the moment as I’ve only really experienced one and maybe a half relationships the game allowed. Sorry to say I went basic mode and romanced Shadowheart, however I did find her questline to be the most intriguing. I did NOT have sex at all during the act 1 party however the rest of the relationship progressed pretty naturally. Only slightly odd given how fast certain characters’ approval will max out compared to the ‘questline’ requirements needed to progress romances forward. Just a weird disconnect I had with the games’ romance system.
It’s also very weird just how seemingly flexible much of the party relationships can be, on the one hand I can understand the going ons behind the machine -to a certain extent- but then I read up on other people's experiences regarding certain variables or understandings of certain characters that differed from mine and I tilted my head a bit. I kept seeing impressions of Shadowheart being someone that strictly preferred a more monogamous relationship, yet late in the game when asked by Halsin if I wished to pursue anything romantic I kinda humored him and said 'yeah lemme ask shadowheart', I saved my game just in case something went awry, but when I asked she seemed to have been easygoing about the idea, even kinda curious. I was floored! Here I was extremely late into the game, pretty deep into the SH relationship and maybe I had maintained such a healthy understanding of each other that she was supportive of me humoring Halsin as a bit.
What I will say is i think the usage of the whole "X approves!" mechanic can look really stupid in certain situations. It didn't bother me too much but on occasion an event would play out that would just tilt my head as to why certain acts would proc a disapprove. In one instance, my team was coming up on an assisination in progress- our culprit monologuing to his paralyzed victim, blade to the epidermis of their neck. Before the assassin can finish the deed I was given three options :
1)<Monk> Something, something i cant remember but you reveal yourself
2)<Stealth> Keep to the shadows…
3) <Half Orc> You're a coward.
Picking the 2nd option gains disapproval from Karlach and Wyll -both of whom were present in my party- seemingly because my option just wasn't...bombastic enough? These points end up being minor in the long run but I had Machiavelli over my shoulder throughout some of these encounters considering how petty some of these disapprovals might be. Astarion disapproving of certain acts feels a bit more natural, he's a pompous silver tongued rogue so trying to act high and mighty runs counter to his desire to. But what, does sneaking up on someone just bore Karlach that much? Does Wyll need me to announce my presence to every meddler in tow? This guy has dimension door shoes! We need to catch him off guard!!
Alright I will say this game was already battings pretty high and I was pretty elated throughout most of it, but there was always one thing nagging over the back of my shoulder and I was never sure what- but after 120 hours I think it's fine to materialize that complaint:
I don't know if I like the combat system. Or if its just hiccups regarding 5E in general. or if its just Act 3 fights that are hammering this nail into my head. Man I don’t know, I just got really tired of fights by the end of this game.
Throughout the game I felt kinda rude doing this, but I figured I should compare its moment to moment gameplay with that of Fallout New Vegas and Disco Elysium, two of my and assuredly many others favorite WRPGs. What I lack in what feels like some petty originality I'll try and make up for in some form of critical comparison, if you may forgive me. One of the things I appreciated most about both of these games is its consistent and in games like Fallout New Vegas, almost insistent chance to try and talk your way out of given combat encounters. If you've played FNV pretty thoroughly and are of a high enough level it feels almost impossible to not have maxed out one of the few skills needed to talk the legion out of invading the west. Maybe it decreases the stakes or the dramatic tension that you can talk down a guy just by saying his trade lines are gonna be fucked if he expands territory any more than he already has, but to me I think its a fitting way to conclude a game that was already so talkative and so skill check intensive. Disco runs a more similar path to Baldur's gate by having most of its skills be dice rolls altered by your boons and banes. The main difference is that Disco does an excellent job namely for having 0 combat outside of tense standoff moments. I think this also does a great job in characterizing our prenamed and predetermined character Harrier by having us, the player, feel like some kind of a trickster god in our failures and our insistence to keep failing- as there's very few ways to truly 'lose' in Disco Elysium. Most outs in DE involve you deliberately choosing options that might cause your self destruction. Hell even in events with constant health or morale hits you can continue to spam your medicines mid-dialogue just to keep yourself as alive as necessary. What I'm trying to get at here is that whenever I am in combat in this game I feel less like a tactician or a player character or even some god and more like I've been dragged along by whatever the game's predetermined choices have in store, and unlike FNV where I feel as thought the game offers a variety of outs for major fights, there's a lot of times the game wants it to be this epic battle of varying satisfaction; and unlike Disco Elysium there's a very real chance to die often, these dice rolls mean everything and you just have to live with whatever the dice give you. While I don't think the dice do a bad job at giving you a fair fight, it is very easy to get frustrated whenever you have a good shot at targeting something and just end up whiffing it.
It reminds me a lot of fire emblem (I say this to myself a lot whenever I play a video game, I hope I never say this again in a game that isnt fire emblem or fire emblem adjacent, please message me if I betray my wishes in future reviews)
Overall I think the combat is completely manageable and there's a lot more interesting encounters in the first two acts. However, I can't help but think that the third act really drops the ball in a lot of these encounters. There's not 1 nor 2 but 3 different encounters that have the same build up, descending into a circular arena where the boss is surrounded by cronies (maybe a 4th i haven't done every 3rd act sidequest). These fights range in difficulty but when they get bad- man did I wanna throw something.
(Sorry the next few paragraphs are just me ranting about certain encounters maybe you had an easier time with these, Orin bugged on my run but I know others had a way worse time with her)
The worst in my case was Viconia, namely because there's just 20 other dudes surrounding you. This is the main thing that frustrated me about a lot of the late game encounters, it just felt like there were so many encounters where the main difficulty was that you had to deal with a group of enemies if not 4 times your squad size, than only somewhat smaller but with more 'elite' opponents that are harder to handle or have a lot of spells at their disposal. Not helped that it feels like good dungeon design would ask that you deal with certain smaller encounters that prep you as to what's to come, maybe have enemies that mostly deal with Necrotic damage to let you know hey you might want Necrotic resistance. They actually do this a few times like when you're about to fight Orin or Gortash. In the - Viconia fight nah you get allowed in and dont have too much of an idea as to what she's capable of and will Blight one of your party members instantly, all the while you get drowned in a sea of darkness.
This and the Gondian questline where you have to sneak into the backroom of a factory and find plans regarding a submersible, but afaik you have no idea that there's supposed to be a clue about the questline back there? And if you head in normally you have to fight several guards, the gondian slaves and the last few mechs roaming around? And if you do get to that submersible you have to go on a rescue mission where you have 4 turns to rescue several hostages (rest in peace duke ravengard I didn't care, sorry Wyll), go back to the factory and then deal with the same enemies one last time but the Gondians now rebel against the masters and are....useful 10% of the time. Hell, most NPCs in this game are only good half the time aside from a few recurring characters. For the most part this wouldn't be too bad but this encounter got really obnoxious as the higher ups in this fight will begin activating signals that detonate the collars around the slaves' necks both in this room and for anyone that was working in the room prior. This got to be pretty obnoxious in any case where the Gondians DID decide to be useful and attacked these higher ups but were so far away that none of my allies could get over to the signal uninterrupted before the signal went off (that or the staircase got so crowded my member literally couldn't reach it).
This is how a lot of the fights in the last act feel, not literally but there's always just 1 aspect that complicates things for the worst and I just wonder why all of these were lined up in the last 10% of the game. For comparison, Act 2 had a pretty interesting build up as there's three major fights in the town outside the Moonrise Towers, each of which had their own manner of fighting but also their own way to beat them through skill checks. It's fun! I'll admit to cheesing the tollmaster a bit as she was my last, but I did fight and lose to Thisobold (the bartender) and I naturally beat the surgeon- mostly because I accidentally started the encounter as Astarion and had a way better persuasion proficiency. The second of this group, Thisobald is probably my favorite encounter in the game, both as a fight and as a gauntlet of several skill checks. Just a few rounds of drinks and maybe a few constitution saves and I made the dude kill himself.
Lastly I did wanna just touch on some general QoL stuff that I ran into that I think could be easily fixed/touched up on now that games are just living things now so I didn't wanna hark too much on these points.
-Namely I wish it was easier to manage your members back at the camp- it got incredibly tedious switching between two party members throughout the later half of the game. For a large part of the game I had Astarion/Karlach/Shadowheart on deck but rarely took any of them out until the end of Act 2 when I was told to put Wyll back in for one section. He had been severely neglected for most of the game so he got back 5 levels or so and seeing that massive upgrade I was able to understand what tools in his kit to focus on, making him a much more potent fighter in one sweep than whatever stealth build I was trying to mold. So, I kept Wyll on for my main team. However! Astarion is hands down the best lockpicker, and this game loves give you locks to pick, well above the usual 20. Act 3 is also the point in the game where combat becomes MUCH more frequent and large scale. Act 3 constantly had me going back to camp, talking to Wyll, going to Astarion, unlocking something that seemed important, going back to camp talking to Astarion, and then re-talking to Wyll to get him back and each time I just thought "why can't I just do this from the main map"
-Also why can you just attack empty spaces? I guess if you wanna be a hot shot and guess where invisible enemies are, the game will allow it but I was always pretty frustrated whenever I clicked around an enemy too fast and clicked on an empty space a foot away from them to attack.
-Would it kill for maybe a few more levels? I hit level cap way earlier than I’d like.
-Why does Act 1 not end at the Grove party? Why does it persist into the whole Underdark area? Act 2 feels way shorter than 1 or 3.
-I also don't know what the weird missing exp issue is? It's hard to explain but the game keeps track of what I guess is 'lost' exp as a result of either a party member dying or not being present in the party to gain the exp from quests, kills etc. However because of this you might have party members in your party throughout the entire game (I basically just kept Karlach and Shadowheart on deck since getting them) with way less exp than others. To remedy this you just tell them to leave the team for a minute and when you ask them to come back, they regain that exp. Thankfully it's that simple but it was such a weird thing to encounter.
These aren’t the biggest of issues and hell some of these might be fixed over time or hell! maybe its something i missed! I was gonna complain about how there’s no multi select in the inventory but it was shift click the entire time. Sometimes I’m just stupid.
Baldur's Gate 3 is an excellent showcase to Larian's commitment and critical eye as to how to make a wrp 'video' g as similar to a real game of '5e DND' as it can get, while having the presentation to boot and the gameplay fine tuned throughout. It's an easy recommendation but I did have some hangups by the end of the game that kept it from becoming an all-timer like some of my other favorite WRPGs. Maybe with time and a more focused build I can fully indulge myself in what the game has again, but by the end of my first playthrough I had drank what felt like twice than enough.
(Finished on 9/29/23)
Usually whenever I open up to the start of the year I don't entirely know what I'll be playing throughout the months to come. After all, there's a bunch of games that just drop on a dime with little to no warning nowadays. Usually I have about 5 games that are certain to come out and I just scrounge around and see what looks good as the months go by. Here, with Baldur's Gate, is a weird cross section between a game I had known about for sometime but didn't think about how it was fully releasing this year nor did I really think I'd be getting my hands into it. Lo and behold I begin correspondence with someone for a few months and they, on top of a few podcasts, bring its release date up in conversation and suddenly the idea of getting it felt like a good opportunity. And here I thought I was gonna check out Starfield as my game for that August... shudder. My expectations were pretty moderate but I was pleased that the game offered a breadth of customizability and intrigue from the start, so as to keep me hooked and continuing to play. Prior to this I had played a couple of hours of Divinity II, longing for a DND experience without the need to set up or rely on everyones' schedules to align perfectly. While I enjoyed my time with D2OS, it didn't really get sucked in like I did here, probably in part to the overwhelming amount of discourse at the moment, but also the near immediate critical uproar upon release convinced me to start it up once it dropped and follow through in finishing it.
For my run I decided to play as a half-orc Monk, with the folk hero background. I had recalled one of only a few runs of TTRPG I'd ever played where my preferred class of Monk had just ran up to a first boss and ended up comboing a string of good dice rolls in one turn, tearing the fiend in half. It felt glorious having my character ostensibly run up and style on a boss in a game that feels so magic heavy. I loved it! Here I was hoping to rekindle some energy of that and, as I'll explain later I got something a bit different than what I had in mind. Here we have the first and perhaps largest dissonance between the gamified ttrpg vs the tabletop-ified rpg(?). Imagination is a wonderful mechanic, so little effort and so little cost but it's hard to share the sentiment. I do wish I had chosen a different background as you soon meet another character in solo play that has the same Folk Hero background that I had. On the one hand this meant any chance to get 'Inspirations' as a folk hero meant I got two points just because I had Wyll in the party, but on the other hand it just didn't feel as unique.
Currently this game is receiving the utmost critical and commercial success, praise from all ends and its looking to be a lot of people's GOTY, including mine if we're not counting remasters (thanks Katamari) or expansions (thanks Xenoblade). While I feel this is a solid contender I did want to point out I think this is far from a perfect game and I do think there's a lot of ironing out that needs to be done, but what's presented is still a strong release for this year. I think the cast overall is incredibly fun, and you get more winners, at least in one aspect, than duds. I think the expressive ways to customize your characters both original and the builds you can do with your party members can lead to interesting builds. The ease in which you can recustomize and rebuild your party is very appreciated, and I took advantage of it pretty early on (went way of the four elements and switched quickly to Way of the Open Hand, good change). The game looks really nice and you get to see a lot of really neat locales throughout your journey (although I never did go back and check out the githyanki creche area). The amount of detail put into 95% of the game's interactions is stunning to say the least and several times I was glad to see the game took account of certain actions I had taken several play sessions prior. I was always glad to see my character's backstory, race or class have unique dialogue and it even helped me gain access a few times. The amount of details regarding every element of the environment during battles is staggering, with many details probably still not found or well known yet.
I think the idea of relationships with your party is pretty fun overall and I think the game does an alright job fleshing out your characters throughout the adventure. It’s a bit hard to judge at the moment as I’ve only really experienced one and maybe a half relationships the game allowed. Sorry to say I went basic mode and romanced Shadowheart, however I did find her questline to be the most intriguing. I did NOT have sex at all during the act 1 party however the rest of the relationship progressed pretty naturally. Only slightly odd given how fast certain characters’ approval will max out compared to the ‘questline’ requirements needed to progress romances forward. Just a weird disconnect I had with the games’ romance system.
It’s also very weird just how seemingly flexible much of the party relationships can be, on the one hand I can understand the going ons behind the machine -to a certain extent- but then I read up on other people's experiences regarding certain variables or understandings of certain characters that differed from mine and I tilted my head a bit. I kept seeing impressions of Shadowheart being someone that strictly preferred a more monogamous relationship, yet late in the game when asked by Halsin if I wished to pursue anything romantic I kinda humored him and said 'yeah lemme ask shadowheart', I saved my game just in case something went awry, but when I asked she seemed to have been easygoing about the idea, even kinda curious. I was floored! Here I was extremely late into the game, pretty deep into the SH relationship and maybe I had maintained such a healthy understanding of each other that she was supportive of me humoring Halsin as a bit.
What I will say is i think the usage of the whole "X approves!" mechanic can look really stupid in certain situations. It didn't bother me too much but on occasion an event would play out that would just tilt my head as to why certain acts would proc a disapprove. In one instance, my team was coming up on an assisination in progress- our culprit monologuing to his paralyzed victim, blade to the epidermis of their neck. Before the assassin can finish the deed I was given three options :
1)<Monk> Something, something i cant remember but you reveal yourself
2)<Stealth> Keep to the shadows…
3) <Half Orc> You're a coward.
Picking the 2nd option gains disapproval from Karlach and Wyll -both of whom were present in my party- seemingly because my option just wasn't...bombastic enough? These points end up being minor in the long run but I had Machiavelli over my shoulder throughout some of these encounters considering how petty some of these disapprovals might be. Astarion disapproving of certain acts feels a bit more natural, he's a pompous silver tongued rogue so trying to act high and mighty runs counter to his desire to. But what, does sneaking up on someone just bore Karlach that much? Does Wyll need me to announce my presence to every meddler in tow? This guy has dimension door shoes! We need to catch him off guard!!
Alright I will say this game was already battings pretty high and I was pretty elated throughout most of it, but there was always one thing nagging over the back of my shoulder and I was never sure what- but after 120 hours I think it's fine to materialize that complaint:
I don't know if I like the combat system. Or if its just hiccups regarding 5E in general. or if its just Act 3 fights that are hammering this nail into my head. Man I don’t know, I just got really tired of fights by the end of this game.
Throughout the game I felt kinda rude doing this, but I figured I should compare its moment to moment gameplay with that of Fallout New Vegas and Disco Elysium, two of my and assuredly many others favorite WRPGs. What I lack in what feels like some petty originality I'll try and make up for in some form of critical comparison, if you may forgive me. One of the things I appreciated most about both of these games is its consistent and in games like Fallout New Vegas, almost insistent chance to try and talk your way out of given combat encounters. If you've played FNV pretty thoroughly and are of a high enough level it feels almost impossible to not have maxed out one of the few skills needed to talk the legion out of invading the west. Maybe it decreases the stakes or the dramatic tension that you can talk down a guy just by saying his trade lines are gonna be fucked if he expands territory any more than he already has, but to me I think its a fitting way to conclude a game that was already so talkative and so skill check intensive. Disco runs a more similar path to Baldur's gate by having most of its skills be dice rolls altered by your boons and banes. The main difference is that Disco does an excellent job namely for having 0 combat outside of tense standoff moments. I think this also does a great job in characterizing our prenamed and predetermined character Harrier by having us, the player, feel like some kind of a trickster god in our failures and our insistence to keep failing- as there's very few ways to truly 'lose' in Disco Elysium. Most outs in DE involve you deliberately choosing options that might cause your self destruction. Hell even in events with constant health or morale hits you can continue to spam your medicines mid-dialogue just to keep yourself as alive as necessary. What I'm trying to get at here is that whenever I am in combat in this game I feel less like a tactician or a player character or even some god and more like I've been dragged along by whatever the game's predetermined choices have in store, and unlike FNV where I feel as thought the game offers a variety of outs for major fights, there's a lot of times the game wants it to be this epic battle of varying satisfaction; and unlike Disco Elysium there's a very real chance to die often, these dice rolls mean everything and you just have to live with whatever the dice give you. While I don't think the dice do a bad job at giving you a fair fight, it is very easy to get frustrated whenever you have a good shot at targeting something and just end up whiffing it.
It reminds me a lot of fire emblem (I say this to myself a lot whenever I play a video game, I hope I never say this again in a game that isnt fire emblem or fire emblem adjacent, please message me if I betray my wishes in future reviews)
Overall I think the combat is completely manageable and there's a lot more interesting encounters in the first two acts. However, I can't help but think that the third act really drops the ball in a lot of these encounters. There's not 1 nor 2 but 3 different encounters that have the same build up, descending into a circular arena where the boss is surrounded by cronies (maybe a 4th i haven't done every 3rd act sidequest). These fights range in difficulty but when they get bad- man did I wanna throw something.
(Sorry the next few paragraphs are just me ranting about certain encounters maybe you had an easier time with these, Orin bugged on my run but I know others had a way worse time with her)
The worst in my case was Viconia, namely because there's just 20 other dudes surrounding you. This is the main thing that frustrated me about a lot of the late game encounters, it just felt like there were so many encounters where the main difficulty was that you had to deal with a group of enemies if not 4 times your squad size, than only somewhat smaller but with more 'elite' opponents that are harder to handle or have a lot of spells at their disposal. Not helped that it feels like good dungeon design would ask that you deal with certain smaller encounters that prep you as to what's to come, maybe have enemies that mostly deal with Necrotic damage to let you know hey you might want Necrotic resistance. They actually do this a few times like when you're about to fight Orin or Gortash. In the - Viconia fight nah you get allowed in and dont have too much of an idea as to what she's capable of and will Blight one of your party members instantly, all the while you get drowned in a sea of darkness.
This and the Gondian questline where you have to sneak into the backroom of a factory and find plans regarding a submersible, but afaik you have no idea that there's supposed to be a clue about the questline back there? And if you head in normally you have to fight several guards, the gondian slaves and the last few mechs roaming around? And if you do get to that submersible you have to go on a rescue mission where you have 4 turns to rescue several hostages (rest in peace duke ravengard I didn't care, sorry Wyll), go back to the factory and then deal with the same enemies one last time but the Gondians now rebel against the masters and are....useful 10% of the time. Hell, most NPCs in this game are only good half the time aside from a few recurring characters. For the most part this wouldn't be too bad but this encounter got really obnoxious as the higher ups in this fight will begin activating signals that detonate the collars around the slaves' necks both in this room and for anyone that was working in the room prior. This got to be pretty obnoxious in any case where the Gondians DID decide to be useful and attacked these higher ups but were so far away that none of my allies could get over to the signal uninterrupted before the signal went off (that or the staircase got so crowded my member literally couldn't reach it).
This is how a lot of the fights in the last act feel, not literally but there's always just 1 aspect that complicates things for the worst and I just wonder why all of these were lined up in the last 10% of the game. For comparison, Act 2 had a pretty interesting build up as there's three major fights in the town outside the Moonrise Towers, each of which had their own manner of fighting but also their own way to beat them through skill checks. It's fun! I'll admit to cheesing the tollmaster a bit as she was my last, but I did fight and lose to Thisobold (the bartender) and I naturally beat the surgeon- mostly because I accidentally started the encounter as Astarion and had a way better persuasion proficiency. The second of this group, Thisobald is probably my favorite encounter in the game, both as a fight and as a gauntlet of several skill checks. Just a few rounds of drinks and maybe a few constitution saves and I made the dude kill himself.
Lastly I did wanna just touch on some general QoL stuff that I ran into that I think could be easily fixed/touched up on now that games are just living things now so I didn't wanna hark too much on these points.
-Namely I wish it was easier to manage your members back at the camp- it got incredibly tedious switching between two party members throughout the later half of the game. For a large part of the game I had Astarion/Karlach/Shadowheart on deck but rarely took any of them out until the end of Act 2 when I was told to put Wyll back in for one section. He had been severely neglected for most of the game so he got back 5 levels or so and seeing that massive upgrade I was able to understand what tools in his kit to focus on, making him a much more potent fighter in one sweep than whatever stealth build I was trying to mold. So, I kept Wyll on for my main team. However! Astarion is hands down the best lockpicker, and this game loves give you locks to pick, well above the usual 20. Act 3 is also the point in the game where combat becomes MUCH more frequent and large scale. Act 3 constantly had me going back to camp, talking to Wyll, going to Astarion, unlocking something that seemed important, going back to camp talking to Astarion, and then re-talking to Wyll to get him back and each time I just thought "why can't I just do this from the main map"
-Also why can you just attack empty spaces? I guess if you wanna be a hot shot and guess where invisible enemies are, the game will allow it but I was always pretty frustrated whenever I clicked around an enemy too fast and clicked on an empty space a foot away from them to attack.
-Would it kill for maybe a few more levels? I hit level cap way earlier than I’d like.
-Why does Act 1 not end at the Grove party? Why does it persist into the whole Underdark area? Act 2 feels way shorter than 1 or 3.
-I also don't know what the weird missing exp issue is? It's hard to explain but the game keeps track of what I guess is 'lost' exp as a result of either a party member dying or not being present in the party to gain the exp from quests, kills etc. However because of this you might have party members in your party throughout the entire game (I basically just kept Karlach and Shadowheart on deck since getting them) with way less exp than others. To remedy this you just tell them to leave the team for a minute and when you ask them to come back, they regain that exp. Thankfully it's that simple but it was such a weird thing to encounter.
These aren’t the biggest of issues and hell some of these might be fixed over time or hell! maybe its something i missed! I was gonna complain about how there’s no multi select in the inventory but it was shift click the entire time. Sometimes I’m just stupid.
Baldur's Gate 3 is an excellent showcase to Larian's commitment and critical eye as to how to make a wrp 'video' g as similar to a real game of '5e DND' as it can get, while having the presentation to boot and the gameplay fine tuned throughout. It's an easy recommendation but I did have some hangups by the end of the game that kept it from becoming an all-timer like some of my other favorite WRPGs. Maybe with time and a more focused build I can fully indulge myself in what the game has again, but by the end of my first playthrough I had drank what felt like twice than enough.