Played this since it won GOTY. Something I haven't seen in the public conversation at all about BG3 is how incredibly badly engineered it is.
I've had multiple quests bug out on me entirely (sazza the goblin, the emerald grove quest, and the inn defense battle), one of which resulted in me permanently losing a character.
Combat is incredibly bugged. There is a roughly 10-15 percent chance on a melee attack that the attacking character will stand there for upwards of 10 seconds, and no animation will play at all. Combat can start, and you won't be able to end your turn, or use any action, or even save or load the game. The enemy AI is so laggy, and as the game throws more and more at you, you can wait upwards of 3 IRL minutes for you to take a single turn (happened to me when fighting gortash).
The game is a hundred hours long, but I would wager 30 percent of that is literally just waiting in combat. Any competently made strategy game would allow you to fast forward enemy turns, or skip them entirely. If a set of enemies are in a contiguous action block, just have them execute their move actions all at once.
This is /after/ Larian has patched the game and applied multiple thousands (!) of bugfixes -- I can't imagine how bad it must have been for someone playing a few months ago.
===DISREGARDING ALL OF THESE INCREDIBLE TECHNICAL ISSUES ===
There is a massive pacing/content distribution issue in the game. Act 1 is okay, but in the roughly 30-40 hours of Act 2, I levelled up maybe 4 (!!) times. There are extremely few NPCs, and you are mostly walking from one middling encounter to the next. Content wise, Act 3 is much better than act 2, but it's incomplete and so buggy and broken so as to be borderline unplayable. Also you hit level cap at basically the very start of it, so for the next 30 hours your characters go nowhere. This is an inexcusable miscalculation.
The encumberment system is also inexcusable. You can already teleport stuff to camp or to another party member (even during combat!) so weight capacity feels like this vestigial organ that no longer has any reason to exist apart to annoy you. If you're a wizard with low strength like I was, it's even worse. Why do I have to stop every 5 minutes to manage the individual inventories of 4 party members? There is ZERO enforced gameplay reason for characters having individualized inventories at all. Just throw it all in a single group inventory and be done with it.
The positive public response to the party characters is largely the result of good VA/mocap, and clearly money was spent in that arena. But at the same time they feel pretty flat to me -- characters don't really DO stuff so much as REACT to stuff.
Take Astarion as a character: his entire being could be summarized and the wiki would be 1/8th the size of any party member's plot in FF7. There's just a lot less going on, and its not very substantive.
As a matter of fact, i went to the BG3 wiki on fextralife or w/e and the article is literally 50 percent by volume a guide on how to fuck him, and the other 50 percent is just a list of how he reacts to stuff.
I really want to watch other people's letsplays of this game, because in earnest I have no idea how this was even in the conversation for GOTY.
I've had multiple quests bug out on me entirely (sazza the goblin, the emerald grove quest, and the inn defense battle), one of which resulted in me permanently losing a character.
Combat is incredibly bugged. There is a roughly 10-15 percent chance on a melee attack that the attacking character will stand there for upwards of 10 seconds, and no animation will play at all. Combat can start, and you won't be able to end your turn, or use any action, or even save or load the game. The enemy AI is so laggy, and as the game throws more and more at you, you can wait upwards of 3 IRL minutes for you to take a single turn (happened to me when fighting gortash).
The game is a hundred hours long, but I would wager 30 percent of that is literally just waiting in combat. Any competently made strategy game would allow you to fast forward enemy turns, or skip them entirely. If a set of enemies are in a contiguous action block, just have them execute their move actions all at once.
This is /after/ Larian has patched the game and applied multiple thousands (!) of bugfixes -- I can't imagine how bad it must have been for someone playing a few months ago.
===DISREGARDING ALL OF THESE INCREDIBLE TECHNICAL ISSUES ===
There is a massive pacing/content distribution issue in the game. Act 1 is okay, but in the roughly 30-40 hours of Act 2, I levelled up maybe 4 (!!) times. There are extremely few NPCs, and you are mostly walking from one middling encounter to the next. Content wise, Act 3 is much better than act 2, but it's incomplete and so buggy and broken so as to be borderline unplayable. Also you hit level cap at basically the very start of it, so for the next 30 hours your characters go nowhere. This is an inexcusable miscalculation.
The encumberment system is also inexcusable. You can already teleport stuff to camp or to another party member (even during combat!) so weight capacity feels like this vestigial organ that no longer has any reason to exist apart to annoy you. If you're a wizard with low strength like I was, it's even worse. Why do I have to stop every 5 minutes to manage the individual inventories of 4 party members? There is ZERO enforced gameplay reason for characters having individualized inventories at all. Just throw it all in a single group inventory and be done with it.
The positive public response to the party characters is largely the result of good VA/mocap, and clearly money was spent in that arena. But at the same time they feel pretty flat to me -- characters don't really DO stuff so much as REACT to stuff.
Take Astarion as a character: his entire being could be summarized and the wiki would be 1/8th the size of any party member's plot in FF7. There's just a lot less going on, and its not very substantive.
As a matter of fact, i went to the BG3 wiki on fextralife or w/e and the article is literally 50 percent by volume a guide on how to fuck him, and the other 50 percent is just a list of how he reacts to stuff.
I really want to watch other people's letsplays of this game, because in earnest I have no idea how this was even in the conversation for GOTY.