Wuggy
1 review liked by Wuggy
Baldur's Gate 3
2020
I hate to feel like a contrarian, but after almost 195 hours of this, I fail to understand why this is being praised as leaps and bounds above Bethesda products in terms of narrative. The vast majority of amusement from this game is the exact same kind of thing I get from Bethesda games, which is in experimenting with how small character changes affect how different scenes play out and the explore-fight-loot loop. The Dark Urge had some fun surprises in Act 1, for example, with random acts of violence that tease that shit's about to get serious if you play this character compared to the rest. With such a tease, I was determined to push the thematic tensions this game introduces as far as they would go to get the most out of things, making decisions on a whim based on how curious I was to see their outcomes. I played on Tactician difficulty too, expecting a greater difficulty forcing me to make harsher decisions. This is the game that, after all, people are recommending as the antithesis to Starfield.
Except, just like Bethesda games, BG3 struggles about as much to make these role-playing decisions mean much in terms of thematic impact or gameplay scope. The Dark Urge's story is my main example here also, because of just how disappointed I started getting with how his narrative twists barely affect anything revolving around your party composition despite several actions he takes or took prior to the events of the game being obvious huge red flags. BG3's mainly concerned with telling the stories of cultists escaping abuse and what kinds of people they choose to become afterwards. However, despite having the majority of its main cast dealing with varying situations like this, it's a bit astounding to me that we're rarely shown why their histories complicate their decisions more. It's more like their cults are established and then there's a pivotal scene where they realize they want to be more autonomous, and then what they do with that autonomy is frustratingly trivial: designed to just get you to check out their native boss fight(s) in Act 3.
The most memorable scene for me in the game is when Lae'zel enters the zaith'isk and you're just witnessing this empirical soldier you've been traveling with obsessed with cleansing herself of rot, even though almost everyone there understands it's a euphemism and that machine will kill her. Scenes like that, where the consequences the game wants you to think about feel like they mean something - potentially losing the most powerful party member in the game to some force outside of your control - feel so scarce, while the gameplay of fights feel entirely disconnected from any of these themes whatsoever. Your companions fight each other a few times in Act 1, and then the tensions that feel like they shouldn't be resolved so quickly just dissipate. I felt like maybe I could get to understand these characters early on in the game, with another memorable scene being when Lae'zel threatens to murder-suicide you all because she was just that paranoid over losing control and losing the favor of her god. But this desperation reaches its apex at the scene in the zaith'isk, and then seems to lose any urgency overnight.
BG3 essentially tries to add some complications to the hero narrative by allowing you and your companions to abuse power just as much as your predecessors did, but there's barely any meat behind your or their decisions. This is especially obvious when you recruit Minthara, who requires that you mass murder two entire groups of innocents. The game's options for you to explain yourself as to why you did these atrocious things are shockingly scant, and the most that happens is one companion tells you to fuck off and the other just straight up disappears for the rest of the game. The "companion disapproves" message started to feel completely superficial after this. During the celebration after the massacres, talking with your companions on their feelings about this major event reveals very little about their motivations. Shadowheart hints at having more complicated feelings, but they don't amount to much; as far as I can tell, it doesn't affect her going forward. Astarion wants to feel more powerful, but there's never anything that even remotely challenges his position on any-means-necessary.
The gods and masters of Baldur's Gate 3 are also just fickle without having the thematic focus to make standing up against them feel like standing up against any particular concept. Fighting them felt like I was doing so only because 1) I want power and 2) my companions have unfinished business with them. In essence, this feels like I was just doing fights because they were there and I sorta cared about my companions even though I was never really sure who they were beyond their trauma.
The gameplay in Tactician is barely any different from the normal difficulty. The only thing I really noticed was that some enemies in late Act 1/early Act 2 disarm your team a lot more. Really devastating if that happens, except half your team probably does not care about being disarmed. You also get so much food throughout the game that you should never be anywhere remotely close to running out of long rests, so you can't really call the main gameplay challenge resource management either. I know it's a meme if you're like me and save up every single scroll in the game for some big fight in the end, but I think that that also says something about how the game is not challenging you to think outside of the box at all. But beyond that, the scrolls offer you basically what some people in your party should probably already have anyways by mid-game, so they're just redundant. The most fun I got from the fights was pushing enemies around like some schoolyard bully. Big damage numbers are always nice too. I got some nostalgia from XCOM 2 similarities. These were unfortunately not interesting enough as main mechanics to sustain such a long campaign for me.
There's just so little conflict despite so much potential for politically and morally complex storytelling here. I can't possibly take this narrative as a serious work when it kept feeling like background dressing for the tried-and-true explore-fight-loot Bethesda formula everyone is supposedly just as eager to have more depth out of as I am. Yet, the fact that this is being championed as the new standard is just indecipherable to me. Meet the new gods, exact same shit as the old gods. That's the real theme of this game.
Except, just like Bethesda games, BG3 struggles about as much to make these role-playing decisions mean much in terms of thematic impact or gameplay scope. The Dark Urge's story is my main example here also, because of just how disappointed I started getting with how his narrative twists barely affect anything revolving around your party composition despite several actions he takes or took prior to the events of the game being obvious huge red flags. BG3's mainly concerned with telling the stories of cultists escaping abuse and what kinds of people they choose to become afterwards. However, despite having the majority of its main cast dealing with varying situations like this, it's a bit astounding to me that we're rarely shown why their histories complicate their decisions more. It's more like their cults are established and then there's a pivotal scene where they realize they want to be more autonomous, and then what they do with that autonomy is frustratingly trivial: designed to just get you to check out their native boss fight(s) in Act 3.
The most memorable scene for me in the game is when Lae'zel enters the zaith'isk and you're just witnessing this empirical soldier you've been traveling with obsessed with cleansing herself of rot, even though almost everyone there understands it's a euphemism and that machine will kill her. Scenes like that, where the consequences the game wants you to think about feel like they mean something - potentially losing the most powerful party member in the game to some force outside of your control - feel so scarce, while the gameplay of fights feel entirely disconnected from any of these themes whatsoever. Your companions fight each other a few times in Act 1, and then the tensions that feel like they shouldn't be resolved so quickly just dissipate. I felt like maybe I could get to understand these characters early on in the game, with another memorable scene being when Lae'zel threatens to murder-suicide you all because she was just that paranoid over losing control and losing the favor of her god. But this desperation reaches its apex at the scene in the zaith'isk, and then seems to lose any urgency overnight.
BG3 essentially tries to add some complications to the hero narrative by allowing you and your companions to abuse power just as much as your predecessors did, but there's barely any meat behind your or their decisions. This is especially obvious when you recruit Minthara, who requires that you mass murder two entire groups of innocents. The game's options for you to explain yourself as to why you did these atrocious things are shockingly scant, and the most that happens is one companion tells you to fuck off and the other just straight up disappears for the rest of the game. The "companion disapproves" message started to feel completely superficial after this. During the celebration after the massacres, talking with your companions on their feelings about this major event reveals very little about their motivations. Shadowheart hints at having more complicated feelings, but they don't amount to much; as far as I can tell, it doesn't affect her going forward. Astarion wants to feel more powerful, but there's never anything that even remotely challenges his position on any-means-necessary.
The gods and masters of Baldur's Gate 3 are also just fickle without having the thematic focus to make standing up against them feel like standing up against any particular concept. Fighting them felt like I was doing so only because 1) I want power and 2) my companions have unfinished business with them. In essence, this feels like I was just doing fights because they were there and I sorta cared about my companions even though I was never really sure who they were beyond their trauma.
The gameplay in Tactician is barely any different from the normal difficulty. The only thing I really noticed was that some enemies in late Act 1/early Act 2 disarm your team a lot more. Really devastating if that happens, except half your team probably does not care about being disarmed. You also get so much food throughout the game that you should never be anywhere remotely close to running out of long rests, so you can't really call the main gameplay challenge resource management either. I know it's a meme if you're like me and save up every single scroll in the game for some big fight in the end, but I think that that also says something about how the game is not challenging you to think outside of the box at all. But beyond that, the scrolls offer you basically what some people in your party should probably already have anyways by mid-game, so they're just redundant. The most fun I got from the fights was pushing enemies around like some schoolyard bully. Big damage numbers are always nice too. I got some nostalgia from XCOM 2 similarities. These were unfortunately not interesting enough as main mechanics to sustain such a long campaign for me.
There's just so little conflict despite so much potential for politically and morally complex storytelling here. I can't possibly take this narrative as a serious work when it kept feeling like background dressing for the tried-and-true explore-fight-loot Bethesda formula everyone is supposedly just as eager to have more depth out of as I am. Yet, the fact that this is being championed as the new standard is just indecipherable to me. Meet the new gods, exact same shit as the old gods. That's the real theme of this game.