This game doesn't deserve to be called Baldur's Gate.
It's not a bad game as such, but it comes up short.
There's plenty of positive things to say about this game: The gameplay and combat is pretty good throughout more or less emulating 5e D&D combat with some changes, the game is pretty nice looking and the production values are generally high even if the over-the-top high fantasy aesthetics don't appeal to me personally. There's some good performances in the game as well and it's very impressive that the game is fully voiced (other than your PC in dialogue, which I don't count against the game). Overall the game is impressively ambitious. Some of these things are something of a double edged sword though, more on that later.
So, while most of my negatives will be very much up to taste, it is undeniable that the game is unfinished. The entire game is janky in every aspect of the game, but the further into the game you go, the rougher it gets. Then it almost completely falls apart toward the end. Performance takes a huge hit, weird glitches and bugs start appearing (both visual and gameplay), quests start breaking, dialogue scenes start breaking, enemies see you through walls, people start conversations with you from a mile away. It's really bad.
Your choices end up having very little impact in the end. Especially one persistent, very foreshadowed choice that you choose to do or not do throughout the game, ends up seemingly making no difference at all. Toward the end NPC interactivity drops significantly, wherein almost every NPC becomes an animatronic puppets barking single lines of dialogue, where you cannot interact with them, like you would in any other CRPG. It feels like companions stop participating in the story almost altogether, sans their personal questlines. Some of this is present before the final act as well, but toward the end is where it becomes very jarring. This is part of the aforementioned double edged sword for wanting to voice and animate all dialogue in the game.
It also feels like they cut an entire area out of the final act, an area for which you can see an entrance but can never access. That is fair I suppose, as they didn't manage to populate even what they had with meaningful content, I wouldn't want to see it spread out even further.
But then there's other CRPGs I've loved even though they've had lackluster or unfinished final acts, such as Tyranny. So what are the other problems?
I said that the gameplay is pretty good, but it has its own share of problems. In tabletop D&D 5e, the DM should be careful about making their combat scenarios too large, because the system scales pretty poorly and becomes a slog. Same is true here, and Larian was not careful about scaling their combats. There are many mass combats with way too many participants that end up being such tedious drudgery. It becomes more tedious when the game has its characteristic slowdowns where enemies just stand there for 30 seconds before apparently succumbing to analysis paralysis and skipping their turn. This game is so janky.
Then when it is your turn, you'll have to contend with some very bad user interface and user experience. Targeting your spells becomes maddening when the AoE indicator keeps wiggling and flickering around. Good luck not hitting your allies.
Sometimes the game just kind of freezes for about 5 seconds just to figure out what's going on. Sometimes the game will tell you, you have a 100% chance of hitting... and then you miss 3 times in a row. What?
Then there's the jank of party control, or more accurately lack of control. It's fine most of the time, except when you present me with areas with traps and hazards which are triggered by characters stepping on them, and then have my party step on everything without my say-so. Not to speak of when a party member just decides to stop following you for some reason. Where's Shadowheart again? Oh, she's on the other side of the map standing in front of a chest high wall every other companion jumped on top of no problem. This game is SO janky.
In general the quality of life and usability features of this game are very lacking. Inventory management and looting especially is a bane for the entire game.
I really don't like the camping system. You're just whisked away into a pocket dimension in an instant, a place that is always safe regardless if your camp is in the middle of a dangerous dungeon. No watches, no wandering encounters, no meaningful consideration for resources or safety. This may not be a big deal to many, for me this hurts the immersion of feeling like this is an adventure. For reference, if you want to see this kind of system done right, play Kingmaker. In fact, my general advice is to play Kingmaker instead of this regardless.
Then there's the writing, which is what I think truly makes this game unworthy of having the name "Baldur's Gate". It manages to be kind of entertainingly cartoony at best, and pretty bad at worst. The companions are a very mixed bag with middling highs and steep lows. So many of them have a kind of a "coolest guy ever" syndrome going on, where they have these incredibly over-the-top grandiose backstories. We're level 1 or 2, and my companions are formerly paramours of gods, right hands of an archdevil and the most notorious warlock-batman of the whole region. It's ridiculous, and so lame. There's a couple exceptions, though. Astarion and Shadowheart turned out to be ok as characters.
Oh and everyone wants to have sex with you, for some reason? I think Larian imagines that the end goal of any positive human relationship is to have sex. It gets even worse when all sorts of otherwordly being start wanting to bonk you as well. It's embarrassing, and juvenile.
The story and writing generally runs the gamut from tropey and shallow, to childishly melodramatic. Plenty of ironic detachment, Marvel-style smug quips, squeecore, and scenes where it feels like you're a receptacle for exposition rather than a character. If you're looking for something with depth, maturity, interesting character dynamics, or complexity you won't find it here. I think pretty early on there was a villain who wanted to kill a kid without a good reason other than she was just that bad? You won't find a character like Jon Irenicus in this game, I'm afraid.
Oh and the humor. I was afraid of seeing Larian -style wacky humor, and Larian provided. Comedy is probably more subjective than most other types of writing, but man the sort of 2010s style random internet humor stuff doesn't work for me at all
I'm not pretending that BG 1 or 2 were perfectly written. Both had their quirks and clichés, but it was much more nuanced and complex than this, especially for its time.
What the other Baldur's Gate games did much better as well, was portray a world and place with a reasonable degree of verisimilitude. You felt like a character inhabiting a place in the world. BG3 feels more like walking around a high-fantasy theme park. It seems like Larian really favors having big open maps where everything in the current section in the world is present seamlessly, but it makes plot points like "None of our scouts can find this place that's next door 5 minute walk away from here" feel really ridiculous.
I feel like this property was given to the wrong hands, or maybe shouldn't have been given to anyone at all. The game is fun, and impressive in many ways. However, Baldur's Gate deserved better than a 'just okay' CRPG with a big budget, low artistic ambitions, and all-encompassing jank.
It's not a bad game as such, but it comes up short.
There's plenty of positive things to say about this game: The gameplay and combat is pretty good throughout more or less emulating 5e D&D combat with some changes, the game is pretty nice looking and the production values are generally high even if the over-the-top high fantasy aesthetics don't appeal to me personally. There's some good performances in the game as well and it's very impressive that the game is fully voiced (other than your PC in dialogue, which I don't count against the game). Overall the game is impressively ambitious. Some of these things are something of a double edged sword though, more on that later.
So, while most of my negatives will be very much up to taste, it is undeniable that the game is unfinished. The entire game is janky in every aspect of the game, but the further into the game you go, the rougher it gets. Then it almost completely falls apart toward the end. Performance takes a huge hit, weird glitches and bugs start appearing (both visual and gameplay), quests start breaking, dialogue scenes start breaking, enemies see you through walls, people start conversations with you from a mile away. It's really bad.
Your choices end up having very little impact in the end. Especially one persistent, very foreshadowed choice that you choose to do or not do throughout the game, ends up seemingly making no difference at all. Toward the end NPC interactivity drops significantly, wherein almost every NPC becomes an animatronic puppets barking single lines of dialogue, where you cannot interact with them, like you would in any other CRPG. It feels like companions stop participating in the story almost altogether, sans their personal questlines. Some of this is present before the final act as well, but toward the end is where it becomes very jarring. This is part of the aforementioned double edged sword for wanting to voice and animate all dialogue in the game.
It also feels like they cut an entire area out of the final act, an area for which you can see an entrance but can never access. That is fair I suppose, as they didn't manage to populate even what they had with meaningful content, I wouldn't want to see it spread out even further.
But then there's other CRPGs I've loved even though they've had lackluster or unfinished final acts, such as Tyranny. So what are the other problems?
I said that the gameplay is pretty good, but it has its own share of problems. In tabletop D&D 5e, the DM should be careful about making their combat scenarios too large, because the system scales pretty poorly and becomes a slog. Same is true here, and Larian was not careful about scaling their combats. There are many mass combats with way too many participants that end up being such tedious drudgery. It becomes more tedious when the game has its characteristic slowdowns where enemies just stand there for 30 seconds before apparently succumbing to analysis paralysis and skipping their turn. This game is so janky.
Then when it is your turn, you'll have to contend with some very bad user interface and user experience. Targeting your spells becomes maddening when the AoE indicator keeps wiggling and flickering around. Good luck not hitting your allies.
Sometimes the game just kind of freezes for about 5 seconds just to figure out what's going on. Sometimes the game will tell you, you have a 100% chance of hitting... and then you miss 3 times in a row. What?
Then there's the jank of party control, or more accurately lack of control. It's fine most of the time, except when you present me with areas with traps and hazards which are triggered by characters stepping on them, and then have my party step on everything without my say-so. Not to speak of when a party member just decides to stop following you for some reason. Where's Shadowheart again? Oh, she's on the other side of the map standing in front of a chest high wall every other companion jumped on top of no problem. This game is SO janky.
In general the quality of life and usability features of this game are very lacking. Inventory management and looting especially is a bane for the entire game.
I really don't like the camping system. You're just whisked away into a pocket dimension in an instant, a place that is always safe regardless if your camp is in the middle of a dangerous dungeon. No watches, no wandering encounters, no meaningful consideration for resources or safety. This may not be a big deal to many, for me this hurts the immersion of feeling like this is an adventure. For reference, if you want to see this kind of system done right, play Kingmaker. In fact, my general advice is to play Kingmaker instead of this regardless.
Then there's the writing, which is what I think truly makes this game unworthy of having the name "Baldur's Gate". It manages to be kind of entertainingly cartoony at best, and pretty bad at worst. The companions are a very mixed bag with middling highs and steep lows. So many of them have a kind of a "coolest guy ever" syndrome going on, where they have these incredibly over-the-top grandiose backstories. We're level 1 or 2, and my companions are formerly paramours of gods, right hands of an archdevil and the most notorious warlock-batman of the whole region. It's ridiculous, and so lame. There's a couple exceptions, though. Astarion and Shadowheart turned out to be ok as characters.
Oh and everyone wants to have sex with you, for some reason? I think Larian imagines that the end goal of any positive human relationship is to have sex. It gets even worse when all sorts of otherwordly being start wanting to bonk you as well. It's embarrassing, and juvenile.
The story and writing generally runs the gamut from tropey and shallow, to childishly melodramatic. Plenty of ironic detachment, Marvel-style smug quips, squeecore, and scenes where it feels like you're a receptacle for exposition rather than a character. If you're looking for something with depth, maturity, interesting character dynamics, or complexity you won't find it here. I think pretty early on there was a villain who wanted to kill a kid without a good reason other than she was just that bad? You won't find a character like Jon Irenicus in this game, I'm afraid.
Oh and the humor. I was afraid of seeing Larian -style wacky humor, and Larian provided. Comedy is probably more subjective than most other types of writing, but man the sort of 2010s style random internet humor stuff doesn't work for me at all
I'm not pretending that BG 1 or 2 were perfectly written. Both had their quirks and clichés, but it was much more nuanced and complex than this, especially for its time.
What the other Baldur's Gate games did much better as well, was portray a world and place with a reasonable degree of verisimilitude. You felt like a character inhabiting a place in the world. BG3 feels more like walking around a high-fantasy theme park. It seems like Larian really favors having big open maps where everything in the current section in the world is present seamlessly, but it makes plot points like "None of our scouts can find this place that's next door 5 minute walk away from here" feel really ridiculous.
I feel like this property was given to the wrong hands, or maybe shouldn't have been given to anyone at all. The game is fun, and impressive in many ways. However, Baldur's Gate deserved better than a 'just okay' CRPG with a big budget, low artistic ambitions, and all-encompassing jank.