its pretty good, but it feels like it has a lot of issues that previous games in the genre have already dealt with.

the story is pretty uninteresting, where it constantly throws "reveals" at you that aren't really reveals in any way. a lot of them boil down to "it turns out the evil guys are tied to this dnd lore thing!" like, ok, turns out the absolute is ruled by the three evil dead killer gods. turns out the thing controlling the tadpoles and mind flayers is the thing that controls tadpoles and mind flayers. while i'm not saying there should be 'twists', it feels like it's too wound up about dnd lore to care about having the proper structure that makes a story interesting. i guess this is standard fare for fantasy rpgs, but many have done it better.

the smaller antagonists of this story have this issue as well, but at least they're funny and wacky sometimes (i.e goblins, raphael). a lot of the mini choices you make throughout the story are just "do you do the mean thing or the not mean thing???". while i think good and evil stories aren't inherently bad, i'm not super motivated to do the "mean choice" that pops up, especially since they often have less rewards than the selfless choices for some reason???

for example, the nightsong is framed as the soul cage that is keeping up ketheric thorm's immortality, an issue that makes you go after her in the first place. so in my head the choice was to either kill her and make ketheric weaker for your own goals, or save her at the expense at your own chances.

turns out killing her doesn't really affect much at all! if you save her, just use the help action near her and the soul cage doesn't work anymore!! turns out its actually harmful to yourself in that fight to kill the nightsong!!!!!!!!!

the last light inn and isobel also die if you kill the nightsong, for reasons that i do not know and i am not sure are even said in game. so you miss out on the tiefling refugees and jaheira as well if you do this.

you can also just let her be kidnapped by balthaazar, and they reward they give you for this is... one tadpole!!!!! wow!!!!!!!! this is also functionally the same as saving her (either way she's soul caged and can be freed to help you), and she's still chill with you afterwards even though you let her get kidnapped!

look, i'm chill with there being choices that aren't always beneficial to you. but if every complex and potentially interesting choice boils down to something like this, then what's the point in doing things in a unique way instead of just doing The Easy Best Option.

the companion storylines are an exception to this sorta, where they deal with problems that have actual thematic parallels to them, as well as having neat choices within their questlines. astarion has struggled with a past that has given him no real control over his life. wyll is constantly being harmed for doing good, yet he still keeps up his morals despite it. karlach is grappling with either a short life or a life in slavery, that has no real golden ending behind it. pretty much all of their stories are well fleshed out.

that said, i really wish they didn't have 30's millennial prose behind it lol. outside of lae'zel, they all got those annoying epic sarcasm quips that feel like they've worn out their welcome in the past decade. while i've never played the earlier baldur's gate games, i loved the dialogue given out by jaheira and minsc much more than any other companion in the game, and sarevok felt much more charismatic and intimidating than any other villain.

a standout for me was lae'zel and the githyanki story in general. i was more invested in those guys over there then the rest of anything else.

while i didnt like the story too much, it probably the best combat ive ever played in a western CRPG. long rests being tied to food is a great way to prevent having long rests being spammable without having time limits in place. while dnd 5e is a shitty tabletop system, larian was able to make it work well enough in this game!

ngl after everything i said here i'll revisit this more in the future. even if the choices feel lame, there's still the widest depth of them that i havent seen before, and the freedom of being able to kill or ignore most npcs like in the early fallouts is great.

tl;dr
Not Recommended
This is one of my favourite games.