I just finished my 110 hour playthrough of this game and it's occupying a cavity in my brain that has transformed into a battleground between all of the positive and negative criticisms I have for it.
I've never participated in a full D&D campaign due to the few attempts I've tried fizzling out after a session or two. So, I don't have any knowledge on the elements of this game that were pulled from actual DnD lore and manuals or what was changed/simplified. The only dungeon I've ever been in is the public restroom of my local Walmart, so this is purely a review coming from a person who just enjoys playing a variety of wildly different games.
My first initial thought was to create a Tav that was some replication of a character I created who never saw the light of day from one of those previous DnD attempts. Enter in my Half-Orc Bard, primarily meant to cast debuffs as some sort of unga bunga saboteur to anyone who dared step to my party. Turns out, that idea was atrocious and it resulted in my first 15 or so hours getting absolutely nothing done and everyone getting absolutely raw dogged by every fight we came across. Fine. My saviour Withers came to town and the game allowed me to change things up, thank god. You can do this with any of your characters at literally any time and I can't thank them enough for including it because after this, we cruised through Act 1 like it was nothing. My character was now a dual wielding Bard with the occasional healing buffs instead. I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't necessarily craft the character I thought up in my mind, but I just attributed that to me not understanding DnD classes or mechanics, so it's whatever.
As for someone who has never played a game like this before, it was slightly overwhelming at first. By the end of it, I was glad to see a multitude of giga spells and attacks at my disposal, but to say that it wasn't confusing at first would be a huge lie. The game just kind of assumes that you'd be aware what every little dice roll means, or what concentration even is in the first place. I originally thought that buffs could stack similar to JRPGs, but it took time for me to realize that's nowhere near the case because it isn't really explained. There's some fights in the game where misclicking or getting your concentration immediately broken is very bad, so I imagine that first 15 hours would have been more manageable if it was a bit clearer. Nevertheless, we persevered.
The combat in this game has highs and lows for me. Once I finally grappled the mechanics and shifted my spells around, it started to become a lot more fun. It became pretty clear to me that pre-emptively making my life less miserable for the future was the best strategy to getting through some boring as shit fights. My character looked like a dumpster, yet had such high charisma that it meant fighting 20 less enemies in some scenarios. So, I don't even want to imagine what playing this game without it is like. The persuasion rolls were some of the funniest moments in the game for me and it actively changed the outcomes of some battles. The worst fights in this game are the ones where it's 50 vs. 4. It's incredibly tedious and the difficulty of them are purely based on the map layout and initiative roll of your characters. Act 3 has some of the most horrendous fights I've ever seen in my life. They basically boiled down to just forcing the enemies to walk through a meat grinder of AoE spells, which was incredibly unfun.
I persevered through all of that because I was genuinely intrigued in the story and characters. I was the most invested in my party of Gale/Shadowheart/Karlach, but the other characters chilling back at camp had compelling weight to them as well. There are definitely some characters who were treated with more care than others. Astarion and Shadowheart's plotlines are like 3 novels of writing in comparison to someone like Karlach, which I found pretty disappointing. I wish that the other characters interacted with each other a bit more because it kind of feels like they just are friends by default after a certain point despite never seeing them together in any capacity whatsoever.
Playing this game as an asexual person is a wild ride. Everyone wants to eat your ass in this game. I tried to make the ugliest character I could and yet, she was still a super model. You do not understand how badly I wanted to play as a goblin freak, only to realize that if I got my wish, the characters would still cry for my grubby goblin hands. I see why this is the way it is, so that everyone has an option, but they didn't need to give Wyll such a sad puppy dog face after I rejected him. I'm not complaining too much about it because it's optional content, it just took me out a bit because it continued to be the funniest thing ever. You know I still gave in and got that fire engine hot rod pussy though.
The level of pseudo-sandbox this game gives you to play in is tremendous. I've found myself getting pretty exhausted with open-world games lately, but it's mostly because those games don't seem to offer really anything in their worlds for me to stay interested. Here, there's side quests and interesting lore bits crammed into just about every crevice. It helped really sell the world building for me, as someone with zero experience with DnD. I found myself investigating through most conversations and genuinely wanting to absorb the information as much as possible because it was actually interesting, for once, and delivered by actors that were giving it their all. If I could complain a little bit though, I wish the journal was handled a bit better, especially with the time sensitive sounding nature of the events taking place. Some quests are written with such mixed signals and given deceptive waypoints, that it literally caused me anxiety. It would result in me running around looking for the way to go for way too long sometimes.
This game was great. It was great for the first 2 Acts, it was even awesome. Then I beat Act 2. Oof. Act 3? Oof. Pretty much all of my criticisms revolve around this section of the game, just like most others who have beaten it. I actually find the sheer amount of people who are saying this is a 5 Star masterpiece while also openly admitting that they still haven't even set foot past Act 1 in the same sentence is insane.
I'm gonna vaguely mention some things that happen in Act 3 without directly spoiling them, but if you want to know literally nothing about Act 3 before going into it, this is your stopping point of my review.
I personally think that the pacing in Act 3 from start to finish is paced very weirdly in comparison to the first two acts. Before, I really felt as though the side quests and every little battle or tribulation weaved together very nicely no matter which scenario you went to first. Pretty much as soon as I entered the city in Act 3, the city that the characters have been talking about the entire game, the city that my character is literally from, a certain character decided "Hey. You stepped foot in my area so I'm now going to railroad you into doing my very important quest. :)" WHY? A scenario that was only triggered because I was exploring in a game meant to be heavily explored. I thought that was a very odd choice, and I didn't like it. Not to mention that most of Act 3, all of the character trauma companion quests are backloaded in this section. It made the game start to feel like a big checklist, "Ope- I did Shadowheart's therapy session, so now I gotta do Gale's." Of course, I wanted to do these quests because I cared about the plotlines that were hanging open, but I feel like they just could have been wrapped up a bit better while also intertwining themselves with the important plotlines as well. It just made Act 3 a bit of a slog to get through, especially with a certain grief fueled fight that might as well have run me over with a car. I also didn't really care for the introduction of Spoiler, Spoiler, and Spoiler. It just felt goofy the way that it was done at the end of Act 2.
And for my last trick, this section of the game is still atrociously buggy. As my playthrough went along, it ran mostly fine up until the final battles of Act 2, where I noticed some graphical bugs beginning to show up more often with every session. Once I got to Act 3 though, Jesus Christ. Baldur's Gate was supposed to be this beautiful city no one would shut up about, but all I saw was endless planes of grass with invisible walls and people floating around while the game chugged to load everything. It messed with the cutscenes endlessly. I had some weirdo conversations with some companions who were suddenly addressing me as one of the Origin characters instead of my Tav. I couldn't finish some side quests because they just simply wouldn't work. It made every session closer to the end even more painful than the last.
My last grievance: The Ending. I will not spoil, but holy shit did it give me the biggest course of blue balls I have ever been given. I spent 110 hours with my party, suffering through some grueling, endless fights, the game shitting itself to death, and the emotional weight of every character piled on top of my back, just for the ending to feel so incredibly rushed with basically zero closure to any of the characters, including mine. Some companions weren't even present. It felt like such a massive wet fart to the face, I questioned if the game bugged out and missed some scenes and it turns out that, no, it did not. This was what I was left with. The final cutscene did not load a single building or object and the final dialogue scene kept freezing because it couldn't load the transitions. That was... a way to end my playthrough, for sure.
I am happy having played this game, but it did not come without it's problems. It's definitely a unique playstyle that I had to seriously commit to learning and I am seriously glad that I did. But, this game does not stick it's landing and that's really unfortunate. The plot threads were what inspired me to keep surviving every battle despite how hard they were getting, so to see the final 25 or so hours to end up like this, really threw me off and kind of offended me.
I really do want to give this game a lot of the credit it deserves though, but it's a weird one to think about. Acts 1 and 2 are basically entire seperate RPGs worth of content and length alone, with so many diverging paths to make the adventure you want while never feeling like they're overstaying their welcome. That alone warrants this game to being fantastic. It's been a while since I truly gave a shit about such a large cast of characters. But, I cannot hand wave how salty everything in the last act made me. I still had fun though, and I'll be remembering this playthrough for a long time.
I've never participated in a full D&D campaign due to the few attempts I've tried fizzling out after a session or two. So, I don't have any knowledge on the elements of this game that were pulled from actual DnD lore and manuals or what was changed/simplified. The only dungeon I've ever been in is the public restroom of my local Walmart, so this is purely a review coming from a person who just enjoys playing a variety of wildly different games.
My first initial thought was to create a Tav that was some replication of a character I created who never saw the light of day from one of those previous DnD attempts. Enter in my Half-Orc Bard, primarily meant to cast debuffs as some sort of unga bunga saboteur to anyone who dared step to my party. Turns out, that idea was atrocious and it resulted in my first 15 or so hours getting absolutely nothing done and everyone getting absolutely raw dogged by every fight we came across. Fine. My saviour Withers came to town and the game allowed me to change things up, thank god. You can do this with any of your characters at literally any time and I can't thank them enough for including it because after this, we cruised through Act 1 like it was nothing. My character was now a dual wielding Bard with the occasional healing buffs instead. I was a bit disappointed that I couldn't necessarily craft the character I thought up in my mind, but I just attributed that to me not understanding DnD classes or mechanics, so it's whatever.
As for someone who has never played a game like this before, it was slightly overwhelming at first. By the end of it, I was glad to see a multitude of giga spells and attacks at my disposal, but to say that it wasn't confusing at first would be a huge lie. The game just kind of assumes that you'd be aware what every little dice roll means, or what concentration even is in the first place. I originally thought that buffs could stack similar to JRPGs, but it took time for me to realize that's nowhere near the case because it isn't really explained. There's some fights in the game where misclicking or getting your concentration immediately broken is very bad, so I imagine that first 15 hours would have been more manageable if it was a bit clearer. Nevertheless, we persevered.
The combat in this game has highs and lows for me. Once I finally grappled the mechanics and shifted my spells around, it started to become a lot more fun. It became pretty clear to me that pre-emptively making my life less miserable for the future was the best strategy to getting through some boring as shit fights. My character looked like a dumpster, yet had such high charisma that it meant fighting 20 less enemies in some scenarios. So, I don't even want to imagine what playing this game without it is like. The persuasion rolls were some of the funniest moments in the game for me and it actively changed the outcomes of some battles. The worst fights in this game are the ones where it's 50 vs. 4. It's incredibly tedious and the difficulty of them are purely based on the map layout and initiative roll of your characters. Act 3 has some of the most horrendous fights I've ever seen in my life. They basically boiled down to just forcing the enemies to walk through a meat grinder of AoE spells, which was incredibly unfun.
I persevered through all of that because I was genuinely intrigued in the story and characters. I was the most invested in my party of Gale/Shadowheart/Karlach, but the other characters chilling back at camp had compelling weight to them as well. There are definitely some characters who were treated with more care than others. Astarion and Shadowheart's plotlines are like 3 novels of writing in comparison to someone like Karlach, which I found pretty disappointing. I wish that the other characters interacted with each other a bit more because it kind of feels like they just are friends by default after a certain point despite never seeing them together in any capacity whatsoever.
Playing this game as an asexual person is a wild ride. Everyone wants to eat your ass in this game. I tried to make the ugliest character I could and yet, she was still a super model. You do not understand how badly I wanted to play as a goblin freak, only to realize that if I got my wish, the characters would still cry for my grubby goblin hands. I see why this is the way it is, so that everyone has an option, but they didn't need to give Wyll such a sad puppy dog face after I rejected him. I'm not complaining too much about it because it's optional content, it just took me out a bit because it continued to be the funniest thing ever. You know I still gave in and got that fire engine hot rod pussy though.
The level of pseudo-sandbox this game gives you to play in is tremendous. I've found myself getting pretty exhausted with open-world games lately, but it's mostly because those games don't seem to offer really anything in their worlds for me to stay interested. Here, there's side quests and interesting lore bits crammed into just about every crevice. It helped really sell the world building for me, as someone with zero experience with DnD. I found myself investigating through most conversations and genuinely wanting to absorb the information as much as possible because it was actually interesting, for once, and delivered by actors that were giving it their all. If I could complain a little bit though, I wish the journal was handled a bit better, especially with the time sensitive sounding nature of the events taking place. Some quests are written with such mixed signals and given deceptive waypoints, that it literally caused me anxiety. It would result in me running around looking for the way to go for way too long sometimes.
This game was great. It was great for the first 2 Acts, it was even awesome. Then I beat Act 2. Oof. Act 3? Oof. Pretty much all of my criticisms revolve around this section of the game, just like most others who have beaten it. I actually find the sheer amount of people who are saying this is a 5 Star masterpiece while also openly admitting that they still haven't even set foot past Act 1 in the same sentence is insane.
I'm gonna vaguely mention some things that happen in Act 3 without directly spoiling them, but if you want to know literally nothing about Act 3 before going into it, this is your stopping point of my review.
I personally think that the pacing in Act 3 from start to finish is paced very weirdly in comparison to the first two acts. Before, I really felt as though the side quests and every little battle or tribulation weaved together very nicely no matter which scenario you went to first. Pretty much as soon as I entered the city in Act 3, the city that the characters have been talking about the entire game, the city that my character is literally from, a certain character decided "Hey. You stepped foot in my area so I'm now going to railroad you into doing my very important quest. :)" WHY? A scenario that was only triggered because I was exploring in a game meant to be heavily explored. I thought that was a very odd choice, and I didn't like it. Not to mention that most of Act 3, all of the character trauma companion quests are backloaded in this section. It made the game start to feel like a big checklist, "Ope- I did Shadowheart's therapy session, so now I gotta do Gale's." Of course, I wanted to do these quests because I cared about the plotlines that were hanging open, but I feel like they just could have been wrapped up a bit better while also intertwining themselves with the important plotlines as well. It just made Act 3 a bit of a slog to get through, especially with a certain grief fueled fight that might as well have run me over with a car. I also didn't really care for the introduction of Spoiler, Spoiler, and Spoiler. It just felt goofy the way that it was done at the end of Act 2.
And for my last trick, this section of the game is still atrociously buggy. As my playthrough went along, it ran mostly fine up until the final battles of Act 2, where I noticed some graphical bugs beginning to show up more often with every session. Once I got to Act 3 though, Jesus Christ. Baldur's Gate was supposed to be this beautiful city no one would shut up about, but all I saw was endless planes of grass with invisible walls and people floating around while the game chugged to load everything. It messed with the cutscenes endlessly. I had some weirdo conversations with some companions who were suddenly addressing me as one of the Origin characters instead of my Tav. I couldn't finish some side quests because they just simply wouldn't work. It made every session closer to the end even more painful than the last.
My last grievance: The Ending. I will not spoil, but holy shit did it give me the biggest course of blue balls I have ever been given. I spent 110 hours with my party, suffering through some grueling, endless fights, the game shitting itself to death, and the emotional weight of every character piled on top of my back, just for the ending to feel so incredibly rushed with basically zero closure to any of the characters, including mine. Some companions weren't even present. It felt like such a massive wet fart to the face, I questioned if the game bugged out and missed some scenes and it turns out that, no, it did not. This was what I was left with. The final cutscene did not load a single building or object and the final dialogue scene kept freezing because it couldn't load the transitions. That was... a way to end my playthrough, for sure.
I am happy having played this game, but it did not come without it's problems. It's definitely a unique playstyle that I had to seriously commit to learning and I am seriously glad that I did. But, this game does not stick it's landing and that's really unfortunate. The plot threads were what inspired me to keep surviving every battle despite how hard they were getting, so to see the final 25 or so hours to end up like this, really threw me off and kind of offended me.
I really do want to give this game a lot of the credit it deserves though, but it's a weird one to think about. Acts 1 and 2 are basically entire seperate RPGs worth of content and length alone, with so many diverging paths to make the adventure you want while never feeling like they're overstaying their welcome. That alone warrants this game to being fantastic. It's been a while since I truly gave a shit about such a large cast of characters. But, I cannot hand wave how salty everything in the last act made me. I still had fun though, and I'll be remembering this playthrough for a long time.