Cross-Posted to Signals and Light Cohost: https://cohost.org/SignalsAndLight/post/2800169-analyzing-baldur-s
Caveats on Experiencing "Unfinished" Games
First, I must acknowledge that not everyone will have the same experience with this game in more ways than I have EVER seen in gaming history. Not just different stories or experiences of gameplay mechanics but also wildly different amounts of bugs and experiences of how quests can fall apart if a player doesn't play carefully and willingly reload over issues. The "best case" of the game requires avoiding triggering chaotic outcomes arising from the number of opportunities that exist to provoke violence with NPCs unintentionally or how easy it is to play the game like a deranged murder hobo even though it's not written or scripted to make that a fulfilling experience. I personally ran into <5 actual bugs that affected my progression, most of which I could fix or workaround; otherwise, my only technical problems were varied UX issues (with inventory, combat mechanics, navigation, stealth, etc).
All that said, I had a FANTASTIC experience, and this is EASILY my favorite combat-focused RPG ever made, which is saying a lot, given how rough the edges are on release. I hope Larian can continue cleaning up the issues and add another layer of polish in a definitive edition so that more people can play without problems. (Though some of the possible chaotic outcomes in this game are genuinely impossible to remove given its systemic and complex nature.)
Overview
I don't think I've ever felt so mentally consumed by a video game with such a long runtime (~125 hours). Most of the other games I play that go >100 hours are just raw gameplay in a way that makes time evaporate (PvP games, Monster Hunter, etc), whereas this felt like an immense journey crammed full of memorable experiences. I don't think I've ever shouted "hell yeah!" as many times as in playing this game, always as a result of some whacky and wild story beat or incredibly cool piece of loot or mechanical benefit that majorly changed my gameplay options and turned my characters into unstoppable juggernauts. Every layer of the game is working overtime, with fantastic gameplay and entertaining stories enhanced by masterful level design and beautiful environment art that sang together in absolute harmony to offer one of the most immersive game worlds I've ever experienced.
I was so engaged in every minute of playing it that by the last stretch…Well, I was honestly burning out to a degree, like my mind had too much of it (granted, that was also due to my compulsive need to click on every book). The game probably offers a great experience to non-completionist playthroughs, and the people who replay it to find things they missed and be surprised on a second go have a lot to look forward to. Having done nearly every quest (I think I only missed completing 3), it did reach a point where I didn't feel like I was improving my experience in terms of pacing by playing so much content. However, since the game hides many of its best moments in so many corners, I also couldn't risk missing anything. Some of my favorite RPG encounters EVER are in parts of the game that are entirely optional.
But the consequence is that the game targets BREADTH by a considerable margin over depth. There are dozens of quests and scores of NPCs, and while every location might have a basement full of expository books and corpses with pocketed convenient notes, any given minor quest generally only has one essential outcome (complete the quest, sometimes with or without bloodshed) and some other pretty chaotic outcomes (kill or refuse any number of people and simply don't do anything helpful). Rumors inform me that these more chaotic outcomes, at times, also unfortunately literally break the game (mainly in Act 3).
So, let's dig into it...
World and Plot
Like the Forgotten Realms tends to be by design, everything is here to be a circus of melodramatic interactions and outcomes with a world-building style that feels like hyperactive teenagers throwing every idea that they have into a pot (though the ideas of the hyperactive teens do filter through the finesse of relatively skillful RPG writers). Faerun may have an actual hell, but the world itself is also hell, so littered with murderous cultists that I'm pretty sure a player finds more interactive corpses that their actions did not cause here than in any other game ever created. Regardless of what little effort the writing makes to have some grey areas, evil and good are literal forces in this world that talk to the player, and they are not here to make the player wax philosophical. They are here to provide the player the context to gleefully engage in battles to the death with scores of individuals without batting an eye about it.
So D&D can't be more than it's designed to be, nor can the Forgotten Realms. Take that as a given, see the game as the giant adult-themed Saturday morning cartoon that it is, and there's a lot to love! I was consistently surprised by the developments of both the macro plot and the micro stories. Even when things went exactly as I expected in a general sense due to knowing how the Forgotten Realms operate, around every corner, there was always some detail, some character moment, or some choice that kept me on my toes or made me shout (as I said above) "hell yeah!" The plot isn't mind-blowing, even though it's about blowing minds, but the heights of the heroic adventure it provides are some of the highest the genre of the Western Fantasy RPG can offer by the end of the game.
The limitations of the Forgotten Realms will be a breaking point for many who want more serious fantasy. Hell, typically, I also want more serious fantasy! But given the nature of this game world and how fun the game was to play (more on this below), I uncharacteristically did not have trouble "turning my brain off" as it were and being less preoccupied with nitpicking the lore and ethics and drama to death like I usually do.
Branching Story Paths (Good vs Evil)
In terms of structuring the game around choices, Larian takes on an approach I haven't experienced in any game quite like this one—they created a cast of NPCs who accumulate over the course of the game and follow the same road the player follows. Many of these NPCs arrive in Baldur's Gate when the player does, which blossoms into further developments and quests with these characters due to earlier events.
While maybe I've seen something like this before (NPCs mattering from early in the game until late in the game), Larian then blows up the formal nature of quest scripting by making it possible that any one of these individuals might NOT be there in later parts of the game based on the player's choices (many of which would have to be chaotic by nature, but some of which might be due to failing to complete a quest). What that means is that Larian has effectively designed the content primarily for completionists who will do what they can to keep everyone alive and fulfill everyone's needs. This makes sense because it's a heroic D&D campaign, so the "default" experience a player should want is to "save the day."
However, it runs contrary to the purpose of a BRANCHING narrative game where players want to express their characters through meaningful choices that change how the story plays out. Many of the alternative and generally "Evil" choices a player can make will lead to the deaths of several, if not literally dozens, of NPCs, and rather than opening up the door to an equal number of different (presumably evil) NPCs whom they may have sided with, it generally just means there is no alternative path (particularly because many of the evil NPCs can't be in Baldur's Gate).
Unlike Bioware's philosophy in Dragon Age: Inquisition, where the player chooses one of two sides in a (somewhat) morally grey political scenario, in this game (like I said above), most paths are strictly GOOD (be a hero), EVIL (kill everyone for no real reason), or AMBIVALENT (don't do anything). This binary choice matrix has plagued RPGs like this since they were first created. While Forgotten Realms can hardly do better than this by design, D&D definitely can, as can a branching narrative game using D&D (even if a great deal of combat is inevitable).
So even if I loved playing the game on the default heroic gameplay path where I "do all the right things, save all the people, and always win in every way," I have to admit that if someone wanted or expected more emergence, freedom, and flexibility in the storytelling, they would be justified in being disappointed in the game. While the game might seem like it's doing that sometimes, it's not doing so in the way, for instance, Disco Elysium does, and it won't fulfill the needs of players with more complex desires.
Characters and Quests
The companions are, across the board, expressive, fantastically performed and directed, and incredibly fun—and that's clearly the design pillar underlying all of them: be FUN. Unlike Bioware's best writing, this game is not about the nuances of culture or upbringing. It is instead about the epic and bizarre tribulations of a collection of classic heroic D&D characters with just enough nuance to their tragic backstories to dig the hooks in and invest the player in helping them solve their problems. This is what the game's setting allows for, so it's for the best that the writers didn't strive for a level of nuance in the companion stories that this universe would fail to support. There are moments when a savvy player might think or hope the game is setting them up for a more mature read on Faerun lore, but I think that's more in the heart of the player and less in the text of the game.
The NPCs varied in their level to grip my interest. Because there are so many of them (again, breadth versus depth), the meaning they provide in any given story beat is limited to their relevance to that story beat, which at times can be frustrating because so much is happening around some of them at all times and some of it affects them more than Larian had the scope to account for in their astronomically large dialog recording allotment. Even with that said, almost beyond belief, here are all the things that Larian decided to put their narrative scope towards when counting things that are entirely non-interactive dialog:
- Groups of NPCs have fully voiced looping ambient conversations in the world.
- Every background NPC has 1-2 fully voiced cinematic lines, the second of which only triggers when talking to them a second time (a thing most players wouldn't even do!). (Also note that while the city of Baldur's Gate introduces non-interactive background NPCs, there are still 5-20 interactive NPCs per building/area).
- Some background NPCs have more lines, including 2-3 dialog choices that the player can make to learn more about them or influence their lives (in ways that are not quest-relevant).
- Many major quest steps completed near a group of NPCs end with every single NPC in the area (whether background or more important) having 1-3 NEW fully voiced cinematic dialogs in reaction to the event.
- Many major quests and steps in those quests result in granting every single companion 1-3 fully voiced lines in reaction to that event.
Again, this dialog involves ZERO player agency other than choosing to listen to it. While I believe some games have a larger scope of recorded lines for this type of dialog, I would not be surprised if this game has the highest scope of non-interactive dialog that actually conveys meaningful information about the emotional and cultural state of literally scores of NPCs that have no gameplay relevance to the player's story or quests at all.
So, with all that laid out, I admit that I am quite a bit disappointed in the lack of depth with some of the NPCs that stick around for a lot of the game's run time! I would have preferred to have more conversations with layers of interactivity or even just expanded exposition rather than have the ability to click on 200 refugees and Baldurians and hear 1-2 lines. Larian evokes the scale and reality of the world to the player, again, through immense breadth (the player genuinely knows how scores of people in the world feel about what's happening in their city) but with little depth. I can't even have a casual friendship with a single one of these people. At best, I can save their lives so they're devoted to my cause or give me an item, and then they might as well not exist.
Is this different than most other RPGs? Absolutely not, there are only a couple of exceptions. If nothing else, it is more extensive than the average. Did Larian leave me wanting more because the breadth of their game made me able to imagine a similar game that was deeper than the one in front of me? Yeah.
"Romance"
I’m going to keep this brief because I don’t think 125-hour epic RPGs need to be preoccupied with solving the intricacies of how to deliver compelling, well-considered, and deep representations of romantic relationships. Flatly, the delivery of this idea here is incredibly flawed, easily the most frustrating and annoying part of the experience in my mind, and is unlikely to satisfy the average player, not just in terms of poor execution but also in terms of how broken it has been for millions of people playing on release (with even the developers admitting it was somehow tuned incorrectly on launch). It is utterly baffling that these companions fall head-over-heels in love with the player simply based on whether the player has the same morality as them as it regards dealing with goblins and tieflings and druids. There is simply zero narrative design overlap between the actual content of the game and this tacked-on “relationship system.”
This system’s shallow implementation appears to me to be a way to justify putting a bunch of softcore sex scenes in the game more than to allow for an equal distribution of interesting companion relationships to the player. These scenes are entertaining and titillating at best and just funny at worst, but my own experience (with Halsin and Karlach) and the experiences I’ve heard from others do not in any form or fashion sound to me like an even mildly interesting implementation of a dating or relationship system. I’ll even put aside how the characters throw themselves at the player going 100mph both sexually and romantically, in most cases it simply is not good or believable writing and it feels like nothing more than horny fan service.
Role-Playing Mechanics
I've already implied that the role-playing mechanics are pretty limited in story branching, but I must detail the D&D systems Larian ties to this content in the narrative trees. Like several RPGs of its kind, this game offers "Charisma" checks that influence the outcomes of conversations (Persuasion, Intimidation, and Deception). This system originates from D&D mechanics but, of course, hardly captures the same design utility through the sheer fact that the structure of the dialog trees can never be as creative as a real player. The narrative designers at Larian try their best to offer creative outcomes sometimes, but it's a mixed bag.
The Charisma options feel quite lazy at many critical moments of the game. Throughout Acts 1 and 3, they generally allow for mind-controlling characters to do whatever the player would want in an ideal world to accomplish their given objective. Throughout Act 2, that went in a bizarre direction, as succeeding Charisma checks often meant just mind-controlling characters into doing things actively harmful to themselves. While playing Act 2, I kept wondering why it felt like Larian didn't have the scope to write creative secondary options for solving quests beyond just "succeed one Charisma check to end it instantly," but having finished Act 3, it's pretty clear they simply didn't have the time because there were too many quests! Yet ANOTHER example of breadth over depth.
Again, the obvious point of contrast is Disco Elysium, a game designed from the ground up to prove that RPG stats can influence a branching narrative in a way that allows all stats to have equally compelling use cases in complex storytelling. And, again, D&D simply isn't equipped to do this, as nothing about the game system serves this end by design. It is only through the application of a good Dungeon Master and player creativity that anyone can bend the minimal social rules that the game provides into many possible narrative outcomes, and often the greatest depth in D&D storytelling is a result of improv and has nothing to do with the game systems themselves.
D&D Mechanics
So, unlike Dragon Age or (by far more deeply) Disco Elysium, while I may have been entertained here, I wasn't enraptured by the ideas of the world, the cultures on display, or the thoughts and feelings of the characters. But…none of that mattered to me much because the melodrama, gameplay, and exploration were so incredibly fun! What a mind-blowingly exemplary implementation of the most popular TTRPG into a video game! Despite all the little rule changes and all the fiddly bits that might not do exactly what one expects, playing with pre-existing deep D&D mechanics knowledge felt so rewarding.
I am on the record of having finished almost no turn-based strategy games in my life because I suck at them and often feel frustrated by them. In this case, with an immensely copious use of quick saves during every combat, it felt like any weird misclick I made or ability I failed to understand could be fixed with a quick load the same way it would be if I were negotiating what happened with my DM in a tabletop session. I get about as annoyed at moments like that as I do by a rude attack in Monster Hunter—will I yell, "What the fuck is going on!" sometimes? Yeah, but that's part of the fun. I am led to believe that some players save infrequently and accept the consequences of misclicks or misunderstandings of the mechanics they choose to use, and I can't say how good the game is from that angle. I have to assume it's much worse than many tactics games out there, and I frankly don't believe the designers intended the average player to get through the hardest encounters without at least some amount of reloading (if even just to start over entirely).
Lastly, the default difficulty offers a power fantasy with much more overpowered PCs than one would ever get in tabletop D&D, but that also made me love it more. Rather than scraping by, worrying about resource attrition or action economy like in other strategy games, here I could quickly make decisions and exercise a lot of mechanics in fun and creative ways without much stress. With all the potions and scrolls and (actually good!) magic items, the game gave me 5x more than I needed, and I actively avoided even using a lot of the things because there was no reason to.
Exploration
Last but absolutely not least, exploring this game world is SO GOOD. The level design is impeccable, and the use of elevation, intelligently considered architecture, and genuinely believable naturalistic environments are, bar none, the BEST an isometric game has ever accomplished. Is there some awkwardness with companion pathing, traps, and seeing through doorways? Yeah, there is, and some of that genuinely could be improved. However, for me, those minor issues were ripped apart like tissue paper by the immense beauty and meticulous design of the game environments. The art is UNBELIEVABLY varied, gorgeous, and consistent across a MASSIVE game world, and it's frankly absurd to me how little I see this brought up in any discussions of the game.
That said, the beauty of the world was doing a lot of work for me that may do nothing for a player who doesn't care about that as much. Much of the exploration content leaves things to be desired in terms of gameplay due to, yet again, breadth versus depth. I read or skimmed nearly every book, opened almost every bookshelf and 50% of the boxes and barrels (less so the later I got), and probably unlocked >80% of the chests in the game. Did I enjoy doing this because I'm a neurotic Roomba vacuum of a player? Yes. However, after a certain point, the rewards wear thin, and the narrative context gained from reading the 50th dead man's diary fails to evolve my conception of the stories or game world in a meaningful way. (Shockingly, it turns out a murder cultist really likes to do murders!)
Conclusion
At the end of this, I admit my love of this game feels like a backhanded compliment. I could nitpick it to death. I could make a 2-hour YouTube video recapping the most unhinged, broken, and bizarre issues I encountered in gameplay to make it look like nothing but a mess (including a moment where I was forced to make my companion jump off a bridge so that I could revive him in order to remove clown makeup that the game failed to remove from his character model). I could also make a 2-hour YouTube video capturing the heroic quests I went on and how I managed to turn the choices of who I deployed in battle into moments that felt like I was tangibly expressing my story even if the game didn't require or reward those choices (with Karlach the barbarian jumping off a wall in the middle of a siege and her allies following after to overcome the evil drow Mizora).
In breaking down the 125 hours I played this game, I could say so much more than I could have ever said about most other games that took me 125 hours to play. I adore Baldur's Gate 3, and from the first few hours I started playing it, I've wanted nothing more but additional silly, heroic, and wildly fun D&D 5e content presented in precisely the format this game offers, whether deep or broad.
Caveats on Experiencing "Unfinished" Games
First, I must acknowledge that not everyone will have the same experience with this game in more ways than I have EVER seen in gaming history. Not just different stories or experiences of gameplay mechanics but also wildly different amounts of bugs and experiences of how quests can fall apart if a player doesn't play carefully and willingly reload over issues. The "best case" of the game requires avoiding triggering chaotic outcomes arising from the number of opportunities that exist to provoke violence with NPCs unintentionally or how easy it is to play the game like a deranged murder hobo even though it's not written or scripted to make that a fulfilling experience. I personally ran into <5 actual bugs that affected my progression, most of which I could fix or workaround; otherwise, my only technical problems were varied UX issues (with inventory, combat mechanics, navigation, stealth, etc).
All that said, I had a FANTASTIC experience, and this is EASILY my favorite combat-focused RPG ever made, which is saying a lot, given how rough the edges are on release. I hope Larian can continue cleaning up the issues and add another layer of polish in a definitive edition so that more people can play without problems. (Though some of the possible chaotic outcomes in this game are genuinely impossible to remove given its systemic and complex nature.)
Overview
I don't think I've ever felt so mentally consumed by a video game with such a long runtime (~125 hours). Most of the other games I play that go >100 hours are just raw gameplay in a way that makes time evaporate (PvP games, Monster Hunter, etc), whereas this felt like an immense journey crammed full of memorable experiences. I don't think I've ever shouted "hell yeah!" as many times as in playing this game, always as a result of some whacky and wild story beat or incredibly cool piece of loot or mechanical benefit that majorly changed my gameplay options and turned my characters into unstoppable juggernauts. Every layer of the game is working overtime, with fantastic gameplay and entertaining stories enhanced by masterful level design and beautiful environment art that sang together in absolute harmony to offer one of the most immersive game worlds I've ever experienced.
I was so engaged in every minute of playing it that by the last stretch…Well, I was honestly burning out to a degree, like my mind had too much of it (granted, that was also due to my compulsive need to click on every book). The game probably offers a great experience to non-completionist playthroughs, and the people who replay it to find things they missed and be surprised on a second go have a lot to look forward to. Having done nearly every quest (I think I only missed completing 3), it did reach a point where I didn't feel like I was improving my experience in terms of pacing by playing so much content. However, since the game hides many of its best moments in so many corners, I also couldn't risk missing anything. Some of my favorite RPG encounters EVER are in parts of the game that are entirely optional.
But the consequence is that the game targets BREADTH by a considerable margin over depth. There are dozens of quests and scores of NPCs, and while every location might have a basement full of expository books and corpses with pocketed convenient notes, any given minor quest generally only has one essential outcome (complete the quest, sometimes with or without bloodshed) and some other pretty chaotic outcomes (kill or refuse any number of people and simply don't do anything helpful). Rumors inform me that these more chaotic outcomes, at times, also unfortunately literally break the game (mainly in Act 3).
So, let's dig into it...
World and Plot
Like the Forgotten Realms tends to be by design, everything is here to be a circus of melodramatic interactions and outcomes with a world-building style that feels like hyperactive teenagers throwing every idea that they have into a pot (though the ideas of the hyperactive teens do filter through the finesse of relatively skillful RPG writers). Faerun may have an actual hell, but the world itself is also hell, so littered with murderous cultists that I'm pretty sure a player finds more interactive corpses that their actions did not cause here than in any other game ever created. Regardless of what little effort the writing makes to have some grey areas, evil and good are literal forces in this world that talk to the player, and they are not here to make the player wax philosophical. They are here to provide the player the context to gleefully engage in battles to the death with scores of individuals without batting an eye about it.
So D&D can't be more than it's designed to be, nor can the Forgotten Realms. Take that as a given, see the game as the giant adult-themed Saturday morning cartoon that it is, and there's a lot to love! I was consistently surprised by the developments of both the macro plot and the micro stories. Even when things went exactly as I expected in a general sense due to knowing how the Forgotten Realms operate, around every corner, there was always some detail, some character moment, or some choice that kept me on my toes or made me shout (as I said above) "hell yeah!" The plot isn't mind-blowing, even though it's about blowing minds, but the heights of the heroic adventure it provides are some of the highest the genre of the Western Fantasy RPG can offer by the end of the game.
The limitations of the Forgotten Realms will be a breaking point for many who want more serious fantasy. Hell, typically, I also want more serious fantasy! But given the nature of this game world and how fun the game was to play (more on this below), I uncharacteristically did not have trouble "turning my brain off" as it were and being less preoccupied with nitpicking the lore and ethics and drama to death like I usually do.
Branching Story Paths (Good vs Evil)
In terms of structuring the game around choices, Larian takes on an approach I haven't experienced in any game quite like this one—they created a cast of NPCs who accumulate over the course of the game and follow the same road the player follows. Many of these NPCs arrive in Baldur's Gate when the player does, which blossoms into further developments and quests with these characters due to earlier events.
While maybe I've seen something like this before (NPCs mattering from early in the game until late in the game), Larian then blows up the formal nature of quest scripting by making it possible that any one of these individuals might NOT be there in later parts of the game based on the player's choices (many of which would have to be chaotic by nature, but some of which might be due to failing to complete a quest). What that means is that Larian has effectively designed the content primarily for completionists who will do what they can to keep everyone alive and fulfill everyone's needs. This makes sense because it's a heroic D&D campaign, so the "default" experience a player should want is to "save the day."
However, it runs contrary to the purpose of a BRANCHING narrative game where players want to express their characters through meaningful choices that change how the story plays out. Many of the alternative and generally "Evil" choices a player can make will lead to the deaths of several, if not literally dozens, of NPCs, and rather than opening up the door to an equal number of different (presumably evil) NPCs whom they may have sided with, it generally just means there is no alternative path (particularly because many of the evil NPCs can't be in Baldur's Gate).
Unlike Bioware's philosophy in Dragon Age: Inquisition, where the player chooses one of two sides in a (somewhat) morally grey political scenario, in this game (like I said above), most paths are strictly GOOD (be a hero), EVIL (kill everyone for no real reason), or AMBIVALENT (don't do anything). This binary choice matrix has plagued RPGs like this since they were first created. While Forgotten Realms can hardly do better than this by design, D&D definitely can, as can a branching narrative game using D&D (even if a great deal of combat is inevitable).
So even if I loved playing the game on the default heroic gameplay path where I "do all the right things, save all the people, and always win in every way," I have to admit that if someone wanted or expected more emergence, freedom, and flexibility in the storytelling, they would be justified in being disappointed in the game. While the game might seem like it's doing that sometimes, it's not doing so in the way, for instance, Disco Elysium does, and it won't fulfill the needs of players with more complex desires.
Characters and Quests
The companions are, across the board, expressive, fantastically performed and directed, and incredibly fun—and that's clearly the design pillar underlying all of them: be FUN. Unlike Bioware's best writing, this game is not about the nuances of culture or upbringing. It is instead about the epic and bizarre tribulations of a collection of classic heroic D&D characters with just enough nuance to their tragic backstories to dig the hooks in and invest the player in helping them solve their problems. This is what the game's setting allows for, so it's for the best that the writers didn't strive for a level of nuance in the companion stories that this universe would fail to support. There are moments when a savvy player might think or hope the game is setting them up for a more mature read on Faerun lore, but I think that's more in the heart of the player and less in the text of the game.
The NPCs varied in their level to grip my interest. Because there are so many of them (again, breadth versus depth), the meaning they provide in any given story beat is limited to their relevance to that story beat, which at times can be frustrating because so much is happening around some of them at all times and some of it affects them more than Larian had the scope to account for in their astronomically large dialog recording allotment. Even with that said, almost beyond belief, here are all the things that Larian decided to put their narrative scope towards when counting things that are entirely non-interactive dialog:
- Groups of NPCs have fully voiced looping ambient conversations in the world.
- Every background NPC has 1-2 fully voiced cinematic lines, the second of which only triggers when talking to them a second time (a thing most players wouldn't even do!). (Also note that while the city of Baldur's Gate introduces non-interactive background NPCs, there are still 5-20 interactive NPCs per building/area).
- Some background NPCs have more lines, including 2-3 dialog choices that the player can make to learn more about them or influence their lives (in ways that are not quest-relevant).
- Many major quest steps completed near a group of NPCs end with every single NPC in the area (whether background or more important) having 1-3 NEW fully voiced cinematic dialogs in reaction to the event.
- Many major quests and steps in those quests result in granting every single companion 1-3 fully voiced lines in reaction to that event.
Again, this dialog involves ZERO player agency other than choosing to listen to it. While I believe some games have a larger scope of recorded lines for this type of dialog, I would not be surprised if this game has the highest scope of non-interactive dialog that actually conveys meaningful information about the emotional and cultural state of literally scores of NPCs that have no gameplay relevance to the player's story or quests at all.
So, with all that laid out, I admit that I am quite a bit disappointed in the lack of depth with some of the NPCs that stick around for a lot of the game's run time! I would have preferred to have more conversations with layers of interactivity or even just expanded exposition rather than have the ability to click on 200 refugees and Baldurians and hear 1-2 lines. Larian evokes the scale and reality of the world to the player, again, through immense breadth (the player genuinely knows how scores of people in the world feel about what's happening in their city) but with little depth. I can't even have a casual friendship with a single one of these people. At best, I can save their lives so they're devoted to my cause or give me an item, and then they might as well not exist.
Is this different than most other RPGs? Absolutely not, there are only a couple of exceptions. If nothing else, it is more extensive than the average. Did Larian leave me wanting more because the breadth of their game made me able to imagine a similar game that was deeper than the one in front of me? Yeah.
"Romance"
I’m going to keep this brief because I don’t think 125-hour epic RPGs need to be preoccupied with solving the intricacies of how to deliver compelling, well-considered, and deep representations of romantic relationships. Flatly, the delivery of this idea here is incredibly flawed, easily the most frustrating and annoying part of the experience in my mind, and is unlikely to satisfy the average player, not just in terms of poor execution but also in terms of how broken it has been for millions of people playing on release (with even the developers admitting it was somehow tuned incorrectly on launch). It is utterly baffling that these companions fall head-over-heels in love with the player simply based on whether the player has the same morality as them as it regards dealing with goblins and tieflings and druids. There is simply zero narrative design overlap between the actual content of the game and this tacked-on “relationship system.”
This system’s shallow implementation appears to me to be a way to justify putting a bunch of softcore sex scenes in the game more than to allow for an equal distribution of interesting companion relationships to the player. These scenes are entertaining and titillating at best and just funny at worst, but my own experience (with Halsin and Karlach) and the experiences I’ve heard from others do not in any form or fashion sound to me like an even mildly interesting implementation of a dating or relationship system. I’ll even put aside how the characters throw themselves at the player going 100mph both sexually and romantically, in most cases it simply is not good or believable writing and it feels like nothing more than horny fan service.
Role-Playing Mechanics
I've already implied that the role-playing mechanics are pretty limited in story branching, but I must detail the D&D systems Larian ties to this content in the narrative trees. Like several RPGs of its kind, this game offers "Charisma" checks that influence the outcomes of conversations (Persuasion, Intimidation, and Deception). This system originates from D&D mechanics but, of course, hardly captures the same design utility through the sheer fact that the structure of the dialog trees can never be as creative as a real player. The narrative designers at Larian try their best to offer creative outcomes sometimes, but it's a mixed bag.
The Charisma options feel quite lazy at many critical moments of the game. Throughout Acts 1 and 3, they generally allow for mind-controlling characters to do whatever the player would want in an ideal world to accomplish their given objective. Throughout Act 2, that went in a bizarre direction, as succeeding Charisma checks often meant just mind-controlling characters into doing things actively harmful to themselves. While playing Act 2, I kept wondering why it felt like Larian didn't have the scope to write creative secondary options for solving quests beyond just "succeed one Charisma check to end it instantly," but having finished Act 3, it's pretty clear they simply didn't have the time because there were too many quests! Yet ANOTHER example of breadth over depth.
Again, the obvious point of contrast is Disco Elysium, a game designed from the ground up to prove that RPG stats can influence a branching narrative in a way that allows all stats to have equally compelling use cases in complex storytelling. And, again, D&D simply isn't equipped to do this, as nothing about the game system serves this end by design. It is only through the application of a good Dungeon Master and player creativity that anyone can bend the minimal social rules that the game provides into many possible narrative outcomes, and often the greatest depth in D&D storytelling is a result of improv and has nothing to do with the game systems themselves.
D&D Mechanics
So, unlike Dragon Age or (by far more deeply) Disco Elysium, while I may have been entertained here, I wasn't enraptured by the ideas of the world, the cultures on display, or the thoughts and feelings of the characters. But…none of that mattered to me much because the melodrama, gameplay, and exploration were so incredibly fun! What a mind-blowingly exemplary implementation of the most popular TTRPG into a video game! Despite all the little rule changes and all the fiddly bits that might not do exactly what one expects, playing with pre-existing deep D&D mechanics knowledge felt so rewarding.
I am on the record of having finished almost no turn-based strategy games in my life because I suck at them and often feel frustrated by them. In this case, with an immensely copious use of quick saves during every combat, it felt like any weird misclick I made or ability I failed to understand could be fixed with a quick load the same way it would be if I were negotiating what happened with my DM in a tabletop session. I get about as annoyed at moments like that as I do by a rude attack in Monster Hunter—will I yell, "What the fuck is going on!" sometimes? Yeah, but that's part of the fun. I am led to believe that some players save infrequently and accept the consequences of misclicks or misunderstandings of the mechanics they choose to use, and I can't say how good the game is from that angle. I have to assume it's much worse than many tactics games out there, and I frankly don't believe the designers intended the average player to get through the hardest encounters without at least some amount of reloading (if even just to start over entirely).
Lastly, the default difficulty offers a power fantasy with much more overpowered PCs than one would ever get in tabletop D&D, but that also made me love it more. Rather than scraping by, worrying about resource attrition or action economy like in other strategy games, here I could quickly make decisions and exercise a lot of mechanics in fun and creative ways without much stress. With all the potions and scrolls and (actually good!) magic items, the game gave me 5x more than I needed, and I actively avoided even using a lot of the things because there was no reason to.
Exploration
Last but absolutely not least, exploring this game world is SO GOOD. The level design is impeccable, and the use of elevation, intelligently considered architecture, and genuinely believable naturalistic environments are, bar none, the BEST an isometric game has ever accomplished. Is there some awkwardness with companion pathing, traps, and seeing through doorways? Yeah, there is, and some of that genuinely could be improved. However, for me, those minor issues were ripped apart like tissue paper by the immense beauty and meticulous design of the game environments. The art is UNBELIEVABLY varied, gorgeous, and consistent across a MASSIVE game world, and it's frankly absurd to me how little I see this brought up in any discussions of the game.
That said, the beauty of the world was doing a lot of work for me that may do nothing for a player who doesn't care about that as much. Much of the exploration content leaves things to be desired in terms of gameplay due to, yet again, breadth versus depth. I read or skimmed nearly every book, opened almost every bookshelf and 50% of the boxes and barrels (less so the later I got), and probably unlocked >80% of the chests in the game. Did I enjoy doing this because I'm a neurotic Roomba vacuum of a player? Yes. However, after a certain point, the rewards wear thin, and the narrative context gained from reading the 50th dead man's diary fails to evolve my conception of the stories or game world in a meaningful way. (Shockingly, it turns out a murder cultist really likes to do murders!)
Conclusion
At the end of this, I admit my love of this game feels like a backhanded compliment. I could nitpick it to death. I could make a 2-hour YouTube video recapping the most unhinged, broken, and bizarre issues I encountered in gameplay to make it look like nothing but a mess (including a moment where I was forced to make my companion jump off a bridge so that I could revive him in order to remove clown makeup that the game failed to remove from his character model). I could also make a 2-hour YouTube video capturing the heroic quests I went on and how I managed to turn the choices of who I deployed in battle into moments that felt like I was tangibly expressing my story even if the game didn't require or reward those choices (with Karlach the barbarian jumping off a wall in the middle of a siege and her allies following after to overcome the evil drow Mizora).
In breaking down the 125 hours I played this game, I could say so much more than I could have ever said about most other games that took me 125 hours to play. I adore Baldur's Gate 3, and from the first few hours I started playing it, I've wanted nothing more but additional silly, heroic, and wildly fun D&D 5e content presented in precisely the format this game offers, whether deep or broad.