decent concept, but horribly executed

the game is buggy as hell, missing a bunch of content, and each new patch breaks as much as it fixes - if not more

it lacks meaningful choices bc anything you do is forgotten after either a single conversation or, if you're lucky, a single long rest. my evil durge committed every atrocity possible and everyone talked to her the same way they did my goody two-shoes paladin bc there's no morality or reputation tracker in this game. i genocided the tieflings but thankfully a single good night's rest cleared that up and nobody ever brought it up again, despite gale killing refugees in cold blood himself and having a crisis wherein he almost left the party over it. in fact, just a few hours later, gale told me how much of a kind person i was, because i saved some tiefling kids - who i then went on to murder! if you let isobel be kidnapped, jaheira will come back at moonrise and join you as if it never happened, and aylin (her soulmate, apparently) will throw a quick "oh damn that sucks" at isobel's corpse and ALSO join you as if it never happened, never bringing it up again. the game is filled with fake options like that & it really falls apart once you realise that nothing you pick will actually change anything.

ties into my next issue - the game lacks features that other games have been including for decades. no morality system (in DnD???), no reputation gauge, no transmog system, no "hardening" system or equivalent, banter dries up completely after act 1, characters barely acknowledge each other in camp, and nothing happens unless tav is there to spur it forward.

but tav also has no meaningful background, either; there's no origin system or way to define who your tav is. the only thing you do is pick a menu option and sometimes you get a different dialogue line every now and then... not that it changes anything, because none of these different dialogues actually do anything to how characters perceive you. you get a single changed spoken response and maybe an approval point. absolutely nothing else.

the most variance i noticed was in act 1, between whether or not the goblins let you into the camp based on whether you picked a drow, but even that doesn't matter bc you can just shapeshift into one.

plot choices are railroaded as hell: there's only one way to resolve act 1's tadpole issue (the resolution is that you do nothing); act 2 ostensibly has two resolutions in how the shadowlands is handled, but these resolutions are "successfully complete the quest" or "fail to do the quest" (there's no actual choice here, the only choice is whether or not you do the quest - there's no nuance, like kidnapping isobel but keeping her alive after the myrkul fight just means she dies basically off-screen for no reason and no explanation is ever given and characters don't acknowledge it); act 3 is the same, with a minor superficial divergence if you picked durge.

there's barely any narrative structure at all and the game flops narrative thrust HARD. you're tadpoled and your party members spend the first long rest telling you how important this is, but you experience 0 negative consequences for ignoring this and you quickly find out that actually it's not a problem at all and there's no sense of urgency really at all.

in fact, there's only one way to "resolve" the tadpole issue (which, again, is to do literally nothing bc the prism has it sorted, so everything in act 1 is pointless), but act 1 is filled with false leads that don't accomplish anything. act 2 ends with an army marching on baldur's gate. act 3 opens with you going to a circus and fucking around doing minor sidequests because the army was completely irrelevant and was never a threat.

extremely inconsistent content between characters, too. wyll, a character whose father is mentioned throughout all the acts and rescuing him is an important plot point that ties into a main villain's ascension to power in act 3, gets the LEAST amount of content. astarion, a man whose personal quest and circumstances have absolutely no relevance to anything at all in the plot, gets 6 hours more content than wyll. wyll also has no agency in his personal quest, either - you have to directly tell him what to do bc the game neglects his development entirely.

the combat is janky, easily cheesed, and, thanks to aforementioned bugs, barely works. some turns can take over 2~5 minutes to get through bc each enemy npc takes their sweet time processing whatever random, dumbass actions they're going to get themselves killed over next.

the fans and the company and the VAs are all annoying. never seen so many parasocial relationships with a game before, it's wild. ppl defend this game like they're defending their cult leader, and the company/VAs spend so much time intruding on fan spaces. it's giving jobless.

i wish these characters were in any other crpg. i wish this game was made by any other crpg developer.