My thoughts on Baldur's Gate 3
This might just be the best RPG game ever created, and whatever you say game devs this should be a new benchmark for RPG game development! Let me touch down on some great, less great and just general experiences and thoughts around playing through this game ^_^
This game feels like it took the best parts of Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, Dragon Age Origins, 2 and Inquisition, Divinity Original Sin and Witcher 3 and just made the optimal game ever.
The character creator - amazing. All the choices you need without being overly complicated. Lots of beautiful moving hair. Does not make you create your character in the green light of the Fade (looking at you DAI). 10/10.
The intro is epic and highly immersive, beautiful, scary, intense and a great introduction to the story.
The graphics and environments are STUNNING and immersive. The devs said they wanted to create an experience that is like the one you have with a group of friends going on a pen and paper adventure when it comes to environment epicness and magical story element, and they have.
The companions are insanely well written and voiced, and most importantly their personal quests are intrisincally linked to the main story in a way that almost no other of those games I listed above managed. And the multitude of characters you can enlist and get to know is perfectly diverse, and it gives you great choice when it comes to how you want your playthrough and party to be.
Going back to Dragon Age Origins and voicing everyone else but not the main character to instead focus on a multitude of choices, hooray and yes! It's wonderful!
Characters aren't gender bound in their sexuality, as a bi pan gamer I thank you from the bottom of my heart that you enabled us to create and write our own romance stories instead of making out genders the most important part of the storytelling of the game.
The music is epic and amazing, tear inducing <3 Just wow, queue on Spotify in repeat mood.
The books are great; they are never too long like they can be in Elder Scrolls games but just the perfect addon to the rest of the content to deepen the lore.
Outfits and dyes; the diversity is through the roof in all the good ways and it's not all armor bikini. Like, you can have raunchy underwear and bikini dress if you want to (late game, for gold) but there is all kinds of armor and outfits for all kinds of characters and needs and it's just so in line with the lore of the world. Thank you!
What I would have liked improved
A way for us to actually hear the companions banter even though we are not exactly over them with the camera. I have missed at least 80% of the banter because you have to zoom out to create a path to walk for them. The party banter needs it's own volume setting and it needs to be heard no matter where your camera is.
Inventory management; more bags with autosort, and much better "Sort by type" sorting (the dyes where all over the place o.O) and and less times the sorting bugs out. Also the possibility to sort according to the unsual themes in the vendor screen. Perhaps even a subcategory of buttons for "armor, weapons, potions, books" and so on.
Better warnings when you are about to cast another concentration skill while already concentrating on something.
There was one NPC I honestly disliked very much that I felt broke the immersion and it is the bloated bartender son in Act 2. It was full on modern Resident Evil vibes and not at all a very Dungeons & Dragons type of character. Nope nope. That whole area was just weird, far too modern in comparison to the rest of the game.
Bugs that screwed with my game
A bug that makes the character portraits go black or weird if you do not have your graphical settings on ultra for everything, please fix that one Larian!
Shadowhearts friend disappeared, rip.
A romance scene was deleted due to too many long rest cutscenes getting stacked on each other, and it put me into a fight with steel watchers instead.
The city houses in Act three constantly loaded their objects way before their walls which messed with countless cutscenes where the only background was the sky and a floating bed. I really hope they can fix this so the walls are loaded first.
My journey through the game
Act 1 is amazingly well polished and filled with exploration, wonder and well balanced magical content.
The game's incredible way of letting you choose whatever way you want to do things is both a blessing and a curse. It makes for wonderful content; you can sneak, persuade, kill everyone, you can be good, evil, chaotic, neutral, wise, stupid, decieving or intimidating, you can miss whole quest lines, areas and characters, or you can stumble into the most obscure little nooks with lore tidbits. It's daunting, and really cool that they give you so little guidance and so many options. The openness and vague nature of the Journal - akin to the original games - are sometimes a fun challenge and sometimes for me too scary to handle.
Just because you can never be sure if your choices lead to what you want or the death of everyone making choices can be a bit too scary for me sometimes and I find myself relying on guides to be able to choose. Not optimal, but that's mostly down to personal preference. In those moments I long for the railroaded stories of Mass Effect, but those moments with more railroaded questlines are also there in BG3 and they are amazing.
Act 2 was honestly really scary, the atmosphere was completely different and they did an amazing job creating a frightening cursed land. The only "weird" thing here for me is how very "steampunk" the game turns, which continues into Act 3 as well, which is a testament to the whole American and D&D view on fantasy settings. It is what it is, I'm just not a fan of that kind of setting mixing.
I also developed a fear of long resting here somewhere because I had quests that failed when going to the camp or resting and there is like no telling what those are so I just started doing as much as I could between rests which made the cutscenes during the rests go haywire and fight with each other.
Act 3 had an amazing beginning, and fun well crafted areas. The performance was terrible and kinda buggy due to the many NPC:s and assets in the area. The villains and their quests and areas were great!
I think I did some personal quests a bit early while I should have waited until I was a higher level, they were pretty punishing. When I reached level 12 with a gazillion summons nothing was really difficult anymore.
In the end I had basically every ally possible (except for Astarion's vampire buddys T_T) but I only used the strange ox and dame Aylin, who survived, and iron hand gnomes and city guards (who were killed by mind flayer arcanists) since I don't want people to die.
What the heck Larian, that's not ok. No reasonable closure on my romance, no tale of what happens to everyone, I just got a cutscene with Karlach and some lines from Gale. I really hope they are working on expanding on this as we speak and there are some indications that they are.
It wasn't full on "Mass Effect 3 at launch" but not too far from it. I am disappoint... And on that note:
It started amazing with both Astarion and Shadowheart, beautiful stories both. Up until the ending of Act 1 it was amazing and peachy pie. During Act 2 not much happens at all, except for Astarion breaking up with me over a drow and her blood. The horror... I had to break up with Shadowheart to be with Astarion, and at least we could kiss.
But that was about it, the only thing after that until the end of the game was the main personal quest of that character - where I missed a whole part because I couldn't find his siblings - and I did that waaay too soon, and I chose the soft ending which just made him sad and brooding and then there was nothing except for him slut shaming me when I slept with the incubus and scenes bugging out, as well as no real ending.
It started so well, and it ended with emptiness and sadness. Apparently he also has new voice lines during the final fight that I missed T_T
Amazing game, 9/10 until they patch the ending and pace the cut scenes during long rests better and make the lower city less laggy. I am perfectly confident in that within a year all this will have happened and there will be no games able to rival this one in the scope of epicness and emotion <3
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