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No_one  1yr ago (text post)   3599 thread views

Baldur's Gate 3 thread (no spoilers outside of spoiler tags) - reviews, technical matters, griping etc.

Intro

Baldur's Gate 3 is a sprawling, slightly kitschy, long-winded,accessible yet also quite challenging[1] role-playing game with fairly high production values that apparently pissed off other CRPG devs.

A sort of interactive pulp swords & sorcery novel. It's a flawed if IMO provisionally worthy yet lesser sequel to Baldur's Gate 2. Lesser but still rather good.

It is like heroin to CRPG types despite a slight tinge of woke, the dumb and optional romance system, and some flaws which are going to be rectified by mods fairly quickly or solved by the time you get to Baldur's Gate and can actually buy a fucking quiver, gem pouch or potion case. Romances are optional, the personal quests of party members are fairly interesting and quite decent afaict.

It allows up to 4 people to play what's essentially a D&D campaign without someone having to be GM. Perhaps some people would like to play it together in the evenings and it might strengthen this community? If playing thrice weekly for 4 hours, you could probably clear it under half a year even with a bit of save-scumming that's necessary for some of the tough fights.

Don't rush- perhaps Larian will give it paused realtime or FPS play or just speed up the computer turns which should be instant but sometimes (5% of the time) take 200-300 ms to decide per enemy mook.

As it's a significant cultural artifact and probably of interest to enough people on this forum, I believe it deserves its own thread.

For mods: ||It's not related to 'science, politics or philosophy', however, I feel it maybe deserves an exception due to its high profile. Factorio, a decade old game popular with Motte kind of people has 29 hits in search, BG3 has 25 mostly from the last 2 weeks. All argument and no play makes Jack a dull boy, no ? ||

Rules:

  1. Please post in the appropriate subthread. I'm going to start with 'reviews, technical issues, rant & gripe, gameplay advice, lore'. Feel free to make another top-level subthread if it doesn't fit into the other categories.

  2. For story and lore discussion not known to people familiar with general D&D, use spoiler tags, which are doubled pipes = '|' repeated twice without the quotes. Spoiler tag end is another set of doubled pipes.

  3. Story discussion only in the 'lore discussion' thread.

  4. Please report any comments spoiling the plot outside of the stuff that's in the intro cinematic.

[1]: I'm at around +2sd of ice people mental acuity and a disgusting minmaxing scrub who almost cleared** the infamous 'tactics' mod for BG2+ToB and I'm being challenged by the high difficulty fights in BG3. Even a run-of-the mill fight turns deadly if you're not paying attention, and certain fights are positively malicious.

And I'm just in chapter 2 atm. Yes, if you want you can re-roll PC and every party member for every dungeon but in essence that's just like save-scumming but worse. You don't have to do it, and I only re-rolled main char because I was unfamiliar with the ruleset and wanted to try a few different options. The dungeon puzzles, so far, seem mostly bloody obvious, I've encountered some mildly challenging treasure related ones, surely there's going to be a few good ones too.

**am not sure I ever cleared the final fight of the entire game with the tactics mod.

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Reviews, including partial ones.

OK, Baldur's Gate 3 isn't a bad game, but I think there's a temptation to criticize it because of it's absurd 96 Metacritic/Opencritic score. PC Gamer gave it their highest score in like 20 years, which is just ridiculous. I think that's where it's coming from. It's not even clear that this is the best game of this year (I don't think it's necessarily not, but we'll see after the Fall releases), let alone in many years. I'm having fun with it, but not more than I had with, say, Jedi: Survivor.

CRPGs or any story-driven RPGs are about writing. Whether you're listening or reading, you're spending dozens of hours consuming written content. The graphics, animations, levels, even the gameplay to some extent are set dressing for "the campaign", ie. the writing. That doesn't mean they're not important, but these games are held together by their writing. And BG3's writing feels like Divinity Original Sin 2.5, which is to say it doesn't feel very good.

I mean, you're right, but there's people who enjoy the battles and the kill / loot / repeat more than the writing.

I mean, I'm fairly sure I finished Icewind Dale, a game which is nothing but one long dungeon crawl, battle after battle after battle. (And i'm feeling like playing it again tbh with mods).

I'm personally enjoying the game a lot. I'm at the beginning of Act 3 and haven't encountered that many bugs so far, although I heard it can get rough towards the end. Hopefully I don't softlock. Otherwise it's been a great experience.

Most of the other reviews so far have been pretty negative. I feel this forum is slipping towards the 4chan consensus of "everything that's popular sucks, the only things that don't suck are too obscure to really talk about due to their low playercount or because they're 20+ years old at this point".

...question re: act 1/2.

How many items did you forge from adamantine ?

I only got one chance. When I turned on the lava, the forge boss appeared, and I had to fight it. After, I used the forge to create some armor. I found some more mithril ore later, and when I returned, the game broke the machine, and I couldn't use it again. After playing through the Divinity games, this kind of quest-breaking bug wasn't a surprise.

Known bug, I think. Larian says patch 2 is on its way fairly soon and will focus more on bug fixes of this general sort.

Great to see where Larian's priorities lie: First patch -- Romantic fixes. "We need to make sure people can do romance bug free!"; Second patch -- Quest bug fixes.

Same happened to me.

You get 2, and I'd recommend getting medium or heavy armor since the weapons are fairly mediocre compared to alternatives, while the armor can easily last until the end of the game.

... it didn't occur to me the other mithril ore item would be that close, and the forge completely bugged out afterwards, so I've only got the shield.

Should've got the plate mail, dammit.

everything that's popular sucks, the only things that don't suck are too obscure to really talk about due to their low playercount or because they're 20+ years old at this point

There's a lot of truth to it, though. Something very popular will almost always be optimized for sufficient-mass-appeal-to-sell rather than sufficient-niche-appeal-to-earn-glowing-reviews-from-internet-contrarians.

be optimized for sufficient-mass-appeal-to-sell

Some works might be like that, but I feel this sentiment is often misused by contrarians to reason backwards without providing evidence. How is BG3 "optimized for mass appeal to sell"? I grant maybe the ubiquitous horniness goes towards that, but what about the gameplay? This game severely punishes mistakes, which isn't something I'd say an average normie consumer is really looking for.

Reviving a reputed franchise + Horniness? I'm honestly not speaking specifically of BG3 here - I'd need to have played it!

A reputed franchise from 20 years ago when gaming was a niche hobby enjoyed by a fraction of todays potential audience.

Not sure this would be the first franchise I‘d revive when looking for mass appeal.

That being said, it’s probably a well-known franchise within the niche of CRPG fans … which is sizeable, but still not huge (especially since it probably is still very PC-focused … while these games are released on consoles nowadays, they are still mostly created for and played with with mouse and keyboard).

Not sure this would be the first franchise I‘d revive when looking for mass appeal.

It, uh, took them 20 years to revive it?

Interestingly, of my friends playing the game at the moment, all of the pc gamers have moved on, while my console gaming friends are still fairly addicted to bg3. Anecdata, I know, but it also makes sense to me. The existence of a console port is proof of mass appeal and I assume wotc wouldn't have given the baldurs gate license to spiderweb software, even though every crpg player knows Vogel has mastered the formula, because no normie has ever heard of them and they wouldn't make beaucoup bucks.

I'm also enjoying it a lot .. but there are so many weird flaws.

For example, the interface stuff, the cumbersome party member swapping - you can't tell X to go to camp and send Y back..

Also recently ran into a horrifically bad fight and the game simply wouldn't let me bait these guys into meeting the very tough undead group I preferred to avoid..

I agree the interface really could use some love, especially the "group by type" for inventory which is almost worthless right now. Would also be good to have a "search for itemname in camp chest + all char inventories". Character swapping is also cumbersome but I rarely do it so it's not that big of a deal for me personally.

Also recently ran into a horrifically bad fight and the game simply wouldn't let me bait these guys into meeting the very tough undead group I preferred to avoid..

Not sure what you mean by this.

Yeah, the "group by type" isn't, not that I can see; some items that should be in a row with others aren't. Means I keep fumbling around the inventory going "I could have sworn I had that particular scroll/potion I need right now".

Group by type largely works. What works best is going to latest and just sending everything to camp. Once you have huge piles it gets less tedious to sort it by type and mass assign.

Why they didn't make an option to put 'add every item of this type to wares' automatically I do not understand.

search works. I've started to just cram every scroll into one backpack and search.

That's a useful hint, thanks!

The undead are hostile to almost everyone. The group in question was an astral hit squad, 100% some random cursed undead would attack them on sight.

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