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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
Story discussion only in the 'lore discussion' thread.
-
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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I am by no definition a gamer. I liked Larian's Divinity games so I tried this one way back when it was in early release, bounced off the fight system and forgot all about it until the official release. Right now I'm slowly (very slowly) making my way around it, mainly by ignoring the main plot driving you to get to Baldur's Gate and just wandering around exploring the world, which is my main interest.
I'm enjoying it, mostly because I'm also ignoring all the stuff about romance and whatever other woke/culture war topics are being thrashed out (no, I do not care about the bear-effing because I'm not going anywhere that kind of thing). My main complaint is the usual complaints people had with the Divinity games: travelling around the map is so damn slow (the waypoints are not useful for "I want to walk from here to there but be able to move faster than a shuffle") and the combat system (oh, so my party's momentum lets us move three steps and then we're done, but the NPC mobs can hit us three times in a row? how does that work, eh, Larian?)
Yeah, I'm dying but not quite so much as I expected, and at least when I respawn I have a good idea what not to do this time round. So I'd say it's 6 out of 10 experience so far, might bump that up higher as I get better at what the damn game wants me to do.
The most frustrating feature missing from the old games, at least for me so far, is the ability to right click on the map and tell my party to move to that location. Why do I have to micromanage the act of walking from one side of the map to the other?
More options
Context Copy link
... three steps ? There's plenty of items that give you momentum, rogues can dash and have an action.
The damnably slow AI moves though. IF there's 6 mooks and each of them moves for 3 seconds and 'thinks' for .5 seconds before moving, you either have to have great DPS or grit your teeth..
It's also part of the layout, I keep forgetting I can use Dash because the buttons are so small and similar. But you're right about the slow AI where there are six mooks and each has a turn and is 'thinking' about where it can go. I'm going "hurry up so I can get this over, my party should be able to smash this low-level group instead of standing around waiting for each of you to make your move".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link