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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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Oh my goodness 🤣

Meanwhile, Shadowheart keeps trying to get into my (Astarion's) pants even though I keep telling her I'd rather we stay just friends, and Gale who (by the estimation I've formed of his character so far) is a total slut tells me that we're not yet friendly enough for that level of intimacy.

Looks like I'll be spending my nights chastely and if I wanted to get some, I should have rolled up a githyanki character. Who knew they were the sex-maniac species of the game? Though yeah, I have also been fending off Lae'zal because uh, well, she's inclined to be a bit too quick off the trigger about holding a sword to my throat and assuring me she'll make it fast, I won't feel a thing.

..she was hitting on my drow character on second rest or something. Apparently they are into casual sex only or something like that.

Writers have really outdone themselves with making the githyanki look like complete assholes. However, she's a great fighter and easy to manipulate, plus you can hide her goblin.-like features with minor magical items ..

I don't mind her features, it took me a little while to get used to them, but now she just looks to me like she has a chimpanzee face or something. She's normal for her species.

Though since I'm not interested in banging a chimpanzee, that may be part of why I'm "thanks but no thanks" to her 😁 The githyanki do get the short end of the stick in being "species that you wouldn't mind if they collectively fell off a cliff". Even though she's a good fighter, I'm still "nah you stay back at camp" because she's just too irritating to deal with in the party.