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:
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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.
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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.
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Story discussion only in the 'lore discussion' thread.
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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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Notes -
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).
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