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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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  • I hate rests as a resource system. It feels like it breaks power fantasy when a character can only do things a few times a day that they ought to be able to do at will, especially the weapon maneuvers. There's no believable reason why my character can only do a flourish with their sword once an hour. It certainly wouldn't cost them more energy than leaping 5 meters, which they can do every turn.
  • Related: The game expects you to rest a lot, and weaves in story progression during each night. .. but it also rewards you for not resting. There are incredibly powerful buffs that get applied once to your party during various story events and then last until your next long rest, and then you can't get them back. (Eg. +1d4 radiant damage on weapon attacks, +1d6 to attack rolls, ability checks, saves)
  • Some builds and features are so good/broken/fun that they make everything else feel lacklustre. Eg. Tavern Brawler (+str to attack & damage for unarmed + throwing). Eldritch Blast (The best damage cantrip for only 2 levels in warlock, long range, deals 1d10 + cha, pushes enemies, and gets extra beams scaling with character level without any more investment).
  • Common for CRPGs like this: Items and ability features are a total clusterfuck. With the exact same rules text, some items work on all weapon attacks, some only on melee. Some apply to throws. Some don't. The only way to know for sure is to test. There are some bonkers interactions where one effect procs another, which procs the first again and so on.

I was hoping that bonkers interaction would have been fixed from EA. I didn't actually test at launch. It's definitely a glitch.

One of the reasons I've spent so long on the game is that I like to drag out each period as long as possible so I end up in a lot of fights without spell-slots.

I don't mind requiring rest, but I'd like it if time were actually passing and the rests were in-game.

E.g. in Icewind Dale, you had to find a good spot to rest and even then you got disturbed now and then..