The turn-based combat made the game really tedious. The 3D camera made me want to throw something at the monitor. The story is awful. The companions are unlikable and hypersexual. The environments are often so over the top they wrap around into boorishness. The reddit-style humor (like the "poop knife") was just completely inappropriate. The unfinished state and constant patches made me feel like I was doing QA for free.
I loved BG2, but this wasn't what I wanted at all.
For each turn on the turn based combat, there’s overhead and waiting required. The characters slowly accelerate as they start to move and take their turns. Sometimes it feels like forever by the time you get control of your characters again.
Some of the battles are so one-sided against you. You have to come back later after grinding everything in the map.
Inventory management is horrible.
I could go on, but I’d be preaching to the choir. But I’ll just say it is an unfinished game.
I had the same experience at first but it really just comes down to using all resources the game gives you. For me it got significantly easier once I stopped hoarding items. The difficulty seems very dependent on playstyle and motivation to optimize damage, I've seen people destroy bossfights with 10+ enemies in one turn with a single playable character.
I did expect BG3 would have an NSFW on/off setting though - if only for the benefit of streamers. I guess not one thorough enough for okasaki?
Each to their own.
It was an incredibly stale game awards, nothing really has been stand out shown to be fair, except 1 or 2 titles.
I don't think the pseudo-RT pause-unpause gameplay of BG2 would show up in AAA either.
> The reddit-style humor (like the "poop knife") was just completely inappropriate.
Larian games tend to do this. Note that intersection of sets of people who worked on BGs 2 and 3 is most likely an empty set.
I would rather complain that it wasn’t more like divinity. Divinity’s game design was vastly superior to 5e. But it clearly is a BG sequel. The plot connections are pretty strong. Perhaps more than ought to have been expected
It's amazing that we have two great games that modernize the formula in different ways - Pathfinder showing how to do the old style with modern tech and BG3 interpreting it.
Having them try to pretend to be 1990s/2000s-era Bioware would have been a disaster (even today’s Bioware wouldn’t be able to do that).
The romance has basically no agency and it’s weird that multiple side characters want to fuck you out of nowhere before the person people are identifying as your partner. Frankly the sexual tone of the game is super weird. It’s very tame despite how horny everyone at least for the characters I chose.
The story doesn’t offer you many forks to branch off of. Act 2 is particularly disappointing in this regard.
Act 3 is kind of slog of ticking off boxes and losses the appeal that Act 1 offered imo.
Stopping leveling up at level 12 near the beginning of Act 3 was super lame.
Several character arcs felt extremely underdeveloped (mol, Arabella, zevlor, karlach).
It’s still pretty good though. Good writing and good production values can carry it. Divinity 2 with BG3 production values would have been much better though imo.
Which is probably why you and the OP had such different experience.
Split screen did seem to have some bugginess whereby side characters would randomly decide they wanted to fuck whichever player talked to them first, regardless of past interactions.
other than that i do remember the companions being really horny for me at the big camp party in act 1. i did find it jarring but one perspective that i liked was that you could look at it as casual sex - games usually treat sex as an end goal for relationship mechanics. its still hard to square it up with almost everyone wanting to get in your pants - but i think that's a by-product of making sure players have choice and i can live with that. it also only happened to me once and once i turned everyone down i wasn't interested in they left the matter alone ( except Gale lol )
Divinity 2’s fighting was very unusual but I think it was great in retrospect.
I wonder if that will happen - Larian never released any DLCs for their games, even for successful ones like D:OS2.
Are you serious that the "authenticity and believability" of a fantasy RPG have been compromised by some gay romance?
On a personal note, this was the first time in my life I got to play a game at launch. The hype and excitement of playing alongside everyone who was discovering the game at the same time as me was magical.
I‘m playing on PS5 and Switch, where no title came out I enjoyed until Tears of the Kingdom.
But even that game had me a little disappointed, because the recycling of the map kills the wonder of discovery. I stopped somewhere in the middle.
Mario Wonder, Spider-Man 2 are ok, but no GOTYs. I didn’t play BG3 yet because I‘m no fan of turn based RPGs.
Due to the weak start of the year I played Bloodborne for the first time and it is my GOTY.
BG3 however has been a joy. What a great experience from the moment you boot it to every interaction and scenery. Definitely deserved. Overall its been a amazinf for RPG players this year.
It's an interesting experience, a situation where I can acutely detect the bar getting moved for what I expect a game to be. I hope recent progressions in AI will bring us more interactive stories a la BG3 in glossy and well-funded packages a la Cyberpunk 2077.
As a relatively busy working adult, this actually ruins games for me. It creates FOMO and people rushing to beat the game to post their DAE low brow moment on social media.
I'd rather play it patched at my own pace, 2 years later.
it helps that the dev studio is based in Belgium where loot boxes are banned by law :)
I think this happens with a lot of older games too. Games like Bastion or FlatOut 2 sometimes don't get criticized enough for any bugs they may have had, and people look at them with rose-tinted glasses. It definitely happens a lot less with more recently released games.
That there seemingly is no great story shouldn't be that much an issue to me, it doesn't always matter to me, but with the battles not being engaging, character progress nonexistent, exploring not being exciting nor rewarding, there's just nothing that makes me want to come back. Now i do have a great dislike for open-world games, and it seems bg3 just has all the elements that makes me dislike it, too much make your own adventure. I don't recall the earlier baldurs gate games being this way.
Sure maybe they could have included a little more education on how stuff works in game, but it’s not too bad.
What has me most entertained about the game is that your choices and dialogue options have real impacts on your path through the game. Unlike most games that feel like they are on rails.
Its nice companies give us such obvious indicators of quality.
If you’re as keen on Linux as you seem to be, then Proton is your friend. We may never see native builds, but already developers are putting way more effort into making sure the Deck (meaning Linux) experience is good.
Here’s a video of the head of Larian Studios talking about how they’re viewing the Steam Deck - https://youtu.be/kzfEkSGa45k
> This is an ambitious device. We love it. We’re going to do everything we can to support it. We’re going to make sure that every single game, Baldur’s Gate III included, is going to play really smoothly on the Steam Deck.
Valve have made adding Linux support easy and desirable (because of the market share of the Deck). And developers are responding. Don’t miss out because you want “native builds”.
It does work quite well under Proton, and runs on the Steam Deck.
I don't like paying to be a beta tester and programmer. That is my day job.
No official support, but Steam make it work.
I got through act one and didn’t want to play anymore. There were too many bugs, and the game is an active development as if it were in beta. The game was in beta for years before it got to this state.
Save scumming 75% off the time because almost everything needs a 15 or higher, or spending an hour on a 20 roll treasure chest, or needing so many successful swings to complete a battle is not my idea of fun.
Loading a save took over a minute sometimes
I thought it was sloggy and buggy.
The characters were fawning over me, although I barely talked to them.
Dragon age origins did it SO much better.
Then why would you do that? That isn't a feature of the game, that's a feature of the player?
>or needing so many successful swings to complete a battle is not my idea of fun.
You can use tactics waaaayyyyyy beyond "make smash thing with sword."
I'm not trying to be a Dick, but maybe don't focus on 100% completion, and think outside the box. This game has multiple ways to accomplish things. The number of times I avoided fights by using the environment to my advantage is hilarious to me.
Don't focus on perfection, just have fun?
While I think the OP is talking out of their butt, I kind of disagree with this. Smash with sword is generally the best strategy. The game is pretty darn easy. Playing with the duds of Wyll and Shadowheart give an early impression of Act 1 perhaps being very hard.
I'd be broke, dead 200 times over, and missing a ton of fun contexts if I didn't savescum. It's a feature of the game. Not a bug of the player.
Even on Explorer mode, the game is laughably stacked against you sometimes. The dice rolls make no sense. I've spent an hour trying to get a D20 on savescumming once.
I like high completion so I don't have to replay games and go through the 80+% of repeatable stuff I already did again.
The new honor mode makes savescumming impossible and is still quite possible. Savescumming is optional.
> or spending an hour on a 20 roll treasure chest
A 20 roll treasure chest with only the free guidance bonus gives you a 10-25% chance to open on the first attempt. Alternatively you can just smash the chest, contrary to popular belief it doesn't have any negative consequences like destroyed items.
> The characters were fawning over me, although I barely talked to them.
That bug was fixed long ago.
3mo ago, actually. Game was in beta for 2+years before release.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/169q6zh/baldurs_g...
I finished Act 1, but the game was so unrefined and obviously unfinished. The hotfixes and patches with new content keep coming. The game is still obviously in Beta, but it's just not called Beta.
I'll revisit the game once the patches stop. Too many things changing during playthroughs.
Eventually there was a sex scene, and the host graciously enabled the setting to let us all watch.
"Multiplayer voyeurism" wasn’t on my bingo card for 2023, but it was an interesting experience.
When I was 11 or so, I used to play StarCraft 1 custom games. Some of the maps rewarded the players by revealing a smutty image in the minimap if you won. It was funny seeing everyone suddenly go idle for a couple minutes after winning the map. Usually everyone disconnects right away. Somehow this reminded me of that.
Wasn't that more akin to watching a porn movie together with your buddies? "Voyerism" means you're watching as someone is having sex, not watching a recording of someone doing it in the past. (not to mention that here actually no one was having sex, it's just pixels in a video game).
I used to play an old game called Underlight, where you weren’t allowed to break character. There was a lot of sexting, which got the tongue in cheek name of QRP aka Quality Role Play. Back then we had to imagine https://underlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/UthyTrial.... as something sexy, which in retrospect was quite a feat given that the avatars were from the original Doom engine. So we didn’t even have pixels in a video game, just our imagination; the ultimate mod.
> Eventually there was a sex scene, and the host graciously enabled the setting to let us all watch.
It took you eight hours to get to a sex scene? I learned about the game's obsession with sex the second time I camped.
Kind of put me off playing it, since that just keeps happening whenever you talk to anyone.
One wonders if they used mocap animation. There were about four different positions during the ~3min scene. Bravo to the animators.
I think that was about four hours in. We eventually got to a spider nest, and somehow just barely won. Then we ended up in the forest hag’s lair, and got our asses handed to us five times in a row, at which point we all passed out from exhaustion.
That was probably the most fun I’ve had in a game in a long time. There were a bunch of memorable things. E.g. I was playing a berserker, and they told me to take off my armor because otherwise I wouldn’t get a special damage boost unique to berserkers. So I stripped off my breastplate and leggings, and then realized I could take off my bra and underwear too. They all burst out laughing when I stormed in to the next fight naked. (I was playing as that devil-looking woman that normally you recruit a few hours into the game, since I didn’t feel like setting up a character from scratch.)
If you're referring to DRM like Denuvo though, I don't think BG 3 has anything like that. Which is good for us because things like Denuvo heavily impact performance.
EDIT: I was wrong. It does not have any DRM.
The developer is in charge of what happens when the game is launched and the player does not own the game on Steam. Steam does not require you to shut down the game immediately. For instance, the games we port will just run fine in, what we call "DRM-free" mode, when the Steam API cannot be initialized.
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/shawwn/89fb2935b2f4ae3a10...
I’ve seen the infinite cloudflare captcha problem before, but I can’t remember anything about it. If anyone knows or if you figure it out, post some info here.
If you've played DoS2 you'll find yourself sometimes conflating the two quest lines sometimes :).
I definitely recommend it
D&D is a crap system though, which drags BG3 down (but hey, I've made my peace with D&D's vancian magic at this point in my life).
The other strategy/sim nominees were Fire Emblem: Engage, Advance Wars 1+2 Reboot Camp, Company of Heroes 3 and City Skylines II (sim).
Note that StarCraft is called a "real-time strategy" game to differentiate it from the existing category of "strategy games", which has now been relabeled "4X".
Based on your list, Giorgi appears to be correct that there were no strategy games nominated in the "strategy" category.
After that I thought, why not try some other "newer" games? Since then, I picked up and played Cyberpunk 2077 + Phantom Liberty, Persona 5 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Each close to 100 hours, and each far exceeded my expectations. What a blast! Thank you, BG3.
What an incredible piece of art that team made.
1. Last act was mostly a chore
2. The plot was a mess, you don't have to tie everything into a single path ending up having to come up with ridiculous shenanigans. Also they threw every part of Forgotten Realms lore into a melting pot.
3. The writing was quite disappointing most of the time as well. I can't stand characters in a medieval setting saying "Wow" multiple times in a row or "f*ck" and acting like emotionally stunted teenagers. Also the fact that every companion wanted to have sex with my avatar for no reason was very annoying.
4. Even though it's praised for its polish, it has a LOT of bugs. Some of them game breaking or locking you out of storylines/options.
Mind you, BG2 is my favorite game of all time.
Even without the sex and romance, I would rank it as the best single player gaming experience for me, since Arkham Asylum.
