The entire time Baldur’s Gate 3 was in early access, I was on the fence about getting it, telling myself I really should get back to Divinity Original Sin 2 or Pillars of Eternity before starting another CRPG that I will probably drop after 12 hours again. But the friend I played DOS2 with convinced me I needed to get this one. So I fired up the single player campaign and it’s great. It has one of the smoothest tutorials I’ve seen for such a complex game. The game is built for the player to get lost for hundreds of hours if they want to with a very generous amount of stuff to do.
The game set kind of a bad first impression with me with the amount of gross-out stuff at the very beginning (the first choice you have is to pull a brain out of a skull or not), and it’s handled quite graphically. There was another point later on where the game made me kick a squirrel which was similarly way too graphic and kinda lost me. The tone of these games is a little all over the place, it certainly feels like it’s speaking to many different audiences. I’m enjoying the fantasy adventure elements and lighthearted relationships with characters a lot more than the mind-flaying parasites and devil stuff happening. (Maybe I just need to check out Planetscape Torment?) It’s certainly quite nice to have the characters feel like they have relationships among each other with the party chat. I think you could compare this writing to Bioware games and not be too far off, but it feels much more interesting than a Dragon Age game. I do consistently wish I could kick my own created player out of the party because compared to your companions, they are kind of boring… even though I spent 2 hours in the character creator.
I’m playing on Balanced mode and have I found myself tempted to save-scum, even despite telling myself I want to live with the consequences of what I’m doing. The battles are kind of long and punishing, so there’s a pragmatic reason for wanting to avoid or win them the first time. The turn based tactics are pretty good so far, though the creator Larian Studios does seem to pull out a lot of the same tricks from Divinity Original Sin, hiding barrels full of oil everywhere and rocks dangling from a rope above the battelfield. But I’m cool with it.
Maybe this is my own inexperience with the genre talking… but everything feels similar to DOS2. I don’t know how much of that game was based on the original Baldur’s gate, but it’s very samey. Aside from a few different races, classes, and lore stuff, I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the games. After the tutorial area and then getting washed up on the beach of similar-looking environment only to have similar feeling battle systems, exploration, inventory system, and quest structures. It’s not broken I guess they don’t need to fix it, but I don’t think this game has a real identity on its own for me yet. Maybe that will change when I get to Baldur’s Gate.
On a side note, in some ways this game solidifies my gripes with Tears of the Kingdom. While there are tons of NPCs and side quests and one conversation can lead to 3 things getting added to your mini-map, I don’t feel as sidetracked in this game. I can do a lot of the side questing on the way to the next objective, sometimes multiple quest lines come together, and there’s no collecting things just for the sake of it (unless I get deep into the game’s crafting mechanics I guess).
The game also makes my PC chug like crazy. I need to upgrade it, because while I can deal with the occasional aliased/bad looking textures, the game had trouble loading the overworld at times and shows characters t-posing and sometimes things like walking animations glitch out. Part of my issue could be that i’m playing it off of a mechanical hard drive because the file size is a whopping 120+ gb . Also it sucks that even after early access there’s a giant “v.4.1.1.3622274” on screen at all times. Why? This and Michaelsoft Flight Sim 2020 are the only games that have really pushed my PC to its limits and I can feel it.
Overall I like this game a lot more than I expected to, and it’s been a very pleasant surprise for me this weekend. I will easily pass the 12-15 hours I usually put into game in this genre.
