Baldur's Gate 3 (First Impressions from a huge DOSII Fan)
Developer: Larian Studios
Publisher: Larian Studios
Released: Aug 3, 2023
Price: $59.99 USD
Larian Studios has long been considered as one of the top development studios for CRPG gaming of recent years, thanks to its enormous success with previous projects such as Divinity Original Sin & Divinity Original Sin II.
The level of freedom you had in prior games made every adventure you took feel fresh and exciting. You could do anything, and I mean anything you could think of.
Kill enemies by hitting them with heavy boxes. Set up large explosives before a confrontation or even smuggling death fog into cities and locations, causing massive deadly clouds of insta-death wherever you go or just set the whole town against each other. You could hide in barrels, wear buckets on your head for a disadvantage and many more things that really showed the freedom and work put into it's design.
Presentation
A mixture of good and bad
I played Early Access of this game for everything it had to offer back in 2020. I have to say that I am somewhat dissatisfied with how the game has developed so far.
Visually it's amazing. Along with the music, audio, voice acting. It's nothing short of perfection, the light gleaming off my scales and armor. It's done so effectively that you can't help but notice it, especially the cinematic shots that really bring the environment to life with proper lighting, sound and attention to detail.
However, be aware that developers frequently do this to conceal faults, much like smoke and mirrors. While the game itself looks great, there are a slew of game-breaking bugs and other flaws that are slowly being fixed, but it's disheartening to see them make it into the final edition of the game. It still has the sense of early access that isn't anywhere near the same quality as their previous titles.
Issues
Sequence Breaking
Consider one of the early quest lines. In short, the actions you are supposed to take eventually lead you to teaming up with Halsin, but if you break the sequence, he will never join you, breaking the sequences of many other quests in the future while also messing up combat in the Goblin Camp, The Grove, and a few other locations.
Some goblins are allies, some are enemies, and some are fighting you from afar when they shouldn't even have a line of sight of you. Everything is so buggy and ridiculous.
I killed everyone in the goblin camp because, despite silently killing most of the True Souls within the Goblin Camp, the entire base aggroed to me, despite the fact that nobody was within earshot of me killing them all as it was isolated. This is akin to me killing someone on the other side of the map only to have everyone on the other side know about it in a different area. It would have made a lot more sense if I had done it in front of a large crowd, but not like this in a secluded room, with few NPCs.
What's worse, my order of events went something like this: Aid the Thief lings in stealing the idol, Druids massacre them all. This alone broke every subsequent event.
Assisted Halsin (Druid Leader) in eliminating the goblin leaders. Instead of killing them in the camp, lured one to the grove to avoid drawing the notice of 15 goblins nearby which would be a very long tedious fight. Despite the fact that the grove was completely empty, they had evidently killed them all through their dialog of not putting up a fight even though Halsin was alive and well after completing the task, he had vanished shortly after assisting him after the prison escape.
Dialog & Grammar
Act 1 featured numerous grammatical faults due to numerous dialogue interactions. Which is significant since the game is largely centered on the world, narrative, and interacting with NPCs, so when you run into dialogue like the following:
It takes you out of the game for a few moments to think about it. It does become a problem. This was barely 2 minutes into Act 1's opening beach scene, but there were many more to come and I believe more will follow in future acts. It's something so easy, yet it seemed to be the least of their concerns as they worked through the stages of early access, most likely owing to deadlines and such. It's disappointing, coming from someone who expects perfection. It's strange to see so many strange and simple bugs making it into the final version of the game after so many years of development. I am confident that there will be more in the future.
General Gameplay
There is a lot to cover
Interaction followed by wonderful narration, to your typical dice roll checks to get you out of sticky situations to handling situations in many different ways, right up to combat, which revolves around a hidden 1d20 roll before every action to see if you hit or not, so seeing a 95% chance to do damage miss can be frustrating a lot of the time even with advantage. Think about a game like XCOM 2. That's how you'll start to feel about the combat unless you fully take use of the fundamental rules of Dungeons and Dragons to aid you in your success to avoid and to deal damage to targets.
Conclusion
It's not without issues
I enjoyed their prior games a lot. But that does not absolve them of responsibility for the serious flaws I continue to encounter with this game that should have been of higher quality. The flaws, the lack of safe auto-pathing over terrain when there is a clear path, and a variety of other issues make it less of a game than Divinity.
While dissatisfied, I do continue to appreciate the game for what it has to offer. I'm currently half-satisfied. Only time will tell what the game has in store for us in the future patches and changes. But I doubt it will live up to their previous achievements.
My initial thoughts on this game come to a close with the caveat that, while others may disagree, that is what makes gamers unique. You don't have to share their interests or agree with them and are welcome to critic me on mine.
If you want to catch me on one of my streams or locate me on social media, you may do so at the following locations, I'm always playing something new.
- Pawkt
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