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No_one  8mo ago (text post)   2757 thread views

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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The Sex% speedrun category continues to get faster.

Lae'zal has some serious issues to work out.

You ain't lying. She took her first run at my character and yikes, she is thirsty. I was genuinely uncomfortable.

Found out githyanki are oviparous. Not unnaturally my character wanted to know how this was (given that female githyanki have breasts). Lae'zal said it happened after they were liberated from the illithids and yikes, indeed. Their queen decides who will be egg-layers, when, and how many, and the searing contempt with which Lae'zal speaks of "imagine not being able to enjoy the pleasures of sex without having to bear children" is really off-putting. I think even if you're pro-sex is for fun and pro-contraception etc., she comes on strong.

She would definitely be a member of the childfree sites online and would regularly post about breeders and crotch goblins and how disgusting the entire notion of "children" is.

Oh my goodness 🤣

Meanwhile, Shadowheart keeps trying to get into my (Astarion's) pants even though I keep telling her I'd rather we stay just friends, and Gale who (by the estimation I've formed of his character so far) is a total slut tells me that we're not yet friendly enough for that level of intimacy.

Looks like I'll be spending my nights chastely and if I wanted to get some, I should have rolled up a githyanki character. Who knew they were the sex-maniac species of the game? Though yeah, I have also been fending off Lae'zal because uh, well, she's inclined to be a bit too quick off the trigger about holding a sword to my throat and assuring me she'll make it fast, I won't feel a thing.

..she was hitting on my drow character on second rest or something. Apparently they are into casual sex only or something like that.

Writers have really outdone themselves with making the githyanki look like complete assholes. However, she's a great fighter and easy to manipulate, plus you can hide her goblin.-like features with minor magical items ..

I don't mind her features, it took me a little while to get used to them, but now she just looks to me like she has a chimpanzee face or something. She's normal for her species.

Though since I'm not interested in banging a chimpanzee, that may be part of why I'm "thanks but no thanks" to her 😁 The githyanki do get the short end of the stick in being "species that you wouldn't mind if they collectively fell off a cliff". Even though she's a good fighter, I'm still "nah you stay back at camp" because she's just too irritating to deal with in the party.

I am by no definition a gamer. I liked Larian's Divinity games so I tried this one way back when it was in early release, bounced off the fight system and forgot all about it until the official release. Right now I'm slowly (very slowly) making my way around it, mainly by ignoring the main plot driving you to get to Baldur's Gate and just wandering around exploring the world, which is my main interest.

I'm enjoying it, mostly because I'm also ignoring all the stuff about romance and whatever other woke/culture war topics are being thrashed out (no, I do not care about the bear-effing because I'm not going anywhere that kind of thing). My main complaint is the usual complaints people had with the Divinity games: travelling around the map is so damn slow (the waypoints are not useful for "I want to walk from here to there but be able to move faster than a shuffle") and the combat system (oh, so my party's momentum lets us move three steps and then we're done, but the NPC mobs can hit us three times in a row? how does that work, eh, Larian?)

Yeah, I'm dying but not quite so much as I expected, and at least when I respawn I have a good idea what not to do this time round. So I'd say it's 6 out of 10 experience so far, might bump that up higher as I get better at what the damn game wants me to do.

travelling around the map is so damn slow

The most frustrating feature missing from the old games, at least for me so far, is the ability to right click on the map and tell my party to move to that location. Why do I have to micromanage the act of walking from one side of the map to the other?

... three steps ? There's plenty of items that give you momentum, rogues can dash and have an action.

The damnably slow AI moves though. IF there's 6 mooks and each of them moves for 3 seconds and 'thinks' for .5 seconds before moving, you either have to have great DPS or grit your teeth..

It's also part of the layout, I keep forgetting I can use Dash because the buttons are so small and similar. But you're right about the slow AI where there are six mooks and each has a turn and is 'thinking' about where it can go. I'm going "hurry up so I can get this over, my party should be able to smash this low-level group instead of standing around waiting for each of you to make your move".

How I dislike CRPGs. So much writing, and almost all of it bad. Planescape: Torment, okay, fairly unique. Disco Elysium, not my cup of tea but I can see there's something to it. But yet another generic trip down D&D memory lane, with all the same old systems, the same old setting that was never much good outside of the tabletop to begin with? The intervening CRPGs that I tried - Wasteland, Inquisitor, Tyranny, Pillars of Eternity, Pathfinder: Kingmaker to name that ones I most readily recall - were all such bad, unrewarding trash that I finished not a single one of them. The gameplay is a stupidly contrived to make a tabletop RPG run without a GM, the dialogues go on forever but if you've read one of them you've read them all and none are worth reading, why even play those games? Many play them, so I'm sure I just don't get it, but do I ever not get it!

Which is too many words to say - I hope you're having fun, but I'm not touching another CRPG until I hear some serious praises sung about both the writing and the gameplay.

Larian (and the Pathfinder games) have very purple prose even by the standards of WRPG writing. It's really bad, it's embarrassing. And I think that's important, Harry Potter isn't high literature but Rowling writes in a brisk way, descriptions are moderately evocative, you don't (or perhaps I don't) read Harry Potter and think "this writing is awful" the entire time, because it's fine (and actually I think Rowling could be a much better writer than she shows, but I don't think she aspires to literary fiction). That's my threshold, especially for genre fiction.

To me, Disco Elysium and Red Dead Redemption 2 are some of the best examples of genre fiction in games. They know what they're trying to be, they know their influences, they know their vibe (and they are each derivative in their own way), and they go for it and execute well. Not high culture, but good, and combined with the other aspects of those games enough to qualify as good art. Outer Wilds (NOT Worlds, although that's not as bad as the internet has decided it is), as @TheDag says, also has great writing and a good soul.

But in general, we have to differentiate between games that have "bad writing" and games that have "unambitious writing". This is kind of like the old Ebert review thing, one has to judge things on their own merits and getting upset that a D&D game isn't particularly ambitious with its themes or dialogue isn't really justifiable. What is worth criticizing is if it's embarrassing and shoddy at being a solid piece of mainstream genre fiction, which unfortunately Baldur's Gate 3 is. The writing is worse than any Dragon Age, Witcher 2/3 (I assume the first was fine in Polish too, but the English translation was poor), either Pillars game. I've actually played quests in recent World of Warcraft expansions (and Blizzard's writing might well be the lowest bar in the entire business) that had better and more realistically human dialogue than big chunks of Baldur's Gate 3.

So it is especially bad, even for what it is.

BG3 is slowly but surely turning into one of those games I enthusiastically binge in the beginning but lose interest and possibly never finish or only finish with substantial effort. I used to worry I was just losing the capacity to appreciate games for some unclear reason, but earlier this year I belatedly discovered Final Fantasy VII and was kind of fanatically gripped from start to finish. So maybe the problem isn't that I don't like games, but that a lot of games are just missing writing that gives me a reason to care about the scenario or characters, and so I end up not really caring to see what happens.

I had the same experience with Divinity OS 2 (also by Larian). I got the game in 2017 and played quite a bit of coop and solo, but ultimately only got about half - 2/3rds through the game. I think whenever I am forced to go into a new unfamiliar area and act, I kind of lose a little bit of motivation, like I didn't get appropriately awarded for the accomplishment of finishing the old area. I think there's also a little bit of a pacing issue with unengaging writing.

I think, if acts are wrapped up with a boss fight that feels epic like I earned it / the story has a hook to keep me interesting, then I would keep at it.

I didn't finish divinity until we were stranded in our houses in 2020. We'll see how I fare with BG

..did you play BG2 ? The writing was imo way better, although it could get quite wordy at times. I really don't mind, I read fast. This game is less chatty but I dislike skipping because sometimes it feels like you can miss out on something by accident.

BG2 has actually good writing, but it's because David Gaider is actually a good writer, he has that certain quality that good gay male writers tend to have where they're able to quite wittily describe people, and that filters into the dialogue and also other creative aspects of the game.

..he's gay?

Says so right in the last name.

Damn. I guess it's good there are gay people doing good work. Makes me tolerate them more. Now I have one more to appreciate. BAP's pretty good and Gaider has done truly excellent work in gaming and game modding too. (iirc a lot of these mods were by him).

There's also a War Thunder playing gay furry who's both an excellent player and not .. weird. E.g. if he didn't have a fox pfp and people hadn't wheedled a statement out of him, you'd not know he's one.

People really need to keep their sexuality private. No clue why they don't.

I think that depends on what you want in a game. Me, I'm not interested in combat or levelling up fast as possible or mowing down mobs. I like lore and the little sideways and off the beaten track parts. So I'm picking up all the books and notes and letters and scraps of paper and reading them and they're funny (or not). Some of it is useful advice, some of it is just worldbuilding and to add colour, and that's what I want. Oh, hey, the long-gone troupe of actors had a smash hit performance here years ago? Wish I'd been there to see it!

But certainly for other people, that's all just padding and a waste of time that adds nothing, and that's equally valid point of view.

What videogames would you say have excellent writing, then?

Brigador. Homeworld. House of the Dying Sun. The writing is short and to the point and qualitatively decent and all of it supports the gameplay or world-building and isn't just wordy padding. Remove any of the writing in those games and they'll be poorer for it, because what little there is serves a purpose and is good enough to be worth reading.

Okay, that was a bit of a joke doubling down on "videogame writing is universally bad" by implying that the less, the better. Serious answer: None that I can remember. Cyberpunk 2077's writing is pretty good IMO, but I really mean that it's pretty good for a videogame. I enjoyed my time with it, recommend it, would happily play and read more of it, but even then it's the whole immersive package that makes it work, and the writing mostly contributes by being above-average for its medium.

So far, whenever I followed someone's suggestion of "play this, it's text-heavy but well-written!", I ended up sorely disappointed.

Game writing tends to be derivative (all fantasy CRPGs, all AAA titles), or excessively pretentious (Sunless Seas/Skies, Cultist Simulator), or just plain low-quality either because the developers barely speak English and saw no need for proper localization (E.Y.E. Divine Cybermancy, Shadow Empire) or because the writers they hired are untalented hacks (Hunt: Showdown, Destiny 2).

There may be games with good writing in genres that I don't play, but I don't really consider visual novels and the like games.

Have you played Outer Wilds? I feel like it has some of the best writing for a game, and a lot of that is because of where they put the writing.

I started it, it having come heavily recommended from multiple sources.

...but then I stopped because I'm too much of a caveman for games without shootybangsmash. Yeah, I know. I should probably give it another go, if only to see whether its reputation holds up.

Well my ears are burning. So what media would you say has excellent writing? Because it seems to me like you object to anything that gets in the way of gameplay and your favourite games would be the likes of Galaga and Centipede.

Since your perspective is so alien to my own, I hope you don't mind some additional curiosity - what did you think of something like Super Hot, or aliens dark descent, or grim dawn? And how would you rank fire emblem, xcom and total war? Oh, and what you do you think of grand strategy games?

Well my ears are burning. So what media would you say has excellent writing? Some books. A few films.

Because it seems to me like you object to anything that gets in the way of gameplay and your favourite games would be the likes of Galaga and Centipede.

Hey, I do appreciate some plot and lore and world-building in games. But the formula is (quality divided by quantity). If quality isn't possible, then I do prefer the least quantity required to let the game make sense. In cases where that means no writing at all, the game is usually too simple to hold my interest.

Since your perspective is so alien to my own, I hope you don't mind some additional curiosity - what did you think of something like Super Hot, or aliens dark descent, or grim dawn? And how would you rank fire emblem, xcom and total war? Oh, and what you do you think of grand strategy games?

  • Superhot: Massively overrated. Gameplay is an one-trick pony. Writing is aggressively bad. Would recommend staying away from.
  • ADD: Never played, can't say.
  • Grim Dawn: It's okay for an ARPG, which isn't saying much. Not my cup of tea. The writing struck me as utterly forgettable, but sparse and irrelevant enough compared to the massive levels to not get in the way.
  • Fire Emblem: Never played.
  • XCOM: I like those. For the gameplay, that is. What little writing they have seems pointless to engage with - the plot never goes anywhere, the world isn't built up, might as well ignore anything but the instructions.
  • Total War: I fondly remember the very first Shogun: Total War, and I must say that I'm disappointment by what that entire series has become. The gameplay is extremely stale, and the writing - what little of it is there - is trash.
  • Grand Strategy: Do you mean Paradox map-painting simulators? I played EU3, HOI4 and Stellaris, and I've come to thoroughly regret that as wasted time. The gameplay is a mess and the writing, piecemeal as it is, is not worth sticking around for. And maybe I'm too much of a rube, but that worm story in Stellaris was so much pretentious crap. Apart from Paradox, let's say looking at Stellar Monarch, Terra Invicta and Dominions, I'd say Grand Strategy has a few intriguing titles, but most of them are very flawed in many ways and their writing is above average at the most.

Hey, I do appreciate some plot and lore and world-building in games. But the formula is (quality divided by quantity).

Ah ok, that is not so inscrutable a position to me, although I am still intrigued - I would be more generous in my appraisal, but your assessments are directionally similar to mine (btw you'll hate the writing in dark descent, but if you like Brigador and XCOM I reckon you'll enjoy the gameplay.) What do you think of roguelikes like caves of qud and dcss? And one out of left field - what's your opinion of the song-writing of David Bowie?

Sorry if it feels like I'm grilling you, but your original post opened my eyes a bit - I had fallen into the wordcel trap of assuming anyone with greater intelligence than me must love words even more than me (deep down I always knew that wasn't the case, I was typical minding). And when I read your post and remembered that that was not the case, I also realised I'd never really tried to see the medium from your perspective (hence my overly reductionist opener).

Ah ok, that is not so inscrutable a position to me, although I am still intrigued - I would be more generous in my appraisal, but your assessments are directionally similar to mine (btw you'll hate the writing in dark descent, but if you like Brigador and XCOM I reckon you'll enjoy the gameplay.) What do you think of roguelikes like caves of qud and dcss? And one out of left field - what's your opinion of the song-writing of David Bowie?

Roguelikes I like.

Qud stands out as one with good world-building, which I always like playing for the atmosphere although even then I think the actual texts are somewhat overrated and pretentious.

DCSS stands out as one that's pleasantly streamlined and requires no great investment of time to play but has no plot or world-building to speak of, IIRC.

I have played many roguelikes and I like the genre, but here too good writing is rare. Even though some of them manage unique world-building or an immersive atmosphere, it's rarely down to the words.

As for David Bowie, I can't say. I'm barely able to place his music. Looking up some "best lyrics" of his on google, it seems fairly random. I'd withhold judgement on account of insufficient exposure.

Sorry if it feels like I'm grilling you, but your original post opened my eyes a bit - I had fallen into the wordcel trap of assuming anyone with greater intelligence than me must love words even more than me (deep down I always knew that wasn't the case, I was typical minding). And when I read your post and remembered that that was not the case, I also realised I'd never really tried to see the medium from your perspective (hence my overly reductionist opener).

Going by the standards of the Motte, it's likely that I am not more intelligent than you. Pretty sure I'm at the low end here. But while we're defending our positions - I must say that on account of having little time to play, I am very quick to dismiss any individual game as not worth my time, and so it's entirely possible that my opinions are too negative by default.

Recommendation for David Bowie album: Station to Station. Yes, it's during his Thin White Duke (alleged) fascist heroin chic phase, but it's good music.

To hell with David Bowie - we were just at a pub music quiz and despite the fact that all members of the team had extensively listened to Station to Station, we still got the question "What song has this lyric: It's not the side-effects of the cocaine / I'm thinking that it must be love" wrong.

What the heck? I'm sorry for not replying earlier, I thought I did, I thought I replied yesterday but I guess it didn't take? This has been happening a lot lately.

Anyway, I thought you might like roguelikes, but I would have guessed you'd go stone soup over caves of qud. Caves of qud is so great though, although yeah it is a bit pretentious. Part of the difference here is clearly that I have a much higher tolerance for shlock and pretentiousness.

CoQ has a unique setting whereas DCSS is entirely generic. I do prefer the straightforward gameplay in DCSS, but not enough to offset Qud's merits.

Disco Elysium and Outer Wilds are the only two that come to mind for me, at least.

If Disco Elysium and PS:T didn't impress you sufficiently, you'll be waiting for a long time. Video game writing generally sucks.

Yes it does, and I wish videogame developers would acknowledge that and just trim the text in favor of focusing on the gameplay - but people play wordy games no matter how badly I think they're written, so what do I know.

There have been thirty (30) World of Warcraft novels. None of them will ever be considered literature.

A lot of people don't need writing to be high quality to enjoy it.

Tie-in novels are generally second-rate, with few exceptions (e.g. if the novelist is already established/a name in the field). That's because (going by Star Trek fandom when the first lot of novelisations came flooding out), there's a ton of interference by the studio/rights holders about what characters you can use, what they can and can't do, if you can create OCs at all, how the world can or can't change and so on. You're not allowed contradict established canon (unless or until something is shown in an episode of the TV show or in a movie) and in general there's lines you have to stay within. That's to protect the property, of course; if the fans want another book about Erwin Skullcrusher the superhuman warrior and berserker, you can't turn Erwin into a pacifist (or if you do, it can't stick) and in part because if you have twelve different writers churning out books, to keep the characters the same they have to be bland stereotypes.

Hey, I've read the Brigador novel and four Battle Brothers stories. Somestimes you just want to read more about a setting you already spent much time in.

But for me that's interesting only if the game world was well-done to begin with.

There isn't "too much" writing in this game. The questing related dialogues are competent and to the point, with little waffling about. You can sometimes ask for more backstory and get a little longer exposition.

Some of the romance dialogue is so bad I cringed. You can safely ignore it. Shadowheart, the nutty cleric might be okay.

Lots of books lying around, each with 1-4 paragraphs on the wider world.

Why is this game so popular? I played Wrath of the Righteous which seems much more complicated and interesting. Lvl cap at 20 so more content and customization, at least twice as many classes plus a bunch of mythic classes, plus Pathfinder has more choices per level anyway. You can switch between real-time and turn-based at will. There are difficulty settings so it can be as hard or easy as you like. Does Baldur's Gate not have difficulty settings - how can it be a 'hard' game?

Pathfinder has its flaws - 3/4 female romanceables have eaten human flesh. The ending slides were pretty bad. I suppose the graphics aren't too great, there aren't really close-up cinematics. Sex is all cut too black. But why would I play Baldur's Gate when I can play WOTR instead?

The limited scope makes the gameplay less tedious and allows them to put in more random fun.

For instance the implemented the talk with animals spell with full voice acting. So you can chat with a cow and then catch up with her when she’s been moved to a new area. They also put in this bit with a cat the seems to have no plot relevance.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XXpDsROtiT8

Gameplay wise the choices hit the right balance between mindless levelling and having to read every skill description and overthink things.

Does Baldur's Gate not have difficulty settings - how can it be a 'hard' game?

It has. Combat difficulty is toggleable, not sure if it changes ability checks.

At the highest difficulty it's usually pleasantly, sometimes frustratingly hard.

Sex is all cut too black.

Of all the things I want to see in a game, badly rendered characters emulating human porn is not one of them. If that floats your boat, why not go onto PornHub instead and get the real thing (for a certain value of 'real')? Okay so Milly Mysteria the Witch and Oakheart Ironthew the Barbarian are getting it on, and you've tweaked the settings to give Milly zeppelin boobs and Oakheart a prodigioius endowment, but... how is it enjoyable to watch the stuttering framerate of two sprites banging against each other?

But as ever, for every one, it's YMMV.

Yeah personally I favour cut-to-black as well. But apparently BG3's 'you can have sex with a bear' was popular, or at least attention-grabbing.

I tried to play Kingmaker. The gameplay seemed to offer nothing new over older CRPGs and the writing appeared extremely derivative. I quit shortly after the prologue, being unable to justify spending time on it, and thus War of the Righteous isn't even on the table for me.

Most thirty year olds (male) at this point grew up playing games, and see no reason to drop them in favour of watching tv for hours like their boomer parents.

A third of the people in the War Thunder group I participate in work full time. Well, half of them are bachelors though or don't have children. But 2-3 hours in the evenings isn't too much time..most people watch that much TV.

most people didn't have time for games

We all have time to participate here, so none of us have a super-constrained schedule.

I assume you wouldn't find it strange for someone to watch/binge netflix, and the time investment is the same.

I'm in my mid-30s and I have no time for my usual daytime hobbies, and not enough concentration left for anything mentally demanding, so instead I spend about an hour of most late evenings playing a game. It's convenient.

It's an internet forum. The correlation with games is pretty high.

Lore

Gameplay Advice and questions.

I'm amused to find out that a bit of cheese that was present in infinity engine games made the transition to this one.

Spoilered because once you know about it, you'll be tempted to abuse it and while it's not really game-breaking (effectively not different to just having more short-rests it feels.. cheesy.

items that increase constitution when repeatedly swapped out 'heal' characters due to what I guess are rounding effects. So effectively, healing outside of combat without having to rest. This item swap cheese worked in BG2 too, where, however, time passed and there were nifty regenerative ioun stones, sadly missing from this game.

After playing through Act 2, I think I'd advise starting the game as one of the origin characters, specifically Shadowheart or Lae'zel, rather than creating your own.

For one thing, you get to have 4 written characters in play at once rather than 3+generic protag

But also, it feels like the game is supposed to be their story. Eg. Shadowheart begins holding the MacGuffin, and a lot of the game locations & NPCs are directly related to her personal quest. Lae'zel has a pretty obvious character arc tied up in the main plot too. The world-shaking revelations don't land the same way for Tav or the other companions, who are just along for the ride.

I disagree. Creating your own character and playing it through the story is 90% of the fun in the Baldur's Gate series and Dungeons and Dragons as a whole. Of course, managing four Origin characters is easier than three, but it isn't difficult to figure out when to swap characters into the party when a milestone in his or her personal quest approaches. For example, swapping in Lae'zel when your party heads to Rosymorn Monastery to find the githyanki creche or bringing in Karlach when you find an infernal piece of iron and take it to Dammon working outside the Last Light Inn.

Playing as an Origin character might be better for a subsequent playthrough.

**Critical Advice **for those going into the Underdark and thinking of doing some sidequest smithing.

The Adamantine Forge gets bugged easily, and stops working after killing the boss. The only sure way of smithing two items seems to be doing it back to back, so make sure to get both chunks of the mithril ore and both moulds you want and then to do it at one time.

Okay.. chapter 2 question: does anyone know whether shadow-cursed undead / harpers should be neutral to Githyanki spec-ops squads ?

Just got hit with one cunning ploy - I use my rogue and his insane running/ hiding skills to introduce these two groups. No dice. They ignore each other for some bizarre reason.

They really shouldn't. Both groups are happy to attack anyone else on sight? So what gives..

Oh, man. I just started Act 2 and I want to kill the githyanki. I really, really want to kill the githyanki and I'd have given it the good old college try the first time I saw them, were it not for that pesky dragon.

This is highly unusual for me, since I'm generally "oh no, that would be too mean/cruel/violent" when it comes to "smush kill or talky talky?" choices in encounters, but fudge this lot, they need to die yesterday, the stuck-up prats who think they can just swan around murderating anyone they see because they are so superior to non-githyanki.

Gosh, I was not expecting this! Now, gotta get back to plotting how I can wipe them all out at once...

I just started Act 2 and I want to kill the githyanki. I really, really want to kill the githyanki

Did you find the creche under the Rosymorn Monastery?

I just did, and I'm slowly and carefully slaughtering my way through them with no regrets.

Possibly I may go "shouldn't have done that" later if there's an important quest I need them for, but honestly - the more I explore the monastery and find the records of the githyanki landing, attacking and murderating everyone, the fewer qualms I have about "they gotta die, all of 'em".

I have no particular feelings towards them. They do seem needlessly cruel and it's not doing them any favors. Let's just say I think you're going to be pleasantly surprised during act 2 by the githyanki.

I hope so, otherwise It's Clobberin' Time!

I just beat the game. Depending on when you acquired some of your companions you might be locked into a class-path that isn't intuitive.

I respec'd Karlath and Shadowheart, eventually running the following party Main Character: Gale: Evocation Wizard Shadowheart: Life Cleric Astarion: Assassin Rogue Karlach: Berserker Barbarian

It's not complicated, but it gets the job done and lets you experience the game for the first time so that you can have fun making weird party compositions for your next run after you feel like you've got a strong handle on the game and know what to expect. Karlach is an HP tank that eventually becomes a khorne-tier murder berseker, Astarion does regular sneak attack damage, Shadowheart eventually becomes an high AC heal tank, and Gale give you the CC & sheer damage you need. Fireball solves everything.

Fought every battle normally and had a great time. With one exception. The True Soul Nere fight. Save scum. plant barrels. do whatever you have to do. That fight was an absolute nightmare and you can get screwed on spell slots due to its time restricted constraint.

I respec'd Karlath and Shadowheart, eventually running the following party Main Character: Gale: Evocation Wizard Shadowheart: Life Cleric Astarion: Assassin Rogue Karlach: Berserker Barbarian

Curious if this party makeup works in Tactician Mode.

Yes, imo. I use all of them but I haven't re-specced them. I guess one could min-max Karlach a bit..

Gale's pretty good as he is, Shadowheart can't do DPS but is a healer/buffs, Astarion is a great assassin although I think I gave him a level in fighter so he can use the ability bonus with his other hand and use heavier armor.

Karlach is good as she is. Although I really wish you could talk her into filing off those unsightly horns. Besides, how can tieflings wear helmets ?? Makes no sense.

I don't use Gale much as my PC is a lvl 1. fighter/sorceror. Fighter so you can wear full plate, have a shield and cast from that, sorceror because it's very flexible and has some unique features, such as being able to haste 2 fighters once per long rest.

Laezal is a great fighter too, due to her insane leaping ability and numerous unique buffs the githyanki get in items.

Wyll is extremely strong too due to the blade pact spec. Can use any weapon as a pro, can cast very solid spells quite often. A Warlock can cast 6 high lvl spells after one long rest.And the force beam cantrip is fairly strong due to very little force resistance in enemies at least, so far.

E.g. I use all the party NPCs.

...whaat. Nere? That was an extremely easy fight.

.. I imagine you did not bribe the duergar into helping you out, right?

Ah, line up explosive barrels everywhere to take out the opponents you haven't a prayer of even standing up against - an oldie but a goodie! And courtesy of /r/drama, I was made aware of this glorious playthrough, with the appropriately cinematic ending 😁

Jordan Peterson voice

Feral halflings - you think they are funny, but they are no joke!

Well, if by this stage of fantasy, you don't know to never underestimate the halflings, there's no hope for you except a quick death 😀

When you fought Nere, did you have the aid of the duergar that wanted him dead? I found that to be a huge help - especially in that it seemed the duergar I was still fighting preferred to try to kill my new "allies" instead of my party.

A few people have said things to the effect of the game turns into a bit of a buggy mess in act 3, with the illusions of choice falling away and the devs' politics becoming more intrusive? Can you confirm/deny, without any spoilers? I'm not sure if I should hold off on playing more of the game until major patches arrive.

Act 3 is absolutely the weakest act (although it also had my favorite Boss). I did not encounter any bugs but there are so many parts of the narrative being kept track of that Act 3 is where something would show up. I've heard of bugs showing up regarding Oathbreaking Paladins in Act 3, but i never had one.

If you've already sunk your teeth into the game into Act 2 then it's worth it to see it through to the end.

My biggest complaint with Act 3 isn't the devs politics but rather that there are so many plot threads that need tying up that the Act doesn't have a strong "Do X then Y then Z" narrative structure. Instead it feels much more like going down the checklist of plot points that need to be wrapped up. A bit of a "wait remind me who this is?" issue.

The best part of Act 3 is that you really get to feel like your party has come into it's own. Everyone is levelled up. End game equipment starts coming into play. You feel like everything you've been building towards has really come into it's own and you can bask in the fruits of your labors. But the game really simply isn't balanced at that level 12 and the solution of 'add more enemies' tends to make some combats a slog.

It's a Larian CRPG so the illusion of choice is precisely that. Most conversations are more about the tone/flavour of how you respond than an actual diverging choice. But there are still real choices in how you want to approach the ending and i'm satisfied with the path I took for (in my eyes) a maximum Good ending.

Is Act 3 as long as the other acts ?

Honestly I don't mind lack of structure. I hate when games like BG2 or Fallout 1 lock you into one story you must do or X. I like the exploration of ever hairier places.

Alright. I'll keep playing. :)

But the game really simply isn't balanced at that level 12 and the solution of 'add more enemies' tends to make some combats a slog.

I saw that they removed wizard protections spells and dumb downed the casting. 12+ lvl BG2 wizard fights, especially unnerfed were a treat. You had enemy wizards have contingencies, and killing them was very non-trivial.

Griping

Fighting my way through a dungeon and it's really irritating not being able to coordinate your characters to attack all at as a surprise round. In BG1 & BG2 you could pause the game, queue up an action for each party member, and unpause, and let 'er rip. But I can't do that here since BG3 doesn't have an actual pause function. Nor, weirdly, is there the ability to delay / ready an action.

Best work-arounds I've found are putting my entire party in stealth, having one character attack, and the introduce the rest of the party character by character. You're still at the mercy of the initiative rolls here though so focused-fire efforts are a crapshoot. I've tried putting it into turn-based mode but that also seems to be a crap-shoot for turn order. Anyone having better luck on bring down a world-of-hurt all at once?

Most enemies can be surprised, which means you can attack all at once, effectively speaking...

Imo, best way to bring in a world of hurt at once is have your sneaky fighter throw a barrel of water, followed by some nasty cold or electric based spell..

Maybe I'm not just quick enough on the mouse, but I can't seem to get my party to attack simultaneously even from stealth/hiding. The closest I've been able to achieve was snuffing Dror Ragzlin from the rafters in the goblin basewhich took a fair amount of positioning to get just right.

Edit to fix spoiler tags.

You don't need to be quick, I believe.

First person attacking from stealth causes enemies to be 'surprised', which means they don't do anyhting on their first turn. A few rare types (early to mid game) can't be surprised, but generally they can be.

Once someone is in combat, someone else can move in and iirc (almost certain) attack the enemies in the same turn as the first player who triggered the battle by joining in.

Finally got it to work on the gnolls nearby the Risen Road. Then got TPKs 4 times in a row because fuck gnolls and their goddamn multiattack bullshit.

  • 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..

So far I just think there's too much dice rolling. I'm fine with combat having tons of dice rolls under the hood, but there are just too many occasions in dialogue where you have to roll for outcomes, sometimes for things that shouldn't be left to chance, or situations where someone with 18 in an ability simply should never fail the check unless they're dead drunk. It encourages savescumming which I'd rather not engage in.

Absolutely agree that this is a big problem and the game would be substantially better without it. My party's rogue has a 95% chance to unlock almost every single lock I encounter, and anything that is possible to unlock for anyone else is near impossible for him to fail. Every single chest or lock is just a 5% chance for me to lose an item through chance. On the flipside, there's no actual punishment for making different choices either. My twig of an elven sorcerer can frequently just pass strength/dexterity/religion checks with the help of guidance/savescumming, so there's no real reason to care about the tradeoffs.

What having dicerolls for checks like this means is that you just emphasise being good at rolling dice and de-emphasise character-building and the choices you make in it. Competent RPGs have known for a long time that social rolls/skill checks like this should just be flat prerequisites rather than random rolls, because making it random is bad for the game. I can't really blame someone for savescumming when their super-strong barbarian can just, through random chance, end up actually being an erudite scholar who can't do basic athletic tasks because of a funky role distribution. It reduces the distinction between playthroughs and makes your choices in character creation/levelling that much less impactful. Game will be a lot better when a mod comes out that just replaces all of the rolled checks with flat bonus requirements. I also think a cheat mod which gives you guidance at all times when there's a caster with it in the party would be a net improvement along those lines as well.

I think dice rolling on screen is immersion breaking, you don't need to remind me your game is a toy every 5 minutes, it's like a movie zooming out every half hour to show the director shouting instructions to the cast on a soundstage.

In general hard stat-checks are preferable to dice rolls. On tabletop there's a communal gambling element to it, which can be fun, but in single-player games (and I'd guess 90%+ of BG3 players will primary or entirely play single-player), stat checks reward you for building your character in a certain way without subjecting you to the arbitrariness of dice throws. It doesn't make sense either, you either have the charisma to be charming or the strength to lift an object or you don't.

Yeah, that's a big complaint for me. It should happen instantly, you should see the dice roll like in BG2..

Especially because my FPS tanks during the dice rolls.

I think if the game (a) removed the "nat 1/20 is an auto-fail/success on skill checks" and possibly gave you the option to "take 10" 3e style on a bog-standard check (or take 20 outside of conversation at the cost of a short rest), that'd go a long way to solving the problem.

That drove me nuts when I played paranoia, since the more you roll, the more 5% chances you have to have something horrible happening to you. It makes you never want to do anything, since even opening an (untrapped) door can be hazardous.

removed the "nat 1/20 is an auto-fail/success on skill checks"

Note this isn't actually a rule in 5e for skill checks, only for attack rolls automatically hitting/missing. It wasn't a rule in 3.x either. It's just people keep misapplying the attack-roll rule to other rolls and inadvertently houseruling it even though it's a stupid change, sometimes including D&D developers and now apparently including Lorian Studios developers.

In 3rd edition it only applied to attack rolls, but then in the Deities and Demigods supplement they added a special rule for gods:

Deities of rank 1 or higher do not automatically fail on a natural saving throw roll of 1.

Yes, if you attain godhood you don't automatically fail saving throws on 1, just like everyone else. Then in 3.5 they actually did add automatic success/failure to saving throws (which I would argue was a negative change) but still didn't have it for skill checks. (3.5 came out a year after Deities and Demigods so they could have been consciously trying to make it backwards compatible, but I'd guess they just forgot it didn't work like that and then in 3.5 rewrote the rules to match the way they played it.)

Yes, agree.

My biggest gripe is the jank. It's like the country interaction menu in EU4 that has like fifty options. It has buttons you want to press often: declare war, offer alliance, fabricate claim; some that are situational: ask for fleet basing rights, send warning; some that are clearly in the wrong menu: sell ships, charter trade company; some that are completely useless: support rebels, surrender. When you first start playing this game you are completely overwhelmed and you need someone to show you that you need maybe 10% of this menu to start, 20% to succeed and the rest is situational fluff or just useless actions.

I feel the same about the hot bar of actions in BG3. Some of them sound like something I would want to use every turn, except they have a cooldown that is even longer than "once per fight". Some of them sound like something situational, except maybe perhaps I should be setting up these situations. Some sound completely useless. All of them are on the same bar, most of them take up the whole turn. People have complained about one of DA2's designers wanting every skill to be "press A for Awesome", but he was not completely wrong.

One can remove the buttons and change it up. I haven't bothered to, mostly added common ones.

Interface janks is jarring though. How come 3 years of EA didn't fix the problem of cumbersome inventory management, or enabling automatic "wares" assignment to loot items.

I guess it's just me getting older. I loved classic Fallouts and Infinity Engine games when they came out and still enjoy them, and they are full of jank. Or perhaps the game industry as a whole didn't know any better back then, so something that was fine in 98 is no longer so a quarter century later.

Are they? They were cheesable before mods and tweaks, but.. not really janky.

Unless you looked under the hood. Entire BG1-2 story and quest system was tied together with thousands of 8 letter variables. Lol, lmao, silent thanks to whomever made it all work.

Fallout 1 had five useful skills (small guns, energy weapons, speech, repair and science) out of eighteen, ten useful perks out of fifty, three useful traits out of sixteen. Maxing out agility was necessary for practically any build. The obvious way to use a stimpak required six AP, the best way required only two. Or four to use as many as you needed.

My kids are finally all old enough for coop BG1 and BG2, and coop BG includes some of my fondest memories so I'm excited ... but from what I'm reading it'll still be quite some time before my youngest is ready for BG3.

I suppose I should be patient, and be thankful BG3 does have coop mode. So many otherwise great CRPGs have a party with multiple characters to control but assume the gamer has no friends or family to help control them. That's just a hurtful stereotype, guys.

I'm excited ... but from what I'm reading it'll still be quite some time before my youngest is ready for BG3.

All romantic and sexual situations can be avoided by shutting down all approaches from the companions. The hysteria over the romancing is greatly exaggerated.

I mean, the game's fairly scary, frontloaded to the start and some of the companions bring up sex, but mostly tbh I'd say the scare factor is way stronger.

On one hand, I'm probably never having a family, but the only mercy there is that I'm never going to have to worry about aby children getting a porn habit.

Highest profile gripe thread from the CW one..

Technical Issues

Anyone has an idea on how to prevent magical (not conjured, ordinary enchanted equipment) weapons and shields from glowing ?

I do not understand why this is the default, it's jarring. I asked Bing AI chat and it confabulated a setting that toggles it off. Search is generally useless..

Am looking for suggestions what to do with UI while playing on a heirloom 1280x1024 LCD monitor.

Parts of the interface are out of whack, text size is sometimes too big and paragraphs turn into columns. Could manually editing settings for pixel size of fonts help?

Well, I found an old TV that has 9% more screen but only 80% of the pixels.

I had a fairly severe CTD problem related to first DPI scaling issues and later quicksave accumulation problem.

I implemented fixes suggested here. Game wouldn't start at all. Unimplemented the last third and game stopped CTD-ing every 20 minutes until I had 2 gb of quicksaves.

After deleting them the crashes stopped.

Reviews, including partial ones.

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).

I'm personally enjoying the game a lot. I'm at the beginning of Act 3 and haven't encountered that many bugs so far, although I heard it can get rough towards the end. Hopefully I don't softlock. Otherwise it's been a great experience.

Most of the other reviews so far have been pretty negative. I feel this forum is slipping towards the 4chan consensus of "everything that's popular sucks, the only things that don't suck are too obscure to really talk about due to their low playercount or because they're 20+ years old at this point".

...question re: act 1/2.

How many items did you forge from adamantine ?

I only got one chance. When I turned on the lava, the forge boss appeared, and I had to fight it. After, I used the forge to create some armor. I found some more mithril ore later, and when I returned, the game broke the machine, and I couldn't use it again. After playing through the Divinity games, this kind of quest-breaking bug wasn't a surprise.

Known bug, I think. Larian says patch 2 is on its way fairly soon and will focus more on bug fixes of this general sort.

Great to see where Larian's priorities lie: First patch -- Romantic fixes. "We need to make sure people can do romance bug free!"; Second patch -- Quest bug fixes.

Same happened to me.

You get 2, and I'd recommend getting medium or heavy armor since the weapons are fairly mediocre compared to alternatives, while the armor can easily last until the end of the game.

... it didn't occur to me the other mithril ore item would be that close, and the forge completely bugged out afterwards, so I've only got the shield.

Should've got the plate mail, dammit.

everything that's popular sucks, the only things that don't suck are too obscure to really talk about due to their low playercount or because they're 20+ years old at this point

There's a lot of truth to it, though. Something very popular will almost always be optimized for sufficient-mass-appeal-to-sell rather than sufficient-niche-appeal-to-earn-glowing-reviews-from-internet-contrarians.

be optimized for sufficient-mass-appeal-to-sell

Some works might be like that, but I feel this sentiment is often misused by contrarians to reason backwards without providing evidence. How is BG3 "optimized for mass appeal to sell"? I grant maybe the ubiquitous horniness goes towards that, but what about the gameplay? This game severely punishes mistakes, which isn't something I'd say an average normie consumer is really looking for.

Reviving a reputed franchise + Horniness? I'm honestly not speaking specifically of BG3 here - I'd need to have played it!

A reputed franchise from 20 years ago when gaming was a niche hobby enjoyed by a fraction of todays potential audience.

Not sure this would be the first franchise I‘d revive when looking for mass appeal.

That being said, it’s probably a well-known franchise within the niche of CRPG fans … which is sizeable, but still not huge (especially since it probably is still very PC-focused … while these games are released on consoles nowadays, they are still mostly created for and played with with mouse and keyboard).

Not sure this would be the first franchise I‘d revive when looking for mass appeal.

It, uh, took them 20 years to revive it?

Interestingly, of my friends playing the game at the moment, all of the pc gamers have moved on, while my console gaming friends are still fairly addicted to bg3. Anecdata, I know, but it also makes sense to me. The existence of a console port is proof of mass appeal and I assume wotc wouldn't have given the baldurs gate license to spiderweb software, even though every crpg player knows Vogel has mastered the formula, because no normie has ever heard of them and they wouldn't make beaucoup bucks.

I'm also enjoying it a lot .. but there are so many weird flaws.

For example, the interface stuff, the cumbersome party member swapping - you can't tell X to go to camp and send Y back..

Also recently ran into a horrifically bad fight and the game simply wouldn't let me bait these guys into meeting the very tough undead group I preferred to avoid..

I agree the interface really could use some love, especially the "group by type" for inventory which is almost worthless right now. Would also be good to have a "search for itemname in camp chest + all char inventories". Character swapping is also cumbersome but I rarely do it so it's not that big of a deal for me personally.

Also recently ran into a horrifically bad fight and the game simply wouldn't let me bait these guys into meeting the very tough undead group I preferred to avoid..

Not sure what you mean by this.

Yeah, the "group by type" isn't, not that I can see; some items that should be in a row with others aren't. Means I keep fumbling around the inventory going "I could have sworn I had that particular scroll/potion I need right now".

Group by type largely works. What works best is going to latest and just sending everything to camp. Once you have huge piles it gets less tedious to sort it by type and mass assign.

Why they didn't make an option to put 'add every item of this type to wares' automatically I do not understand.

search works. I've started to just cram every scroll into one backpack and search.

That's a useful hint, thanks!

The undead are hostile to almost everyone. The group in question was an astral hit squad, 100% some random cursed undead would attack them on sight.

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