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No_one  8mo ago (text post)   2762 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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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.

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