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:
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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.
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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.
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Story discussion only in the 'lore discussion' thread.
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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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Notes -
Griping
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.
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