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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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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.