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 -
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
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