i finished baldur’s gate 3 and i think it’s pretty cool. i’m nowhere near as head over heels about it as a lot of people are though. part of that i think is that for a lot of people this is their first larian crpg so they’re way more into all the (for want of a better term) immersive simmy elements. but i played both of the (imo pretty mid) divinity original sin games and i am so fucking bored of placing a barrel over a vent to stop the poison gas.
the other thing weighing the whole game down for me is the forgotten realms. i would never say that you can’t tell a genuinely good story in the forgotten realms (largely because mask of the betrayer exists and has an argument for being like, the best written video game full stop). but by and large i just think the forgotten realms are kinda just very generic and not very interesting. i think the first chunk of the game suffers from this most heavily; i cannot imagine caring all that much about goblins vs druids (d&d druids are, to me, some of the most boring, poorly realised shit in the world).
my other big beef is how bad a lot of the encounter design in act 3 is. they’re responding to the classic issue (which i think every crpg based on d&d has faced) of ‘oh no, the party is too powerful late game how to we balance around this’. generally the answer to this is you can’t but it’s fine because actually blasting apart entire maps of dudes with your sicko end game build is pretty fun. larian have responded to this issue by making some of the most annoying encounters i’ve ever seen - not actually challenging mind, just desperately trying to make you waste as much time and as many resources as possible. i can’t be very sympathetic because the game is capped at level 12; long before anybody gets access to really broken shit. it’s hard not to be critical of them not being able to balance around levels that most crpgs don’t really have an issue with.
this is a really critical post but mostly i do like the game a lot! i think it’s doing the bioware thing really really well and if it’s at times cheesy and melodramatic well, that’s what bioware games were and it was part of the charm. i had a great time with almost all the the main cast and i’ll probably revisit this game a bunch because hanging out with all my little computer friends feels good and that, ultimately was the entire appeal of peak bioware.
i feel a little bad for being so negative about a game i genuinely do like here but i just kind of didn’t want to write a whole post about how shadowheart is my wife (she is though, she is my wife).
