Baldur's Gate Baldur's Gate 3 RELEASE THREAD

[Swen]

Crazy because BG3 isn't even thay good. Guess the romance simulator and presentation did it.

Not saying the game is bad but it's an 8/10 at best

It's earned the hype, I think - I've honestly never seen this level of environmental interaction and freedom to deploy consistent systems in a cRPG, especially not a big budget one. It still has its limitations and its easy to find them, but in terms of just letting you approach problems in whatever way you want, it easily beats most other cRPGs. It's almost like a stats-based immersive sim at times and it's easily the game that's come the closest to tabletop in terms of accomodating unexpected solutions to things.

Wrote about it somewhere in the release thread but I'm still amazed that a valid solution to get across the moat at the start of Act 3 is to shrink yourself and have Karlach just pick you up and throw you across, which leads to a whole emergent gameplay segment where you have to sneak through the fort alone until you can find a way to get your companions in. It's the kind of stuff I always dreamed of being able to do when I played games as a kid, but which in the past would only ever occur as part of entirely scripted pre-written puzzles.

The romance stuff and the slickness of the presentation undoubtedly help but at the core of it is a good game that trusts the player with more freedom and offers more flexibility than almost any other cRPG I can think of, which hopefully is how the game influences the genre going forward.

Finally an honest review.

 

[Fedora Master]

More gay and cringe shit for the gay cringelord.

 

[Infinitron]

Still not done retrospecting:

 

[Barbarian]

This will follow the course as every blockbuster rpg since 2000. We will likely have "enhanced" or "definitive" editions being released 20 years from now.

The lack of dlc is very bizarre though, considering sales and everything. Is it stipulated in the contract with WOTC that only Larian can develop content for the game? The logical thing would be for another studio to catch the ball.

 

[Fedora Master]

The logical thing would be for another studio to catch the ball

Please no

 

[Swen]

The logical thing would be for another studio to catch the ball

Please no

Lol keep coping, BG4 will be inevitable. The only question is who will make it.

 

[Fedora Master]

The logical thing would be for another studio to catch the ball

Please no

Lol keep coping, BG4 will be inevitable. The only question is how gay it'll be

 

[Barbarian]

Fedora Master how many times have you played and finished BG3 as of yet?

 

[Fedora Master]

Fedora Master how many times have you played and finished BG3 as of yet?

Once. It's not worth more than that.

~bUtt u PlayeD iT thAt meeNs u LiekD it!!!~

 

[Barbarian]

Nah, I just asked out of curiosity. I expected you played the game more than once. I think you surely will.

Have you tried the "unwoke" mod yet?

 

[Fedora Master]

Nah, I just asked out of curiosity. I expected you played the game more than once. I think you surely will.

Have you tried the "unwoke" mod yet?

Yes and it certainly makes the third act less jarring.

 

[dukeofwoodberry]

Crazy because BG3 isn't even thay good. Guess the romance simulator and presentation did it.

Not saying the game is bad but it's an 8/10 at best

It's earned the hype, I think - I've honestly never seen this level of environmental interaction and freedom to deploy consistent systems in a cRPG, especially not a big budget one. It still has its limitations and its easy to find them, but in terms of just letting you approach problems in whatever way you want, it easily beats most other cRPGs. It's almost like a stats-based immersive sim at times and it's easily the game that's come the closest to tabletop in terms of accomodating unexpected solutions to things.

Wrote about it somewhere in the release thread but I'm still amazed that a valid solution to get across the moat at the start of Act 3 is to shrink yourself and have Karlach just pick you up and throw you across, which leads to a whole emergent gameplay segment where you have to sneak through the fort alone until you can find a way to get your companions in. It's the kind of stuff I always dreamed of being able to do when I played games as a kid, but which in the past would only ever occur as part of entirely scripted pre-written puzzles.

The romance stuff and the slickness of the presentation undoubtedly help but at the core of it is a good game that trusts the player with more freedom and offers more flexibility than almost any other cRPG I can think of, which hopefully is how the game influences the genre going forward.

I guess that stuff is cool but there's always a straight forward way to pass that stuff that makes the game much easier. Like you can try and get super creative to make the game more difficult if you want.

For me the game falls short in immersion. I've said this before but because of the writing and companions, I'm never immersed and always bored by act 3. I guess it could be nostalgia but I got way more immersed in games like Kotor and Mass Effect 1 because of the writing and companions.

Honestly I like Kingmaker better than Bg3 aswell. Better characters, better writing, better decision making. I don't value mimicking a table top experience as much.

 

[Elttharion]

The logical thing would be for another studio to catch the ball

Please no

Lol keep coping, BG4 will be inevitable. The only question is who will make it.

Bioware, we will come full circle

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

We can all hope that Electronic Arts terminates Bioware before it has an opportunity to develop any game after Veilguard, much less BG4.

 

[The Bishop]

Honestly I like Kingmaker better than Bg3 aswell. Better characters, better writing, better decision making. I don't value mimicking a table top experience as much.

The problem with emergent stuff in BG3 is that it's nice when it works, but not as nice when it fails. And it does fail frequently. For example I managed to sneak all the way into Ethel's dungeon, take all her stuff and lower the trapped girl's cage. The girl insists you release her, but when you do she just stands there and has nothing to say. You can also go back to Ethel, but the only dialogue available is as if nothing happened. To Larian's credit, the game never crashes or softlocks in situations like that, but this is hardly a satisfying attempt at mimicking tabletop. While in tabletop you expect the game to accommodate your approach naturally, in bg3 you're left with saving/loading just to check if your idea works at all, and doing so does not feel like an adventure.

 

[Old Hans]

Honestly I like Kingmaker better than Bg3 aswell. Better characters, better writing, better decision making. I don't value mimicking a table top experience as much.

The problem with emergent stuff in BG3 is that it's nice when it works, but not as nice when it fails. And it does fail frequently. For example I managed to sneak all the way into Ethel's dungeon, take all her stuff and lower the trapped girl's cage. The girl insists you release her, but when you do she just stands there and has nothing to say. You can also go back to Ethel, but the only dialogue available is as if nothing happened. To Larian's credit, the game never crashes or softlocks in situations like that, but this is hardly a satisfying attempt at mimicking tabletop. While in tabletop you expect the game to accommodate your approach naturally, in bg3 you're left with saving/loading just to check if your idea works at all, and doing so does not feel like an adventure.

this is the problem I always run into one way or another. As much as they talk about "emergent gameplay" if you don't play exactly how they intended, you'll run into so many immersion breaking situations, like casting fireball on the group of magicians near sorcerer sundries, because even when they're dead, there is still a crowd that watches and comments on them. its all very static

 

[dukeofwoodberry]

Honestly I like Kingmaker better than Bg3 aswell. Better characters, better writing, better decision making. I don't value mimicking a table top experience as much.

The problem with emergent stuff in BG3 is that it's nice when it works, but not as nice when it fails. And it does fail frequently. For example I managed to sneak all the way into Ethel's dungeon, take all her stuff and lower the trapped girl's cage. The girl insists you release her, but when you do she just stands there and has nothing to say. You can also go back to Ethel, but the only dialogue available is as if nothing happened. To Larian's credit, the game never crashes or softlocks in situations like that, but this is hardly a satisfying attempt at mimicking tabletop. While in tabletop you expect the game to accommodate your approach naturally, in bg3 you're left with saving/loading just to check if your idea works at all, and doing so does not feel like an adventure.

this is the problem I always run into one way or another. As much as they talk about "emergent gameplay" if you don't play exactly how they intended, you'll run into so many immersion breaking situations, like casting fireball on the group of magicians near sorcerer sundries, because even when they're dead, there is still a crowd that watches and comments on them. its all very static

There are times when it works and times when it doesn't. But even when it work's usually you're making things more difficult om yourself than playing a more standard way

 

[Yosharian]

Honestly I like Kingmaker better than Bg3 aswell. Better characters, better writing, better decision making. I don't value mimicking a table top experience as much.

The problem with emergent stuff in BG3 is that it's nice when it works, but not as nice when it fails. And it does fail frequently. For example I managed to sneak all the way into Ethel's dungeon, take all her stuff and lower the trapped girl's cage. The girl insists you release her, but when you do she just stands there and has nothing to say. You can also go back to Ethel, but the only dialogue available is as if nothing happened. To Larian's credit, the game never crashes or softlocks in situations like that, but this is hardly a satisfying attempt at mimicking tabletop. While in tabletop you expect the game to accommodate your approach naturally, in bg3 you're left with saving/loading just to check if your idea works at all, and doing so does not feel like an adventure.

That's very disappointing

 

[Hydro]

That’s BG3 in a nutshell. Allowing a player to do lots of stuff, but not obliged to acknowledge any of it.

The majority of this “emergent gameplay” is cramped in the Act i, further acts contain a more straightforward gameplay with the act iii being an utterly unimaginative slop completely stripped of the feel of adventure.

 

[Swen]

Honestly I like Kingmaker better than Bg3 aswell. Better characters, better writing, better decision making. I don't value mimicking a table top experience as much.

The problem with emergent stuff in BG3 is that it's nice when it works, but not as nice when it fails. And it does fail frequently. For example I managed to sneak all the way into Ethel's dungeon, take all her stuff and lower the trapped girl's cage. The girl insists you release her, but when you do she just stands there and has nothing to say. You can also go back to Ethel, but the only dialogue available is as if nothing happened. To Larian's credit, the game never crashes or softlocks in situations like that, but this is hardly a satisfying attempt at mimicking tabletop. While in tabletop you expect the game to accommodate your approach naturally, in bg3 you're left with saving/loading just to check if your idea works at all, and doing so does not feel like an adventure.

this is the problem I always run into one way or another. As much as they talk about "emergent gameplay" if you don't play exactly how they intended, you'll run into so many immersion breaking situations, like casting fireball on the group of magicians near sorcerer sundries, because even when they're dead, there is still a crowd that watches and comments on them. its all very static

And yet it's still does "emergent gameplay" better than any crpg before it.


Of course not EVERY situation is accounted for, let's stay a bit realistic here.

 

[Lemming42]

Yeah, pretty much; every cRPG is an exercise in accepting the existence of limitations, but I can't really think of any other game that has BG3's ambition in really trying to let the player do as much as possible. When you do find a limitation or hit a wall - which is easy to do, obviously, on account of the sheer level of freedom you're given to experiment - I didn't have trouble accepting that the game can't do everything since I was so wowed by the amount of trust the game puts in you, and I'd say about 75% of my ideas did actually work, even the fairly absurd ones (like skipping the entire boss fight in the Astral Plane in Act 2 by casting Hideous Laughter on the guy to prevent him from starting his speech and then just throwing him off the platform).

What's most exciting about BG3 is that you can see the DNA of future cRPGs in it. In the same way that Fallout was a revelation in 1997 and still today feels like a blueprint for how to make the cRPGs of the future, even though as a game itself it's very limited and basic in most of its systems and quests. Same for other games that seemed to offer a glimpse into a future that never materialised, like Daggerfall and Deus Ex - I can accept their own countless limitations because they still feel like they're trailblazing new models of what it's possible to do in a cRPG. BG3 similarly feels like it's saying "here's a rough outline of what RPGs might look like ten years from now", obviously we'll have to see if any of that comes to fruition in works from other devs in the coming years.

 

[The Bishop]

Ambition is great and accepting limitations is fine too. The issue is really that exploring BG3 is so dependent on saving/loading. Whenever you encounter another bunch of content you save and you test. If your character starts to do stupid shit that you can't anticipate, when you hit the wall because an option that you were certain should be there is missing, or when a script just doesn't trigger, you load. Eventually you find a satisfactory path and you proceed to the next bunch of content, where you save, test, rinse repeat. Don't know about others, but to me this does not feel like adventuring. It feels like maintenance. You can't really play organically, or rather you can, but then you do only the most obvious thing, which in most cases just attack. And miss out on most of the content.

 

[Lemming42]

Ambition is great and accepting limitations is fine too. The issue is really that exploring BG3 is so dependent on saving/loading. Whenever you encounter another bunch of content you save and you test. If your character starts to do stupid shit that you can't anticipate, when you hit the wall because an option that you were certain should be there is missing, or when a script just doesn't trigger, you load. Eventually you find a satisfactory path and you proceed to the next bunch of content, where you save, test, rinse repeat. Don't know about others, but to me this does not feel like adventuring. It feels like maintenance. You can't really play organically, or rather you can, but then you do only the most obvious thing, which in most cases just attack. And miss out on most of the content.

That wasn't my experience of the game, I only really remember having to reload due to dead-ending myself once (can't remember the context, somewhere in Act 2 iirc). Otherwise I only ever occasionally reloaded because I was dissatisfied with the outcome of a plan - which was often my own fault - and not because the game was actually forcing me to reload through some glitch or irreversible sequence break. Other than the Act 2 softlock the worst I ever came up against was a couple of quests where they didn't anticipate you moving ahead in a certain way, like the aforementioned Ethel quest.

I also tried to limit reloading as much as possible because it's always more interesting to try and deal with the aftermath of a failed plan (which, again, I think BG3 does better than any other cRPG I can think of). Having the team accidentally split up, having party members trapped or arrested, having people stranded without the spells to get back, stuff like that is all part of the fun. You don't have to reload until you find the most "satisfactory path", you can/should keep playing when things go badly wrong for the party.

If your character starts to do stupid shit that you can't anticipate

When did this happen to you? Other than trying to take the party up ladders, which the game seems to completely shit itself on every time.

 

[Hydro]

As a blueprint for future CRPGs BG3 is great, no doubt about it. As a standalone game it’s shite for furries.

 

[Yosharian]

Ambition is great and accepting limitations is fine too. The issue is really that exploring BG3 is so dependent on saving/loading. Whenever you encounter another bunch of content you save and you test. If your character starts to do stupid shit that you can't anticipate, when you hit the wall because an option that you were certain should be there is missing, or when a script just doesn't trigger, you load. Eventually you find a satisfactory path and you proceed to the next bunch of content, where you save, test, rinse repeat. Don't know about others, but to me this does not feel like adventuring. It feels like maintenance. You can't really play organically, or rather you can, but then you do only the most obvious thing, which in most cases just attack. And miss out on most of the content.

I mean the hardest difficulty explicitly discourages this