#ofc act 3 was so buggy once again

[tadpole-apocalypse]

Morgan art to celebrate finishing another play through!

[honshew]

thoughts on bg3

overall, i had a lot of fun and would recommend to anyone interested! very ambitious game, and i'm amazed it exists tbh. there are so many really, really great aspects of it. however, i'm also glad to be done with it, bc i started to have less and less fun with it at the last part. which is an unfortunate place to have the worst part of the game. i really wish it wrapped up in a more satisfying way, because i became really attached to the characters and the incredibly detailed world. a shame it had to be rushed toward the end of development. it's incredible, though could have been more still.

i'm spending some time trying to figure out what i liked about the game, so this may or may not be updated as thoughts come to me. there will be spoilers all the way thru the end of the game so here's your spoiler warning

i think while people unfamiliar with dnd can play and still have a good time, it probably will feel overwhelming and there will likely be things you won't understand unless someone explains it to you. i can't even really call the tutorial a bad one as much as it's barely there. but i do know plenty of people with zero dnd experience still having fun and simply enjoying learning on the go!

on the other hand, being someone who plays dnd, once you figure out the interface it's a pretty smooth experience. there are some things that are a little different to accommodate how the game works (e.g. second-story work reduces your fall dmg rather than increasing your climbing speed, since the game doesn't really count climbing as distance), but those are pretty quick to learn. seems to me that the devs thought people who didn't play dnd wouldn't be all that intersted in bg3, but a ci'd be curious to see how many bg3 players will look for a dnd group to join from here.

act 1 was solid and was paced well. i really liked how many characters ended up showing up later in the game, as opposed to characters you save once and never see again. i think what was most fun was getting to know what i could get away with LOL not just an exploration of the world, but an exploration of the game itself. i have video of me talking to auntie ethel while my friends set up and set off a circle of flame barrels, so i got a front row seat of her being blown to smithereens.

act 2, also solid. i really enjoy quests that involve impacting a place in a really tangible way, like in okami, so the shadow-cursed lands were pretty cool. unfortunately, the game doesn't really show you this happening except a liiiiittle bit at the end, so it doesn't feel as good as it could. still, i liked exploring the area a lot. all of the mini-bosses of the area were unsettling, but we got past literally all of them via high charisma rolls. actually aside from the exploring, a lot of the fun was seeing how we could cheese boss fights, which carried into act 3

act 3 felt way more all over the place and buggy, which significantly lowered my enjoyment. ofc a game this massive will have issues, but i'm still sad that the last part of the game where everything crescendos is where i enjoyed the game the least. small things not working the way they're supposed to (e.g. certain npcs not running or climbing up a ladder when they are fleeing I'M TALKING TO YOU ZUMBO PUMBO AND FEATHERWEIGHT FALSON, astarion falling sleep to a spell even tho he's an elf during his end-of-quest fight). what sucks about things being so frustrating too was that the main quests had really great setups or concepts, but the execution was messy. still, we had a lot of fun messing with bosses. cazador couldn't do anything bc he was forced to dance while we killed him, orin was disintegrated, gortash turned to stone. kinda wild having a bard with 100% spell hit rate....!

i do wish we got to explore baldur's gate more. i totally get that would be a huge undertaking tho. i had a thought that maybe act 3 should've been its own game, but then i guess you couldn't call it baldur's gate 3 if you never get to baldur's gate. i didn't play the previous bg games, but i liked how they wove in the story from the previous installments and ttrpg modules without leaving newcomers to the series out of the loop too much.

i liked shadowheart's, astarion's, and wyll's quests a lot. the ansur part of wyll's was really cool. i adore trials to test character as a setup, especially ones administrated by some major figure. but also? fuck balduran for what he did to ansur and later to me. he's the city's hero, but he only really looks out for himself. which is cool for me as a viewer, not cool for the character i play as LOL

i have more thoughts but i will type them up here later maybe this has gotten long enoguh