#when people say they unironically like astarion it’s on sight for me

[prozach27]

Baldur’s Gate 3 is dizzyingly difficult. Like I love hard games and enjoy a challenge - I’ve platinumed every soulsborne game for christs sake - but the game progression is just… so unclear? It takes a LOT of game play to level up, and the differences between levels is stark. Like you get to the first main settlement at level 2 (level 3 if you go through an optional crypt before hand), the settlement tells you to go to a goblin camp, but you really should be level 4 for that. Which is quite a bit of level progression away. You can go south of the goblin camp to find a swamp and boss storyline, but you really should be level 4 for that also. You can go north, but not DIRECTLY north, because you should be level 5 (!!!) for that it seems. And even if you go to a fight properly leveled, every move has a 5% chance to miss no matter what your stats are due to critical failures, and there’s nothing to stop this rng luck from occurring on multiple rolls back-to-back.

Like the world and story is so cool!!! I love the dialogue and storylines, and they’ve added in SO MANY ways to approach things!! I found a person I’d been talking to dead so I used my spell to speak to the dead and figured out who killed him and what to watch out for. I came across noxious fumes coating the ground and when I passed a perception check I could find the vent they were coming from. After thinking about it, I threw a rock on to the vent and it plugged it up and the fumes went away. Like I love how much thought and detail went into the world building and the seemingly infinite number of ways you can approach things.

It’s just a shame that this comes at the expense of combat being joy-crushingly difficult with no clear story progression that helps you level appropriately, leaving you following the story only to discover too late that the next story step requires further leveling so you wipe and have to search elsewhere hoping you can find an appropriate challenge. I’m playing on normal and looked online to see if this is why the game has a “story mode,” but the Reddit threads are filled with people saying story mode is actually still brutal for them and they can’t get past the starting area.

I paid for the game so I’m gonna beat it and I’m sure once you get used to combat and understand the order of where to go it’s much more fun, but the trial and error approach players are forced to go through really isn’t great or entertaining. I can see why people want to give it game of the year based on how amazingly the developers made the story / player choice / dialogue in the game, but it feels like a massive oversight for it to have won considering how genuinely unplayable it will be for a solid chunk of players