I’m just a little bit late to the Baldurs Gate 3 party, but I searched on here and didn’t see much follow up discussion about it after the review thread. I’m also trying to submit more to Lemmy so the communities can grow, so I thought I’d bring it back up now that it has been out for a few weeks.
I only just bought Baldurs Gate 3 this week and finally got time to sit down and play it tonight for the first time really and I am so impressed. The character creator allows so much character expression. I made a generic red Tiefling and when I saw there was an option to add vitiligo, I immediately built out a head canon where my character is a Tiefling that is slowly being transformed into a human by a curse from his past. I never would have thought of a character like this, but the character creator just provided some pretty unique designs and options.
Everything just feels so polished. I’ve played Pathfinder Kingmaker before this and parts of Wasteland 2, but I’ve never been much of a CRPG fan. I feel like the user interface in this game is a lot easier to follow and read. It’s especially nice because I played in co-op with a friend that doesn’t play much in the way of RPGs and has only ever played tabletop D&D once and he was able to easily slot in and start figuring out how things work together and where everything in the UI was. It was very entry-level friendly for our experience and it made the entire experience a lot better.
Also it’s kind of a weird thing but I’m really impressed with the facial animations so far. I was expecting Bioware or Bethesda style faces where their lips move, but their faces are otherwise lifeless. I’ve been loving seeing the character seemingly actually move their eyebrows and their jaws when they’re speaking.
I’m not super far into the game since I’ve only had time today to play it, but I’m super excited to play more when I get the chance.
What have your experiences been like? Any fun stories or characters you’ve made?
I don’t play that much any more sadly, only one evening per week with the buddies but BG3 looks very appealing. Do you think it can be enjoyed casually ?
No. I’m playing on the easy/story mode and the battles still take forever. Especially early on when you’re learning the game you can expect ordinary fights to last 10-15 minutes on average, big fights can last much longer and end with your death which makes them feel pointless. Movement is also very slow, it takes a long time to get anywhere. There’s also a ton of inventory management you’ll need to do + the learning curve if you don’t know D&D already.
It’s a very good game but there’s nothing casual about it. People will recommend the game to you anyway but I don’t think it’s a good fit for casual players. Also, the game gets buggier and buggier the farther you get from Act 1. I would at least wait for it the last two acts to get fixed, act 3 is actually really bad right now.
The fucking inventory management is the worst. It’s so slow and clunky. What’s annoying is that there are bags and pouches you can put stuff into to better organize but the things like lotions and throwables don’t show up on your hot bar. They have a dedicated bag for alchemical ingredients and one for camp supplies, but I wish they had gone further and made one for books, throwables, potions, special arrows, etc.
Also there’s no easy way to look at camp items and all your characters. Especially ones not in your party. So moving stuff around or trying to optimize equipment is super annoying and time consuming. Especially if you have one set of armor you like to use but want to bring on two different characters depending who is in your party.
One thing I like is that characters automatically teleport keys to each other as needed. The game even calls it magic pockets when it happens. You can move items between characters freely in combat. I just wish there was a way to have a pooled inventory then that way we could have all characters have access to scrolls and stuff without having to move them.
And encumbrance becomes annoying because of everything you mentioned. I pick everything up. So the 25 goblin bows and scimitar all add up in weight. My main character is a sorcerer so every once in a whole I have to move all the junk from him to the barbarian
Yeah, super annoying. I have a melee ranger with 19 strength and still have to dump my inventory pretty often.
If encumberence is your main complaint there are mods to make it higher. I’ve been considering it because encumberence is really only a fun limitation when planning what to bring into an area, not when planning what to bring out, and I hardly use consumables anyways. So really it just saves time not having to go to camp and back.
So they’ve actually captured the tabletop experience with this game.
Huh. I’m no “pro gamer” but that hasn’t been my experience on balanced. My longest fight has been 20 minutes but a 4v3 or 4v4 has been taking just a few.
Mileage varies I guess
It can be enjoyed casually solo or with close family like a girlfriend or teenage kids. But with friends you need to schedule long sessions because it’s a huge game. It has 3 difficulties: explorer, balanced and tactician. So a solo explorer play through could be done casually in 30 minute chunks. You might have to pause mid combat during longer fights but it has quick save so you can finish it later.
One thing to be aware of is that it’s not designed for drop-in multiplayer. I offered to be player 2 for my girlfriend’s playthrough and now any time she wants to play by herself my character is stuck in her party, not following her around and taking up a slot that can’t be allocated to one of the origin characters.
(UPDATE: This last bit may have been a transient bug; I was able to get the character to follow again after some troubleshooting. Still can’t swap the character for an NPC though.)
So unless you know your other multiplayer buddies can always play with you, think twice about MP or you may be at a disadvantage.
It’s not the best, but you can group the other player characters with your character so they just follow you around the same way the origin characters do. You still lose the slot, but it’s otherwise the same as using an origin character.
My wife left early last night while we were playing and her character ended up coming in clutch in many combats. Figuring out I could get her to follow me was a game changer
Yeah, it’s weird. Last night group and split were having no effect on the character, but after a bunch of restarts and updating to the preview build of SteamOS I’m able to group again. So at least there’s that. (No idea which if any of those things resolved the bug, unfortunately.)
I’ve just had a baby and can only manage to play half an hour here and there randomly. It’s awesome.
If you loved baldurs gate as much as I used to, definately worth it.
It’s looking like I will only get to play around 3 hours a week with friends and I’m ready. Last night’s session was fantastic. It felt like meeting up once a week for a more simplified DnD session. We got through a fair chunk of content.
You may never be able to reach the end of the game, but I think if you enjoy the base gameplay then it’ll still be very worthwhile