Greetings everybody. I've been playing EA BG3 since late 2021, and I've played six or seven runs as a Bard, Ranger, Paladin, and Sorcerer. All in all, I've had a blast, loved DOS2, love DnD, love BG3, but I've never given my two cents on things, so I'll throw it out there now.
Quick thoughts:
- Level 5 feels right at home for the Underdark part in the journey. Fights like spectator and Nere felt like they required a bit of gaminess to play at level 4(hiding characters, overly relying on the environment for damage, reloading for better initiative, etc.). At level 5 fireball and two attacks on martial characters even those fights out so you don't have to play in those ways while the fights still offer meaningful challenge.
- Some jankiness remains in certain dialogues. Generally it's when you're skipping dialogues and there's an animation during, text will show but characters will stop speaking.
- The game feels super point-and-click after this many runs, my deepest hope is that full release will shake things up a bit from the jump, so that things feel similar but refreshing for all of us who've tumbled through the bug reporting.
- That up-and-down the ladder thing, while still present, didn't trigger me nearly as much in the past. Idk if I've been conditioned to it or what at this point, but it didn't feel as present.
- Paladin felt a bit underwhelming to be honest. In the tabletop, paladins have always been boss killers in my mind. Maybe I just had a bunch of bad damage rolls (which is what it felt like), but it wasn't until Nere that I really slapped anything down with my paladin Tav. Probably an anomaly, but worth mentioning.
- The automaton fight in the forge feels much better. I don't know if I just got better at it, but it finally feels relatively clean compared to what felt really glitchy before
Storyline remains excellent. Although I have experienced all the dialogue, I was going back and paying a special mind to Ketheric's lore due to the new trailer. That being said, although his name gets brought up, I wish the foreshadowing was a bit heavier. He felt like he was dead already when I had previously played, so I sorted it to the back of my mind. Now that I know he's a living, breathing character, I want to pay more attention when others speak his name. Extremely excited to kill his ass. Other than that, plot hooks feel like they're all going somewhere. Lae'zel's, Wyll's, and Shadowheart's stories all have significant momentum going into the Moonrise path. Gale is someone who, personal confessionals aside, doesn't really have a pathway towards resolution yet; but I'm knitpicking at that point, obviously we're due a big reveal at some point. I killed Astarion this run with the stake--I've wanted to kill him for so long but could never give him up to the hunter due to my snitching aversions--that felt good. I'm desperate for the what's going on with The Absolute reveal at this point. All the sub plots have meaning without detracting from where you're going.
Quests more-or-less feel like they just meet you along your journey and fit the pacing of the storyline well. Sometimes you have to go a bit out of your way to hit your mark, but I think that kind of balance is important and differentiates different sorts of playstyles. No complaints here.
Vulkan still gets outperformed by DirectX11 for me. I'm running a mid-tier machine, and while Vulkan definitely looks better, it drops frames like crazy. I would rather run with the stability of DirectX11. I was playing on high settings, something my machine can run the equivalent of on many newly-released games, and Vulkan crapped out on me after escaping the ship. I don't know if Vulkan is intended to be preferable to DirectX11 on my kind of machine, but it definitely did not feel that way.
Combat feels really tight--easy to learn and difficult to master, true to DnD. Having quite a bit of tabletop experience, I think about bringing some of the scaling that the game offers to challenge my own parties. Combat feels really clean, you always have a chance, and has a very real tension to it. I couldn't be happier with the fights. "Easier" fights are not resource hogs and major battles feel just like that, a major battle. Personally, I would want to take away the automatic sneak success when behind a character that's threatening you, I really feel like that should be a roll to at least takeaway part of that style of playing (which currently it feels like you aren't playing the game well without sneaking on a lot of your turns). Fights feel a lot fairer in general, too. I've been trying to generate more critiques, but I have no more, I'm satisfied on this front.
There's some minor sound glitches here and there. My MC got stuck chuckling after confusion wore off one time, that forced a reset. Game remains to be solid sound wise on the effects front. I wish we had more music though, a lot of the tracks are just background and don't really have any emotional impact on the tone of the thing that you are doing. Particularly during fights, I love myself a good fantasy fight track.
I cannot wait for August 29th. If the remainder of the game is 75% as good as the opening act, this will be my favorite game of all time. Larian, you're absolutely crushing it. Finish strong, I know you will!
