Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General BG3 Is a Decent Game But...

Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3) is a decent game, but it has some glaring flaws that stop it from being a masterpiece.

I’ll preface this list by saying believable and compelling fiction is logically coherent. There’s magic and there are dragons in the Forgotten Realms, but we’re given a good in-game explanation for their existence. What explanation has been given for a 5’2’’ human woman with spaghetti arms wearing heavy armor and wielding a great sword like it were a feather? None has been given. What explanation has been given for elves, gnomes, and dwarves with facial features from races found in human beings? None has been given. Why not? Because Larian Studios has sacrificed art for political points. They’re not the first and unfortunately they won’t be the last.

• Too easy on Tactician mode. I’m not well-versed in BG3’s mechanics or how Larian Studios (LS) has done things with their past games regarding combat; yet, I’m destroying it on Tactician mode. Create Water + Lightning Bolt, much? Hundreds of scrolls and potions in my inventory, much? I can’t imagine how mind-numbingly dull the lower difficulties are.
  
  
• Obvious game-breaking bugs and performance issues that should have been fixed three years ago. I ran into a bug (days ago) with The Dark Urge where I never received credit for murdering Isobel. How in the world did LS miss this one? Saving/kidnapping/murdering Isobel is a pivotal plot point. It’s not like you need to drink 10 Health potions, spin around in circles for 5 minutes, and then cast Summon Mephit—all in the correct order—to replicate this glitch. One would think LS would have discovered and fixed this issue by now. What’s going on over there in Belgium? They’ve had 6-7 years of development which includes beta testers that paid them to test their game, called Early Access. Then there are the performance issues. There are certain points in the game that run like garbage no matter what your video settings are. Since LS’ recent patches, I’ve switched over to the Vulkan client, and the game runs like grass-fed butter. I’m getting 60-150+ frames in many parts of the game on high settings. However, there seems to be some kind of memory or CPU/GPU allocation issue. I’ll be standing still in an area with 60+ frames, with nothing new happening in the game world (and nothing new happening on my computer), when suddenly the frames plummet to 20 frames for several seconds. Then it’ll fix itself and go back to 60+ frames. The DirectX 11 client is even worse though because on average the frames are much lower in all parts of the game.
  
  
• The User Interface (UI) is clunky, sometimes unresponsive, and glitchy. You get scrolls and potions up the *ss, but there’s no autostack feature? Are you kidding? I need to take a 10-minute coffee break to sort through all the crap in my inventory. I’ll select a party member’s portrait, hear a click, but it doesn’t switch over. I'll have a character selected in the merchant menu, highlight a weapon from the merchant, and then the weapon will be compared to a weapon from a different party member. Then I’ll re-highlight the same weapon and it'll compare it to my selected party member's weapon. Are you using dice rolls for the UI?
  
  
• The pathfinding is horrible in areas where my party members need to jump over obstacles. Sometimes I’ll go several minutes without realizing that Astarion is not with me because he couldn’t figure out how to jump over something.
  
  
• According to Morte from Planescape: Torment (PT), tieflings are oftentimes addled or have a mean streak through them because they're a mix between a human and a fiend. Fiends are evil creatures from the Lower Planes. All of this was reflected in PT’s world. In BG3, they're just furries. And that goes for the rest of the non-human NPCs except for creatures like goblins and ogres. Different species with different alignments and behaviors is a big deal in the Forgotten Realms, and some of these species don’t like each other. How did you mess that up? You never watched Lord of The Rings? You don’t remember how dwarves and elves didn’t like each other? Tolkien’s work and the Forgotten Realms are two different things, but I’ve made my point.
  
  
• Sexually degenerate content. In BG2 and PT there's sexual/romance content, but it was done tastefully. These games relied more on innuendo and colorful language as opposed to hitting the player over the head with, "Hey, wanna go to a secluded area and f***?", after knowing them for only a day. Also, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but most of your customers are straight men. We don’t want homosexual NPCs badgering us for sex. It’s weird. The people who post on your forum about romancing Astarion are in the minority, just like they’re a minority in the general population. If you want more money, then you shouldn’t alienate the majority of your customers to chase the fringe. If you can’t stay away from that kind of thing, then you should remove all sex from the game. There’s already enough sexual degeneracy in all other forms of media. And since I'm on the topic, why can't I explicitly tell Astarion that I'm not a homosexual? I can only tell him that I'm not interested, which leaves room for my avatar being a homosexual who isn't interested in Astarion in particular. If a man came up to me and asked if I wanted to have sex with him, then I'd say, "I'm not a homosexual." In the hood, he’d get beat up.
  
  
• In general, the dialogue is adequate and sometimes good, but it can be rather simplistic at certain parts of the game. I'm speaking of both the dialogue choices and what NPCs are saying to my avatar. Sometimes party members don’t react where they ought to, NPCs don't say enough, or NPCs sound like juveniles rather than adults. Moreover, some dialogue options lead to exactly the same outcome, so why include them? Get rid of them if they don’t lead to anything new.
  
  
• Information regarding classes and skills is, I suppose for the sake of dumbing things down, hidden or suppressed. This can lead to players unknowingly making bad decisions. For example, I was messing around with multiclass with my monk, looking at the rogue's Sneak Attack (melee), and based on the skill's description in that menu it looked like I'd be able to use it with unarmed attack, but I knew better. For whatever reason, the Finesse Weapon requirement was absent. This is just one example. Another problem is the rolls in the combat log are automatically hidden. I need to highlight links to see rolls, which gets tiresome. Give us an expanded option.
  
  
• Too many female fighters/barbarians and too many females in leadership positions without good reason. Human women in the Forgotten Realms are no different from women in the real world, which means they’re much smaller and weaker than men. Therefore, a regiment of female soldiers in heavy armor wielding great swords looks stupid. It looks as stupid as if there were an all-children regiment of soldiers wearing heavy armor and wielding great swords. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any because there are always exceptions; however, when I see a group of Flaming Fists it shouldn’t be 50% male and 50% female or 25%/75%, favoring females. Under normal circumstances, no sane civilization would create a 50% male and 50% female military because there’s this thing called chivalry and another thing called biology. Men by nature want to protect women, and women by nature want to be protected by men. That’s chivalry. One woman can have around 15 children in a lifetime by one or many men; the number of children a civilization can produce will only go up if the number of females goes up. That’s biology. Consequently, it makes absolutely no sense for a civilization to send women to the battlefield. Doing so weakens the military and the future of the civilization. As for leadership, in the real world most leaders are men because men have more testosterone. Testosterone makes you bigger, stronger, and more confident, which inspires others to follow. Do you think Ketheric Thule would be as cool as he is if he were a 5’2’’ female with a high-pitched voice? When I see a 5’2’’ female NPC barking out orders to 6’2’’ chads in a voice that she’s obviously trying to deepen through inflection, because she’s aware of her physical inadequacy, I cringe. Only people who have grown up sitting in front of Netflix can take this kind of thing seriously. Stop letting your Human Resource department control your artistic vision.
  
  
• Why do many of the dwarves, gnomes, and elves have the facial features of races found in human beings? They're an entirely different species. This feature makes as much sense as a human with the features of a duergar. The only time this makes sense is with half-elves, tieflings, and half-orcs because they're mixed with humans. Elves, dwarves, and gnomes are humanoid, not humans. There’s a difference. That’s why human is a separate option in character creation.

"Political points"

"Sexual Degenerate"

Your parents used to complain about Wanton Murder, Wanton Violence, Demon Worshipping and Demon Summoning - and now here you are, complaining about another aspect that disturb your ever relative moral value.

I think your criticism is trash and has no merit whatsoever apart from the bug complain which everyone already aware of.

Feel free to back to Steam forum.

Thanks for the well thought out and nicely written feedback and Welcome.

Nice view you have about females and maybe try to read up on Faerun lore, where it is clearly said, that females and males are them same in every regard. But I bet you belong to the category of guys that think, women belong in the kitchen, right?

You might want to go back to the Steam forums.

Well, a post with this level of sexist and homophobic provocation isn’t a promising start for a new forum member.

Pro tip for new folk joining us: at least try to build up some trust and good will with the community by engaging in a constructive way on topics that aren’t so personal and likely to be offensive before wading into such murky waters. A post like the OP’s is likely to lead to a warning or even a suspension in any case, but as a very first post it just looks like you’re here to be a troll and, like Diogenes The Dog, you’ll get a perma ban.

Also locking this thread.