Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback First Impressions

I've wrapped up my first day of playing the early access and wanted to share my thoughts. As someone who adored BG 1 & 2 (and still plays through them again, every few years), this game is a bit of a mixed bag.

First off, the storytelling is great, and the game is full of potential. Waking up in a crazy spelljammer ship in the middle of a pitched interdimensional battle is *a lot*, but it's not much more of an escalation from BG2 than BG2 was from BG1. There's a lot else to like about the game too - the sheer scope of ways you are able to interact with the environment around you is highly promising and feels like playing a game of DnD as no scripted game has done before.

Unfortunately, there are also some glaring problems that marred my own first impressions, and would like to talk about. I'll prioritize the ones that seems to be fundamental game design issues and not early-access issues.

There are some out there who had worried that the game would be Divinity: Original Sin 2 with a Dungeons and Dragons skin slapped over it. That might not be the case in the long run, but playing the game for a little bit underscores that thought, puts it in bold font, and overwrites any other impression anyone might get of the game.

The DIVOS-style special attacks every weapon gets don't seem necessary, and don't add much. Some of them, like the staff knockdown, should be included as part of the basic rules available to every character anyways. While it's great that spells like Create Water can be used to put out fire and makes sense, you've completely rewritten most of the offensive cantrips to act as Divinity Spells rather than Dungeons and Dragons ones. Fire Bolt doesn't light foes on fire, Acid Splash doesn't create acid terrain, and so on. These aren't GM feat things either - they're just rewriting the rules to be more like DIVOS. The surface system was a funny gimmick in the DIVOS games but it's really just spammy and ridiculous and undermines the more tightly balanced DnD system.

There's a lot else that contributes to the critique that this is a DIVOS game and not a Baldur's Gate game at all. The UI obviously needed modernized but carries over absolutely nothing of the menu aesthetic of BG1&2. The terrain looks way too similar to DIVOS and has none of the warm colors and charm of most of the outdoor maps from the previous games. All of this adds together to make something that feels absolutely nothing like Baldur's Gate. When they revived Fallout, Bethesda did a lot to respect the original series and managed to keep the spirit of it through a similar number of massive changes, but it feels like absolutely none of that respect was paid to the old Baldur's Gate games here.

I also suspect that this is an early-access problem, but the caste feels limited. There's such a tiny number of potential party members and absolutely none of them are classically heroic. The old games dealt with plenty of mature themes and dark situations, but they also had a lot of humor, and goofiness, and funny banter. There were also plenty of chances to be a hero - I haven't run into any of those, really, in the first several hours that I played.

To conclude, the game has a ton of potential but also has some glaring shortcomings and is lacking a major component of likability and warmth that defined the series and secured the series's place as an all-time classic. I hope Larian can take this the rest of the distance.