Good Afternoon,
First, allow me to thank the Larian team for your hard work and exceptional effort thus far on Baldur's Gate III. With so few role-playing games being developed these days, I greatly appreciate all of your work and dedication to an exceptional genre of gaming.
While I experienced my fair share of challenging bugs which forced me to be obsessive with saving as a result; it was still an enjoyable overall experience. And while the mechanics are always the toughest part to get perfect (and still need some refining); I really have to give exceptional props to your level design and art team for creating such a beautiful game. The level art assets and their layout were perfect throughout.
I completed the full play through; and enjoyed the video at the end requesting feedback. Here are the major problems I experienced along the way:
1. After character creation, as soon as game-play began, while exploring the ship near the tanks filled with brains, the framerate ticked to close to a halt out of no where, then the game crashed. I submitted a crash report accordingly. This problem occurred eight times throughout different areas of the game. I tried loading with DirectX when it became available, and the problem still occurred one time after that, but was more stable overall using DirectX. [I played with an nVidia GeForce 2070 with the latest drivers]
[I tried saving one time right as the problem described occurred; and discovered that it corrupted the save game file to the point that it would crash the game anytime it was loaded.]
2. In underground areas, sometimes major parts of the map would cull. This occurred the most for me in the underground area where the evil book was located.
3. Also in the area with the Evil book, it was the first time I ran into a cutscene that wouldn't allow me to progress. No options would come up to select a dialog reply. This was after the second day update. I had to reload a save and skip interacting with the evil book as it would continue to happen each time. Only later did I find a work-around.
4. The cutscene issue occurred for me again later in the game. When I returned to camp one time, Shadowheart says "Something's wrong, I feel...I feel...", "... what the - ?! Darkness protect me...", and the cutscene then wouldn't proceed. Since camping isn't something I could easily skip, I did some research online, and a few others were experiencing this as well. One pointed out that "Space bar" could be used to skip ahead in a cutscene; and sure enough, this gave me a work-around that got me out of a tough situation. I wish I would have know this earlier!
5. In the area where you have to sit on two thrones to open a hidden door to a room; the door was totally glitched out opening and closing ten times a second. At this point in the game, I didn't yet know how to individually select party members. So I put the game into turn based mode to allow two characters to sit on each throne; after which the door went crazy. [Suggestion: Have a short tutorial at the beginning of the game that explains how to group and ungroup characters in the party and also how you have to double-click a character's portrait so the camera follows the character (which was another problem I encountered near the beginning of the game that I had to look up a solution for online)].
6. Five times part way through a battle my stopwatch wouldn't be available to end a character's turn, so I'd have to close the game, reopen, load a save, and start the combat again. This was one of the more frustrating bugs. One of the times it occurred near the end of the game (while fighting on the two boats), Windows displayed a message that NVidia Share was not responding. I was too near the end of the game to have an opportunity to test it, but it may be worth looking into whether having NVidia Share turned off resolves this as a temporary work-around for others (I wasn't actually utilizing nVidia Share throughout game-play, but having it on (nVidia's default setting) may have been enough to cause problems). I looked it up online and it can be disabled by opening Geforce Experience > Gear Icon in the toolbar > IN-GAME OVERLAY (switch to off). If anyone else is running into the same problem, this may be worth a try for now.
7. Every once in a while, when I'd try and use an item from the hotbar, single-click would stop working, so I'd have to single click more than once until it finally worked. Closing the game and reopening would fix it for a while.
Minor Annoying Problems:
1. Lots of instances throughout game-play where the ragdoll physics would go crazy when an enemy is killed. I even had instances where a dead body ended up floating multiple feet above the ground stretched ridiculously.
2. Most in-game cutscenes had graphical issues such as the camera being inside objects or characters during camera cuts.
3. The cutscene with the Gith and the dragon that destroys the bridge near the end of the game...when the knight of the flaming fist bends backward...I don't believe a back can actually do that...I looked on with amazement at his exceptional flexibility...just a suggestion, but you might want to correct that for the sake of realism.
Suggestions:
1. Despite the bugs, while I really enjoyed the game to this point, for me, the bugs weren't the worst part. The worst part was when I hit the low level cap of level 4. After that, combat turned into a tedious chore for me, as my thrill of achievement was gone. I'd highly recommend increasing the cap to at least level 6 during early access so players have something to continue to work toward as they continue to explore and do battle.
2. Second to this was the amount of times my characters would miss during combat. Super annoying... If I'm right next to someone and I swing a melee weapon, it's pretty unlikely I'm going to miss. For enemies with a high armor rating, scale damage accordingly. But missing every other turn; or two turns in a row; then being presented with combat scenarios when the AI thinks for multiple seconds before returning control...is pretty frustrating.
3. About 10 hours into the game, I realized that all of my hard work collecting and selling items wasn't worthwhile. For all of the hard earned gold I made, the only benefit was expensive weapons and armor that overall only added +1. This really isn't enough incentive to collect and sell a ton of items like many RPGs often provide more extensive combat incentives for.
4. With food items available for health recovery, which could be consumed after attacking and moving each turn, I quickly learned I didn't need expensive health potions; there was almost no fight I couldn't win just by eating high hp value foods I found throughout game play (like the many pig parts and roasted meats) each turn. While I enjoyed this strategic advantage, especially in light of some of the more frustrating combat bugs I experienced along the way; I'm not sure you really want to leave this exploit in permanently when it comes to the overall game-play challenge.
5. While the map could be explored in different directions, the overall experience still felt somewhat linear. While I loved the additional occasional locations to explore, like going down a well, or into a cellar; outside of these, I was always still working my way up the main map. Consider taking the player off the main map to other islands and additional locations, then back to the main map.
6. Consider adding some kind of rare collectibles that can be found in select locations throughout the game; and can be traded to a particular trader for special items. This is always an enjoyable addition to many RPGs to make exploration and looking in so many containers more rewarding -- especially considering so many containers were empty.
Thanks again for all of your hard work!! I look forward to playing through future additions!!!
