Dear Larian,
first of all a little bit about myself. I'm a D&D veteran, I've played countless hours of BG2, BG1, Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter, Dragon Age, Divinity... And the only reason why I decided to put my time into posting this feedback is because I
love the Baldur's Gate world and also that I felt that if anyone can pull off BG3, it's YOU guys <3. BG is a heart felt issue for me and probably BG2 is one of my most favoritest (yep, you read that right) games of all time.
First of all, please take all of this feedback with a grain of salt. I've only played a couple of hours and it is Early Access, so it is likely that most of the things will improve somwhere down the road.
With that being said, on to the feedback!
Intro, character creation:
When I started the game, I loved the intro and I super enjoyed the character creation. Sure, I missed some of the classes and things like 'rolling your attributes', alignment... but that's ok. Time is precious and spending hours trying to roll the perfect attributes just isn't "in" anymore. Anyways, on to the gameplay.
First gameplay impressions:
My first impression of the gameplay is that... this is not really a sequel to BG
. Don't get me wrong, it is a good game even in Early Access, I like it and I'll play it till the end, but it feels like the changes to the gameplay are just a bit too drastic to call it a sequel. The only similarity so far are the D&D and that it's set in the BG world.
Combat system:
The biggest difference for me is probably the combat system - I used to love the "pause, give commands, unpause -> all hell breaks loose" flow of the old BG system. But here we have primary actions and secondary actions, backstabs require advantages (still don't really know what these are)... It just feels a bit overcomplicated and unintuitive, but maybe that's just because of the D&D ruleset. For example in Divinity the combat system was just super intuitive and crystal clear. You've got your action points, armour and magic armour, you have X points to spend, every action costs something... just intuitive and clear. But here it's just... what action can I do? Is it this kind or that kind? Why can't I do this one twice? Just my personal opinion...
Once there's a wiki documenting everything I'm sure it will become clearer.
UI:
So far I found the UI to be a bit confusing and not-easy-to-find-stuff-in. But I think this will get better the more I play.
Party:
The fact that you only get 4 members in your party. Again... a huge change compared to the previous BG games. I personally don't mind it as much, but it would have been nice to have the full 6 people with the option of having less & getting more XP if you choose to.
Story:
So far, I love the story. Illithids have always been sort of a mysterious race which you encoutered almost only in the underdark, so great choice there. Lookin forward to seeing where it leads
.
Quests:
Can't really very well evaluate on this front yet, but I like what I've seen thus far.
Companions:
I hope there's more
. The ones I've seen so far are great. The githiyanki is a total cow :D, but that's actually great. Having some personal feelings - be it negative or positive - about a character means that the character is written well.
Gameplay notes:
The whole "short rest" "long rest" system feels... I dunno. Weird. It's strange that you try to rest in the middle of the dungeon, you actually go aaaaall the way back to your camp, you rest there and then go aaaall the way back to the dungeon (albeit it's done automatically)... I mean
why not just rest in the dungeon? That made for some interesting mid-rest encounters in the old BG games. Haven't seen any of those in BG3, but maybe I will
.
I miss the old "magic book" from the old BG games
.
Things that felt nice at first, but ended up being annoying:
The jump mechanic. At first I was like "WOW, that is SO COOL", but then I wanted to move my whole party somehwere that required jumping, and I had to go and manually click and move every member. That's... a chore. It's not fun, it's just annoying. Perhaps if the other members could follow the first member who the player controls even through jumps? That'd be awesome.
Bugs I encountered:
The saving bug. Basically, when you want to overwrite a previous save game, you get a bunch of errors with the keyword FileSystem in them telling you that it can't access & overwrite the savegames. I managed to fix it by turning off the "ransomware" protection in my antivirus, but I feel like it should be addressed because many people will encouter it.
Graphical artifacts: this is to be expected - it is early access after all. Am using Vulkan on Ultra btw. There were actually several times when some part of a dungeon just didn't render and when my party went into it, they completely disappeared. They reappeared when I moved them away.
Camera problems: primarily in buildings / dungeons / on cliffs. The camera can get stuck either way above or below your party and can be a pain to get it to work correctly.
Thins to polish: cutscenes and characters not moving their mouths as they talk in conversations
.
Those are my thoughts so far. I'll keep the feedback updated the more I play.
I know that most of the feedback is on the negative side, but maybe that's just the nostalgia and conservatism talking. I still LOVE the game
. Make no mistake, I have complete faith that if anyone can deliver, you can. So keep up the great work and thank you!
