Having put twenty-five hours of playtime into the early access version of Baldur's Gate 3, I've hit the point where I feel like I have a firm opinion on the game as it stands. Overall, I think it's going to be a great RPG when it's complete. However, I feel like there are issues with it that are going to cause problems down the line unless they are rectified. For context, I'm a huge fan of the Baldur's Gate series and enjoyed Divinity: Original Sin 2.

I'll start with the positives.

The story begins well and has a wonderful opening hook: you've been captured by psychic monsters who put something in your head - escape! Then you end up in a few alliances of convenience with prickly guys and girls and things go from there. Everything with the Grove and the Goblin Camp is great, and it leaves me wondering where everything is going to go next.

I'm a big fan of the party members, too. They all feel like people who've been abducted and abused and have been thrust together with a bunch of random people whom they must rely upon to survive. They're not the usual Bioware heroic fare, and I think that's a good thing. I'm very interested in learning more about them and seeing where their stories go. People are judging them too harshly. Perhaps people don't remember the early bit in Divinity: Original Sin 2 where the Red Prince tries to make you into a slave, for example.

'All the characters are evil' is a fandom meme. Like all fandom memes, it's not really true. Gale and Wyll are both decent people, although the former is secretive and it appears the latter made a deal he regrets. Both of them have approval ups when you help people, pet dogs, and so on. Lae'zel isn't evil either - she's got a goal-focused mindset (with the goal being 'get this psychic monster out of my brain.') Astarion is the closest thing to a typically evil party member, and is pretty much the only one who approves of you doing heinous things. But it only makes it more obvious that he stands out compared to the others.

Oh, Shadowheart? Honestly, I can't stand her voice acting and don't have much of an opinion on her yet. But she doesn't seem evil, just kind of rude and haughty.

I think people will have to get used to this bunch. I'm not convinced there'll be many more companions, if there's any at all. Consider that D:OS2 had you meet everyone initially, much like BG3 has done. Unless Larian has been running an extremely long game of only previewing the party members they'd show off in EA, I wouldn't hold out hope for another four or five party members. I feel like we might get one or two, but I don't think we'll get one for each class, nor get more than one for any class.

I'll take a few moments to go on a bit of a tangent here. People are going to say, well, Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 had way more characters. Yes, they did. But Baldur's Gate 1's cast were basically blank slates with names and some flavor lines - the expectation was that they'd die and you'd cycle them out without fanfare. Baldur's Gate 2 had a smaller cast with more detail, but even then I think it's safe to say that most players used a lot of the same characters and that, outside of specific gimmick runs, the majority of the cast was not utilized. Without even going into the production side of things like detail, the evolution of expectations, and so on.

The sound design, music, voice acting, and so on is all fine. I even like the chargen 'down by the river' song. The voices are all solid enough, but I don't think I'll ever warm up to Shadowheart. She just sounds like a high school kid.

Chargen is great and while more options would be appreciated, what's there is really good. I didn't have a problem making a range of characters with a range of ethnicities and looks.

The gameplay is about what I expected and wanted. I appreciate that it continues the trend of D:OS2 of allowing you creative solutions to problems, such as employing Suitably Ludicrous numbers of explosive barrels and so on. However, I think the overall gameplay is weaker than D:OS2 - but more on that on a moment.

So, here it is: the biggest issue facing Baldur's Gate 3 is that it is tied to a tabletop system. And this is an issue. Dungeons and Dragons 5e is a system designed to be used in a fairly collaborative, friendly manner between humans. On one side, you have humans playing the party and, on the other, one person playing the world (and making sure it all runs smoothly.) Just about every complaint/issue that it looks like BG3 is running into comes from the fact the system is a heartless algorithm being run by a computer with pre-determined outcomes. When you get right down to it, the reason a lot of fans are complaining is that there's no friendly DM to nudge the nice, bend the rules, and so on. Very few people actually play Dungeons and Dragons in the 'hardcore' manner that BG3 depicts it.

(Actually, the biggest issue is probably calling it Baldur's Gate 3 when the story of CHARNAME wrapped up in Throne of Bhaal and there's been twenty years of Dungeons and Dragons lore and products since then but I don't think that's Larian's fault.)

I don't think this is an issue with any right or wrong answer. Ultimately, it looks like the goal of BG3 is to faithfully port over a lot of DnD 5e to a CRPG format. The problem is, the most faithful part of the system is, when you get right down to it, that human element of making everything run smoothly. How many people would play a tabletop campaign if the GM was Data from Star Trek or Terminator's Cromartie? 'You walk into a dark cavern. You can't see anything because you don't have infravision. Roll initiative. You are hit by a Basilisk at maximum range and turned to stone. Game over.'

(As an aside, Baldur's Gate 1 had this exact issue and people rightfully hated it. Don't keep those rose-tinted goggles on, people.)

Anyway, to illustrate my point, I'll draw on a bunch of issues that I think have compounded together by looking at a specific part of the game that draws repeated complaints. Some of these have to do with the game as it is, and some of it stems from how players interact with the game. The part I'll be using as a 'case study' is the 'healing' the player receives from Nettie in the Druid's Grove.

The background is simple: the player, seeking to be healed of their brainworm, goes to see a healer - Nettie. Nettie promptly poisons them and the player is faced with an option: pass multiple skill checks to get the antidote from Nettie or die. Alternatively, the player can kill her or pickpocket her.

In no specific order, here are the issues:

1. Skill Checks are Boring

BG3's skill checks have a problem - they, without fail, feel like they fit the mould of succeed or fail. With success meaning you do the thing you wanted to do and fail meaning you don't, and often end up in a fight. There's no Disco Elysium-esque idea of failures having interesting consequences in and of themselves. So, Nettie's three checks are just three opportunities to 'lose.' I don't think there's anything wrong with the multiple skill checks, providing they're not just hoops to jump through to succeed. Unfortunately, they are.

I don't tend to 'save scum' in RPGs. I've played through Wasteland 3 and Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire recently and did it without reloading. This is because my consequences felt like they were arising my decisions and that, if something went wrong, it wasn't arbitrary. Meanwhile, there were certain moments in BG3 - such as Nettie - that I reloaded multiple times because it felt like I was being screwed by a dice roll. When I have a +4 modifier, it doesn't feel good to fail a DC10 check. DC20 checks just seem ridiculous. DC 5 feels terrible when you fail. A little bit of randomness is fine, but I think BG3 is bit too heavily loaded towards the dice roll.

And you don't even get experience for making the skill checks either. Oh, and the fact that so many of them are just DC10 (aka coin toss) is another related problem. I assume a lot of the numbers can and will be changed, but the underlying structural issue of it not being fun or interesting to fail is a deeper problem.

2. Story Elements are Missing/The Rest Mechanic

The first time I played to the end of the Refugee quest, I'd only gone to camp twice. The first time had been within the Goblin camp itself. I'd managed to get by on consumables and lucky checks. The first time I went to camp, a demon showed up and I felt like I'd missed a few pages. So, on my second playthrough, I made it a habit to go to camp whenever a party member talked about being tired. This improved a lot of things by a drastic amount, and smoothed over a lot of initial issues I'd had with the plot and characters. I feel like Larian may add in a fatigue mechanic at some point, but this is a pretty drastic issue.

To go back to the Nettie example, however, I'll point to something that came too late. At a certain point, Lae'zel mentions that you should be careful about going around and telling people you have a worm in your brain. But this had come after Nettie had already tried to kill me. If the player has been told that, hey, maybe don't go around telling people you're going to turn into a Mind Flayer, it might alleviate the issue that someone tries to kill them over it.

I really like the rest mechanic, but it's another of those things that gets smoothed over by a DM. I don't think I can stress enough how much I'd missed on my first playthrough by not going to camp every so often. All kinds of really nice character moments. I won't spoil them. It's also a nice way of dealing with an issue the originals had, where rescuing Imoen from Spellhold could take anything from a few days to a few months based on how much CHARNAME abused the rest button after every encounter. Winnowing it down to a short rest and a day end is really interesting, but it gets complicated when there's story and character beats tied to it. But without any sort of mechanic, how often should I be going to rest? And what am I missing if I don't?

3. Players Want to Experience Everything

A solution to the Nettie thing is to just not talk to her. But players generally want to experience all the content they can in a single playthrough. Having a consequence be 'you just don't get to do something' is related to my first point. I'd put a few other things under this umbrella - like Perception checks as you're exploring - as being similarly annoying. What did I miss? Who knows, but now I have this feeling in the back of my head that I'm missing out on something. Was it something that I'd think was cool? A neat bit of lore? Something to make Lae'zel like me? I can tell myself that it was probably just two gold pieces and a fork, but my brain will insist otherwise.

4. Gameplay and 'Choices'

Players draw a distinction between choices in dialogue and choices in gameplay. Going into combat with Nettie to get the antidote is not seen as a 'choice.' This is complicated by the fact that players generally just want to be the good guy, and don't want to kill someone who isn't highlighted red under any circumstances. Building on Point 3 - who knows what a player will miss out on if they kill Nettie? And this kind of leads to my next point...

4. Stat/Class (Im)Balance

The fact that Charisma controls all of the 'roleplaying' skills is pretty much absurd. I understand that it's how the 5e system is, but that's my point - the system sucks when it's being run by a machine. If the Nettie scenario was a tabletop session, I'd probably be allowed to posit that I could intimidate Nettie with Strength. And I mean, look at the way you talk to her in that scene, all about how you'll destroy the whole grove - if that isn't a threat based on how immediately physically imposing you are, I don't know what is.

On one hand, it's great that for the first time in the history of Baldur's Gate that Charisma isn't the dump stat. On the other, it sucks that it's now THE roleplaying stat which you better put a bunch of points in unless you want to be stuck failing everything.

This will probably be alleviated if party members are allowed to do checks. However, it may become more of a problem if the spellcasting classes can cast spells in dialogue to resolve things, meaning the more martial characters have to pump 'roleplaying stats.' And this is assuming there won't be moments where you won't be forced to make checks with one specific character, of course.

D:OS2's freedom of skill-based as opposed to class-based felt a lot better. I could shore up my weaknesses as I wanted and develop characters how I liked. Again, to all of you hardcore DnD players, I get that DnD is based around the class system. But part of the issue that people are upset about is that classes and their stats and skills matter so much more than they ever did in the earlier Baldur's Gate games - for better or worse.

(I feel like the multiple checks are a well-meaning attempt to give Fighters some equivalence. After all, Fighters don't clear whole combat encounters with one dice roll, right?)

5. Modifiers are Boring

Pretty self-explanatory. The player gets +x on the dice roll based on their stats and/or proficiency bonus. Yawn.

Where are the circumstantial bonuses? Where's the character, where's the history? Again, this is something a DM may just throw in. Perhaps the Nettie scenario might not feel so unfair if, say, the player was able to nudge the scales based on things they had done. This is something that Disco Elysium did extremely well. Wouldn't it feel satisfying if you had a +1 to the Intimidate if you punched out that adventurer or a +1 to the Persuade because you rescued Arabella?

They wouldn't need to all be positive, of course. But it'd help feel like things were arising as a result of my character's choices and history, and not just being decided because I didn't put enough numbers into certain stats when I made the character a few hours before.

6. Combat Downgrade

Move/Standard Action/Free Action is a step down from Divinity: Original Sin 2's AP-oriented combat system. BG3's combat is perfectly fine, but it's also not nearly as interesting. Again, the issue is that BG3 is doing it as close to tabletop as possible. Some people are upset over the surfaces being so common, but I think without them the combat would be far less interesting than it is.

That's really about it. As it is, I think just about every issue people have with BG3 stems from these compounding issues arising from the strict tabletop gameplay. For example, people wanting an increased party size - because you practically need someone who can lockpick and a Wizard for spells and a Fighter to tank and a Cleric to heal and support and, well, suddenly you feel like you're locked into needing specific characters just to experience content and be ready whatever you might run into. And if you made a Fighter and happen to like Lae'zel, well, good luck having two Fighters.

As for everything else - well, I only crashed once, and a lot of the other things are pretty minor that can definitely be fixed during the EA period (more loot, optimization, more autosaves, XP outside of combat, missing loot from shoving people into pits, etc.) But I think the way BG3 sticks so close to the established tabletop ruleset is something that will alienate a lot of players, both people expecting something more like D:OS2 and the hardcore DnD crowd who are used to having a friendly DM on their side.

Last edited by Milkfred; 11/10/20 02:05 PM.