Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The game isn't fun

So after a few attempts to get into the game i just don't like it. The main issue here is DnD. I have never played nore do i care for the tabletop game, more of a Shadowrun guy, but one thing was obvious: DnD is just bad in video game format. I tried Pillars of Eternity 1 and i immediately hated the DnD systems. I was glad that all these DnD faithfull games failed more or less because of the obvious lack of fun. Seeing all those games undersell should have been enough of a hint that this type of videogame doesn't work but apparently we are still trying to make it work. If you followed the feedback, the forum threads and all the complaints you can all track it down to the same culprit.

The conclusion should have been to move on from DnD but here we are again. It is kind of funny because Bioware learned this lesson decades ago with Dragon Age Origins, a much more streamlined but ultimately more enjoyable game. So what happened? Are we evolving backwards? But enough of this, let's dig in.

First of all the abilities all lack impact. None of the abilities feel good to use on one hand because they are limited to a few uses, on the other because they don't do much of anything. You have this spell that has 2 uses, it does like 10 damage and has a 50% hitchance. You fire it off and it misses or does 1 damage. It feels like a waste of time even using any of these. Having to rest to get your abilities back is also a system beyond terrible. I mean they even acknowledged this ingame by making you rest in order to advance the story. So what do you do? You mostly resort to auto attacks...well sneak attacks to be precise wich brings me to my next point.

Sneaking is a nesscesity. In every encounter at every turn i enter sneak mode because it simply increases my hitchance. I don't know how hitchance is calculated in this game nore do i care but it's just terrible. In games like Pathfinder where you have rtwp and 6 people flailing away it isn't as noticable how bad DnD truly is in that regard (in turn based it is ridiculous) but here your lack of hitchance is full on display. So you sneak every turn. You simply sidestep the visdioncone of that guy in front of you, press sneak and voila...60% hitchance instead of 40%. Warrior? Mage? Doesn't matter everyone has to sneak. This is just stupid.

The cutscenes are mostly bad. Not only do they chug along in like 30 fps, they are pure unfiltered uncanny valley. In a game with the ammount of content as this why on earth would you opt for cinematics? I tell you here and now, the bottleneck of the entire development is these cutscenes. The funny thing: noone who is a fan of crpgs even cares about that stuff. So who was this for? Swens ego? Mainstream audiences don't play crpgs let alone the abomination that is the DnD ruleset. It is such a massive waste of ressources that could have been invested elsewhere it baffles the mind.

Traps...just remove them, all of them. In Divinity 1 + 2 people mostly didn't mind all the trap nonsense because you had unlimited heals or could just bedroll through them but in this game? Holy hell. Add to that the unoprimized nature of the game, the time it takes to even save or load the game, it is just bad.

Narrative and storytelling are mediocre again. Nothing memorable really wich makes the descision to emphasize that aspect of your game with unnesscesary cutscenes even more of a headscratcher. I really don't understand this, there are a lot of talented authors out there with a rich trackrecord of quality books, why do you make some noname write your story? It's like you completely neglect and at the same time emphasize the story of your games...what?

So you stripped away the main selling point of your games: fun combat in order to get the Baldurs Gate nostalgia crowd but Baldurs Gate wasn't memorable because of the combat but because of the story wich was the weakest aspect of your previous games. It is a double downgrade.

This is all for now, i add stuff later if i remember more to add.

Edit:
I just played this fight again with these teleporting cave spiders after aimlessly walking arround and some more cutscenes i already forgot about. I took my rogue and sneak attacked every turn or followed the spiders arround when they were teleporting away. I completely skipped my other characters because frankly i didn't need them and moving them arround just to use another auto attack? Why even bother? It was really boring, well not entirely because when i wasn't bored i was annoyed by the traversal and glitchy camera.

My point is that in this encounter or any other for that matter characters don't matter. All i do is sneak and auto attack/cantrip. Classes don't matter, characters don't matter. I have never been less engaged in any rpg ever.

Edit2:
After thinking about it i came to the conclusion that the Larian concept of designing a few large areas stands in direct conflict with good pacing. You cannot develop a narrative journey in just a few areas. The first "act" is so cramped chock full of high fantasy high stakes plotlines and monsters that everything loses it's meaning and becomes a blurr of i don't care. There is no pacing and this is a direct result of this level design and committe writing. See you can't have a single coherrent vision when 5 people sit in a room and the all want their own little epic plotline. As a result there is no comfy fantasy journey that starts out slow and builds up momentum over time but nothing more than a themepark with every ride competing with eachother for attention.