Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Annoyances/Complaint aside, does anyone else feel that BG3 is an insane leap from DOS:2?

It is, absolutely.

Larion deserves that bit of praise.

How to truly describe the current BG3 experience:


The steak is cooked to perfection and the mashed taters reminds me of grandma's secret recipe.

...however...the sweatsock tea, the cockroach crunchies, and the booger salad are kinda spoiling my apatite.

I love companion banter and cinematic dialogue as well! I am glad these are in BG3!😊

Those are both awesome sauce.

The banter between characters is spot on, even if the individual origin characters have abrasive elements on their own.

There’s a slight whiff of reddit off this post OP. If that doesn’t make sense, no bother at all… But I don’t share your starry-eyed optimism – and I wish I did: sounds like a pleasant drug. It’s been years since I’ve played a game that invoked what you describe. I’ve tried a few modern titles, and borderline enjoyed them for at most two thirds – but usually half – of the game, and then my brain just roped me back into reality, which these days is a lot more ‘grindy’ than any video game (keep saving up and then splurge it all on the next ‘house feature/upgrade’).

I do see the psychological appeal of games like Valheim: start off as a penniless nobody, slowly accumulate resources, get creative, build, build, build – and the brain probably gives you that dopamine fix from the castle you end up carving out when all's done. Except I get it from reality now, in that respect, and it would feel self-defeating IMO, at this point in my life, to play a game which merely apes that particular fix from building up a phony pixel-house bit-by-bit.

Hollow Knight brought back a sense of childlike wonder that I hadn’t experienced from games in years. Death thrash, likewise, has that implacable ‘magic’, but is only EA. These two games, and only these, lately struck me as ‘art’, in the way certain old games struck me as art: games like BG1 and in particular BG2.

What I mean by that is they’re clearly passion-projects. Hollow Knight, in particular, released tonnes and tonnes of free incredible DLC, which must have taken yonks to put together. And they only sold the base game for something like 5 quid. Death Thrash has the same vibe. It’s being put together by a small group of devs who probably enjoy making the thing more than gamers enjoy playing it.

I don’t see BG3 as sharing anything in common with what I’ve just described. It may be because the company is too huge now. There are too many chefs, too many creatives, so the lowest common denominator wins out to keep the peace. The end result strikes me as this very safe product: polished but vacuous, a kind of high-budget bubble-gum. Like a Marvel film. Lots of big boom moments that dazzle and disappear like fireworks over a fun but forgettable festival.

BG3 doesn’t have the Hollow Knight magic, or the Death Thrash magic – and it doesn’t have the BG1/2 magic. That’s just my take on it. I’d play this thing once, and I’d try and get through to the end – but I’ll probably only get two thirds of the way.

Which, like I mentioned, is an endorsement in itself these days.

Ah wells, at least some folk will enjoy it. And sure there’s always a target audience for Fane/Astarion memes and artwork, which Larian is sure to milk in every twitter post going forward.

I certainly feel that way! I am extremely impressed with BG3, complaints and issues aside. <3

Because fans are not monolithic.

In other words, not everyone likes what you like. Larian is catering to a broader audience than just you and the folks who tend to agree with you.

Mods cater to niche groups.

Sidenote: maybe if they had some less ‘spectacular’ characters, and a few more familiar grumps from reality, I might feel more connected to the game, in the way some of Hollow Knight’s characters remind you of certain cantankerous no-hopers, embittered and war-faring in their trite and cyclical way. Like the brilliant Zote, who’s so utterly pompous, ridiculous and inept. Yet convinced he’s right about everything.

Imagine, say, someone like Zote who thinks his ideas are ingenious, even if they’re patently weak-sauce and slight. But he goes and attacks everyone else who has an idea that might actually become ‘something’.

This is the kind of thing that consistently riles Zote in the game – he’s comedic in the most brilliant way. Completely delusional and utterly lacking in self-awareness – what he hates the most is the possibility that someone else’s ‘bright bulb moment’ might actually be endorsed. So that’s his first line of attack: spittle-flecked slander of the idea that affronts him. And he just keeps working himself up from there, until he’s no longer even coherent.

So funny.

There’s just nothing ‘organic’ like that in BG3. All the characters are plot-pots, broiling with MacGuffins.

The 5e group is not a niche group. 5e is the current rule-set that is the standard for all current D&D campaigns. Everyone else would not have known the difference had they followed the blueprint.

We wouldn't have division at all, and people who don't understand "what the big deal is", would still be having fun.


...and yes, EVERYONE else who has played the current version of D&D likes what I like.


Let's keep in mind that the only reason that Larion Studios did not follow the blueprint, have a day / night cycle, a decent interface, or solved minor problems in a timely manner is because they don't know how.

It was "too difficult", "can't figure how to make this work with multiplayer", and so on.

It is absolutely not because they didn't want to...they just weren't good enough to pull it off.


On that note, the game is in "orange phase", and I am sure they cannot complete it fast enough. Feedback at this point is in fact pointless.


Final verdict:

BG3 is the best Larian Studios game ever made, and also the worst Baldur's Gate game ever made.

Not entirely true. For some cases (Shove for example) it would be extremely easy to stick with the blueprint. Here they just did not want to. Probably to make it more larianish.

Hopefully the modders can/will fix it. At least with mods we can get close to having a real D&D game...

Back on topic:

In some parts BG 3 is certainly a vast improvement from D:OS 2, e.g. party banter and cinematics. But in many ways it isn't and pretty much feels D:OS with a D&D skin, e.g. everyone and their dog having flashy ability Vfx.

No doubt about it, BG3 is a massive improvement over DOS2 in several areas. Characters, storytelling, believability of the environments are much improved over DOS2.

Except not really, IMO. As many others stated, DOS2, despite being ho-hum in the writing dept, had a solid identity with the game mechanics. It was Larian-unleashed, all fire and ice and environmental mayhem – and it was quite brilliant and unique in that respect. There’s nothing out there like it.

BG3 remains confused, as others have rightly pointed out – is it Larian or is it DND?

The shove is very Larian – and the most game-breaking-ly OP mechanic in the whole game.

In its current form, it’s a cheat code that some will say you don’t have to use. Except it’s ‘there’. Why put a cheat in plain view? And it is, because I’ve used not only the standard shove but the ‘arrow shove’ (whatever it’s called) to completely trivialise combat by just knocking opponents off a cliff or a boat, comic-book style.
The environments were excellent, I agree – until Patch 8. See Crimsonrider’s topic for more details. They ruined the best thing they had going, this late in development. Which is not a good sign.

I don’t like the plot-pot characters – no complexity, just ‘extraordinary’ gimmicks. I’ll pass on that, cheers.

We’ve gone the whole way through Act 1 and everyone is calm as a cucumber the whole time, even though apparently they’re aware there’s a worm in their heads that might mutate them into some kind of mess.

Okey-dokey.

There’s a few mentions of the generically named ‘Absolute’. The Dead Three was much more evocative, but yeah let’s go with ‘The Absolute’. Will it be a god that wants to destroy the world?

You never know, I guess.

It's visually better then BG3, but still feels the same. All flash and little substance. I will most likely ignore the companions and solo play the game as I don't feel connected to them at all, just like DOS2. It's kind of sad knowing Tav is a blank slate of a character and still feels more real than the written origin ones.

Man, OP tries to make a thread talking about what they enjoy about the game and almost the entire thread is nothing but people saying what they hate about it. The negativity here is suffocating sometimes.

+1

Well, he started the thread asking what others think. Maybe as I tend to favour smaller titles anyway, studio upscaling and raising production value doesn't impress me that much.

I am keeping quiet from this point on, I didn’t expect my thread to turn into this.

Sorry! I am a bit too frustrated with the title to pat it on the head.

Nah, don't do that. As much as negative feedback is valuable, so too is positive feedback. The people that are going off topic to what you intended believe that it is their responsibility to be a "squeaky wheel", so anything that attempts to assert some positivity must be crushed. If you're overall having a good time, and like some of what you see, by all means point it out.

Inb4 "so we can't offer up negative feedback": By all means, in one of the thousands of threads that exist for exactly that purpose, instead of going off topic in threads that aren't focused on those issues. As suggested by The Composer in another thread that followed the same pattern here.