Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Min-maxing good? Bad?

Fortunately, we can decide ourselves how we’re likely to have most fun playing BG3. I think it’s reasonable to assume that EA difficulty will more or less equate to normal in the full release, and minmaxing certainly isn’t a requirement for that. It can make fights easier if that’s what people want, and it’s of course perfectly fine if they do. And having a really poorly-built character can make things much harder and more frustrating, but as folk have said, there’s a long distance between trying to make sure your character doesn’t suck and minmaxing.

There aren’t any right or wrong answers as to how the game should be played, beyond us playing in the way that we each will find most rewarding. But over the course of EA my experience has been that the game’s very flexibility can make it hard for us to work out the best way to interact with its systems to extract maximum enjoyment for ourselves. And it doesn’t hand-hold us through the process, so I suspect it would be possible for someone to play in a way that succeeded, but that they didn’t hugely enjoy, when they could have had more fun with a different approach. I certainly found it took many tens of hours playing the game before I figured out what worked best for me. And I’m now very grateful to BG3 as some of those lessons also apply to other cRPGs that I now realise I have been playing “wrong” all these years, by which of course I mean in a way that doesn’t maximise my enjoyment of them.

Personally, I know I have more fun if I pick a roleplay concept and stick with it, even if it makes some elements of the game harder. Finding ways as a player to overcome those weaknesses is one of the challenges I find interesting and rewarding about cRPGs. I still try to make a reasonably effective character, but wouldn’t sacrifice roleplay for it. Others might prefer the challenge of finding the “perfect” build. Or want a different challenge each time they play.

Because of this, I think it’s totally valid for the PC Gamer article to suggest that people reflect on whether they might have more fun taking a different approach, from the experience of someone who had previously enjoyed minmaxing but found that wasn’t the best way for them personally to enjoy the game. Everyone’s different, of course, and people are of course perfectly at liberty to ignore the suggestion but it seems a fair enough one to chuck out there for people to ponder.