Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Story & Character Discussion My biggest problems with BG3 *Spoiler*

While BG3 is a good game there are some things which seriously reduces my enjoyment of it


Because of those things I dont think that BG3 deserves all the hype and praise it gets.
That is Mass Effect 3 and the last season of Game of Thrones combined level of bad.

What can I say? You're absolutely correct.

Act 1 was very good, Act 2 was ... variable (parts of it were very good, while others were pretty bad) and Act 3 is quite frankly rather bad.
So, essentially like D:OS 2... which got better with the release of the definitive edition. We can only hope it's the same with BG3...

I’m actually really down about this. I loved early access. I loved Act 1 start to finish. There were a lot of things not in the game that I wished there were (quality banter), but the rest was so good. I really want to like the game. But the limited character development, narrative, and scope of Act 2 was a turn-off, however excellent the ambience and combat encounters.

Now that I’m in Act 3, cracks are beginning to show. There’s so little interactivity or reactivity for my companions or decisions, respectively. The exploration leads to barren zones like the “passageway,” or tunnels in Rivington. Features that were important in Act 1, like Speak with Dead, are now useless. The narrative slowly falls apart into an uninteresting mass.

How can something that started so well fall apart so easily? Why can the rest of the game not be like Act 1? I’m losing motivation to continue playing. This sucks.

After finishing my first campaign and going over to my second playthrough I must say that I pretty much feel the same. It's really demotivating to play through act 1 again and seeing all these plot beats with the knowledge that really none of it has any consequence in the end. You can't really resist the Guardian. You can't really make a deal with Raphael. You can't really find a cure for your tadpole. There's no point in not using all the powers it gives you. There's also the fact going evil feels so hollow now knowing that every evil choice I'm making is basically just going to result in less content for me in act 2 and 3. The illusion is completely gone because the choices that initially seemed meaningful and interesting simply don't really matter.

The illusion of choice is the perfect way to describe this game.

I have to say, for how much we were hearing "reactivity!!!!" over and over again, it's a bit shocking just how limited the ending is. We even have people coping with datamined files that mention cut content that had another possible ending, and they're positive that it's going to come back. Like, that's great for people that might play the game more than once after a year or so, but for the majority of players that play a game a single time at release, they're sort of screwed.

There are consequences for using the two major tadpoles.

I think I've said something along these lines in another thread here. Even if they do end up fixing/salvaging the ending of the game, most people will have finished the game by then and even if they replay it, it's simply not the same as witnessing a game of that scale for the fist time. The initial impression usually stays with you.

But what I've seen in streams is that

Yes, it's the huge chasm/disconnect between how the game is being advertised and promoted (by Larian, by reviewers, and by fans) as the "new standard" for cRPGs on choices and consequences and reactivity, and the reality of those things in the game, that bothers me so much. If people weren't trying to make these grandiose claims about the game, then I could just accept the game for what it is, which is that it is a good game overall but not particularly better than other good cRPGs. But when people try to make claims about it being the "new standard" in the face of what are indisputable shortcomings, for me that hurts my appreciation of the game rather than helps it.

There is no consequence for using the tadpole casually throughout the game. Every time the narrator says her famous "A-thor-i-ty", it sure sounds sexy, but it's meaningless. Once that illusion dropped, something was lost for me. Now I won't think twice about freeing SH in the tutorial, or using it later on in the game for interacting with illithid machines, because it's consequence free, and you're just missing out on content if you don't use it. Even the skill tree, although I'll never use it, there are zero consequences if you simply remain at the first stage of development. NONE.

I think more than the ending, that was the most disappointing part of the game for me, roleplaying without any sort of game feedback can be fun up to a point, but when I realized that the game simply ignored my decisions, I simply stopped caring about them.

edit: didn't see Kanisatha's post above before I posted:


It's a new standard only in that it's extremely high production values, very approachable gameplay for a crpg, huge amount of content, and overall, it's a very solid cohesive experience (regardless of the ending). That alone will ensure it's popular for years to come, but if you were looking for real reactivity, and an amazing story including a great ending, that's simply not BG3.

I think the main issue is that there's nothing really connecting these choices. They're completely divorced from everything you did up to that point. Using either of the two "major tadpoles" isn't really contingent on using the tadpoles in the past, nor is it contingent on your relationship with the Emperor (or any other character for that matter). When people talk about meaningful choices in CRPGs they tend to expect some level of interconnectivity. They want their decisions to have cascading effects on the world and see that reflected in later choices. If you can pick every evil choice in the game, kill every person you meet and still get the generic good ending then that's sort of bullshit. Likewise, giving into temptation every single time by using the illithid and inserting every tadpole you get into your eye socket only to have the same outcome as someone who never even looked at them just because you rejected the "ultimate tadpole" is an exceedingly hollow choice.

[spoiler
Yes. It certainly feels like two different games, you have the first part, with tons of reactivity, racial and class specific dialogue options, different choices that affect the story and how it carries forward, a character that gives you an item intended to be an important story artifact (Omeluum's ring), and then everything that occurs outside of specific Tieflings that may show up later, are never revisited. The game proceeds and you enter Act 2, there is still some racial/class dialogue options, but the story is much more railroaded, which is bizarre given that we were told Act 2 is the longest, which it is certainly not. Almost all of the side quests still plug into the story of the Act itself, companion stories, and the main story itself to a degree, then you get to Act 3, all the side quests have absolutely nothing to do with the main plot, except for


it could be argued that none of the companion stories really have much relevance either given they are not resolved by the end. The main story feels very thinly threaded and weak, with the two main obstacles being a joke and having very little relevance. Their entire motivations are


then you get railroaded again into the final sequence, which feels like a slapdash last minute addition and is sort of outside of the main flow of the entire story leading up to this point.

Two different games, and I'm pretty sure it feels this way due to significant re-writes all the way up to the final months of release. They should have stuck with a story, framed it correctly, and had it flow consistently, instead it's a patchwork of plots that eventually split and feel completely irrelevant by the end, and finally we are then presented with an ending that is not an ending, which just caps the entire experience off by saying "none of your decisions mattered, and none of the companion specific quests really mattered (or, in the most generous fashion, mattered very little). The entirety of any decision making throughout the entire adventure culminates in the final minute and none of your decisions leading up to that moment have any relevance as to whether or not those circumstances would change or be permitted.

It's a very confusing situation to be in, the beginning is so good, and then latter half is such a mess, what cognitive dissonance...

Fair bit of hyperbole going on here, as expected.

Some of it could maybe be improved, but it’s nothing like the Mass Effect 3 debacle.

There were some quirks, but I enjoyed act 3.

I am also disappointed that there are no special bonuses for those not using tadpoles. There are consequences, if you start using them actively in act 3, the appearance of the hero changes, but if you do not use them AT ALL the whole game, there is no special bonus

The consequence you talk about have nothing to do with using your tadpole. Your appearance will only change if you use the Astral tadpole. It's a one off choice that has nothing to do with how you approached the whole tadpole situation prior to that.
Can you explain how it is any different from the Mass Effect 3 ending situation? If you're being honest to yourself, it's exactly like it. ME3 was trashed for its ending because unlike ME2, your decisions didn't affect the ultimate conclusion of the story which was instead boiled down to an extremely rudimentary choice between control, destroy (sounds familiar?) and synthesis. This was controversial because ME2's ending had a lot of variance based on your approach to companions which also tied into the morality system of that game and people expected ME3 to live up to that standard if not to surpass it. Arguably, ME3's ending was still better than what we got in BG3 because your Alliance military strength (which was a sort of score that was calculated based on your choices and side quest completion) could affect the ending. No such mechanic exists for BG3. It's more or less a simple binary choice.

I sure can. In Mass Effect 3, whatever choice you made, you were treated to the EXACT same cutscene, with the literal only difference being a different colour effect on the relays. There was no dialogue with your companions, because you were gone. Nobody commented on what happened or what comes next for them (it was implied that they were marooned).

In BG3, there is dialogue with your companions. The choices you made throughout the change what they do next, and in some cases you can try to convince them otherwise.

Also the war score thing was much less fun than calling the allies you made, made even worse by the fact that the best war score results were originally unachievable for people who didn’t want to get involved in multiplayer death matches.

Wow! This one is a new revelation to me. Says a heck of a lot to me.

There are really no consequences for eating tadpoles if you still want to go for a good ending? That's a bummer...

In EA I remember after eating each tadpole all the companions would be mad at you and you always got another cutscene with the Daisy, which meant you evolve into a MF. Knowing that in my playthrough on release didn't touch a single tadpole, they changed so many good things that were in EA..

If you pick the evil ending in BG3 you get a 2 minute (or even shorter) cinematic that's the same for every playthrough and that it's it. If you choose the good ending you get the cinematic showing the city being saved which is also the same for every playthrough PLUS you get one or two lines from a select few companions. But this isn't really the saving grace you think it is. The flaw of ME3's ending wasn't that there's no slideshow or banter adding a bit of context to the state of the galaxy with your red/blue/green ending - after all, they added that to the game's extended cut on and the endings still sucked. The fundamental flaw was that with the way the Mass Effect series handled player choices people expected the culmination of that series to be a tapestry of those choices. But none of your actions leading up to the ending actually affect it. No matter what you did, you would end up in the same spot choosing A/B/C. With BG3 it's exactly the same. The issue with both games is that your prior choices come to nothing and get supplanted with a choice that's the same for everyone. I'd argue BG3's ending is even worse because they don't bother properly setting up the stakes for it until it's already there but that's a different issue.