Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General What do you think of Act 3?

Ooooffff.

On one hand, the urban environment, from the level- and environmental-design standpoint is great. Hopping on rooftops, exploring the alleyways, seeing the changes between the less and more well cared-for parts of the city.

On the other...

The game's sense of urgency, as mentioned already by so many, comes to a dead stop. It really feels like the city should have been Act 2 instead, with perhaps us going to different areas (such as the shadow-cursed lands) and it being a central hub that slowly but surely descends into martial law. Threat escalation is off as well, with us switching from dealing with a literal avatar of a god to some schmucks who are more dangerous than githyanki troopers which were trained from childhood to be perfect warriors (it's Pathfinder: Kingmaker's issue all over again).

Writing and world-building flaws and inconsistencies are too many to count, here's a few though:

- For a city on lockdown with a lot of distrust towards outsiders having a gith or a drow run around in broad daylight seems... strange, at best. The fact that Voss can just stride into a brothel with a freaking silver sword on his back and nobody bats an eye was a head-scratcher for me.

- The Emperor feels more like a poorly shoe-horned plot device than ever, and that we were deprived of Daisy and the theme of losing oneself to temptations of power for him to be a constant annoyance and a thirst trap is a travesty. Anyone remotely familiar with illithid lore should know that they are beyond sexual desire and emotional attachment, and if one raises such topics, it's as blatant a manipulation as it can be.

- Why are there Netherese graffiti all over a relatively new city, and why do we camp out in the streets with nobody to interfere? You'd think that counts as vagrancy, and the city has literal Robocops patrolling it as is.

- The old character cameos feel less like they're actually meaningful and more like cheap fanservice. No Kevin Michael Richardson is really sad, too.

Even if the Upper City was never planned to be included (which I highly doubt, to be honest), the Lower City still feels like a lot's missing. Where's Blade and Stars, which was even teased in a book you can find in Act 1? What's the Blushing Mermaid for, as there doesn't seem to be any meaningful content tied to it? Why are there some many merchants with only a "Let me take a look at your wares" line of dialogue? Why does the city just run like usual when certain main story events happen and the streets become obviously dangerous? Why is Cazador's palace sitting there and not in the proper noble part of town?

And the content quality in general drops too, with there being literal fetch quests which involve looking everywhere for one of the X parts of a clown or a mummy's internal organ assemblage. Scenes that seem like should be there (Lae'zel, for example, hints at another romance scene which you can even choose the, erm, intensity of - but nothing happens) are missing, characters have little to no things to say (the camp in general grows really quiet as of Act 2), and the game starts over-relying on the narrator digesting and over-explaining the plot not letting the player make a single conclusion on their own. The narrator in general feels like it hurts the game more than it adds to it, since it's no longer required to compensate for the lack of cinematic expression but is used even more heavily than in Larian's previous title.

Finally, the difficulty becomes practically non-existent, though I'd say it's less Larian's and more the system's own fault. 5e is braindead easy in general, but a Level 11 great weapon fighter trivializes it to the point of it no longer being funny anymore. When I am casting Disintegrate on the final boss out of pity of all things when I could have just kept smacking it for >100 damage per turn, it's actually quite sad instead.