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

I quite enjoyed act 3. There�s a lot to do in the city, and I didn�t notice that many bugs that others seem to report. A few wonky lines of dialogue here and there, but nothing too serious.

It does suffer from a fair common issue in many RPGs where the story is pushing the urgency of the situation while giving you a load of side quests that your character probably shouldn�t be wasting their time on.

They could have pitched it less about the city being in imminent danger and more that the antagonists had suffered a bit of a blow in act 2 and retreated to the city to regroup. Maybe even leave the big reveal of exactly what they were up to until later, so you could be investigating their plans in between looking for clown bits or whatever.

I agree with a lot of what others are saying about the plot companion story arcs, etc. to some extent. But I don�t think it�s terrible or completely broken. Would be nice if they did build on it and tidy up some loose ends though.

No. Completely unacceptable. If Larian includes a non-lethal option, they must provide handling for non-lethal takedowns. To suggest otherwise is insulting.

Let me put it this way.

Act 1 and 2(maybe minus implementation of the Emperors story) has a comfortable place in the Valhalla of RPGs.

Act 3 no score. It is still EA/alpha.

Neat stories. Unfinished and unpolished.

So Act 3 has very high highs and very low lows...

First: Dialogue
For a game that thrives on your choices and the reactions NPC's and especially your companions have to your choices, I was really disappointed at the lack of companion responses. There is just so little they ever say through this act versus the abundance in Act 1 & 2.

Second: The finality of companion quests
I loved Astarion's mission. The voice actor really brought out the big guns with that one. But then....nothing. There was some dialogue but then Astarion didn't have anything else to say. I romanced him so I was expecting a lot more in terms of him explaining how he felt or some new insights on missions etc. It just didn't feel right that everything felt done and over with at that point. I mean, he's still important to the story, right? Doesn't he have anything else to say? That goes double for Shadowheart, Wyll, Karlach etc.

Third: The Ending

Overall, I'm still replaying the crap out of it. But had I known all of this, I would have braced myself for an overall mediocre experience instead of continuing to get the quality I was used to.

I really enjoyed Act 3. I seem to have had a different experience from others in that I didn't have many bugs. My ending was heroic and tragic with a really sad element. It was awesome. I started a new character almost immediately.

Haven't fully played it yet due to performance, but it is a convoluted mess. I kinda supposed that I will arrive in a city under siege with a huge sense of urgency to get things done and streamlined quests leading me to the end game. Instead it feels more like the middle part of a 5 act game, with quests that might tie in into the main story line, but I'm in no mood to look after some missing letters, solve the housing problems of a noble and so on.

I'm in act 3 again and while this time the # of bugs has gone down A LOT, it still feels like total chaos. I don't want to go into too much detail here, but it doesn't "glue" together as well as acts 1 and 2.

Journal has become worse (again) (example: I don't know if I have saved enough special friends for a certain other big thing to do without too bad repercussions, quest log doesn't tell me, also the quest log assumes that I have done something before I actually did, etc...).

I also wish that a certain companion would be available much earlier in the game, one that was intended for act 1 already from what I gathered from the "cut content" files.

And the whole Karlachgate... I mean... come on. Dammon is our friend, Dammon is a fine guy, Dammon can find a solution. It should be a challenge.

But, back to my main issue with "act 3" - it feels like a supercharged version of Arx (the final act of D:OS2, I still can't get if this was act 3 or act 4 of D:OS2, because of the part in between which was still like 2-3 evenings of gaming) before DE - a collection of quests with "go here, go there, do this, do that" with a strong feeling of "a lot of incohesive stuff was just thrown in there which is hard to follow, not because it's complicated, but because it is too dense".

In my most honest opinion, act 3 should be reworked not only for more companion-related content, but also for more "clarity" and "order" for DE. The bugs will be fixed, I'm sure of that, but clearly act 1 with it's "openness" and "easy goingness" should stand model for the DE act 3.

They should also make non-lethal takedowns mean something.

I will bring up the report of non-lethal takedown to the secretary general of United Nations. It has to mean something or else we will dissolve the defense line between Cyprus and Northern Cyprus.

Act 3 was the highlight of the game for me. The only thing that was really jarring was the emperor/orpheus debacle that made 0 sense. Everything except the clusterfuck of an ending story-wise, I had a grand time in act 3. Though the bosses needs +100 HP.

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.

You literally took all the words out of my mouth

I do like act 3 in general, there are some really good interactions like
The locations are great too. I don't really click with Gortash. The other two have simply more personality to them, while he is the sleazy politician. Jason Isaacs is great as always though.
Some quests are a bit confusing, like the
I'm just about to start endgame ( couldn't play as much as I wanted due to real life and a virus that struck me down) for the first time, so can't say much about that.

I highlighted two relevant things:

First, from what I understand of illithid lore (and who knows it may have changed over the years), they are not actually beyond emotional attachment. Even mindflayers dominated by an elder brain can have thralls they treat as pets and get upset when they die. Moreover it isn't unheard of for them to occasionally retain properties of the person they sprang from. So (at least from what I know) it is not actually true that if such topics come up within an independent mindflayer that it is necessarily manipulation.

Second: The lack of difficulty is absolutely, one hundred percent Larian's fault. The absolutely absurd levels that martials can reach in this game are completely down to the ill-considered, completely unbalanced itemization and homebrew rules that they themselves put into the game. It is *resolutely* not 5e's fault, it is *not* a feature of 5e that martials become this ridiculously overpowered at 12th level, it is absolutely, *completely* Larian's own doing.

I agree with a lot with what is sad


Does anything think it will be changed in any meaningful way beyond the smallish patches??

On the first: I meant emotional attachment as in its romantic/carnal-adjacent aspects. They are asexually reproducing hermaphrodites, and a race that is inherently pragmatic to the core. As for the retaining the original person's properties...


And on the second: I have to disagree, I am afraid, because I've had the exact same scenario happen in Solasta, where the rules are a lot more accurate and the itemization is reined in. Potions of too much strength are just as available there though, so that might play a role, but still - a level 11 fighter with a good weapon capable of doing 6 attacks per round at ~20 damage each plus criticals makes everything the casters are capable of in terms of damage pale spectacularly by comparison. In BG3 it's just even more pronounced thanks to the great weapon master feat (a PHb one!) in combination with the Battle Master's accuracy boost compensating for the -5 penalty you're taking. It's not 3.5e where shields can provide ridiculous AC boosts and dual-wielding can make you attack 6-7 times a round to compensate for how plainly superior two-handed weapons are raw damage-wise.

About the only damage-dealing spell that remained useful throughout in BG3 in my experience was cloudkill, and the mega Magic Missile you get from the Red Knight book, which is practically endgame. Monks too are busted, which you can get a first-hand experience of during the Act 2-3 interrim. Stunning Fist working on everything in existence, just like sneak attack, is rather stupid. Though I don't disagree with there being way too many plain broken items, like the gauntlets of disadvantage against combat maneuvers and heavy armor reducing damage far too much.

Overall, the final third of the game needs a big rebalance (and the level cap should really be 14, there's more than enough XP in the game to get there...), and Act 3 really shows that the game got the Dragon Commander treatment of being released as-is. Something did feel off about how the marketing in the final months took a 180 and the release date got shifted to an earlier day of all things. I suppose Starfield didn't hamper the sales much this way, at least... Still, the community update 24 read as disingenuous, because you can see the seams holding the release version together in some places. Owning up to having messed up would have probably been a better move rather than saying that what we got was all intentional.

I could not understand how people claim the sorcerer or whatever caster was strong. I have seen NPCs that make 6-8 attacks per round. I mean why on earth even use a caster other than for haste... Granted fireball is pretty op at lvl 5.

Like Brainer says, the narrative peaks in all the wrong places. I feel like all companion quests end abruptly in act 3, even Shadowheart has nothing to say for the last 20 hours if you go to the house of grief at the start of the act. And tbh I always assumed the city was act 2.

The only reason I am here is because Larian has a history of listening to their customers, and I read they rewrote act 3 in DOST2 and added 150 000 lines of dialogue. Or something.

If it was any other company I would say that ship has sailed. With Larian ther is hope. Tbh with the success of this game I honestly think it would be a miss not to fix it, because they will have gained new fans for sure, but what is the use if you just loose the old ones? I don't feel the need to play 10 games per year anymore so why would I invest in future Larian projects if it is just going to be like this.

It's my least favorite, but not because it was too buggy (I only had one bug and it was fixed by switching from Vulkan to Direct X for that bug). I just prefer less city and more "wildnerness" or non-city to look at. But it wasn't BAD. I'm about 2 major fights from the end now and the only thing holding it back for me is the city gets boring to trapse back and forth across after a while-- but it's like that for all cities in all games for me. I just don't enjoy them as much.

I finished my companion quests pretty late-- got all the little stuff done first, so I don't have the issue of feeling like my companions had nothing to do or say for the last several hours. I could see where that's an issue though-- I feel like there should be some in-game mechanic preventing you from finishing those quests right away when you hit the city.

Additionally, some players here need to realize that MOST PEOPLE who are playing this game now never played EA, so this Daisy person? No one but the very small minority who played EA knows or cares who she is. If you start yanking important story NPCs now to shove in some "Daisy" most people don't know or care about, it'd create an uproar. Save her for the DLC if one is coming.