Not sure if this review is for you or for me, but I write it anyway.
The longer I think about it the less impressed I am with BG3.
To make it short, in my eyes BG3 is fake. A poser that distracts with superficious things from a thouroghly mediocre core.
What are the things BG3 gets praised for?
- Reactivity
And yes, reactivity is great. Its immersive and really enhances the game.
And also pretty much vanishes as soon as you leave act 1. And even in act 1 some races are more equal than others with lots of effort having been spend on the exotics, drow and gith and less on the rest.
- Cinematics
Cinematics and full voice over are nice, but they are icing on the cake. And Larian threw a lot of money on the icing, but left the cake part undercooked, making it look good but taste bad.
Cinematics would elevate a great game to a masterpiece, but BG3 is not a great game.
- Sex
Not that it has sex, but Larians focus on it. They never wasted an opportunity to mention the sexual content, to brag with having used intimacy coordinators and made sex a central point of their marketing with the bear scene. And this focus on sex also affected the gameplay and especially companion design and interaction.
You know what that reminds me of? The movie Idiocracy, especially the part where inthe future and in the face of globally falling IQ companies kept sexualizing their brand more and more to attract customers.
Starbucks exotic coffee for Men to name a tamer example.
That is BG3/Larian to me. Sexual content does not add anything to the core RPG experience. At best it does nothing, at worst, and that is the case in BG3 it is used as replacement for the things that matter and as distraction that you do not have something else.
So what is the core of RPGs?
- Mechanics
Larian has to use D&D 5e, that comes with the IP. But they had freedom on how to implement them. And they did not implement them well when you compare BG3 to Solasta.
Larian didn't even implement true flight or removed some mechanics from DOS2 like how everyone can use scrolls.
And many implementations from Larian did also negatively effect balance. Haste, Tavern Brawler, tadpole power just to name a few. And also the flood of legendary+++ items which are far more powerful than what D&D 5e is designed to handle.
And then there are also other issues like the toilet chain or changing companions.
- Story
The probably most important part of an RPG. And BG3s story is at best average and probably below that.
It has a lot of inconsistencies like people changing into mind flayer without a tadpole, its pacing is bad, rapidly shifting from pretend time pressure to no pressure at all and back to pretend time pressure intermixed with real time pressure.
Often those shifts invalidate the premise of what happened so far like how tadpoles change from a huge danger that you need to get rid off asap to no big deal and actually a boon.
And its also unfinished with many setups lead to nowhere and its very noticable that some strange things are going on like the entrance to Cazadors mansion.
The bad guys also get less and less interesting the further you progress into the game and encounter new ones.
And there is not even a proper ending sequence to bring the game to a closure. Also an evil story does not exist past act 1, just a good story with less NPCs. Apart from Minthara there is no real "evil only content"
It also doesnt help how story is tied to resting and most players will miss out on a lot of stuff until they figure that out.
- Companions
Not all RPGs focus on companions but games like BG3 do. And here too BG3 is aggressively average.
The companions in BG3 are pretty generic with non of them being really memorable the way some WotR, Kingmaker, Dragon Age or Mass Effect companions are.
They are not bad but wont make any Top X RPG character lists.
And while some of them have mire content than others, some also do not say much at all till act 3 while for others their story is over by act 2 and from that point on just exist.
And often you are left wondering what their motivations actually are as their actions feel very forced and disjunct from what happened before like Shadowhearts decision.
The companions are in many ways very similar to each other. "Living on borrowed time", "abusive relationship" and "manipulated by a superior". Also, human, human, elf, elf, half-elf....
The latter can be attributed to Larians sex focus which becomes really obvious with the companions, the amount of lines dedicated to romance/sex talk, the way how romance is the default relationship and how aggressively the companions purse it so that sex or the promise of having sex soon was already available early in EA for marketing purposes.
To me it looks that the cast was designed for sex first and to cover all the usual sexual fantasies and everything else came after that. Which is why the cast resembles more those of a dating game than an RPG. The tsundere, the shy girl, the hurt bully you can fix, the romantic,...
BG3 has its good parts like how it usually avoids doing simple fetch or slay quests, but overall the RPG experience is not all that great and Larian spend a lot of money in superficial things to distract from that.
And when we look at Larian itself instead of BG3, not all is well there either.
Larian lied (tadpole overuse has consequences), mislead (explore the upper city) and purposefully left us in the dark (is Minthara fixed or not?).
N8t to mention things like saying the endings were left out because they were to long after bragging how long a complete playthrough would take (with inflated numbers) or despite everyone knowing that it was because of Starfield jutifying the decision to release early with that the PC version is making such good progress. That by the time of the later release Larian fixed more than 1000 bugs and act 3 is still a mess shows that this was not even remotely true.
