Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General A lengthy review after pondering about the game.

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.

Well as I have expressed in several posts, BG3 is both brilliant, and bad at the same time.

I genuinely hope they intend to release a definitive edition that is actually a game in a finished state.

I didn't see many brilliant in this game

I'll never forget that this is the company that Hired out an entire historic castle the size of a city block for over a week in order to do a media presentation and generate self-congratulating back-patting hype... but they could not spare the resources to ensure that we have the option to roll for our stats, like they Said Would Be Available In Game At Launch, or to address why we can't.

Their entire production has been a string of misdirection, false promises, broken words and deliberate deception (which they sometimes even emphasised that they did because it was funny to them), culminating in a whole lot of massive over-promise and under-delivery, and the thing that I find really confusing is why they are given such a great big pass on their poor behaviour and their broken, buggy and obviously incomplete product, when any other studio would be torn to ribbons over behaving like this or delivering a product in this condition. It baffles me.

Have to agree with the points in the review, sadly. The game felt like a step either sideways or even backwards in many areas compared to D:OS2, which was at least concise and... genuine? Definite improvements are the level design and, to some extent, companion interactions - but it feels like the latter came at the cost of there being much too little content outside of those. Combat difficulty in D:OS2 was wacky and jumping from really easy to crushingly hard, but it had a lot of fun tactics and interactions you could use with a varying degree of cheesiness - meanwhile BG3's just lacking in difficulty altogether after half-way through, even without the allegedly overpowered things, all you need is a high-level two-handed martial or two and a support caster, plus potions if you feel like humiliating the enemies.

I used to naively assume that the lack of transparency during development was just their approach to, well, development (show when there's stuff to show), but it did get rather suspicious when the first gameplay of Act 2/3 was shown when the game was practically going gold already, and how there were quick cuts of things even then (like, in the Release Showcase PfH you could see how the companions had unique backgrounds, which were replaced with the generic ones on release, not to mention belts, properly implemented crossbows, EA scenes that never returned (fishermen on the nautiloid, Minthara's alternate scene...).

It sure feels like the development was extremely all over the place, possibly the result of Larian growing in scale with so many studios but the management side of things being unable to adapt to being not only so many people in number, but also spread across the whole globe? Plus there's pressure from WotC, and the release date inconsistencies (was it really worth it to give Starfield a cheeky middle finger when the game was clearly undercooked?), and the team seemingly not really knowing what they want the game to end up like (resulting in heavy story rewrites quite late into development so you can see the seams showing, and writing/design decisions fluctuating heavily in quality).

Add outdated visuals on top (some armors (basic chain shirt, Dark Justiciar's...) look downright bad, and it also ties into the whole sex scene/nudity craze - are you really going to use that as a marketing tool when your bodies look worse than ME: Andromeda or even DA: Inquisition, and are devoid of physics to the point of some animations resulting in, for example, females' breasts caving in on themselves?), and the performance issues in Act 3 (didn't get any myself, thankfully, though I was running the game with a 40 frame lock due to having a somewhat older PC), and the final sequence feeling like a poor re-iteration of Fort Drakkon from DA: Origins, and it does not really hold up to being a supposed "standard-setting RPG", unless of course we're implying that the standards got SO low that this is supposed to be a shining beacon of quality.

I sadly have to agree with a lot of what you have said. If I wouldn't find the combat to be highly addictive and wouldn't really like Shadowhearts storyline, I would have given up by now. Somehow I received a halfbaked product, that probably needs another year in development without pressure and crunch time. Now Larian tries to patch this thing in record time into a usable state with their priorities all over the board and at least for me each patch makes the game worse. Didn't encounter so many bugs in act 1 on release date, that's for sure...

It's shallow. Once you realize it's the Skyrim of CRPGs, a lot of the praise it gets makes sense.

I think now that we have moved into the silly POST SEX , dating NPC simulator adoring crowd as come and gone, we can look to some more interesting criticism on the game's actual RPG mechanics and world story building and immersion. And the freakin lack of OPTIONS for difficulty and gameplay.

Instead of of colorful hair colors, sex dating simulator, and fully voiced 3D animated 7 NPCs for example, I'd rather of had super well written 18 companions with some voice acting and friendship talks with romances here and there, and really AMAZING cinematics during key moments of the story; but staying top down most of the game during most dialogues, having even more options and interesting stories.

In the end Larian concentrated way to much on visual cinematic experience. Results? They already look dated and feel shallow. Mods won't help there either.

I said this elsewhere on the forums. We're in EA 2.0. Anyone who thinks otherwise is kidding themselves. We'll stay in EA 2.0 for probably the better part of a year. The "release," as some pointed out, was much more about market timing than it was about the product being ready. "Full release," ergo the beginning of the second phase of Early Access, probably generated enough income for Larian to actually finish the game the way they always wanted, which, for those keeping track, is all we'll ever get. Larian makes games for themselves first and foremost, and they hope that clever marketing will sell enough copies to keep the ride going. Undercooked is the perfect word to describe this game. Every cake you put in the oven has the potential to be delicious and satisfying, but if you take that sucker out early, all you've got is inedible raw dough. That's what we got, warm cake dough. Yuck.

You’re all entitled to your opinions, but relying on clever marketing? Really? What clever marketing? They LARPed like a bunch of goofballs in a castle. Compared to most AAA devs they had a very mild marketing campaign.

Oh come now, do you think they did that for no reason besides having 'fun'. The whole point was to present themselves as one of the people/gamers, the most effective marketing strategy there is. (CDPRs 'we leave greed to others while focusing on what matters')

There is no way a dev that is goofing around would lie/try to trick you or *gasp* try to sell a product, right? Its not like Larian is running a business and their main interest is in money and fame. And you know what? It worked, redditors/youtubers/gamers are running around singing praises and elevating BG3 and Larian to the heavens. (I might also add that they did the same thing CDPR did by astroturfing/buying of streamers/youtubers. Some of them even ended up being in the game - I really want devs stop doing that.)

So yeah the marketing was clever.

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Larian released a mediocre game that any other dev would've been ripped to sherds for (unfinished content, poor optimization, bugs galore etc. but hey ACT 1 is fun) but instead they are being praised for the most basic shit. Patches/hotfixes aren't anything new, no BG3 isn't the only single-player game that has not MTX and adding things that should've been there on release doesn't show how good of a developer they are. (I still laugh at that reddit post saying that no game ever had latin vocalization for their spells)

Gamers are desperate for that good ol dev/game that can stick it to the evil corporations like Activision or EA so they latch themselves onto 'underdogs' (and no Larian isn't a small indie dev like some people like to think) while ignoring reality, add FOMO to that and you have BG3 (people were calling it the best game ever one week in and two months in the act 1 achievement stands at 50%)

ps. I don't hate the devs or want to see them harassed but to say BG3 is the best thing ever since sliced bread is a bit to much for me. Also 'we didn't put in the endings because the game was too long/we didn't think it would make sense for our vision of the game' is just lol, devs make mistakes and devs lie.

The game is at 96% positive Steam user reviews, both total and recent. If you think that’s really all people being tricked into liking the game, wanting to like the game as anti-establishment statement, FOMO, astroturphing and not just people having a different experience and opinion than you do, you need to get off the internet and go get some fresh air. For real.

What is really perplexing is why all of my friends without reservation love this game. None participated in EA, none followed the years of marketing, none watch any streamers. None of any prior experience with Larian or know anything of their studio size or story. Yet somehow Larian still got to them and tricked them into liking this obviously dumpster fire of a game. Larian sure are a crafty bunch.

LMAO Warlocke, I'll ignore you being a Larian cheerleader. Nowhere did I say people cant like the game on their own without being tricked or that I hated BG3, so chill out. Might I even suggest you take your own advice and go check out how fresh that grass is.

You mentioned that marketing wasn't clever or that it was inconsequential to the games success and I disagreed. The rest of the post was separated with those little lines for a reason and was meant to convey my stance on the whole hero worship that Larian/BG3 has received.

As for the rating, Cyberpunk is at 87% despite being one of the biggest blunders/devs lying in recent gaming history. Gamers are sheep and are willing to overlook a lot as long as they are entertained. (As soon as the next CG trailer drops people will forget all about their hate for Blizard also.)

Enjoy your games all you want I don't care, I have my own games that I enjoy despite them being bad or hated (and I'm not saying BG3 is bad just mediocre, I even enjoyed certain parts of it) but do try to satay away from tying your entire being to a product/company that you would lose your shit as soon as someone dares not kiss its ass.

Okay, let’s take it down a notch and avoid being rude, dismissive or accusing people of acting in bad faith. We have different preferences, priorities and takes, and that’s fine. Sometimes we just need to agree to disagree.

In line with Red Queen’s request, I’m going to try and not escalate, but I do feel it necessary to point out:


Yes, you absolutely did.

Quite plainly.

Right here:


And if you weren’t aware and it wasn’t your intention, I’m just letting you know that is reads very much as “my opinion is right and your (fans) opinions are invalid for these reasons.”

Giving you the benefit of the doubt here.

Also, I never remotely suggested that marketing wasn’t consequential to BG3’s success. I don’t know where you picked that up from.

You're conflating, Warlocke - they did not say that folks cannot like and enjoy the game for what it is without having been deceived by the various hype tactics used. They did not say that at all. Many people are, perhaps, and many people were enthused for the game because of said tactics, but that in no way implies that others cannot simply come to the game and enjoy it for what it is without being in that false-hype position. Euph, above, seems to be a good example of this - someone who was not taken in by the hype engine or the over-promising that failed to deliver under the first layer of paint, but who nevertheless enjoyed the game as a somewhat mediocre RPG that was an entertaining fill of their time while it lasted, despite its many issues.

Because gamers ARE desperate, they praised CDPR as the best company ever and Witcher 3 was the best game that ever existed, after that it was Elden Ring and FromSoftware. And now its Larians and BG3 turn while ignoring everything that came before it and acting as it broke new grounds. Something being entertaining doesn't necessarily mean good, if it did Transformer movies would be considered masterpieces.

Again, nowhere in my post did I write that there isn't a possibility for people to enjoy the game or to enjoy it without the interference of others/marketing/devs. Gamers =/= every single person that plays the game.

You and your friends might enjoy BG3 and that's totally fine but the rabid masses of Reddit (echo chamber), YouTube and to an extent Steam have acted differently (ignoring issues that BG3 has, insulting other games/devs, and overall praising the game without even finishing it) and that's what I'm talking about. So its more of a Gamer TM .

Not reading all the posts above me but I read the OP post a little bit (scanning more like, but I get the gist).

Piece of advice for readers: People who post their opinion/review here tend to think their opinion/review is the objective truth, all truth and nothing but the truth.

So read with a kilos of salt beside you because some of their "objective truth" are often laughable.

"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." -> this is an example of laughable opinion, parading as an objective truth can be.

ps. My counter argument is this: WoTR and KM companions are mostly: a joke. You only remember 1 of them, but that 1 person becomes "all the companions" in later iteration of opinion when you talk about video game companion.
BioWare companion was great, the writing was great, but do you know what they sacrifice to achieve that? Dragon Age series is barely an RPG. Mass Effect is Action game parading as an "RPG", in short: these are RPG games for people who do not understand what an RPG is, that is why it's great for them. They prioritize "good story" over RPG, because they never care to play an RPG in the first place if they are being honest.

Dex, it's understood that when someone is giving a review of their experience, that they are talking about what they experienced and their opinions on it; if you're going to take what the initial post says as being proclaimed as an objective truth, so that you can argue with it, that's on you - but either way, calling other people's opinions 'laughable' is not a good look. Furthermore, I'd say that it feels very strongly as though you are projecting your personal experiences and opinions as objective truths here, not the other way around - you are the one claiming as though it were factual, that the companions of other games were mostly jokes, and that 'you' whoever that nebulously is, only remembers one of them. Sorry, that sounds like you projecting your experience onto others. Maybe you only engaged with and really recall one of the companions from P:KM - that's fine, but it's also personal. I enjoyed several of the KM companions, and got emotionally attached to several of them in various ways. They were conveyed well enough for me to do so, easily in fact, to the point that a specific element of the ending still sits with me as one of the most unjust, unsatisfying and unfairly unrightable wrongs in any game I've ever played and felt invested in.

I don't feel this way about any of the BG3 companions yet, and maybe I will given time... we'll see.

Either way, I'd suggest that you consider reading the post you're giving people advice about properly before you judge it - admitting that you didn't read something, to then tell others what it 'probably' does, and deriding it for that mostly just makes you, yourself, look very foolish. Much of what the initial post states is simple a notation of things that are factually true. Other parts of it are clearly personal opinions or feelings about how some elements landed or didn't - it's very easy to tell which is which. If you've got an issue with any of the factual information provided, I'm sure we'd all benefit from a correction, if you've got it to hand.

The same thing can be said about OP post, Niara.

And yes, the same thig can be said about mine.

And also yes, the same thing can be said about yours, which is why I only scan the rest of your opinion past that sentence.


What I was saying is that I am not feeling as strong - to force my opinion as objective truth - as OP did, to post it as a thread, especially when much of it just an abstract assertion, like "Cinematics would elevate a great game to a masterpiece", or obvious limitation this kind of game has *never* overcome: "And even in act 1 some races are more equal than others with lots of effort having been spend on the exotics", or an entirely subjective assertion parading as truth for the rest of the post.

I am glad that you found someone to conform to things you already believe, but "Much of what the initial post states is simple a notation of things that are factually true" - is simply not true. There are plenty of nuances being swiped below the rug to achieve that sentence.