Well, call it as you like, but when a serious event happens with 0 reactivity I deem it to be an unfinished scene. Like, when Durge finds out they were vivisected and experimented on and then companions totally ignore it.
I think the distinction is very, very important. Bug means that something that was intended to be in the game is broken. Lack of reactivity can certainly be detrimental, but you are essencially asking for more content and Baldur's Gate3 is already a very large game, that's been developed for many years.
That's I think is were we disagree. Where you see unfinished game, I see a game that set up unrealistic expectations in the early access as far as detail, interactivity and sheer amount of optional content goes, and in the long run wasn't able to deliver. Larian designed a game that allows for a riddiculous amount of permutations, with almost no systemic abstractions, where each potential path requires expensive, time consuming, handcrafted content to be made possible. I am by no means surprised that they don't want to spend next couple years writing, recording, animating and testing an uncounted amount of cutscenes needed to fill all the scenarios they didn't account for, especially for origins who aren't very popular among the playerbase. In my view BG3 isn't unfinished - it is overambitious.
Originally Posted by neprostoman
Well I guess this depends on the methods used in critical evaluation. Some break down the game into systems and evaluate them separately, i.e. gameplay is a 10, story is 8, graphics 7 etc. This seems like a universal and just approach to evaluation, but I find it deceptive in terms of representing the game's true value. If overall enjoyment the game brings is immense, it would not be just to extract some points just to check some boxes on the evaluation sheet. There should be phenomena and exceptions, when a game gets high scores despite its technical flaws or other mistakes, just for the sake of being a wonderful experience overall.
There is a reason why my go to reviewers tend to not use numerical values in assessing games. I also don't pay much attention to community reviews as I feel they tend to be swayed more by social media trends, rather than game's themselves. I just mentioned scores because I find the shift from "This is 10/10 masterpiece" to "WTF do you mean you are not going to develop the game further after a year of support and extra content" grimly hilarious. That said, if one has to interact with numerical score, treating it as "how good of a time I had" is a terribly way of using it. Too many things unrelated to a quality of the game have impact on how good of a time one has for it to be a worthy metric. A general question that I think should be asked is "does the game deliver on the experience it aims to deliver". A good reviewer should be able to appraise a variety of games pretty well, but I don't expect that amount of introspection from a random player. Still if one things a game needs years of work to be "finished" the score probably shouldn't be too high. It's perfectly fine to love a game that is deeply flawed - in fact, those titles have a tendency to be quite compelling if they fail in a unique way due to trying something new or ambitious.
And personally, whenever BG3 is a game "worthy" of 10, 9, 8 or 7 is just uninteresting conversation to me
Though if you want to know it's 3/5 in my book on GOG, and would get thumb up on Steam with a lot of written caveats, if I owned it there. If I rated it out of 10 like I do movies, it would be 6/10, so I enjoyed it, it's above average but I have a lot of issues with it as well. I don't know why gaming refuses to use scores beyong 7-10 unless something really, really sucks. If you have max 10, than surely 5 should be an average, unremarkable score. 5 is meh anything above is to some degree positive, anything below is to some degree negative
. It is a cRPG with biggest budget that we have seen that tried to allow players to play as both custom and pre-made characters, supports singleplayer and multiplayer gameplay, offers a lot of player agency while at the same time delivering story through expensive to make cinematics, made by an independly owned studio which had to scale up greatly to make it happen, big chunk of development happened during Covid and so far it seems to be a pretty humane place to work. There is a lot to be happy with here, regardless what are ones personal thoughts on the game itself, or whenever putting all the things I listed above into a single game was actually a good idea in the first place.
