Despite the enormous amount of gamer-rage flowing through me right now, I will state this as constructively as possible:) ACT III has been so incredibly frustrating, and has reached a breaking point in my battle with Dolor. Ignoring all the cheese mechanics that have shown up in this act, my problem is a culmination of BGIII's flawed turn-based system.
This is the rage loop I am stuck in: My squad kills Dolor and all but 2 of his clones during our actions. The last two Dolor clones are in a Cloud of Daggers spell. It kills them, combat ends and instantly 4 NPC's run like lemmings into the Cloud of Daggers and die a horrible death... I can't pause the game, and even if I could it wouldn't do any good because my characters are locked into a rigid turn order and the damage of my spells happens, confoundingly on the enemies turn. I literally have no means of turning off the spell until my turn, which never happens because the fight ends... I can't even quickly click back into turn based mode because the button only spawns in a few seconds after the carnage. I even tried the shortcut (shift-space) but it has no effect until the aforementioned turn based mode graphic shows up.
I am going to date myself, but I have been playing DND-based video games for a very long time (I think Curse of the Azure Bonds was my first) and I have never experienced this before. I came to BGIII straight from Solasta and there is no reason an indie game should have a more fluid gameplay system. BGIII looks amazing. The Voice work is top notch, probably the best since Mass Effect I and II, which I have been longing for. But... the turn order mechanics are the worst of any game I have played, and this is coming from someone who made it through the whole X-Com series... if you know, you know:)
The 'bureaucracy' of the system constantly steals actions and teamwork options from the player, and creates problems that don't need to exist. Do I really need to load a save so I can find someone who can throw a healing potion at the murder cultists so they survive their turn just to bypass this nonsense? ACT III has not been fun for me largely because of DM-Cheese and the janky turn-based system. For very different reasons I am having Mass Effect flashbacks where I only played III one time. It was so unsatisfying that when I eventually replayed the series I would always end with II. In this case I keep creating new characters and playing ACT I & II because, ACT III is frankly not fun from a gameplay prospective. The only thing making me slog through are the amazing performances of the voice talent and I could just save myself the headache watch those clips on YouTube.
Constructively, much of this could be easily fixed. A) Turn off concentration AOE spells when combat ends. At the very least make it an option that pops up. B) Allow a player to delay their turn or at the very least just incorporate the reaction system in DND. C) Slow down on the cheese and just make challenging baddies, particularly for the lower 'role player' difficulty levels. If I want to be forced to minmax/metagame (which I don't) I will put it on one of the higher difficulty levels.
Anyway, that's my 20 cents:)
