Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Analysis of 250 Steam reviews

Do the people on steam have the same priorities as the ones on this forum?
I sorted the content of 250 reviews on steam into categories:

Not mentioned here are crashes, glitches in animations and other obvious technical early access issues that Larian is aware of.

Praise:
Many people praised the high resolution graphics.
More than 15 mentions:
Not a classic baldurs gate but good
Good story
Good DnD 5e interpretation

At least 10 mentions:
Lots of character creation options
Good cinematic presentation with animated dialogue
Interesting companion stories
Interesting combat

At least 5 mentions:
Lots of choices
Combat using environment

One to a few:
Exciting dice rolling, skills feel meaningful, coop gameplay good, exploration, romance, camp system




Critique:
More than 15 mentions:
This game does not feel like Baldurs Gate. Many negative reviews are based on this.

More than 10 mentions:
Bitchy companions. Many players are annoyed or frustrated by the companions.

At least 5 mentions:
No Real time with pause
Bad coop gameplay

A few mentions:
Story lacks depth
Story feels disjointed
Not enough meaningful choices
Camera control not good
Area effects are too much
Unbalanced combat
Companions too strange, no normal companions
Combat too slow
Enemies have too many dangerous things to throw
Story too depressive
No XP for peaceful activities

Single mention: Dice rools annoying, lack of memorable stories, interface needs work, inventory complicated, lack of interaction between companions,
language only english, male characters look too feminine, colors too bright, bad facial animations, character development is lacking, lack of worldbuilding and background

Technical:
The game transmits data to Amazon. Some people do not like how much it likes to communicate. Deleting crashereporter.exe, .dll and start by bg3.exe stops transmission.

Summary:
There are only a few people who feel that BG3 is a close sequel to BG2. There are two groups: Those that are disappointed in the game being so different and those that are ok with it being quite different.
RTWP seems to be less important that one might think looking at this forum. Most players enjoy the story but some feel that it is disjointed and needs development.
The various flammable containers do not seem to bother people on steam or GoG as much as the ones here.
While many players find the companions interesting they are often seen as unlikeable and annoying. "No one talks about anyone else unless they disagree" Quote from ferventus
More interaction between party members beyond mere disagreement and oneliners is wanted

For a summary of the first 200 GoG Reviews see: https://forums.larian.com//ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=703782

I like this aggregated data, so have a bump.

Well, this pretty much matches my impressions after a first 30hr playthrough. My guess is that most people will agree on most of the points, but will very much disagree about how important each point is. The "story feels disjointed, lacks depth" is pretty important for me, but that's obviously very subjective.

Thanks for compiling this!

I like how people can't decide whether the companions are too bland/generic or too weird. I've seen both on this forum.

how did you conduct this summary? Did you read through all of these reviews?

Everyone is going to have unique tastes regarding companions. Its accurately accessed.

I think you will always have people with positive and negative reviews of game play change to a game style. Personally I like the turn based combat mode over the real time action mode its an element that is lacking enough representation in games today the games that do have it and have developed a huge following usually never follow up on it so it dies out. (xcom really good example of this - though not the same genera of game).

Larion did a great job with making a turn based game feel good even in early access. Are there areas that could be better sure but its also early access so there will be general fixes for a lot of it. So far as a company they have shown actively that they listen to the people while keeping true to what they have promised and provided a great early access release. Hopefully with more to come soon.

Fleshed out story well its early access. Companions again early access all we are seeing right now is the origins characters which there could even be more added there honestly id like to see all 12 classes appear in origins characters.

As for too weird or plain. The origins characters have to feel unique a little bit other wise why would you care to use them over merc characters once the feature is added having them be slightly unique is what makes them special in ways. I personally dislike gale currently the most because he doesn't feel unique enough why not just play any other mage character instead. The game is still a year off full launch there are lots of ways that larion can and is probably working on expanding this. Most likely we will see more companions / origin characters after the classes start appearing as that is going to be the biggest balance point in early access before tuning things.

BG2 you can find games similar to that everywhere what larion is doing is expanding the table top to a pc and so far its good. A lot of the negatives actually sound like people not really paying attention outside that.

Though I am sure you probably have seen a lot of posts about 6 characters I think its the most common post I have come accross in relation to bg 2.

Critique:
More than 15 mentions:
This game does not feel like Baldurs Gate. Many negative reviews are based on this.
-response to this its a table top adaptation to the game. Its not going to be the exact same it was never advertised that way since launch it was advertised to be a table top conversion to the game to make it feel more like actual dnd.

More than 10 mentions:
Bitchy companions. Many players are annoyed or frustrated by the companions.
- every game someone hates some of the characters, also its early access.

At least 5 mentions:
No Real time with pause
- turn based mode why would you need real time pause click the clock out of combat lol.
Bad coop gameplay
-Co-op works fine there are bugs most of them appear in regular play as well you just see them a little more in co-op with a few co-op specific bugs but nothing way stand out actually its far less buggy than most stuff ive seen in beta and early access.

A few mentions:
Story lacks depth
Story feels disjointed
Not enough meaningful choices
- Its early access...LOL

Camera control not good
-agreed it does need tweaking but not a panic issue.
Area effects are too much
- It can be fairly heavy but it really depends what your doing in most cases its not really that bad.

Unbalanced combat
- still being tuned...early access. There are a few areas that everyones noted. Wizards - Casting healing spells, Swapping all gear mid combat. Stuff like that im sure is still in the correction process. It would be nice to see ac / advantage or disadvantage or minimum saving throw to hit targets rather than a % to hit like a window comes up ac 19 roll 14 or better to hit at disadvantage instead of % but some people might dislike that as well would make a good option to turn on or off. Same for Magic attacks, Save DC 15 enemy saves on a 9 or better (Aka 45% chance you success and or get full damage from the spell) (Target has disadvantage would work out to like 68% roughly). Would be nice to choose which option it is however so some people could understand why they are having a hard time sometimes hitting targets who want to be able to see the reason a target is hard to hit). Damage reduction information would be nice as well as an optional feature as there have been a few times numbers just do not add up. Like being hit for 25 by a sickle a 1d4 weapon 1d4+5x2 doesn't add up to 25 its got no magic properties (currently chopping this up to bugs) or I'm attacking a normal goblin no damage reduction 1d8+4 dex bonus to damage +1 weapon should be min 6 damage max 13 dmage so i should hit every time for 6-13 unless i crit at which point 12-26 some times i will still see a 1 (again chopping this up to bugs). But being able to see this would help a lot to understand the numbers.

Companions too strange, no normal companions
- Asterion is the only non traditional character other than the mind flyer infection. Party is not full of humans if that is what people are getting after but also its early access and everyone will have different companions they dislike.

Combat too slow
- Its turn based a lot of people don't like large scale fights sometimes for this reason. Emmm there are fights like that in every game. Some of the boss fights and side quest monsters in games can take hours. I remember a friend of mine took 4 hours to kill one of the hidden bosses in FF7, raid bosses in wow sometimes take weeks of attempts to just clear it. RPG's have bosses that take extensive periods of times to kill. Theres almost always at least 1 you can pause finish it later if you don't want to do it all in one shot. Even real time action games you spend half the time wandering through the level killing trash mobs for hours before you finally get to the actual boss and the story continues.

Enemies have too many dangerous things to throw
- Divinity thing. I do agree with this a small amount. There are a few to many enemies with flaming arrows bottles of acids explosive alchemy pots ect. It would be more enjoyable to just have some characters who are better in melee and better at ranged.

Story too depressive
- thats personal taste for everyone.

No XP for peaceful activities
You get exp and benefits all the time for doing story stuff it just is not as common as fixed rate exp for combat. You complete different parts of the story it comes up periodically +300 exp +150 exp +50 exp but its a little buggy in displaying it. Its the same however with character approval increases it currently doesnt display it all the time. Chop it up to early access bugs.

Felt a need to comment on some of that as a lot of it is just general people being ignorant. The game was listed as early access not fully developed its a false expectation to expect a fully polished product its actually way better than most early access or beta versions ive seen at this stage in development.

Story too depressive
-What? Where? Typical problems in the hood. Besides, we haven't seen much of a story yeet.

Companions too strange, no normal companions
- What is 'normal' huh? All companions unique and memorable, I love them the way they are right now. Some people also say that they too mean, argue too much with each other, I remember DA:O Allister and Morrigan were at each other's throats all the time - funny, Pathfinder KM companions there criticizing one another in different way- interesting, Tyranny hate, even to the siblings. Companions must argue, must disagree, must bully one another, or they won't feel alive.

Nice work compiling feedback.

Yes. I only skipped bits that seemed to go nowhere or provided further elaboration that I could not include in such an overview.
I started to compress the points made into statements and grouped similar ones

Nice compilation