After about forty hours spent, one run completed and one in progress, I wanted to share my very personal impressions on the EA version of the title, also because of the "ideological clashes" on its nature that are taking place online, hoping they can be helpful both to developers and users.
Please, note that English is not my mother tongue, so you will forgive me for the inevitable errors that I will make.
I will try to divide the "review" (do not expect anything professional) by points, just to make order both in my head and in the text itself.
PLOT
Speaking of an RPG, it's hard not to start from the plot.
Starting from the fact that early access provides only a small glimpse of what will be the complete plot, and therefore to know if there will be substantial connections with the first two titles of the series we will have to wait, it is undeniable that the current version of the game seems to share nothing with BG and BGII. Not that it is an easy task, even if one really want to commit himself, since the plot of Baldur's Gate is the plot of the Baalspawn and that narrative arc ended definitively with BG2:ToB, over a century before the events of BGIII.
As a consequence, form now I can't help myself to have the clear feeling that putting "Baldur's Gate III" as a title was more of a marketing manoeuvre than a real formula of continuity with the original saga. However, Larian has stated on several occasions that "if there was no connection to the original Baldur's Gate, we would not have called the game BGIII" and I want to trust them, even if only because of the passion they have shown. Only time will tell if the "links" to the original titles they mention are going tp be enough to justify the title of the game or if "The Illithid Menace" would have been a better idea. Because, for now, the plot focuses on them, the Illithids.
I admit it is very difficult for me to give an opinion on the validity of the proposed plot, precisely because of its current partiality mentioned above.
The game puts us in the shoes of an individual kidnapped and forced aboard a Nautiloid, an Illithid ship capable of travelling between the planes. In this vessel, one of the Mind Flayers forces a disgusting worm inside our skull which, after a short gestation period, will devour us from the inside and turn us into one of them, a process known as Ceremorphosis. The aim of the protagonist and his companions will therefore be to find a way to get rid of this "tadpole" before it's too late.
On one hand, as revealed so far, the plot of the game is therefore much more limited in scope if compared with the magnitude of the original titles. Here we are talking about some individual who risks turning into an Illithid, while in the early BGs we were talking about the rebirth of the deity of murder, with far greater and epic implications. The BGIII plot could almost be considered as a sub-quest when compared with that of the first two titles, from this point of view.
It must be said, however, that even the first BG started very quietly and the scope of the plot was discovered only later in the game.
On the other hand, the choice to focus the plot around the concept of Ceremorphosis is certainly an original one, and the fact that the events are smaller in scope creates the potential for a more intimate narrative.
So, even if the choice of the plot does not seem to be in line with the "spirit" (actually a concept still much debated and to be defined) of the original BGs, I actually find it appreciable, preferring for once to play a "common" character victim of the circumstances rather than that the usual "chosen one who must avert the end of the world".
SCRIPT
On the script side, the individual quests are well written and are very engaging, even if sometimes they seem they want to overdo it (spoiler, the tiefling bard who sings with an entire orchestra in the background when in reality she would only be playing the lute). One of the things I feared the most was to face the same "dispersivity" of the two Divinities, in which if you didn't play for a couple of days you risked forgetting not only what you were doing and why, but also the main plot as a whole.
In Baldur's Gate 3 I have not found these problems and each side quest was always born from the development of the main plot, intertwining with it rather than forcing the player to abandon the path he was following, thus ending up enriching it, rather than stealing the show. In addition to this, there are also separate quests in the most remote places of the map that reward the player for the initiative undertaken in exploration.
A big negative, however, is the contradiction of having a main plot that imposes an extreme urgency to be solved (from a narrative standpoint) and, at the same time, a series of side quests that no one in their right mind would face knowing to have their minutes numbered.
So, the protagonists are told to hurry up with the utmost urgency to find a cure for their condition because they could turn into Mind Flayer at any moment but, at the same time, they are offered quests such as avenging a colony of mushrooms from the attack druegar or get to finish the work of a blacksmith killed by goblins.
At one point it is told to the characters how, for some unknown reason, a strange spell is keeping the tadpoles in stasis, thus explaining the strange delay in the transformation process. The problem is that this explanation is given about at three-quarters of the first chapter and, in the meantime, the player is given the option to rest eight full hours for as many consecutive times without any kind of negative consequence.
So, if on the one hand there are excellently written quests, on the other there is a break in the player's immersion due to this contradiction, resulting in the script being perhaps the weakest point regarding the role-playing aspect of the game.
MUSIC AND ART STYLE
Regarding the music I have very little to say; it's splendid to the point that it takes me 5 minutes every time to load a game because I cannot stop listening to the main theme of the menu, while during the game the musical background fits perfectly every situation, from simple exploration to combat.
Graphically, the game is gorgeous, both in terms of models and colours. The main complaints I read about are the fact that the various races are too "human-like" and that the colours are too bright compared to the gloomy and desaturated shades of the first titles of the saga. However those are valid and well-founded criticisms, I feel I can say that, overall, the choices made by the studio give an unquestionably valid result. Of course, the colour palette could be slightly desaturated to make it more similar to that of a title like Dragon Age: Origins, from this point of view very similar to Baldur's Gate, but it would also lose the rendering of the wonderful play of light present in the game.
As for the criticism on the aspect chosen for the races, although the elves have indeed lost part of their "angularity" and the githyanki part of their "alien aspect" typical of the original artworks (it has also been 20 years), I believe that a more human-like appearance plays in favour of the incredible facial animations recreated through motion capture.
CHARACTERS
Every single character, be it companion, follower or simple NPC is created, voiced and represented to perfection. I don't remember a single title I played in which the characters seemed so "alive". It does not matter whether someone personally likes or dislike the personality of a particular character or their backstory, not that they try too hard to be appreciated by the protagonist, when you talk to one of them you have the feeling you are talking to a real person.
The facial animations are of a "state of the art" and the same can be said for dubbing, where every single emotion is expressed with a level of verisimilitude that makes you forget you are in front of a videogame.
GAMEPLAY
Let's speak the truth, the gameplay of this game has nothing to do with the original BGs; they are based on two different D&D editions and on two different combat systems, real-time strategy with pause (RTSWP) versus turn-based tactical (TBT). Don't get me wrong, I think it's just a good thing and an improvement over the original chapters.
I speak as a veteran of practically every RTSWP-RPG you can imagine, and while I have nothing in particular to complain about this system, I find myself opposed to those who argue that it makes the game much more dynamic and engaging than TBT.
If you play on a relatively low difficulty it can be true, because you just have to give a couple of commands to the strongest characters in the party and then sit back and watch how the fight is resolved. The reality, however, is that in any game in which you want to faithfully represent the difficulty of the fights envisaged by the PNP version of D&D, the RTSWP forces you to a level of micromanagement such as to spend most of the fight actually in pause-mode, giving a thousand commands and resuming the normal flow of time only for brief moments before blocking it again and repeating the process until the end of the fight. Not to mention that virtually every game featuring this combat system fills the map with an unthinkable number of meaningless encounters to compensate for the shortness of real-time combat. I lost count of how many gnolls I exterminated in the first two BGs, so much so that at times I thought I was playing a Hack & Slash rather than a cRPG.
The TBT combat mode, although it forces you to wait longer times to allow all enemies to carry out their actions, it allows you to make the most of every single character of the party and the resources at its disposal, including spell slots, consumable items and the terrain itself, providing a freedom in both combat and exploration, unrivalled by the RTWP. This allows for a reduced number of fights but far more significant than the endless hordes of kobolds of its predecessors.
CONCLUSIONS
Is Baldur's Gate 3 a sequel to the original titles? It depends.
If to be a real "Baldur's Gate" you think it must have a strictly isometric view, use a dark palette, the RTSWP-system and needs to talk about events related to Baalspawn, then no, this game is not a Baldur's Gate. In the current state of the product, the differences are too many to be considered a real third iteration of the saga.
However, if you believe that in order to be called "Baldur's Gate" a game must use the setting (races, geography, divinities, etc.) of the Forgotten Realms, be a faithful transposition of D&D, be immersive, have well-characterized characters who seem alive, physically taking place in Baldur's Gate and having some challenging but extremely satisfying fights then yes, it is definitely worthy of being called BG3.
If I had to give it a non-numerical rating (net of bugs and glitches that will certainly be corrected), I consider Baldur's Gate 3 a "must play" title which will keep you glued to the monitor for a very long time.
POST SCRIPTUM
I have not talked about all the things the community is currently discussing on this forum and in other places (such as the bastardization of the D&D system with the Divinity one, party limit, character customization etc.) because it would have really taken me to much time and you probably already read about it.
I do hope the guys and gals at Larian are reading the threads on this forum because I think there are actually a ton of good suggestions!
Last edited by Sharet; 18/10/20 08:41 PM.
