but Im gonna laugh if this game is another 90+ metacritic game. Unless they make massive changes.
I am really curious how the game will be received. I know why people liked D:OS2 so much, but BG3 so far is a mess. I can either see reviewers get swayed by visual presentation and sheer amount of things to do, or I can see them seeing through the veneer and recognising how rotten the systems are. But honestly, considering how little presence RPGs had throughout the years I expect it to be well received. Only minor RPG dedicated content creators will release overly long and detailed "critiques" on how broken BG3 is.
And I don't think having plot points resolve without your presence is a shortcoming, it's another ramification of your actions, right?
No, but what I had an issue with was things being changed not based on our actions just to tie the story together. There are many many changes in both "storylines" that have nothing to do with Geralt actions. Like to whom Tris talks to at the end of Flotsam through magical ZOOM, how the meeting at the start of chapter2 is presented, it doesn't seem like Saskia gets poisoned at all if you go with Roche as she is very much on her feet on that path while she shouldn't be, which begs a question how she got mindcontrolled if she 1) wasn't poisoned 2) Geralt didn't bring the pedal of rose which was required for the spell.
None of those are issues in individual playthroughs, but if you create a split in content with the intend of "see that same conflict from both sides" I think that both parts should fit. And they really really don't.
What I will say is that Witcher 2, like Mass Effect 2, and Dragon Age 2, kicked a lot of the promise of their stories into their supposed sequels, and to a one, none of them really deliver. The actions of Witcher 2 are barely a footnote in 3. The central conflict of ME isn't really developed in 2 and the actions of 2 are usually reduced to a character being absent, or some bonus points in a minigame.
I've said enough about Dragon Age and how it fails in this regard too.
I agree, especially Witchers work really well for me as standalone titles, but completely don't add up into a trilogy. Just a concept of what Witcher game is, who Geralt is.
I haven't played all of Arkane's games, but if Dishonored 1 and 2 are what people mean when they talk about reactivity then I don't think they are terribly reactive, there's a hidden number that you contribute to that changes the world-state as you add to it, nothing you specifically do really is reacted to by the world
I said, replayability, not reactivity. BG3 has very systemic design (unlike Witcher or most Bioware/Obsidian games where exploration, combat, dialogue are seperate from each other, rigit and selfcontained), not unlike an Arcane game (or other inspired-by-Ultima-Underworlds). Even now that's where most BG3 replayability comes from, IMO.