I find Astarion severely overrated
I leave him out entirely. Can't stand him
Happy cake day!
I killed him after he tried to bite me. I felt a little bit guilty and replayed that part but letting him draw a little blood from me. He killed me and the next day acted like nothing had happened, like he didn't know why I was dead. Fuck that guy, reloaded the save where I killed him.
Act 3 destroys the pacing
They should have just let you dye equipment at will from the character screen
The Emperor isn't even that hot
It's weird, but I suspect that Act 2 and Act 3 were swapped originally. It makes more sense to have Act 2 be where you go to Baldur's Gate, learn more about your companions, resolve their personal stories, explore a large open map, and THEN move on to the big confrontation against the Absolute at the tower.
From a story perspective it's really weird how you confront the Absolute and then go on to sort of aimlessly do all that other stuff in Baldur's Gate. It makes more sense if the story acts are swapped, imo.
You can tell Act 3 had the least amount of polish put into it. Act 1 and 2 feel very carefully and intentionally designed. You can tell they planned everything out. Act 3 feels like it was rushed and they had to make a lot of compromises.
The pacing is the most obvious thing but there's also stuff like why is Gortash, the literal ruler of the city, being sworn into power in a random fort in the lower city instead of you know... the actual castle?
I always describe it like this:
Act 1 is a great sandbox and the most D&D like experience as a result.
Act 2 is the strongest story and writing, much more focused and tightly built. Some cool D&D like dungeoneering/puzzles to boot.
Act 3 is what happens when you don’t leave enough time and energy to wrap it all up. It tried to be as expansive (more even) as Act 1 and they couldn’t keep up with the writing. They also should’ve done away with the entire section before you actually enter the city. Talk about a momentum killer.
I don’t think your act 3 take is particularly controversial tbh
The game is good despite DND 5e's rules, not because of them.
Unfortunately, DND is mega popular. Many people have never played anything else. Many people have never even played it. So any discussion about it has a "of course 15 strength is +2, isn't that just how RPGs work?" segment where you have to establish that DND is in fact weird.
Hard agree the ruleset is the mayor shackle to the game. I think the DnD part also includes the whole lore of the forgotten realms which is the incredible foundation in which the game could bloom tho. I'm not saying larian can't create fantastic worlds and I'm looking forward to the next games, but the lore aspect of the DnD license is mayorly beneficial to the game
I wish they had done it without Tencent.
Interesting, I didn't even know Tencent was involved, was their influence very visible?
The amount of money that was dropped on the making of the game is a clue but unpopular opinion? Who's a fan of tencent anyway?
For those who don't have the context Tencent is a huge Chinese company that has many investments in games. They are the type that plays it silently usually invest and they do let the people do their thing then take their share. But the problem is two fold first of all you cannot start saying much abou the ccp tencent wouldn't send you to jail but would pull the plung of the funding. Secondly any client info that ends in Tencent hands is potentially viewable by the ccp. There's no need of a Snowden to tell you that, the government made it law so if you buy the game your data goes to China.
I find all the party members insufferable. I change their classes almost immediately for better synergy or I switch them out for the soulless NPC's Withers has. Ironically, I've been D&D 5E Dungeon Master numerous times and I find the party members to be absolutely authentic characters real people would play. Good work Larian, ya made the characters so table top believable that I want to find a new group to play with.
I loved the character design because I hated the characters too: Lae'zel was a close minded warrior, Shadowheart a smartass, Gael Mr nice guy not so nice when you do something he doesn't approve, Astarion the vampire rapist... Etc.
But then I kept on playing and I realized they were really deep characters. Lae'zel was indoctrinated super hard, but she's smart and can recognize when things don't make sense, even if she totally believes those things. Shadowheart has been lying to everyone, including herself, and putting a mask on; but she's a really sweet woman. Astarion was abused in every possible way for centuries, and being a total asshole is his way to cope.
My point is, yeah, the characters are flawed and can come across as dicks, but many real people do too until you understand their circumstances. Not saying that what they do is justified, just that they are interesting characters and redeemable from my PoV.
I feel like a lot of characters were just standard RPG archetypes with maybe a wrinkle added in. Like Wyll is the classic "Warlock that makes the deal for the right reasons" and the wrinkle is that he has dad issues.
Compare him to one of my favorite RPG companions. Classic elf wizard nerd with an abusive father that made him hit the books and hit him also... but because of his childhood trauma his soul's past life, a foul mouthed woman from a long time ago awoke within him and sometimes he dissociates and she takes control because she wants him to be assertive... which, along with his fears of animancy, caused him to have an obsession with control, and why he accepted to join the baddies some time before you meet him.
Oh they're great characters and well written. I just don't like them though. I can't justify my tastes.
I dont care for the lengthy skill checks with the dice roll animation
You are able to click again to skip the animation. The rest of the setup though is important to be able to apply bonuses.
Is it though? Surely it can be made less obtrusive
4 max party size was a mistake
If they went any higher they'd have to make some encounters even larger and lengthier for balance, and some of those encounters already feel like they go on forever 💀
I installed the 16-member party Mod and took all the origin characters (except urge) around for a while. Combat became a chore. Probably the biggest grievance is they'd block each other's movement, but it just took REALLY long to do combat with them all present.
I don't think the writing is particularly good, and it is particularly problematic in Act 3. The pacing falls apart, all urgency disappears and there is also a big problem with the villains. Gortash and Orin are pretty bad characters and the nebulous blob that is the Nether Brain is not a compelling antagonist. The Emperor is a pretty interesting character, but he sadly doesn't really play out as an antagonist - which I find a massive waste in itself. It also felt like some parts of the plot only make sense if you're playing as Dark Urge.
The companions all being extremely horny and protagonist-sexual gives off a weird vibe, and the progression and design of the relationship system is extremely bad. As an example, Shadowheart can say you're her soulmate that changed her whole life on like the second day you spend together! There is also a severe lack of bonding moments that are purely adventure party/friendship and not avenues for everyone else to hit on you.
There being literally 0 consequences for dabbling in Mind Flayer powers felt weird and bad and generally undercut the impact of the entire main story. There is no reason not to fill out your whole tadpole tree (including becoming half illithid), and there is no reward for completely abstaining. No specific dialogue, no impact on the ending. Not even an achievement.
Lots of small attempts at fanservice for fans of BG 1&2 feel like surface level lipservice made by people who never played the originals. The Flail of Ages being a shitty rare regular flail sold in a random shop is just depressing.
I wish they left more BG 1&2 characters alone if they didn't know exactly what to do with them. Jaheira is mostly fine, but even Minsc felt out of place and shoehorned in and the character assassinations of Viconia and Sarevok just felt terrible. Especially since the role of both of those characters in the plot could have easily been replaced with brand new NPCs.
On a similar note, it strikes me as extremely weird that they seemingly outright refused to have any voice actor reprise their role. Heidi Shannon has disappeared from the face of the earth so Jaheira needed to be recast, but Grey DeLisle (Viconia) and Kevin Michael Richardson (Sarevok) are still out there working for example and Jim Cummings (Minsc) was asking random fans at cons to remind Larian he exists.
I don't think the writing is particularly good, and it is particularly problematic in Act 3. The pacing falls apart, all urgency disappears
Overall I disagree with you. I loved the writing in the game, and the companion back stories are rich, and full of tragedy. But I completely agree with you about act 3. We're smack dab in the middle of literally trying to save the entire world. We just defeated a major contributor to the master plan. We finally travel to Baldur's Gate, close to accomplishing our goal... and we stop all of that to help a little kid find their mommy, investigate dangerous toys, and go all detective mode for a missing prostitute. I couldn't figure out how to get into Baldur's Gate because I had rejected all of those story lines. They felt completely out of character, and not something I had time to worry about with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance. I think that they really could have used a smoother transition from act 2 to act 3.
the companion back stories are rich, and full of tragedy.
The thing is, they're mostly exposition dumped at you. All of them already went through the worst of it and tell you about it. To me, Larian fell in the old TTRPG trap of making up those elaborate grandiose backgrounds for your characters and expecting the other players to be impressed instead of writing the story of their adventures during the actual game.
I was there when Jaheira found Khalid's corpse. I accompanied Nalia when she came back to a ruined home and a dead father. I broke Imoen out of the wizard's asylum.
Karlach told me how bad the hells used to be and we proceeded to make a few trips to the blacksmith together. Wyll told me of his pact and his crazy adventures, the rest just happened to us at camp. Gale told me he banged a goddess and I got to make a persuasion check at the end. Astarion told me of the torture he suffered, and the resolution was done in 2 fights after we met zero vampires before the last room (BG2's Bodhi and her lair were so much ahead of this it's not even funny).
Shadowheart is the only one I felt had a story that I actually experienced with her and wasn't just politely informed of. Oh, and Minthara, but the evil play through really got the short straw in any other way.
The romance aspect is a complete waste of time and the time spent on it could have added so much more to the game.
Unpopular for sure ha ha
You can only bone your companion the one time and they turn the lights off in Sharesses Caress.
I want my companions to have a "Let's fuck" button.
It’s not super fleshed out, but it also isn’t time consuming. Like if you are talking to your companions regularly, we are talking about selecting a couple of extra dialogue options here and there.
I’m talking about the time the developer put into the whole thing. The coding, the animation, the VO… all the time could have been put to better more useful things.
The game is not that big, it's far more linear than advertised, the maps aren't really that big, and loot is lacking. The only reason people have 100+ hours is due to extensive conversations, dialogue, and the fact that it gives you no direction. Once you know what to do and where to go, the games shortness becomes apparent. The spell list is underwhelming, and so are the number of classes available. Not producing an expansion is going to hurt longevity, and eventually, people will stop playing because of it. The level cap sucks. Yes, I know, you dont need to be level 20, but who cares if you're brokenly op? It's supposed to be fun, and believe it or not, there are people (like myself) who DO enjoy grinding levels, and there are more of us than people realize. The level cap is a huge miss. The story is not that great (I'd even go so far to say it was very clearly rushed), and the only thing holding it up are the party member quests, which are far too easy to fuck up thanks to the lack of direction. Exploration is strongly discouraged due to the abysmal loot, and it feels unrewarding. There aren't enough legendaries, and you often stick with the same weapons throughout the campaign and are rarely encouraged to try something new. Also, horny companion system makes no sense. Please, please tell me why I was a complete, total shithead to gale and halsin yet they still both "confessed their love" to me? Like, I literally went out of my way to earn their disapproval, and I chose the shittiest dialogue options with them every opportunity I could, and they still said they wanted to sleep with me. Wtf?
mic drop
Fight me.
I agree with a lot of what you said. I'm pretty sure though that I read that the level cap was in place because after level 13 wizards gain access to level 6 spells, many of which would either be impossible to program properly or, if they worked as intended, would break the game.
I very much agree on the loot. I had thought there'd be quite a bit more? It's one of the type of mods I kept adding, just to get me some variety. What do you mean there's no fancy swords for a paladin??
The spell VFX don't feel incredible after level 3.
Me casting Curriculum of Strategy: Artistry of War expecting the coolest shit and getting lame ass skulls that don't even explode
Gale's "bad" ending is actually the best ending in the game.
Who cares that he doesn't get character growth, he disappointed a cat and an old man, HE'S A GOD! Seriously, nothing else matters. So what if Ao is going to make him earn his spot on the pantheon? He's immortal, he has literally forever to do it. Sure professor Gale is fun and more chill, but he's still mortal. In six months Gale does what Vlaakith has been attempting for centuries. I don't know how you can be disappointed in someone for successfully becoming a god
fully agree, I was gunning to for that ending for all of act3
gale best boy, love him
I strongly dislike turn-based combat and I would love an option for real time combat. I just want fights to be over, they distract me from enjoying games. With real time combat I just mash the same attacks until it is over. BG3's combat is a fucking chore and it's the only reason I abandoned the game on the second map (in that monastery ruin).
Scalding hot boiling take
In this community? Definitely. People tend to downvote me when I voice this opinion. But it is what it is. I've hated turn-based games ever since I first tried some X-COM game on the Amiga. It's just not something I enjoy.
But I wish I could enjoy BG3. Everything apart from the combat is so much fun that I really want to finish the game. But for me the combat is such a major drag that I don't think I'll ever play BG3 again.
I love the turn based combat but sometimes it does feel like a chore, I wish I could do real time sometimes or purely rules-based AI, and switch to turn-based only when shit goes wrong. For those fights that really do not pose much of a risk and are not that interesting. Someone might say on the difficulty so no fight is trivial, but that can tire one out as well as now every fight can be a major obstacle and sometimes you just want to move the story on a little.
That's as far as I got too before quitting due to boredom, but for different reasons.
Character building and combat are the main draws for me to D&D, but D&D 5E character building is a step backwards from 3&3.5E and micromanaging an entire party through turn based combat feels like a chore. I'd like to see a Borderlands or Diablo II mod that takes those gameplay styles into the Forgotten Realms setting - a fast paced, skill based game that focuses on action, where you control a single character who's design and progression increase the skill ceiling by providing more options to make split-second decisions about what tactics to use during each encounter.
Really like the pathfinder games because you can swap between turn based or real-time on the fly, sometimes I want to think about my actions but other times yeah it gets repetitive
No physical copy on release day.
The marketing oversold the idea that if you wanted to do something it would amaze you to find it was expected by the designers.
Most of the, I thought at the time, very obvious thing I wanted to explore thematically were not there. Also, Romance felt clunky and unnuanced.
In Act 1 there is a downed bridge. I had something like a scroll of fly and it wouldn't let me cross.
It's a glitchy, unpolished game that, while being fun and having amazing dialogue, did not necessarily deserve GOTY.
I don't know about unpolished, wasn't my cup of tea in a lot of ways but felt very polished in almost every regard I can think of
The flaming fist can see you steal things from like six buildings away.
When I fought Gortash the first time (I didn't do the foundry) his steel watchers kept kicking my ass. "Ah ha!" I thought, "I'll close the door and cast Arcane Lock on it to keep them out and trivialize this fight!". The watchers teleported next to gortash as soon as the fighting began and wiped the floor with me.
During the Ketheric fight, Ketheric decided he... Just had enough? I guess? He went to stand in the center of the platform and fucked off for five entire rounds while I killed everyone else and started phase 3.
Inventory management is impossible with a controller.
I play on a Steam Deck and while the game runs amazingly in Acts 1 and 2, the instant you set foot in Rivington you're lucky if you can get 20 fps. And I hear its the same on a PC?
Speaking of Act 3, the entire act is awful. Acts 1 and 2 were incredible and then the whole thing just falls apart. The pacing is all wrong, and you pretty much forget the absolute entirely. Someone else said they stopped playing after moonrise and ended their game, and honestly I like that idea more every day.
Felogyrs Fireworks. That's all I need to say.
You need to loot literally everything or you'll miss critical items, and the loot overwhelmingly sucks ass. Oh boy! Another rotten tampon I can sell for 1g!
Potion tooltips are less than useless, especially on the crafting screen (oh man don't get me started there). What does this potion do? No idea! But at least you know it tastes like Troll cum!
I really do love this game, but a lot of parts of the game are just steaming piles of shit. I also don't believe it deserved all the awards it got, and it's kind of amazing it did.
Inventory management was horrible. Party management was horrible (but I've heard they improved it a bit). Camera management was horrible around areas with multiple floors, especially when they weren't flat. (The othon fight in particular was awful.) I encountered a few soft locks with enemies sort of teleporting to the shadow realm or some shit and getting stuck inside the illusory door in the hag's den. Specific graphics settings would get unset every time I opened the game. Stuff like a bug preventing tons of Minthara's dialogue not being in the game. They fixed that, which is great, but there's just so many little things like this all over the place. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills when people say it's polished. It's fun and I enjoy it, but it's certainly not polished.
Also, putting a character (Gale) behind a skill check is insane.
I hate multiplayer in pretty much any game where there's a lot of menuing. And being able to wander off? There's a reason you don't split the party IRL and it holds here. Having a shopping session also is boring IRL and it is here, too. Oh, there was important plot stuff happening? I didn't know the other person was in a conversation.
Just let me auto follow the party leader, please
You can do this and also listen to conversations you aren't present for from the active character portraits without changing settings. There's even a prompt for ongoing conversations to join in on them as a listener remotely.
There's a setting, I think it's called eaves drop mode, where you will automatically listen in on any conversation that another player initiates.
Those pyramids were literally necessary in DOS2
Can't imagine why they weren't in this game
Larian's writers can't hold a candle to the Bioware of old.
I don't know how much I would actually pump up Old Bioware on that front, but yeah, the writing quality is actually something I noticed a few hundred hours in. The VAs and animators do such an amazing job that it can slip by for a while, but the writing, taken in isolation, is just kind of... acceptable.
I decided not to buy it yet.
Same. I'm patiently waiting for real sale on it.
I like the "Free The Artist" side quest.
That is all.
That's the most controversial take so far. Cheers!
The alternate party member NPCs are generic stereotypes, and far less interesting for that. They don't hold a candle to the NPCs in something like Wrath of the Righteous, who subvert expectations in a wonderfullly interesting way.
I dislike most if not all party members. Like not always actively dislike, but don’t care much what happens to them. Even if the writing and voice acting is more than decent. Too grimdark and fucked up is how I would describe it. It’s like Larian took all the criticism about previous games being too lighthearted and overcorrected. And not in particularly relatable ways, feels more like they sat down and brainstormed intensely in nerdy excitement and with little depth or restraint about what would be cool and extreme and fucked up, and oh wouldn’t that be awesome… creating freakish caricatures with oh so dramatic and cursed backgrounds rather than you know, relatable flawed characters. Of course I only feel like this because much is done very well and so any missteps are more striking.
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The original vision for the game would have been better. EA was more interesting.
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Pacing and toes of gear is done poorly. There's swords for days but only 2 interesting tridents, war picks, or hand axe for example. There's barely any usable druid gear (anything that actually matters if you wild shape). And the most useful stuff for monks is found only in act 3.
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A lot of people are nitpicky only because it won so many awards and it's not their own perfect game (if such a thing exists).
I still give this game a 10/10 for what it is. Despite knowing if it baked another year it might have been so much more.
What was different in the Early Access?
tl;dr, the story and motivation for everything was far more fleshed out
Here's just some of the things. Not even going into mechanics that are removed (like Wyll's eye). Or my personal opinion some of their starting looks were a bit more interesting/better (you get a bit of an idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MeutkQFliM or from the CohhCarnage videos I link later)
There used to be way more dialog options for one. Your class/subclass/god/etc actually got reflected in more options. There was a great video of a cleric giving some unhinged prayer to the tiefling that opens the gate. It's not major, but it adds to a lot to the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KameRUsFv8Y (with all the BG3 videos now, it's harder to find some of the classics). Also, Shadowheart had a much more interesting conversation if you were also a cleric if you were a Cleric of Shar too.
The camp was way more interesting. There's a ton of story ripped out of the game from the camps. This, was the thing that hooked me in EA. Daisy (the in-game code name for what would be replaced by your dream visitor) would entice you with power, encourage you to use the illithid powers. And when you finally do, and the narrator says "you've lost something you can never get back" probably makes more sense now. Once you did that, you got a class specific illithid power. There was no weird illithid skill tree, it was based around how often you used the powers. But going back to the camp, the companions would comment more about each other. Shadowheart and Lae'Zel's hatred for each other was shown way better, even commenting if you talked to one or the other first. Here's a couple of examples https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYRe2jHhBRc and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw5q6u_iMN0 but overall, the camp at the end of the day was 1000x more interesting and really fleshed out the characters more and I'd say in important ways.
I'd even say the starting area (Nautiloid) was better. The current one is sufficient I guess. But the original showed you more about the fight the Illithids have with the Gith, you got to see more of the ship, what the Illithid did to people, what it meant to become a thrall (to really sell it that this is a terrifying process). But it showed you a few more mechanics too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC-GWA_Yj2c starts at EP2, but you'll want to go to EP 3 as well. But you can see the differences.
Tav used to talk.
For me, the story around "Daisy" was way more compelling. The song "Down by the river" is in reference to these encounters. Here's a video on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTw_9vM5LgA
... So these are just some of the things, lol. There's more like when you got down to the Underdark and some serious changes that happened there. And I haven't even touched on the stuff that never made it in (like the extra companion that was to be a werewolf... or the original Nightsong) (you can see some of it cataloged here https://bg3.wiki/wiki/Cut_and_unimplemented_content ) and I'm fairly certain all the companions were originally supposed to show up in Act 1 instead of 1, 2, and 3. There's a lot of dialog from characters for places they're not "supposed to be" like the eagles (can't find video, but its out there). But none of that is EA stuff, just cut stuff... but if the game had baked longer.... I'm just saying... it might not have been cut sutff.
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I kind of hate how you can not only nope out of nearly every puzzle with lockpicking but rogues get like half a dozen bonuses during the skill check so why are you even rolling the damn dice?
There is no point in fights. They are easy and eventually the game has you pass them either way.
There is no point in loot and items. You can win fights either way.
Its just a linear story telling game.. There are so many side quests and shit all over… your quests list has hundreds of quests you aggregated over the time and most of them are useless, easy, useless rewards and so on. The plot of the main story is so convoluted and complicated to follow especially when playing over a long period. Adding to that all the distractions of side quests…
Its not an rpg game where you progress with spells and items and and experience… you can have whatever bullshit items you find and still win every fight.
This game is great, but if it came out only a year or two after BG2, it wouldn't have been as highly praised being much smaller and also because contemporaries would have been on par mechanically.
You can't be a cleric of any of the interesting gods: Umberlee, Gond, Bane, Bhaal, Loviatar, Myrkul
I don't like the main characters (except my character he is perfect in every way) but I love all the interesting side characters.
Haste isn't a great spell, even twinned by a sorcerer.
The moment the caster loses concentration, the recipients lose an entire turn. Even if the fight lasts a few turns and you manage to keep concentration, you're sacrificing a lot of action economy for that extra action. And if you do lose concentration, you're likely in a net negative for action economy.
At higher difficulties, it's even worse. The extra action only grants at most one attack (the extra action ignores the Extra Attack feature). And enemies are smart enough to do everything they can to pile damage on your caster until it drops.
It's not a bad spell, but it's not the gamechanger lots of people seem to think it is. Especially with items like haste potions and haste spore grenades, which can't be interrupted (though still need to be timed well).
Too horny
Act 2 killing everyone just because I went to shadow land first is super dumb and bad. An escape scene during the chaos of wing mommy would have been perfect.
I'm annoyed you can't
Tap for spoiler
free Orpheus and have him protect you from the brain worm. Instead you have to forcefully ally with the dubious deceitful dumb hentai face dream guardian.
