I’ve recently made time to seriously play Baldur’s Gate III – it is as good as everyone says. It was fine from the outset. The first big tactical fight that I had was fun! However, after about 20 hours it has cemented itself as one of the best games I’ve ever played.
I am going to let go of the slow pacing for AAA games, especially CRPGs. It should have been this good immediately, not taken twice as long as the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy to really hit its stride. But that is just games now. You have to power through. But I did that, and now I can grab the rewards. One of the fundamental gaming memories I have is coming home from high school one particular day and playing Ultima 6 until I went to bed. To some degree, I have been chasing that feeling for over 30 years. I’ve let myself lose track of time with BG3 and the combat and characterization is why.
I loved the combat in Baldur’s Gate 2 due to the variety of “verbs”, or actions or abilities available for your six characters, depending on their class. Having a cleric and a wizard-type character is a must; you’d miss out on a lot without the two of them, and that goes for BG3 as well.
It seems like everyone I’ve had in my party has some kind of magic ability. I am playing as a monk, so there are some special powers. I enjoy being able to push enemies away. I would enjoy that in real life, too. My monk is practical. But I’ve been able to add a rogue, cleric, wizard, druid and warlock. (The green elf character I do not care for. Some research indicates that she is a fighter. I have not put her in my active party yet.) And they can all do so much. It creates joy, and one of the bits of gameplay I like for BG3 is thinking about how to tackle obstacles. More than any game I can remember, when it comes to choosing what spells a wizard might learn for the next day, I am just as open to hurting people with combat skills as I am getting around with things like the “Knock” spell to open locks.
You are able to move characters in and out fairly easily. There is a 4 character maximum for your active party, but the only cost of exchanging is clicking around on the UI. This reminds me of another Ultima game, this time Exodus: Ultima III, in so much as you can do some swapping. It was kind of useless in Exodus, but not everyone is good at everything in BG3.
Everyone is very far away from each other in camp, I should say. The UX could be a little streamlined for that. (The UI, though, is very good – if BG3 is giving you more options than any other RPG, and I think it is, the most magical thing about it is that I can find what I want to do.)
The camp thing is kind of weird, isn’t it? It isn’t a different dimension as far as I can tell, because the scenery of it always matches where you are. But I guess the other people that you see in camp are just behind you, but not actively going to help you in a battle. Maybe it was explained. Nobody gets attacked in their home at night. A land with actual castles does not require Castle Doctrine. It’s VIDEO GAME LOGIC.
The characters that come along with you are enjoyable. I have been a game player that enjoyed making his own characters so I could pick the classes I wanted to fight with. For this one, I just rolled with who showed up and I am glad I did. I hope I am articulating it right. Let me try again. In BG2, you could enter a mode where you made each character. They did not have personalities. I would avoid the companions because I wanted to make sure I got the exact subclasses that interested me. I did not do that for BG3, I’m running nothing but built-in companions, and I like the game this way.
Shadowheart – the companion cleric – is very passionate about her decisions and her belief in herself. She is an elf, but she seems very young-adult to me. I… I used to be that way, so passionate and quick to brood; being around death has a way of mellowing out a person, if only because you realize how little things truly matter.
Astarion (also an elf!) is a malignant narcissist. I keep those people out of my life. For most of the game, I kept him out of my party. I give a fight two tries before thinking hard about party line-up, so I added him at one point. And he’s a great character. I am not falling for any of the BS he is selling, but I can’t think of many characters in gaming in general that are of the repugnant, would-be charming type. And he’s an asshole. I’ve created many text adventures with assholes because sometimes that goes along with being funny. Astarion has a unique voice in computer games. I remember liking a thing in Shadows Over Riva where it was beneficial to keep a character in your party that was only good in towns and Astarion is worth it because he’s just not like anyone else in the medium.
RealNC on my forum stated that his understanding of BG3 is that “the developers and designers thought of everything.” Do you know how freeing that is? I have been playing so many 1980s RPGs where the developers thought of nothing and you had to go read the manual to get the game’s story. This is a total change on what I have been playing lately. It looks incredible and the battles have tactics that I enjoy, but Baldur’s Gate III may be the best designed game I’ve played in forever.
Baldur’s Gate III was played on Steam, with Windows 10. I have an OLED monitor and the deep blacks look great with it.