I appreciate the effort but I wouldn’t have the patience
Kitties!
We finished! We used Wyll, oathbreaker paladin redeemed Durge, Gale, and Minsc in the final battle, without much trouble on balanced difficulty. I think we ended up with one of the more “good guy” endings, but it seems like there are a lot of permutations. My wife has started a bunch of other solo runs, four of them to act 3. I’ll probably take a break for a bit.
I found multilevel combat in tight spaces (e.g., buildings) could be difficult to navigate. And combat across large distances or through portals was jarring as my screen would black out as the camera jumped. But I don’t have many complaints beyond that.
Exactly, it shouldn’t be about “consequences” it should be about seeing the story play out a different way. The reason to go evil is not “I wanna be an asshole” it’s “I wanna see an alternate story”.
That’s an unfair expectation. Baldur’s Gate is setting out to tell a very specific story, and they do it remarkably well. You have quite a lot of agency within it, but ultimately the pretty vast spiderweb of choice and consequences is still hanging on that specific story.
Saying you want an alternate story is essentially saying the developers should have made a second game to go along with the 80+ hour masterclass they already delivered.
So instead they just give us the chance to be an evil dick just for the fun of being an evil dick? Evil choices imply evil storyline, not “consequences”.
Which almost no players will ever see - very few players even attempt “evil runs” in games like this, and even fewer complete them.
In BG3, evil choices give you the opportunity to see how those decisions impact the very specific story that they’re telling. They are impactful, but it’s still the story that the BG writers wanted to tell.
That’s my feeling (and I did an evil run as one of my plays). It’s a story about stopping the Elder Brain from turning you – and everyone else, I guess – either into mindflayers or slaves. It starts out narrow, widens impressively in the middle but then comes back to the requirement to have a conflict with said Brain. The choice to prune branches out of that center means there’s less later on – I also don’t think the devs are really obligated to give you “Tiefling quests, but from goblins” just so someone who kills off a group doesn’t lose out on content and feel punished for it.
Some overall over spoilers if anyone still cares about that
I personally didn’t feel like I was being an “Evil dick for the sake of being an evil dick”. I was trying to get in on, then control of, the Cult of the Absolute and also strengthen my companions to the best of their abilities. I accomplished both of these: took control of the Brain after helping Asterion become ascended and Shadowheart become a Dark Justiciar and control of the House of Loss. In the variant of this, since controlling the brain leads to an abrupt ending, I defeated it and Minthara and I settled in to plot to overthrow the government of Baldur’s Gate politically. Along the way, I had some extended/unique dialogue from Ketheric (due to clearing the Grove), Jahiera (due to capturing Isobel), Gortash (due to aligning with him and giving him the Stones) and Astarion/Shadowheart due to their stories. Also I got to murder that stupid Hollyphant. I also got to hang with Minthara and DO feel it was sort of weak to give good-aligned runs the same chance to recruit her since she was one of the perks of an evil run but, since players were already going through labyrinthine mechanics exploits or just straight mods to have her in the party, I can understand why Larian eventually said “Give the people what they want”.
So, no, it did not match the amount of available quest content if you make friends with everyone along the way but it did provide a sufficiently different and worthwhile experience in my opinion.
I’m kinda sad about this but eager to see what Larian does next:
This is great, really. If you make a hall of fame title it’s okay to go out on top.
If their upcoming mod support is robust enough, I expect the game will have lots of quality content for many years to come.
Given Hasbro’s “We’re not monetizing D&D enough” stance, I’m sort of happy to see Larian looking elsewhere for their next project. I don’t trust Hasbro to not tie the next game down with microtransactions and weak DLC. Sad as it is to close the book on BG3, it’s also sort of nice to know I’m not going to get hit with a DLC a year from now and get back into it.
Yeah…while Larian/Vincke said nothing bad about Hasbro I suspect they had talks about this and Hasbro wanted things Vincke refused to deliver (like microtransactions and what-not).
Vincke has made a much beloved company. I think he is not a guy to cash in. He wants his company to remain well liked and he can do that. Hasbro (IMO) is mostly a greedy troll trying to milk every dime they can out of something.
Larian was probably wise to walk away.
In totally unrelated news, Hasbro announced today that they’re partnering with Converse to make D&D shoes. That’s not a joke, by the way.
Larian has built a name for themselves with BG3; they don’t need someone else’s IP for their next title. Even if Hasbro was reasonable, why pay the licensing fees and accept the constraints?
There is another article where Vincke said no one from Hasbro that was in the room for the first discussions is left at the company after the last round of reductions. I’m sure it doesn’t help that the relationships are all gone.
And if Larian felt contained by the 5e combat system that’s another reason to build something from scratch.
I hope the shoes names are all branded. Start with some spellcaster shoes:
- Trap the Sole
- Mass Heel
- Tongues
Precisely. They don’t need to make Icewind Dale 3, they can make some new game and/or franchise and just say, “From the makers of Baldur’s Gate 3…” If it looks like it’s going to have anywhere near the quality of BG3 that game is going to sell well.
I like the idea of making a pair of shoes called “Air Elementals” and put a silhouette of a whirlwind dunking a basketball.
I mean, isn’t that Divinity: Original Sin?
The reason this makes me sad is because D:OS2 didn’t pull me into the game as BG3 did. Give me FR lore, something I have read and used for decades, and I like seeing what they do with it. Give me new content and I might not be as interested in it, which is what happened to me with D:OS2. I didn’t read that much of Skyrim or Oblivion, either, which are the ones of that franchise I played most.
It’s the same for other computer RPGs and it’s on me. I have many games that I have started but didn’t finish and I think lore is a part of that. Pillars of Eternity, Torment Tides of Numenera, Disco Elysium, WH40k Martyr, Sword Coast Legends, and probably more. I don’t know why and I’m sure it means I’m missing out on a lot of good games.
I also haven’t completed a second run yet in BG3. I have my second character in Act 3, another in Act 2, and many in Act 1. At a certain point for me, playing the game again hoping I make the correct choices to see a different ending doesn’t hold my interest.
It probably didn’t help that the team on the Wizards of the Coast side that worked on BGIII were mostly let go in the December Hasbro Layoffs.
Yeah, along with quite a lot of d&d folks who weren’t. Definitely not a stable time to be making long-term commitments with Hasbro.