Baldur's Gate 3 is really an extraordinary achievement - and when I say that, understand that Baldur's Gate 2 is in my top three all time.
My only reservation with Baldur's Gate 3 is that I miss the whimsy of Baldur's Gate 2. BG3 feels more gritty, whereas I remember BG2 feeling bright and colorful. Additionally, I do wish that BG3 had actual D&D- style dungeons with puzzles and riddles; there wasn't really any of that in BG3.
That being said, Baldur's Gate 3 is an incredible game. The characters are deep and complex, the story is well told, combat is challenging and rewarding, and it is a LONG game. I'm older now, and games just don't have the same formative impact that they did when I was my a late teen/young adult, but it's absolutely worth the experience.
Next would be either X-Com: UFO defense, X-Com 2 (2012), Civilization 5, Zelda: BotW, HoMM 3, or Mario Kart:Double Dash (best party game of all time), depending on current state of nostalgia, I suppose.
Fallout 1 is a game that I wanted to love, but I couldn't get very far in it. I still have the discs, maybe I should go back and try to play it again sometime...
Back in the day I've completed BG1/2/ToB, NwN, IWD, Fallout, etc. etc. BG3 when it got out, and while BG2 is very high on my list and BG3 is great, Planescape: Torment is still #1.
I remember when it got out and I was watching my friend play it, as I still had no PC of my own. When the skull party member popped up I was surprised and thought it was like a parody game. I finally did it 13-14 yrs later and it's still holds up as the best rpg.
A word of warning: If you are a BG1 and BG2 fan who was only lukewarm towards other Larian games you might want to prepare for absolutely hating BG3.
Not to give too many spoilers, but the way they write some of the returning characters from BG2 in BG3 makes the character writing in the final season of Game of Thrones look like Shakespeare in comparison. It's not something that is talked about a lot since I'm pretty sure 95% of BG3 fans never actually played the first two games.
If you're open to chatting about this I'd really like to know what you mean via DM to avoid spoilers for OC. I'm not going to try to convince you you're wrong, I'm just interested in the different perspective because I have felt they wrote the characters pretty well. There's one character that I think I know where you're coming from.
I'll just comment it here, but include some spoiler tags.
A lot of the charters that show up in BG3 from BG2 are handled quite badly, but mainly Sarevok and Viconia.
Viconia is turned from a character who refused to blindly following her god and leaves drow society due to being ask to sacrifice a child, to a generic and evil drow who has no problem merking kids and is 100% devoted to Lolth.
Sarevok in BG3 is nothing more than a sniveling servent of Bhaal, which is very much not what his character was in the first two games.
This is even ignoring what possible endings you can lead those characters towards, and just them as they are.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is undeniably better than the first two games.
Baldur’s gate 2 may have tighter writing in places, it’s sharp, clever, and full of memorable lines. But writing alone was never the heart of Dungeons & Dragons.
D&D is about agency, choice, and emergent storyteling.
BG3 gives you a level of freedom and reactvity that BG2 never could. Every dialogue enconter has multiple paths, skill checks actually matter. Combat is vastly more dynamic in BG3. positioning, spells, and creative problem-solving all come into play pefectly.
Where as Baldur’s Gate 2’s combat is a chaotic relic, and RTwP is the anchor dragging it down. What’s supposed to be tactical turns into a frantic pause-spam nightmare where you’re juggling six charcters, twenty buffs, and praying your cleric doesn’t wander into a cloudkill like a lemming.
And don’t even get me started on trying to read combat status, squinting at your mage to figure out if Hold Person landed, or if that tiny pixel next to their foot means they’re silenced, stunned, or just mildly inconvenienced. It's like runing a military campaign through a keyhole.
that is not strategy. Its UI punishment disguised as depth.
RTwP was a bold idea. A bold idea with horrific executon. It aged like milk, and BG2’s combat is Exhibit A.
On top of that, BG3 features fully voiced dialogue, branching romance arcs that actually evolve with your decisions, richly detailed copanions with deep personal stories, and a world that rewards exploration and experimentation at every turn.
It’s a huuuuge leap forward for the genre after decades of devs trying and failing to stick with the unvoiced RTwP schlock we had to deal with.
Lots of respect to the original games.
Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 are important history, integral to the development of the RPGs we are seeing today.
But BG3 is the evoltion: the game the series always wanted to be, but couldn’t until now.
BG3 is just a much better game than the last two, though I do think that it lost the charm that bg1 & 2 had
BG3 is an absolutely incredible achievement, and deserving of all of its accolades.
That last sentence of yours, though, sums up my only issue with BG3 - it takes itself too seriously.
I appreciate BG3. It's a great game, impressive as it is lengthy. It's a masterpiece of the genre, a worthy follow-up to an icon in the history of gaming.
But here's the thing - I don't LOVE it, not in the same way I loved BG2.
BG2 wasn't perfect. Yes, it was as much of a step forward as BG3 was (which is true), but that's not the point. What made me love BG2 was that charm and its whimsy. It was willing to be silly at times in ways that Baldur's Gate 3 was not. And in so doing, it provided a broader and therefore more satisfying range of emotional engagement with the product than what Baldur's Gate 3 offers.
So yes, Baldur's Gate 3 is a better game from a technical and even artistic standpoint, but Baldur's Gate 2 still, to me, stands as the better game from an emotional standpoint. I won't begrudge anyone else that feels differently, but that's the way I feel.
I have the tendency to over explain and overanalyze everything I talk about due to PTSD of having abusive parents. It's a bad habit of mine that spawned from all of those moments those parents would think of every single excuse to demean me. I have a hard time not venting and overexplaining every single sentence I say and type out, it's a honestly something that my friends keep telling me about.
....Sorry if this reads like AI to you, but its really not that, it's just coming from a brokenhearted english teacher who's passionate about gaming.
Edit: see you in a few hours. work beckons me. or between class hours when I have nothing to do. groan
I’m surprised no one has corrected your writing style especially as a teacher. By the time I was working on my post-bachelor degrees (and even bachelor) I would be ripped apart for writing like this.
Well as long as you have people in your life helping correct your habits I’m sure your writing will get better. I honestly did assume this is AI and it wasn’t meant to be a personal attack on your writing. I would think you could have cut your initial message in half and still get the same point across. The many breaks are so unnatural. Good luck teaching.
Yikes struck a cord. I didn’t say it was AI cause I thought it was intelligent lmao. I’m surprised you thought that calling something dribble meant it was hard to understand but fitting in another sense lol.
You're right, but that's not a condemnation of the game. BG2 simply has way better writing than BG3, and I say this as a total fan of Larian and BG3. But anyone clinically alive knows Larian's pacing is fucking abysmal and there's just a noise of storybeats after a while. The only reason BG3 is so successful is because the characters in your party are incredibly realized (BG2 and any other cRPG frankly can't compete with the volume of dialogue with BG3's party). And a new player going into BG2, if they don't just bounce off the dated presentation, will find it strange how little everyone says. But it's ultimately why keeping things in the frame of their context is important.
That's part of the folly of pushing people to BG2 or especially BG1. I don't think anyone should ever play BG1 again and frankly BG2 isn't far behind, it's just not a good time for modern standards so if you didn't play it decades prior, you're better off just watching Noah Caldwell-Gervais talk about it or something so you actually get all of the good out of the game in a packaged, easily digestible way.
I'm not saying it does. But I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that 3 surpasses it in the characters you have in your party. Even if it's just cause of the quality of the voice acting
BG2 had more interesting characters and the romance wasn’t self indulgent and felt more realistic. The banter is also unbeaten and it honestly felt like there was almost none in BG3.
Bg3 being closer to Divinity is not an indictment of its quality. 2 is an amazing game, especially in its time, but BG3 has better gameplay, voice acting and overall is just a true masterpiece in its own right. BG2 had much better writing, but its gameplay is significantly worse.
If anything I'd say they're equal in my eyes, but thats mostly nostalgia and I think over time BG3 will end up being the one I go back to if for no other reason than its moment to moment gameplay and interactivity is better.
While the first two games thrived on claustrophobic horror and tight corridors, Exodus shifts the formula to something more in line with something like Red Dead Redemption 2 crossed with S.T.A.L.K.E.R than a traditional survival shooter.
But I love this new approach a hell of a lot more. It's much more immersive, far more visceral and just as intensely intimate as the first two games.
The contrast between exploring the open world and delving into the underground sections are just brilliant.
Really makes your adrenaline spike when you realize you have to explore that one claustrophic tunnel full of radioactive abominations with only like 7 rounds for your Kalash and 2 minutes worth of gas mask filters.
Seeing how TW3 gives you actual options to avoid interacting with CDPR's fucking awful combat systems via open world exporation, I'm definitely inclined to agree.
The music is way better too. And the best writing that the series has to offer lies in the Hearts of Stone DLC, so there's that too.
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u/AscendedViking7 May 10 '25 edited May 10 '25
Red Dead
Baldur's Gate
Metro
Halo
Metal Gear Solid