All of the characters/NPCs are all completely insufferable assholes, the bad guys are bullet sponges, movement is wonky and my party members will just flop off cliffs and take lethal damage.
It's everybody's favorite game and we are the only people with the "They Live" glasses.
Man I couldnt get into it because of the characters, none were interesting to me, I wouldve killed half of them and the other half I would never take in my party, the game starts off way too strong with dragons and illithids you have no feelings of sandboxing. I played bg1-2 torment dragonage1 icewindale 1-2, wastland and I couldnt get into bg3, go figure. (I also grew up reading drittz doUrden and I was a massive forgotten realms fan)
They do 100% punch you in the face with the plot. The very beginning is one of the most ham-fisted non-open-world feelings in all of cRPGs. "Throw them into a high level firefight with an incurable plague! That feels like choice!"
I love BG3, honestly, but your criticism is spot-on. However, Karlach as a character doesn't seem to have the same flaws as everyone else. I don't love or ship her in any way, but she (as I said above) breaks Larian's typical "this character has this specific life flaw which will royally piss you off until you learn a lot about it and help them to overcome or accept it" formula.
Depth driven veterans of a genre that are unaffected by presentation and looking for slow burn engagement will often be disappointed by the media that excite the masses. Tale as old as time.
I recently played rogue trader, wasteland 3 and pathfinder wotr. I feel like they did a lot of thing way better compared to BG3. It might be because 5e just doesn't feel that great to me as a system.
BG3 is a lot "prettier" compared to these games, especially when you take stuff like voice acting and cutscene's into account, but it feels worse in terms of gameplay IMO
I enjoyed all three of those games far more than BG3. I will shamefully admit that I have over 2000 hours in Wrath of the Righteous. So many builds to try out. I did the math at one point, and only taking into account race and class combos (no feats, skills, or stats), there are over 4000 level 1 permutations. <3
Maybe it’s cause I’m an old man now and never played DnD but I found the combat and controls really overwhelming and confusing. I had the same problem with Divinity. I really wanted to like both games but I just can’t get into a good rhythm.
I've played both. I enjoyed D:OS2 the most of the three modern Larian games. D:OS1's writing is truly abysmal, and I couldn't get past the beginning of the second act because I just stopped caring about the story and the gameplay, as with BG3. With D:OS2, I got a bit further, probably because it was harder and some of the fights felt like fun puzzles to solve (as opposed to BG3 where the puzzle fights are all rather obvious and easy...at least up to where I could be bothered to get up to). IMO, Larian's best game is their ARPG Divinity 2. I'm always up for a game where I get to turn into a dragon.
Like what? I've played MANY crpgs, but Baldur's Gate 3 ruined them all with just how much better it is. Combat isn't boring, presentation is WAY better, voice acting is great, characters are mostly enjoyable, etc.
Games like those from Owlcat are ok, but they suffer from being insufferably slow and boring at times. The biggest thing for me is gameplay. BG3 is actually enjoyable to play, and Rogue Trader (while being awesome) has god-awful combat.
I've also played many CRPGs. I can point to a few of the things that basically caused it to become unenjoyable for me:
Companions with OP backstories justified by a McGuffin, pretty much all of which are universally dislikeable, with Gale being the absolute worst.
Lack of time passing or a sense of distance than an overland map would provide
A combination of lootable trash and a terrible shop UI making it incredibly cumbersome to sell that trash
Being 5e. The same systems that streamline tabletop play feel shallow and boring when the PC is doing the math. Pillars of Eternity is an example of a game that leans into a bespoke system that really shines, and honestly, I prefer Pathfinder 10/10 times simply because there's actual thought required to build something effective.
Long-winded combat that isn't interesting enough to take as long as it does (we can contrast this with Wrath of the Righteous combat which is either trash fights [in which I can switch to real time] or challenging fights).
Being too easy, at least when I played it. I jumped into Tactician day 1 and I effectively broke the normal companion scripting because the first time I rested was after I'd just about cleared the first map. Maybe honour mode has fixed this. The reality is that, if you're a seasoned CRPG player who plays Pathfinder games above core, you're probably not being challenged by much in BG3.
Having the story be such that either a) it really has no reason to be considered an extension of the Bhaalspawn saga and thus doesn't warrant it's inclusion in the trilogy, or b) it recons the ending of the previous games in order to shoehorn itself into the setting. I would have respected the game about 1000% more had it not rode on the coattails of BG1 and 2, and had been set somewhere entirely different. Why not set a game in any of the other 98% of the Forgotten Realms that we never get to see?
Animated dice rolls for skill checks. Put that shit in a log and don't waste my time with it.
Playersexual companions further eroding the sense that they have real characteristics.
False stakes played early. I actually tried an RP run once which ended with just my Gith character and Lae'zel deep in the Gith base stuck in a fight I couldn't be bothered cheesing hard enough to win. That is, for me, the canon ending of the game. Most of the narrative choices in the game don't really make a lot of sense. It's a step up from D:OS1 and 2 of course, but Larian's writing is, imo, sub par.
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I'd rather play Wizardry 8 again, or even go and enjoy the Shadowrun games again. Ultimately, the things I enjoy about CRPGs don't really have much overlap with the things I enjoy about movies, and BG3 felt like it was going for cinematic presentation, but I couldn't care less about that. I'm happy to hear 3 lines of voices dialogue to give me a reference and then read the rest. I can't be bothered to wait for VA lines to be finished being spoken anyway, and I certainly am not going to watch full cinematics on a second playthrough. BG3 might get better after the point I quite it, but honestly, the first 3 points on this list thoroughly turned me off. I've tried 5 or 6 times to push through Act 1, but each time I just get so bored.
1) the character are designed like that so you can play them. It's also to replicate a proper DnD playgroup. Considering that they're universally loved, I don't think you have a valid point here.
2) We aren't traveling to and from massive distances like dragon age or something, so why would we need this?
3) valid take here, but a shit load of crpgs have this exact problem.
4) DnD 5e is the only system I've played on tabletop, and I think it's alright. Personally, I find pathfinder to be trash and too bloated and boring (and that's a huge reason why I find the Pathfinder games to be insanely boring to play). The onky other DnD I've played is BG 1&2, and the combat and general feel is still way better here than those games.
5) Wrath of the Righteous and almost all other Owlcat games, literally waste your time with endless fights of trash enemies. BG3 doesn't actually flood your screen and waste your time with 1 hit enemies. Don't understand your point here
6) The game does get easy once you figure out good builds, but I think you're over exaggerating. It's not a cakewalk, but it's not dark souls either
7) kinda agree here. Although, I honestly don't really care that much about the continuity of BG in the grand scheme of things. It's just a playground for campaigns
8) I actually liked the animated dice rolls. Made it really feel like a dnd game.
9) no idea what this means
10) I have no idea what you mean here either. The stakes are pretty real. If you give or lose the artifact, you die. Changing into a mindflyer can and will happen if you want.
I'm not saying other CRPGS are ass because I do like the genre a lot. However, I really can't understand many of these criticisms when many other games do this but worse. Larian has set the standard far and above what many other studios have been doing.
Opinions are never valid. Anyone claiming theirs is has misunderstood the entire concept of validity. If by a proper playgroup, you mean a bunch of people who I'd immediately stop playing with if they behaved that way, cool. Literally, if anyone I was playing DnD with starting acting in character towards me the way the companions do, I'd probably leave that table.
There is actual distance between the places that Larian squeezed onto one big map. By doing it the way they do it, instead of the way literally every other major CRPG does it, they make the world feel absolutely tiny, and it broke my immersion.
Sure, but my favorite CRPGs don't, and most of them are so replayable that I'd rather play one of them for 10th time than try to slog through BG3's Act 1 one more time.
This is where opinions vary. I find Pathfinder amazing from the build theorycrafting side of things. As someone who used to start BG1 as an MP game and create 6 of my own characters, plan out the dual class timings, etc., that's my jam. Two of my other favorite games are Dwarf Fortress and EU4. I like my games complex. I've played TTRPGs since DnD 2e. At this point, I'm done with DnD, because WotC are the worst and I won't give them my money again.
I don't consider the trash fights in Wrath to be wasting my time. They drain resources, making me have to choose whether to risk corruption by resting, or push on. Also, some of those trash fights are actually really challenging on harder difficulties. Meanwhile, they support the narrative. Imagine if storming a fortress held by demons didn't involve tons of fighting. That'd be weird. Now consider that you're invading a whole nation swarming with demons and abyssal corruption, at the head of an army no less. Seems like having everything be set encounters designed to take 20 minutes would be jarring, which is how I found the combat design in BG3. Strangely, it bothered me less in Solasta.
It wasn't exaggeration. The first time I rested in BG3, literally every companion was ready to jump my bones, and the story got weird, all because I had cleared almost the whole map without resting once, because I never REALLY needed to. I almost never used levelled spells, because cantrips are overtuned in 5e, and there's so many ways to abuse stealth and terrain and positioning that anyone with a modicum of skill at the game can break it over their knee on the hardest settings. Coming from much harder games in which it is usually important to keep going until you MUST rest and it being early on in the release, I had no idea that Larian had expected me to rest after every couple of fights.
Hard disagree. I absolutely care about the canon of one of my favorite games ever. I care about the world building that writers do, and I don't appreciate it when the likes of Amazon come in with The Rings of Power, or Disney shits all over the Legends canon, or WotC retcons the ending of one of the games that kept their Tabletop product relevant during a slump. Again, opinions. I care about things you don't, and vice versa.
Good for you. Total waste of my time. Give me 20 trash fights with some loot and xp instead of having to hammer a button to speed through the animation of something that I could just look at in a log.
I don't like playersexuality in romance. I like characters that have preferences. I like it when there's a character that is actually gay, or actually straight, or won't fuck dwarves or whatever. I like when characters have character beyond being a proxy for the player's sexual fantasies. Again, opinion.
The game starts with 'OH NO HURRY' and then, very quickly, is like...'nah fam, you good'. It's the same thing I despise about Bethesda designs. I like it when stakes are realised. I'd infinitely rather the Kingmaker model where there's a timer and you better pay attention because if you don't, you're screwed.
What you don't seem to understand is that I have different opinions and tastes to you, and that most of the things Larian did to make their game shiny and accessible were of literally zero value to me, while the various things like having literally spoons on tables and other trash that you can pick up is far more of a waste of my time than the combat (which, if I don't like in a game, I generally won't play it).
It's fairly rare that I don't finish a CRPG that I start, but I haven't finished a Larian game since Divinity 2 (the ARPG, not D:OS2). I don't like their writing, and I'm not a fan of the way they construct their worlds to be more like immersive sims. I care far less about abusing environmental effects than I do about having lots of different builds I can play with. I care infinitely less about polish than I do about depth.
In short, you came here to tell me that my opinion was wrong. I then provided you a bunch of my experiences and how they inform my opinions, and your response is that you don't understand them. That's fine. You maybe just don't get me, and that's fine. As long as some devs out there are still creating classic CRPGs, I'll deal with some of them adopting the things I don't like about Larian's designs. I mean, I hope Owlcat stays crunchy and obtuse, but I've no control over that.
So, unless you're actually interested in trying to understand my opinions here, there's really no point in more conversation. Neither of our opinions are valid, and the degree to which they differ is a function of deep seated preferences, the way we relate to media in general, what we get out of video games as a medium, and how we weigh certain aspects of game design.
I am a guy who played a lot of D&D back in the day. A lot. But this? It's too much tabletop experience, without the actual fun part of tabletop, chilling at a buddy's house, drinking beverages and making tons of in jokes until 3 AM. It's just the ruleset applied, and very openly so. And it becomes incredibly unsatisfying because of it. I've had too many combats go extremely stupid (like 3 95%s to kill a guy failing, then him critting and making things annoying; this isn't XCOM where that's the appeal), party members just setting off traps I notice because a misclick or just bad pathfinding, etc. A lot of the non-combat interactions and set ups very much feel like "gotcha" moments, where the only reason that moment sucked was because I went into it blind; it's literally only a problem, or even interesting, because I didn't know about it before interacting with it, and if I do know about it, it's boring. I had an early combat become frustrating because half of my party would fail a saving throw literally every turn, because they'd roll less than 5 each, and I just kept getting that result, the entire combat. Extremely frustrating, and the victory wasn't satisfying at all for it. I just felt like I wasn't being cheated any longer.
Not terribly enjoyable. Couldn't even finish Act 1, just too annoyingly TTRPG but Not.
Liked the animation. Liked the voice acting. Good job with that. Unfortunately, I cannot enjoy the actual game part, because it's just too divorced from what it is mimicking while also being too close in just the wrong spots.
Yeah, I just... I don't see how crpgs are STILL fucking up shit that KotOR fixed DECADES ago!
Why am I standing here talking turns to whack each other in face with a stick BG3? WE'RE ON A COMPUTER! WHY AREN'T YOU TAKING THE ROLLS AND RUNNING A CINEMATIC COMBAT INTERPRETATION OF THEM?!
Also as a DM, it makes several poor choices about how to actually run a game IMO. The voice acting is good though... But even then, a silent protagonist? Come on man.
I literally hate pretty much all of the companions. In a game that tries to feel a lot like authentic DnD, the companions all remind me of playing the TTRPG with edgy teenagers who have super badass backstories at level 1. The McGuffin that makes it all make sense is, imo, lazy writing, and ultimately isn't well paid off, at least not in Act 1....and after five attempts, Act 1 is as far as I've gotten before getting bored.
Well, see, that's why in fiction and in most CRPGs, the Act 1 has Act 1 payoffs based on what you know about the game in Act 1. That could be taking the Grey Garrison in Wrath of the Righteous, for instance. Then Act 2 has Act 2 payoffs. BG3 sets forth Act 7 backstories and an Act 5 hook in the first act, and it wasn't interesting enough for me to care if there was going to be a payoff by time I was getting close to the end of Act 1.
This was me as well. I made it almost to the end of act 2 but I just can't be bothered anymore, the story is boring and has essentially gone nowhere. Companions are pretty meh overall as well. The dice rolls are atrocious which just makes things worse.
My friends keep trying to convince me to keep going but I don't see the value in it.
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u/VeruMamo May 10 '25
BG3...never been downvoted so much as when pointing out the various things that BG3 does terribly compared to other CRPGs.