Now Playing: Bladur’s Gate 3

Hailed as a masterpiece upon its release from Early Access, Baldur’s Gate 3 received overwhelmingly positive reviews and perfect scores. I’m not going to tell you that BG3 doesn’t deserve high praise – because it surely does. But when I see people speaking as if BG3 cannot be bettered, as if the bar has been raised to such a degree that no others can compete?

I’m sorry, but no. Just no. Because at its core, BG3 is a pretty standard CRPG. The key difference, I think, is that it possesses a degree of production value not typically seen within this genre – from visuals, to sound, to VA – BG3 is a CRPG with mainstream appeal. It’s designed to be more accessible, more appealing, more … well, casual.

But that’s not to say that BG3 has only succeeded by targeting a wider base – it still needed to be a damn fine game. And it really is. But is it the masterpiece I’ve seen so many proclaim? I don’t think so. I think it’s an excellent game that I thoroughly enjoyed and will continue to enjoy, but it’s also a very flawed game and those flaws become increasingly apparent the more you progress.

BG3 is a game that I’d describe as ‘front-loaded’ in the sense that all of the things that make it so damn impressive and compelling are there, front and centre, in the first Act. It’s an incredibly strong opening but sadly, BG3 can’t sustain the same level of quality from beginning to end. With each Act, the less impressive the game becomes – not to mention, the more buggy.

If I were to rate each individual Act out of ten, it would look something like this: Act 1 – 9/10, Act 2 – 8/10 and Act 3 – 7/10. It’s not a massive decline, but it’s a decline nonetheless. Although I do think Act 3 could be bumped back up to an 8 if they’d only fix all the damn bugs. It honestly still feels like Act 3 is in Early Access.

The first two Acts are by far the most substantial and polished, but the diminishing nature of BG3 is noticeable even early in Act 2. Then, at the end of Act 2 you are faced with a clumsy, poorly presented exposition dump before being thrust into the rough and ready Act 3 where the bugs really start to bite, the quests are less complex, the story progression begins to fracture and plot threads are poorly resolved – or not resolved at all.

Act 3 is just . . . messy. Not bad – messy. Despite the open nature of Acts 1 & 2 there was a clear focus to your progression. Act 3, on the other hand, feels incredibly scattered. New plot threads are introduced and then abruptly resolved, the game introduces a new companion far too late into the game for me to care or bother with, and it’s also the point the game begins to feel a little bloated. At this stage of the story I’d expect the pace to pick up, for the game to really hone in on what’s important. But BG3 can’t help but needlessly pad out its content in a way that’s detrimental to the overall experience.

Some of the combat encounters in Act 3 are also pretty poorly designed. They’re either far too easy and fast, or far too tedious. Some of the boss fights are also pretty bad. They’re not terrible, but they don’t feel as carefully planned or thought out as previous battles in earlier Acts. It kind of feels like the developers hastily tossed together some of these battles without really testing them properly.

Oddly, Act 3 is also probably the part of the game I found the most funny. I loved exploring the location and meeting all manner of quirky characters. It’s a shame such humour feels so tonally jarring. Considering the very serious nature of what’s occurring and the terrible things that are coming, it feels bizarre that nobody else in the location seems unduly concerned.

I can’t deny I still had a really good time with Act 3 though, and I do think it picks up after a pretty rough opening, but the dip in quality is noticeable in all areas. I do get the impression – and I could be very wrong about this – that Act 3 saw a lot of rewrites and changes and maybe that would explain why it feels so disjointed.

Overall, I did like the main story of BG3. There’s a twist, of sorts, that I wasn’t entirely won over by, probably because I didn’t feel the way it was presented to the player quite worked, but it did just enough to sell it to me. I did, however, find the ‘tadpole’ aspect to be incredibly disappointing from a narrative point of view. I can’t really say more without spoiling things, but it’s such a shame that plot (and gameplay) element proved ultimately meaningless.

As for the ending . . . well, it’s good. Not great, but good. Like a lot of Act 3, it can feel a little disjointed. There are some abrupt cut-scenes that try to wrap up and address everything related to your choices and it works . . . just about. I came away pretty satisfied with my ending. It’s not a perfect landing, but it doesn’t fall flat on its face, either.

Okay, onto the companion characters who I felt were a somewhat mixed bag. Obviously, this is more of a personal preference issue, but I cant deny I found some of the companions and their personal plots to be rather dull. It’s also a shame that some companions have far more content than others to explore.

Visually, as I’ve said the game is impressive – at least in terms of environments and effects. Character models are more mixed, and character animations and facial expressions in dialogue scenes look incredibly dated. They’re stiff and awkward and the expressions were sometimes so bad for my custom character they were funny when they weren’t supposed to be. I can live with it, but I’m not going to pretend it’s good.

If this review seems overly negative it’s just the kind of thing I do with games I really like – and I do think it’s important to highlight and criticise areas where a game falls short, particularly a game like BG3 where most other reviews just tell everyone how wonderful it is. Because it is pretty wonderful, but if we don’t also talk about its flaws, how can a game improve?

But before we get into that, I need to talk about the thing I wasn’t expecting to enjoy that much but ended up enjoying probably more than anything else – the combat. The game gives you so much variety in terms of classes, skills, spells, items and abilities and so many party combinations that you can clear each and every combat encounter is so many different ways. You can also utilise the environment to your advantage in some pretty neat ways.

Even though I’m not the biggest fan of turn based or dice roll based combat, I am big fan of combat systems that give me a lot of options to experiment and play with and that encourage and reward creativity. And that’s something I think BG3 does fantastically well. It’s a game that, even after clearing a tough battle or area, I’m always thinking of how I want to try replaying it in the future with different characters or using completely different tactics. That’s not to say that combat is perfect – oh no, the camera can be pretty damn terrible and I do have a few other issues to raise, but I’ll include those my big list of Annoying Things I’ll get to later.

It’s not just the variety of options in terms of classes, skills and combat that impresses me but in quest progression. BG3 has an impressive range of options for many quests that allow you to progress and complete them in several ways. It offers some of the most varied range of options available to the player as to how they want to experience and progress through its content that I’ve ever seen in an RPG.

However, like other aspects of BG3, this aspect is also somewhat front-loaded. The Goblin Camp is the key example of this. It’s the main quest location of Act 1 and offers an incredible degree of options for the player as to how they want to play and progress through its content. I’ve seen countless videos highlighting this fact and stressing that this is only one quest in the game, the implication being that all of the quests – or at least, all the core quests – offer a similar level of complexity.

But that’s not true at all. Whilst many other quests do offer several possible routes to completion, none offer such a varied range of experiences as the Goblin Camp. It’s the first major quest location in the game and it’s by far the most impressive in terms of options. This shouldn’t be a surprise considering this section of the game was developed, improved and expanded upon during two years of early access support.

The point that I’m making is that whilst it’s right to highlight how impressive this location and the quests tied to it are, the Goblin Camp is the exception, not the rule and it’s disingenuous to imply otherwise. And over the course of the game, the range of options available to you throughout your quests do begin to diminish.

What were once quests of elaborate, branching pathways now feel like quests of two linear lanes, only one of which leads to engaging content and the other leads to nothing but dead ends and no rewards – only a feeling that you made the ‘wrong’ choice. Don’t get me wrong, even Act 3 offers more options for progression than many other games would at all, but compared to what came before, it is clearly an aspect that has become increasingly streamlined.

Okay, time for an assortment of Annoying Things.

Let’s begin – the combat camera does, on occasion, focus on entirely the wrong thing or positions itself at an angle that makes it impossible to see what’s going on. Enemy pathfinding in battles can also prove annoying. I frequently saw enemies get stuck on their combat turn when trying to climb a ledge – up and down they’d go, over and over. They’d eventually decide what to do, but it was pretty tedious watching them try to figure it out.

Party pathfinding in the world can be terrible. Party members occasionally get stuck on scenery and you might not even notice until you get into a fight and realise your mage is half way across the map. This was a real problem in an area where the environment can kill you and I needed a character to hold an item to protect us. But then, in one location when I needed to use a lock-pick to open a door, said character inexplicably kept running to one corner of the room, taking our protection with him and slowly killing everyone else. I ended up having to tediously micromanage my movement, one character at a time.

Swapping companions in and out of your party is far too slow. You can’t just tell one member to depart and then select who you want to replace them with. No. You have to dismiss them first by talking to them, then go to your camp, then run to the member you want, then ask them to join and then return to the world. As you can imagine, I didn’t bother to swap out my party very often.

Managing inventory for your party – especially characters not in your party but at the camp – is also pretty tedious. But that’s not as bad as taking time to set up custom skill bars that don’t save your settings if say, you get disarmed in a fight, forcing you to set up the bar again once you’ve retrieved your weapon.

Even if you just unequip a weapon for a short spell and then re-equip it – you still lose all your custom settings. This is pretty damn infuriating in one section where you lose all your gear for 2 minutes or so, and then you have to re-do all your custom skill bars for every character – weapons, items, scrolls. Everything.

Sometimes the camera completely misses what’s supposed to be a ‘cinematic’ moment. There’s one involving a dragon that was totally off screen for me because the camera was pointing the wrong way.

The game economy feels like an afterthought. I always had thousands more gold than I knew what to do with and there doesn’t seem to be a balanced selection of quality gear for all classes or builds. Even in Act 3, where I thought I’d get access to a wider variety of items, there really wasn’t anything that exciting to spend my money on. In fact, gear in general in the game is pretty disappointing not just in stats, but visually speaking.

Why is the level cap 12 when it’s so easy to hit very early in Act 3? It means you no longer have any sense of progression for your character, no new skills to unlock, no new abilities to try. You get a lot of xp for quests and combat but it’s entirely useless. It feels like the game needed another 2-3 levels for characters to progress through before the end.

Bugs? I’ve had plenty of those.

Act 1 was easily the most polished but I still encountered one optional companion conversation that wouldn’t trigger, and I lost one of my best weapons to a bug that saw it vanish through the floor when I was disarmed in a fight. This is also where I discovered a persistent bug in that, if I swapped one party member out at camp for another, I would no longer to able to properly access that character’s spell book unless I saved and reloaded the game.

I didn’t encounter anything too serious in Act 2, although one phase of the final boss of this section was somewhat ruined for me when my party was hit by a permanent ‘frightened’ de-buff at the end of the fight meaning I couldn’t move any of my characters. Luckily, I found a save and reload solved the issue, but it did somewhat spoil a key moment when I had to drop out of the game and look for a fix.

In fact, I found a lot of people reporting the same problems I’d experienced but too often fans of the game were awfully keen to gloss over or downplay these issues. I’m sorry – but no. Trying to pretend the game is a perfect masterpiece does it no favours. Especially when the problems continue to mount as you progress.

Act 3 is where the bugs really start to bite and become more than a simple nuisance. One of the first conversations I had in Act 3 featured a character whose head was glitching wildly across the screen. Not a big deal I suppose, but a worrying sign of things to come.

I then experienced my first serious quest bug in which a key item wouldn’t spawn although fortunately, I was able to progress the quest through alternative means – once again thanks to a Google search. I also began to experience a common bug during dialogue in which I would select an option but nothing would happen – the option would simply vanish, and then take me back to the selection screen and I’d have to pick whatever was left.

I also had a few instances of a character talking to me about a specific situation long after the situation had actually occurred, as if we were still in that location and it was still occurring as we spoke. That was weird. I also had an ‘unconsciousness’ character speak to me after I’d beat them in a battle attempting to initiate the fight we’d already had.

I started getting a pretty persistent bug whereby an enemy in combat would do absolutely nothing on their turn. They’d just stand there for 20-30 seconds making me wait, before eventually it would skip to the next guy. Then there was the characters who would suddenly be silent in a conversation because their VA hadn’t triggered. Oh, and one time one of my party just randomly dropped dead out of combat, on full health, for no reason.

Thankfully, nothing I’ve encountered has been in any way game breaking – but I’ve seen plenty of others reporting far worse than me. The game clearly still needs a fair bit of care and attention.

Overall, you don’t need me to tell you that BG3 is a great game. Everyone is saying it – and they’re right. But I think it’s important to tell people that it’s also a game with flaws and shortcomings and you might experience bugs that spoil or even break your experience. No game is perfect, and pretending that BG3 has no flaws is only detrimental to the developer. I’ve seen that happen with other games and as a result, they don’t really learn from their mistakes and only end up repeating them.

Whilst it’s great to see a game like BG3 winning so many accolades I do think we need to tone down the ridiculous rhetoric about it ‘raising the bar’ or how it’s ‘scaring’ other developers because they’re worried they can’t compete. Come the f**k on. It’s good, but it’s not that good, and there’s lots of areas the game could have been done far better, even without the bugs. Act 3, I think, still needs a lot more work.

In a lot of ways, I found BG3 far more enjoyable and engaging for its systems and mechanics than I did for its characters or story and that’s not something I usually say about an RPG and certainly not something I was expecting to say about BG3. Hell it’s the last thing I thought I’d say. Nevertheless, it’s a game I had a real blast playing and want to play again solo and in co-op if I can find the time.

8/10