A Generational RPG: Baldur's Gate 3 Review

Baldur's Gate 3 from larion Studios is the classic RPG that is really kind of taking the Internet by storm from everything from shock over the fact that they have genitals in the game to the fact that it is really just a fantastic fantastic RPG that is kind of setting the tone in a lot of ways for games to come they launched a month early which helped them avoid the issues of running into another RPG that might be setting the tonal over again with Starfield a game that is basically two decades in the making even longer than Baldur's Gate 3 and Promises to be kind of just as extensive if probably with significantly more bugs when I played Baldur's Gate 3 in Early Access I felt like it had potential to be great when I played it at released I realized I'd underestimated that potential Baldur's Gate 3 has been a revelation just over 100 hours in I'm ready to Crown this RPG royalty it's not perfect but it's damn incredible people there are three main things I want to talk about that make Baldur's Gate 3 not just an exceptional crpg but an exceptional game and for me already my game of the year but no game is perfect and we have to talk about some of the things that are not so great about borders gate 3. though I'll be honest it was kind of difficult to find some did find a couple though so we'll talk about those at the end but first there are three main things that are fantastic about this game that I really want to get into first is going to be story with consequence where to begin the story branches off in so many meaningful ways but it's perhaps your personal impact that makes the biggest difference you will find yourself questioning your decisions constantly did you side with the right companion should you have killed the stranger or saved them your choices have deep lasting consequences sometimes it may be loot or power but you could even outright kill companions important to your journey if you're not careful and you take things too fast it's impossible to know when something may brand you off in different direction making every interaction feel impactful clue furless one tread lightly fortunately for you the slithering Vermin I hunt has my attention for now the world itself feels alive and that part of the game's narrative is so damn good even it's winding and intriguing main narrative and companion stories take a back seat to the the urge to save scum because you don't know what the hell you're going to be doing the next time you pick up a conversation with some random NPC please go ahead of us my son is a little nervous and to that point Baldur's Gate 3 is a game that is served by avoiding spoilers because you can find out later the things that you missed in your second playthrough for example well washing my pets washing my pits this is the song went up bye not get any privacy around here bunch of perverts the law of you but that's not to say that the main story and the companion stories are lacking it's just that the way that the world comes alive for you is just so incredible those stories though the companion and main story are deeply engaging I found myself picking through Shadow heart's personal story trying to uncover the secrets the way I would if I was reading a good book it was similar with Gail another companion where there are just so many unanswered questions so many Curiosities so much Intrigue it's all fed to you bits by bit and it makes you want to explore each companion's story there was a moment early in act two in Baldur's Gate 3 that made me tear up it it touched me so deeply in a way that I had not expected from a video game now I am not gonna sit here and say oh I don't cry or anything because I cry a lot I cry at movies I cry at books but video games video games not so much video games seem to take a bit more and I'm not sure if that's a specific thing with the medium or the other parts of the game but this game Baldur's Gate 3 managed to do it in a way that I haven't really experienced since since outer Wilds caused some existential crisis within me at the ending of that game this section of act two it it was kind of just this crazy roller coaster of emotions that hit you like a truck it was it was joy and excitement and then loss and fear and it all just kind of culminated the storytelling in this is so so so damn good in different ways yes there is definitely things you can talk about about inconsistencies but the way that they have crafted narratives and the way that they have made characters approachable with their own thoughts feelings and emotions is something that is rare and very very good these these have these Bittersweet moments that really touch you deeply and there's this feeling of complete consequence as well because there's so much that you can change in the trajectory of the story through your choices you are the cause of a lot of the Bittersweet moments based off of the choices that you made and it hits very hard at times I would recommend that if you go into this game go into it with the with a focus on the story and the consequence and I think you'll really enjoy that part of it the main narrative hits a bit different at least for me it it feels more personal after all it's focused on your character it doesn't suffer the same chase scene exhaustion I remember from watching a movie like The Last Jedi something I feared given that to begin the game you're given a time crunch with the wiggly little bastard in your eye I don't feel pressured to complete the narrative as fast as possible lest I turn into Cthulhu which thankfully makes it easier to do things like return to Camp talk with your companions and go on side quests some of which take a long time and can be devilishly difficult speaking of difficult let's talk about the combat while not appealing to everyone the turn-based combat can be suitably difficult and engaging and it works incredibly well from The Game Source material Dungeons and Dragons which is turn based in itself but there's something special about the layering approach to strategic combat here that feels a bit like the most inventive DM difficult fights can be one completely unconventionally foreign ways to use your skills and diplomacy roles to encourage enemies to attack each other or themselves setting traps or using the geography to your advantage the game tasks you with thinking outside the box and it rewards you for doing so combat can be its own event in the game while some are very quick and easy others are going to take time I think the longest I spent on a single fight was about an hour and I think that was in part because I was using geography and and trying to keep myself alive because the fight was much more difficult for me than it should have been but there are ways to do it it reminds me actually of how how when you played EverQuest back in the the early 2000s a lot of things were not figured out yet there was ways that you could you could find to kind of manipulate the game to make it work for you people found out ways to to solo dragons as Shadow nights when they really shouldn't have been able to by using different game mechanics and that kind of has the same feeling here in Baldur's Gate 3. there are ways to massage the mechanics to make the game more interesting to do things that you didn't think possible and sometimes it'll have lasting issues like I remember early on I did a I was playing as a monk and I punched a giant spider with using a knockback ability I I did not know that the knockback was significant a significant knockback and ended up ended up knocking the spider into a chasm spider died his boss the boss died I didn't get any loot from it though There's No Loot from that spider that kind of sucked but still it was interesting enough that spider was probably about to kill my entire party so hey it worked out in the end but that's kind of what I'm talking about the the ability to do different things in combat the combat isn't perfect and can at times be punishing for a misplaced click a bad roll or just plain unfortunate positioning when you first start but it's designed in a way that makes every encounter feel impactful you will find that not just your class choices but your party makeup are very important one encounter may be particularly easy if you'd rolled a wizard or cleric but difficult as a fighter and vice versa the game resists Min maxing by throwing different questions at you in combat not to say you can't min max there's plenty of guides out there already but it's heartening to think that your playstyle can be useful you just need to figure out yourself how to best run four known barbarians combat is improved dramatically by adding in Dynamics beyond your usual abilities like throwing goblins off cliffs leaping to Higher Ground shoving enemies off said Higher Ground the battlefield itself becomes an important part of your combat decisions not unlike a tabletop game this is where I'd implore you to give the combat a chance if you haven't let it grow on you because you might just find you really enjoy the turn-based approach that larion has instituted now if I could just figure out how the hell to keep Gail alive for more than a couple rounds in every combat oh no time to die you must get up internally finally let's talk about meaningful progression something that's very important to many RPGs every level every item upgrade they all have direct impact and importance the RPG elements of the game are done very well and it tempts you with an easier path that may or may not sacrifice your morals depending on your playthrough the game encourages you to look everywhere you never know if a corpse is going to have absolutely nothing maybe a couple bones or you know just some random [ __ ] or it could have a magic weapon or magic item that'll be essential to you moving forward in the game it really it really improves the gameplay to take your time in this game and obviously that's kind of how Baldur's Gate and how larian wanted you to play it take your time and explore not every magic item that is of importance is going to come from a quest or a massive monster kill you will come across different magical items that will make a pretty dramatic difference in how to approach combat you'll find things that help you in different ways like being able to speak to the dead despite not having that ability because an amulet had that on it or things that work in your favor items that may or may not make you lose control of your character if you put them on everything in the game feels like it has some kind of meaning especially when the food that you pick up like the cheese goes sour always always check the tool tips on the items that you pick up especially that potion that looks a lot like a health potion when you got it from someone that is a little bit untrustworthy you might not want to drink it please leveling as well makes a huge impact on you and while you have 12 levels each one makes a big difference from new abilities to higher Health pools to higher damage everything is important and you take into account that you have the ability was like really pretty soon into the game to change your class really whenever you want because it's pretty damn cheap to do so it makes the game feel more open and more able to change so if you made a choice that you don't like at character creation you can easily change your class pretty much to any class you want to as often as you want to the only downside is you don't have any ability to change things like your appearance I think at some point I hope they will add some kind of Barber at least but you know what it is part of the game as is right now at least you can change your class now finding a negative for Baldur's Gate 3 was a bit difficult but I would be completely disingenuous if I just sat here and I Just heaped Praise upon the game and didn't talk about some of the things that are you know issues at the moment there's still a lot of bugs and crash issues but thankfully those have been remedied by a lot of the stuff that's happening in patches there have been I believe at this point either two or three major patches released by larion to assess different things like like the aforementioned crashes and bugs or taking issues with scenes that aren't showing up correctly in the game or even genitals clipping through underwear which is a sentence I never thought I would say bunch of perverts the law of you but I want to talk about two two issues that really have at times not been great in the game for me these are kind of minor and they're also very personal first is going back to combat much of the game's combat ends with Superior numbers against your smaller Force resulting in long wait times between your moves with intelligent AI often picking off your most vulnerable this too many is going to be part of the Tactical draw of the game but there's just something about the long wait especially when enemies can at times get stuck in their turns that I just don't really like I would have preferred lower enemy density with more individual strength to keep the power and difficulty up but speed up the combat just a little bit I imagine doing that would probably help with the Enemy AI freezes as well because there are less calculations for them to figure out in moving in location those freezes only happened every 10 or so encounters on average so they're still pretty rare anyway and they always did resolve themselves there seems to be some kind of Fail-Safe in the game to fix it but that Fail-Safe seems like kind of like losing that that character's turn so an enemy just may not engage and at least in that turn until they can have a better path to defeat you which can be a little frustrating at times and this all may just be by Design and preference I'm sure a lot of you watching may love having more characters to fight in any given turn it's just it's just a little personal gripe of mine the second negative the second negative I think we may agree on a little bit more and it has to do with story as events happen your companions react they will say something but you'll often have no ability to respond it adds some depth to see them react to events but only having the set responses you always have that are completely unrelated to that kind of breaks the flow a bit you get a comment that is saying something and you want to directly react to that comment but there's often no response and this happens more often than not there are definitely times when you do get to respond directly but there are enough times that you can't where it seems like a follow-up would make sense that it just feels weird it reminds me a little bit of Dragon Age Origins which seem to handle it a little bit better although granted they had a lot less to work with when something did happen you were able to follow up directly with that character and that's how you often try to raise or lower approval with your companions in Dao I kind of wish that there had been a little bit more work gone into having a direct response of some kind even just a one-off comment it almost feels like it's a little bit of a casualty of a crunch towards the end of we had to sacrifice something and so this was the thing they sacrificed still an immersive story and it's fun it's really interesting seeing the companions react when like say two companions are fighting but then not having a response to that doesn't make a lot of sense to me one and kind of tied to that one bonus issue that I had not having a voiceover for your character staring blankly off into this to never saying your lines is surprisingly immersion breaking every other character from random NPCs to your companions to Major antagonists are fully voiced and animated having your character not be feels weird and and kind of off especially when you pick a voice for your character character select that you hear them say as you go through the game talking about not wanting to touch everything or whatever the hell the things are or some little just the little things that you hear throughout the game as you're you're playing this like the other thing feels a bit like a time crunch or budget issue where they may have wanted to but just didn't have the the resources too and this was one of the things that got cut I don't I don't have anything any information for that but it just still seems like something they would have done with how much they did for everything else in the game leaving out your character's voice even their voice lines when how many lines they did do seems like a really strange Choice who knows perhaps laring will add this in later at another time or they may not and perhaps a Moder will but it still feels like an issue to me just kind of like staring and not commenting okay okay so there's there's another bonus as a secondary bonus that I have to talk about because it's one that and it's not it's not the multiplayer issues there have been people talking about the multiplayer issues where you cannot remove a character making it a little bit more difficult to slot people in and out of your your your multiplayer this one is about another way of viewing multiplayer and that's DM campaigns DM mode was one of the coolest things of divinity original sin 2. the mode where you could basically create your own adventure using assets from the game a very big and detailed version of of essentially virtual tabletop I still remember that the hours and hours I spent into creating a whole world for my players to experience in Divinity original sin 2 only for them to break everything within five minutes and and realize that everything I'd done was useless but still it was fun and I would I kind of wish like I would pay for a new version of Baldur's Gate 3 that was just that that was just the DM mode plus who doesn't want to see a critical role version of that a critical role DM run in Ballers gate 3. I I know I do I would watch the hell out of that I'll follow up this review with a more thorough one once I've completed the game but the big takeaway here is if you're on the fence about Baldur's Gate 3 buy it if you have the funds the game is good it's engaging it's fun it'll steal your time away I personally struggle to take time to play games just for enjoyment and not simply for Content creation and this game has kind of forced me to just play I I just wanted to play the game over and over and over again and I'm going to be putting a lot of hours into it this is already one of the best RPGs I've ever played and that goes up against royalty like Elder Scrolls Skyrim Morrowind and Dragon Age Origins larion should be commended on creating such a beautiful and engaging world that really takes you in and one thing I want to note here about about the game in general is when it was released into Early Access that came at a time when I was going through some difficult difficult stuff and I was able to lose myself in that game in the Early Access version of the game and just play and that is something I think is very special and important for games to be able to do to to provide that Oasis and when things are bad they allow you the ability to escape and larion's RPG Baldur's Gate 3 is certainly doing that cheers Valerian and their excellent execution of a proud franchise a legendary world of faerun and their follow-up to another exceptional crpg of their own but if you want to see some less Stellar reviews of Baldur's Gate 3 then this one I looked at some of their one star reviews in that video right there go take a look at some of the strange ones that really took a lot of issue with the game in early access my name is Robert Flynn thank you so much for watching and I hope you have a wonderful day foreign

Channel: Redbeardflynn

Views: 4,300

Keywords: mmorpg, mmo, massively multiplayer, video games, gaming, online gaming, online games, mmos, mmorpgs, bg3, baldur's gate, baldur's gate 3, larian, larian crpg, larian games, baldurs' gate rpg, baldur's gate review, baldurs gate 3 review, bg3 review, baldurs gate III review, should you play baldur's gate, is baldur's gate 3 good, is baldur's gate 3 worth it

Id: hoo7VmqA5Tg

Length: 22min 10sec (1330 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 14 2023