Baldurs Gate 3 is "TOO" Good

at the beginning of the year when Gamers were talking about the biggest games of 2023 Baldur's Gate was not a part of that conversation and it feels like Baldur's Gate 3 has come out of nowhere punched Us in the face and might beat out all these other games for Game of the Year I can't be the only one who didn't see this game coming and I know I'm not the only one that reacts to a crbg based on the fifth edition of Dungeons and Dragons with turn-based combat and going like yeah that's probably not for me but everyone kept talking about this game and the player numbers just kept growing and growing to the point where it's in steam's top 10 highest concurrent player lists the top 10 highest rated PC games on Metacritic and in the top three highest rated games on open critics entire website so I decided to dig a little deeper and I saw a 75 to 100 hour long campaign with 17 000 different variations to its ending you can make your own character you can play the whole campaign in four player co-op and uh I guess you can have sex with bears and it also didn't take long for me to see the messy conversation between developers Gamers and games media going like this shouldn't be the new standard for RPGs and game devs are just lazy and game developers are telling us just to sit down and be quiet I think the whole conversation is just missing the point a little and I need to see what all the fuss was about so I went on Steam spent the sixty dollars downloaded the game and started a campaign and now I want to explain why this game is so amazing how a game like this is even possible and why it is an anomaly that we probably won't see again for a long time but it hopefully will shift the industry forward ball just Gate 3 immediately shows how crazy it is right off the batness Character Creator the game lets you pick things like your race your class your background your abilities and depending on those decisions it can lead to your sub race your subclass a deity can trip spells and it just made me feel like oh I'm gonna spend a long time here and then once you've done all that you could do things like your face your hair your body art your makeup and uh all these choices you're making might feel a little pointless but the thing is that all these choices you make are going to have different impacts on different parts of the game like the game will encourage you to role play your background by giving you inspiration points every time you do something that aligns with it and you can use those points to re-roll on ability checks if you fail or this one time I was getting played by this little sauce Goblin priest lady she was trying to give me a sleeping potion but since I was half wood elf I had a resistance to sleeping potions I didn't know what impacts the choices in the character greater I made would have on the rest of the game but this is only a taste of what this game does best options let me explain so Baldur's Gate is based on the lore and rules of Dungeons and Dragons now as a lifelong gamer I've always heard of Dungeons and Dragons I've seen it in stranger things I saw it in community and I always said if I had the chance to play it I would and about six months ago I got to try my first campaign playing it made me realize that this is the source material for every single RPG I've ever played from making your own character from going on quests to leveling up skill points and so on but then what amazed me about the game and what it does better than every other video game I've ever played is player agency the game lets you as the player do or at least attempt anything you can imagine within the game's framework on one Quest we found ourselves in a cave and we saw slimes on the ceiling all of us were using pre-made characters that each came with their own inventories of assorted items my character was a halfling rogue which primarily used stealth in a crossbow in my inventory I noticed I had a flask of oil and without anyone telling me I could do this I thought I could set up a trap for the Slime so I rolled to go into stealth snuck below the Slime took the flask out of my inventory and laid the oil on the floor and then moved away to safety took a matchbook out of my inventory to light my air on fire and again without anyone telling me I can do that sent the arrow out the oil lit a fire took out half the damage on the Slime this is the type of experience that makes DND so unique any idea that you may have is only gated by your dungeon master saying yes or no and letting you roll the dice to see what's going to happen but in a video game every option you have to complete a goal has to be designed by a developer which inherently limits the amount of options you can have and now what larian's trying to do with Baldur's Gate is to take that d d experience including the level of player agency and bring it into a video game and they got pretty damn close as soon as you leave the tutorial the game does not tell you where to go and right away you have options the perfect example is these runes you can come across right as you start the game it may not look like it but there are four different ways to get inside hypothetically you could just lock pick this door on the beach because most of the doors in the game give you that option but odds are you won't have one yet at the top of the runes you're going to see some Bandits arguing you can try to talk to the bandits and convince them to leave or you could just attack them to get through then you may decide to go through this door and if you do you're going to start talking to a bandit on the other side now you might be able to convince the Bandit to open the door but if the conversation goes south he's not going to let you in of course you could try to lock pick the door after but if you're a little more observant there's still multiple other ways to get inside your character May notice a crack in the ground where the bandits were talking if you shoot the Rope holding the rock above it you can drop the rock to open a hole in the floor and yes if you noticed it earlier you could have shot that rock to take out the bandits in the first place then finally there's a little path on the side and if you go to the end you can jump down and find a wooden hatch that will take you to the end of the Interior if you complete these ruins it gives you the ability to change your class and revive dead party members for the entire rest of the game it's kind of some big and what's crazy is you can completely miss these ruins never unlock this ability and Go the whole game and never even know it was there the fact that you can miss something like this highlight something that I also pointed out my tears of the Kingdom video the game not explicitly telling you where to go or how to do things gives you a strong sense of Pride when finding and accomplishing things gives the player ownership over these experiences versus the game just handing it to you and bulger's gate is bold enough to have this approach in his quest design the first set of quests I found revolved around these group of refugees are getting kicked out of their Camp by The Druids who took them in if you just follow the quest us objectives you end up talking to The Druids leader to try to convince her to let the refugees stay but she won't budge so when back to the refugee's leader to tell him what happened and my conversation took me to this place where he asked me to murder the leader of The Druids at this point I'm like whoa I don't want to murder anybody and I don't want to risk any of the refugees getting killed but then an entirely different Quest let me know that the original leader of The Druids is missing then I think oh okay well if I bring this guy back maybe I won't have to kill their de facto leader and the refugees will be safe nowhere in my journal says I can complete the quest this way but I want to see if it's possible so I made my way to this Goblin camp where the Druid leader went missing and it's up to you how you want to get inside you could decide to just roll through the camp kill everyone in sight never say a word you could decide to sneak inside multiple different ways try to silently take out guards and move yourself into a position to assassinate their leaders you could convince the front guards that you're just a messenger and you could walk right in trade with their vendors engage with other quests or you can even just weaken their defenses you could poison their drinks or you can use to talk to animal spell and try to convince these spiders to help you kill everyone in the camp you could even flip the entire script sell out the refugees help the Goblins kill everyone in their cam the leader of the goblins and make her a part of your party what and believe it or not I did it a completely different way I let the front guard bully me into rubbing on my face so I can get inside without a fight found an owl bear who I ended up adopting bullied a different Goblin into kissing my foot because he was clowning me for the on my face and then tried to make me kiss his foot mine controlled one of their leaders who was talking to a dead body so I can ask the dead body questions and then eventually fought my way out of the camp and after all that it was worth it I brought the Jews leader home the refugees were safe I didn't have to kill their de facto leader I just had to kill an entire Camp of goblins instead now throughout the whole game you're accompanied by three other people either your friends or in-game companions this takes that player agency to a whole other level because you're not limited to what your character could do for what your entire party can do my warlock was the one who could speak to animals so if he was in my party I could talk to any animal in the game you can convince them to fight with you get asked about information in the area Origins might be pointless but something funny might happen and you're not just limited to your companions abilities at any point you can just take full control of them and place them instead of your main character there's this one time that me and the party were in this cave with this huge chasm in the middle of it my main character goes like hmm I wonder what's down there and so as I'm playing is him I jump onto this ledge and it crumbles and Falls below me what the I end up falling ridiculously far into this whole other area and I just hit the floor and died oh my God and to make things worse there's these two giant minotaurs that were guarding my body so then it forced me to play as my other companions do this whole Expedition down to the underdark try to sneak past the minotaurs and revive my Dead character each one of your companions feels like they could be a completely essential part of the game they all have their own quest lines and all this contextual dialogue it might have all these abilities that feel really essential to you depending on how you want to play and just like so many other parts of this game you could just miss them and never meet them for your entire campaign like you know this lady on the cover of the Box she's one of the party members you first meet and she can be with you for the entire game and right next to those ruins that we were talking about earlier she's being held captive and I completely missed it since I didn't see her I was just like oh I'll run into her again later probably right but no she ended up breaking out of the cage starting the quest land that I would have been a part of and died and now she's going to be dead for the rest of my game everything I mentioned so far is all accessible in the opening hours of the campaign it looks like it's going to keep this pace for the rest of the hundred hours it'll take to finish it it's actually crazy how many options this game puts in front of you to complete any goal you want to and how many decisions you can make that just Domino out to the 17 000 different variations to its ending even though I haven't finished the campaign yet I am confident in saying that this is one of the greatest RPGs I have ever played but a game of this scope with these features and this high level of Polish all in a day one package is only possible because of larion Studio's unique position in the industry see most game studios can only make games because of publisher funds them the deal that a publisher will typically give a studio is here's x amount of dollars to make a game by x-day then developers will do as much as possible within that time frame and budget it's the classic situation between the business and the artist the developers just want to make their art but then the Publishers want to make their money back and then some then the publisher will force things on the development Studio to ensure their money gets made like your game must release on these platforms on this day or your game must include microtransactions if the developer doesn't listen to the publisher they risk losing all their funding which shut down their studio and lay off all their employees this results in the landscape we currently live in where games are being released before development is complete or they're stuffed with microtransactions that don't make sense of course there's outliers to this sometimes Publishers will allow the time and space for a game to be good or some studios that develop self-publish their titles and they're still full of microtransactions and there's just developers who suck they aren't managed well and they're willingly engaging with all the things that we hate about the industry but a lot of developers are just stuck in the model I was describing earlier and this will be the norm unless something changes now larion is an independent studio and publisher ran by this guy my name is Sven Vega the studio has been releasing games for over 20 years and they're most known for the crpg series Divinity particularly Divinity original sin 2. the studio kept incrementally improving the series over 20 years and it results in an experienced team and in-house technology specifically suited for crpgs so in 2017 larion was commissioned to make baldi's Gate 3 and then they were able to put the game into Early Access in 2020. the Early Access created this dedicated community of Gamers that essentially acted as beta testers for three years this community was bug hunting providing feedback and funding for the game that took it to the level that we're seeing at day one larion also made the wise move to focus on a PC launch first and to delay the Xbox and Playstation launches to a further date so that way they can ensure the quality on all consoles and avoid that situation that cyberpunk had at its launch delaying the console launch and the decision to not include microtransactions is only possible because larion is an independent Studio self-publishing their game the conditions that created a game like Boulders Gate 3 is an anomaly but what sucks is that it shouldn't be it should be the norm this shows what happens when you give an experienced team years of development early access technology specifically suited for the job and the ability to dictate its launch schedule it is so exciting to see the heights of what this medium is capable of but so many other games feel like they're just disrespecting Us by comparison with unfinished products and egregious monetization a game like Baldur's Gate 3 should undoubtedly raise our standards for the genre in the industry as a whole both Gamers and developers should be forcing Publishers to look at what made this game successful so that way they can learn from it and incorporate it into their pipelines and then hopefully one day we'll find studios in the same position as larion so that way they can make games that are just as great people need to go support a game like this if there's a game making a lot of money seems to be the only thing that's going to go and change people's minds but what do you think let me know in the comments down below if you liked the video give it a like if you want to see more consider subscribing thank you so much for watching the video I really appreciate it I'll see you in the next one

Channel: Nic Davidson

Views: 11,397

Keywords: Baldurs Gate 3, BG3, review, video essay, larian, larian studios, dungeons and dragons, D&D, video games, baldurs fate 3 gameplay, baldurs fate 3 review, baldurs fate 3 romance, baldurs fate 3 character creation, baldurs fate 3 classes, baldurs fate 3 builds, ps5, shadowheart, walkthrough, tips, IGN, girlfriend reviews, The Act Man, PlayStation 5, Xbox

Id: IcVshztQQnI

Length: 11min 13sec (673 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2023