Baldur's Gate 3: Review After 100%

[Music] what's going on everybody morm here this time bringing you my review after 100% for balers Gate 3 some months after the game's official release though I did do a launch review to kick things off and in many ways since then balers Gate 3 has proved to be a gigantic smash hit one of the biggest releases of the year that pushed the genre into mainstream attention or at least this individual game which is usual as someone who covers that genre pretty intently I would say it's rare to see one do that well let alone be a genuine Contender for Game of the Year and after playing the game for roughly 500 hours across about 11 playthroughs in an attempt to sort of soak up everything this game had on offer I have a lot of thoughts in both directions there are some places where I think this game stumbles and some other places where I think it really pushes a lot of things forward now before we dive into all that however I do review games after 100% all the time to set me apart from other reviewers on the platform my steam profile is public and linked below if you want to check that out and while achievements are included in that metric they are far from being the only thing and I think in that particular regard balers Gate 3 is a prime example of exactly that as it only took about three playthroughs to grab the achievements but I went on to play it for hundreds hours more there are a couple other things I need to mention as well I did in between the initial launch of this game and this review do a sponsored video for laran Studios in which they asked me to discuss mind flare lore you can still find that on the channel if you're interested so it's important I disclose that to you but this review is not sponsored nor would any review I do ever be sponsored and last but not least before we start diving more fully into this this video is going to be full of spoilers the launch review I did is pretty spoiler-free if that's what you're looking for that video exists but in this particular one months after the gamees release there's a lot of things I want to talk about and it's simply not possible to do so without spoiling a great deal of it and with all of that said let's start jumping into this thing and talking about it now as I'm sure most everyone is aware balers Gate 3 is an isometric cpg though technically the word isometric now is not literal as that refers to a very specific camera angle but in many ways it is just used to mean top down anymore but in any event this particular game puts us in the role of a custom or origin character as the game calls them as we navigate a mind flare crisis involving being Tad pulled by mind flares which is how they reproduce which leads to us developing all sorts of ilth powers or another word for mind flares basically which kicks off a series of events in and around of course balers gate and we'll discuss the story more in just a moment in a broader sense what balers Gate 3 was trying to do was of course live up to the very high Legacy of the original two games which are generally regarded as some of the best RPGs from that period and of all time while at the same time pushing the genre forward and remarkably I think larryan Studios has mostly delivered on that outside of a few stumbles here and there those stumbles being mostly centered around quality of life things that realistically even now could probably still be added later on as laran is known to support their games for quite some time but at the same time excluding even those things because of balers gate 3's dependence on fifth edition DND which is the tabletop rule set this game utilizes it's also not going to appeal to everyone just because of that you see in many ways fifth edition D and D is a streamlined version of Prior systems that were much more mechanically complex which has resulted in of course the mainstream appeal of things like Dungeons and Dragons these days with fifth edition D and D being the most popular tabletop game by a country mile but there are people like myself who honestly prefer more complex systems like say Pathfinder 1e or even Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 which is also a far cry from the original systems the first two games were built off of which was second edition advanced Dungeons and Dragons which I tell you because frankly there's a lot of room for people not to enjoy everything about this game despite it being so universally enjoyed and while I'm not going to focus on this a ton for the bulk of the video I do want to put it up here at the beginning where I've seen a lot of conversation about how this game is going to push standards forward for RPGs and just sort of generally change the landscape and I've certainly talked about some of those things myself previously but as we get into this review I think the main thing I would like to see balers Gate 3 do and Inspire from people personally is simply to push them to check out other games in this genre because while balers Gate 3 is unique and that's what gave it its appeal in the first place it's a recent entry to a genre that is chalk full of wonderfully told and executed RPGs that while admittedly a bit more difficult to get into thanks to more complex rule sets and Arcane methods of learning information but if you liked balers Gate 3 really it's just the tip of the iceberg for what the genre has to to offer so at the end of the day when it comes to the legacy of this game we'll kind of of course just have to wait and see how it pans out what it inspires from other people though with all of that said let's jump into this thing and talk about what has made people have those conversations to begin with kicking it off with the technical state of the game normally this is a bigger deal for games right as they release as informing people of the launch state of a video game and how it's playing in terms of its performance is an important part of a review these days I wanted to talk about the technical state in this review specifically to talk a little bit about how the game has changed and improved since I initially reviewed it on launch and some problems it frankly still has so in my initial review most of what I had to say about performance was that when you got to the city you would see a lot of FPS drops alongside a variety of just minor bugs like missing dialogue options text strings for book descriptions that kind of stuff that won't really affect your game overall but they are plentiful now in the four major patches and many hot fixes since release much of that has been addressed things have been balanced and adjusted some of the abilities I specifically mentioned in that initial review have been nerfed a little bit as an example alongside just general bug fixes so in many ways the game has definitely improved technically speaking a lot of the little stuff has been ironed out and up until patch 4 the game was running pretty flawlessly for me even in the city proper though that said I do have a very high-end PC for these things so that was somewhat expected but I do think it's worth mentioning that patch 4 which just released a few days ago from the time this video is launching introduced some sort of new problem to the city where it's like your game is lagging when you're actually in town and the game is suddenly really struggling to load basically anything which makes it borderline unplayable for some people myself included obviously but a quick look at the resource monitor on my computer tells me I'm not even using half of my available Ram when this is happening so obviously it's some sort of problem introduced by this patch that with any luck will hopefully be ironed out quickly but my point in telling you all that is simply that there are still a variety of issues some major some minor I haven't really encountered anything to game breaking most of what I encountered was really minor stuff that only took seconds to work around and that issue with patch 4 is probably the most significant issue I've had since beginning to play the game period and what's more while since launch the game has released on PlayStation 5 it is eventually coming to Xbox it was announced though while that is slated for before the end of this year and they are working on it we don't have an exact timeline for that yet with that in mind I hope it's before Christmas for Everyone but it's still very much so wait and see on that front now from there I want to move on to the difficulty settings of the game there are three in total essentially easy normal or hard but in my personal opinion I think they could do with one more past the tactician difficulty or hard mode that increases the difficulty a little bit further probably by reducing the drop rates of certain things like potions and Scrolls but to give you a basic rundown of easy normal and hard it is important to first tell you that it's definitely required to know the system still even on easy you can definitely still lose if you don't know what you're even attempting to do in terms of the dice rolls or how all of the modifiers are calculated and while I've made plenty of videos on exactly that subject to help ease people into this game which is kind of what I do for all crpgs is I love the genre and again decoding them can be a bit Arcane at times without a basic understanding of what the system is and how it works you might run into some issues with that said let's talk about how the game differs with each of these difficulties on story mode enemies have less Health your health is doubled and enemies are easier to hit and in some cases I believe they even reduced enemy numbers a little bit normal is of course the developer intended experience if you're looking to experience the game really all you need to do is play this on normal that's kind of what they had in mind and thanks to a variety of things and how the game is balanced which we'll talk more about in just a second you can approach normal especially and Easy by default of course in any manner in which you like and you're definitely going to be able to find a way forward and that's probably where this game is at its best and that it just kind of hands you all these systems and lets you come up with the solution in a way that is almost reminiscent of immersive Sims then we have tactician difficulty if you're unfamiliar with DND or crpgs at large this might be difficult for you and if that's the case even story or normal might be hard for you which is perfectly fine everybody's got to start somewhere tactician difficulty does make a few changes to the game Beyond just combat in an attempt to make it more difficult for starters when you rest in the game you would normally require supplies for this and you would need 40 of said Supply value to rest under normal circumstances whereas tactician doubles that number it also increases enemy Health by a certain amount it also introduces new tactics and the amount of enemies goes up in a few different cases and what's more in certain fights it even adds extra modifiers outside of the difficulty alone such as as there being fights that you cannot guarantee that you get Advantage which is to say a better chance to hit on your abilities in certain instances and while tactician will certainly prove a challenge if you're unfamiliar with these systems the problem is if you're familiar with these games and you play them all the time tactician is not a big challenge in any way which is why I said the game could frankly use another further difficulty that in my opinion could take a few different forms but I think probably the most straightforward option would be to reduce the availability of a lot of Scrolls and Potions or maybe increase their cost to make resources in general a little less available because as it stands while the game is very approachable and its focus honestly is on the story if you are the type of persons who enjoys these games for the challenge of them that's a place where balers Gate 3 Falls a bit flat and some of that's by Design again the focus is on the story but it would be nice if they added a further difficulty for people like myself who just really enjoy that tactical Challenge on top of these things because as it stands even on tactician you can pretty handily beat this game completely solo and while the game isn't set up for it nor does it really expect you to do that it certainly is possible and what I mean by that is that the game doesn't offer an achievement there is no reason to approach the game solo other than you just want to and this is made very apparent by a lot of the cinematics when you are playing the game solo often those conversations will still refer to you as a group as if you had party members with you the game will often still stop at certain points when you would normally have party members with you to try to give them a chance to say their lines but they're not there so it just sort of awkwardly Cuts away so that one method of increasing the difficulty for somebody like myself isn't even clearly fleshed out all the way which brings me though to the balancing aspect of the game because if there's any part of balers Gate 3 that impresses me more than anything else it is how this game is balanced as I somewhat mentioned during that section on difficulty there you can approach this game in just about any manner you want in fact you can play through the game in Solo tactician mode in a variety of different ways and approaches that are all very viable you can play through the game taking one level in every single class if you want which makes a bit of a monstrosity of a build which I've also done and that is also an incredibly valid and viable way to play through the game so having a game that is balanced in a way that accommodates ridiculous things like that to the opposite end of the spectrum where you can play through solo on the hardest difficulty while making sure the game offers something unique and at at the same time is completable is a genuinely remarkable feat to my mind hands down the most impressive thing this game does is not its cinematics it's not its story it's not its characters Etc it's how they set this up to make sure you could always get through it provided of course you have the will to do so because a prominent feature in other entries in this genre is that in many cases on the highest difficulty a lot of the approaches and options just simply aren't possible you cannot do them because they will not work so seeing a CRP G that manages to Encompass so many different play Styles across all its difficulties is genuinely remarkable to me which is why that aspect of the game outshines even the other already very impressive Parts like the production values for instance but you can't talk balancing without talking a little bit about the karmic dice feature a somewhat controversial introduction to the game that many people talked about as you'll see on screen when you're rolling for any basically ability check in conversation Etc but also in combat when it's done behind the scenes dice are being rolled and while this is obviously more of a computer program than literal dice a feature that was introduced called karmic dice attempts to balance out the highs and lows of this process because in the normal sort of gameplay Loop of that it would be possible to potentially roll like 10 KN ones in a row which is to say you failed something 10 times because the roll of the dice that's just how it works and while karmic dice will prevent that from happening cuz basically if you have a streak of really good or really bad luck like that the game will step in and sort of just alter it but as I just mentioned it doesn't do that just when you're doing really badly it also does that when you're doing really really well so karmic dice's intention is to flatten out those sort of moments of extremes and having played through the game both with this feature on and off I've got to tell you I mostly only noticed when it was off in fact when it was on from a gameplay perspective outside of just knowing it was on I couldn't really tell and while I have seen many videos that have done like the number crunching and how it can even ffect things like damage Etc in my personal experience the only really I would say noticeable thing that happened is when I had karmic Dice off there were multiple times that I would roll like five or six not ones just in a row which is obviously extremely unlucky and it wasn't happening when karmic dice was on because that's what it's designed to prevent but at the same time in telling you that I also acknowledge that I as a person did not notice when the opposite was true when I was just critting regularly I was just like oh I'm just playing Super well and it occurred to me that that feature is likely designed to combat People's Natural inclination towards just acknowledging only the negative which I admittedly found myself guilty of so while it's an interesting feature to include in a game like this and I can think it can be preferable in many cases at the end of the day it's an option if you don't want it messing with your dice rolls and you want it just completely to be the way the dice roll then turn it off for yourself though do know that it is on by default every time you start a playr I think it's supposed to save it but I always found myself having to turn it back on or off now from there let's talk the story and my thoughts on it again completely spoiling all of this so in order to give you my full thoughts on the story I do have to start a little bit previously with the original two games because I have a few I would say major annoyances with the way balers Gate 3 story is told which admittedly only matter to me because I love these games but honestly 99% of people don't care and I think the approach they took probably makes for a better game but this is a big ridiculous over-the-top review so we're doing it anyway balers Gate 1 and 2 told the story of the ball spawn that is to say the children of the god of murder the god of murder got murdered and in order to potentially facilitate his return he had a bunch of kids who inherited his Divine Essence but all kind of by the exact nature of that Divine Essence had an extreme urge to murder and MIM people which brought all sorts of chaos to the realm that resulted in a few literal Wars and how the events of all that played out is what balers Gate 1 and two handles we play gan's Ward one of the ball spawn and while I won't regil you with a complete retelling of those games because I have videos for that too I will tell you how it ends you see balers gate 2 and its expansion more specifically ended with all of the children of bald besides you finally dying or at least so you thought and you could either Ascend to godhood and become the new God of murder and turn that into something more positive or just embrace the evil nature of it or you could reject that power and continue to live as a mortal that is the canonical ending canonically speaking the protagonist of those two games was a man named Abdul Adrien who then went on to after this happened become a Grand Duke of balder's gate where he helped guide the city's governance and everything up until 10 years before the beginning of balers Gate 3 at which point the actual second to last ball spawn showed up got into a fight with abdol and they both died which culminated in the resurrection of the god of murder ball and the reason I'm telling you all that is to explain here in just a moment that balers Gate 3 for the most part respects what is considered Canon from those previous games however where it feels appropriate it fudges a lot of the numbers and the dates and attempts to explain some of it away and again I think that probably makes for a better story overall admittedly but it's also worth mentioning that a lot of that Canon lore that I just mentioned the canonical outcome of balers gate 2 was not exceedingly popular lore which is why going going into this game I fully expected Lan to either outright ignore or mostly just make it so vague that it didn't matter which is why I thought it was really interesting that while the vast majority of the game refuses to name Abdul as the previous game's antagonist despite you meeting people who definitely would have known him like previous companions from the original game there is actually one reference to this character by name called Abdul's Shield which you can get from an NPC who wasn't in the previous games thus confirming the stuff with Abdul and theoretically what happened 10 years before the start of this one was accurate which brings us to some of the marketing or buildup to balers Gate 3 in which they had a sort of Investigation Thing by the community that discussed an event 15 years prior to the start of balers Gate 3 with a serial killer in the city this serial killer turns out to be one of the origin characters the dark urge the dark urge a customizable origin character with a set backstory ultimately turns out to be a true ball spawn which is probably I would say the biggest connection between this game and the previous ones but if you've been paying attention to everything I've set up to this point none of that makes any sense in order for ball to be resurrected all of the ball spawn had to die but apparently this one was alive before the events that led to Ball's Resurrection but apparently long before that he managed to have another offspring that apparently wasn't required to die so it all gets increasingly blurred and the game does actually have a few I would say dialogue lines laid in the game when you can meet the main antagonist of balers Gate 1 and have conversation with him as the dark urge that attempts to explain some of this away but I don't even think that's done particularly well so all of that just to tell you that as someone who's a big fan of the previous games my biggest gripe in relation to is this game a worthy sequel to its predecessors is that they really messed up a lot of that lore for seemingly no reason and while in some ways I do think it makes for a better story it will annoy me to no end from now until forever but let's talk about the rest of the story because it doesn't end there there's a lot of things I like and a few that I don't the game kicks off of course with us being infected by mind flare tadpoles alongside many other people which would normally lead us to turn into mind flares ourselves but it quickly becomes apparent that that is not happening and these tadpoles are now giving us some sort of unusual psychic power and the ability to communicate with others telepathically of course and what starts as a journey to simply try to remove these tadpoles from our brains spins into a much larger narrative involving gods and attempts to take over the Realms of FY run and the sword coast and while I won't regail you with every single detail of that Journey there's a few things I want to mention in each Act for starters the First Act of the game which is naturally what most people are going to be most familiar with is a conflict between Druids of a druid Circle and goblins who are there looking for a weapon the weapon turns out to be the artifact that is preventing you from transforming into a mind flare so in both that way and in regards to looking for a cure which leads you to a potential healer being trapped by the Goblins you get embroiled in that situation and that I would say is where the game is at its best in terms of its choice and consequence there's so many ways to resolve that situation get everybody murdered side with the Druids the Grove betray people it's just a real playground of options but that leads us into the much darker act two where we enter the shadow cursed lands trying to find the source of the tadpoles known as the absolute which is the one granting all of these powers in some way which has led to the cult of the absolute which is worshiping the thing as a God and at the end of act two you found out that this is actually an elder brain the giant brain leaders of the Mind flares but the Elder brain itself is actually being dominated by a Fantastical Relic called the crown of carsus which has way too much lore to explain in a video like this but is being utilized by the chosen or the champions of the dead three one of which is ball and his two other sort of companion Gods Merkel and Bane who all ascended to godhood at the same time in a bizarre deal with a previous God known as jurgel and the champions of these gods are dominating the Elder brain in an attempt to take over the world act two ends with us killing the champion of Merkel and it quickly becomes apparent that the alliance between these three Champions is falling apart very quickly and the army they have gathered via this elder brain in the absolute is going to march on Baler gate proper and we need to both stop it to save ourselves and potentially the city it then becomes apparent there's a more evil option or so especially when on our way to balers gate it turns out that the presence within the artifact or the weapon that has been keeping us safe from transforming into a mind flare is none other than a mind flare itself so one who seems in charge of its own faculties as opposed to being enslaved to the Elder brain actually stole the power to protect you from a gith Yankee a race of people who hate mind flares prince who has the power to disrupt their telepathic Communications which is how he's been protecting you and that spirals into tangents of its own culminating in a supposed 177,000 endings which I'm already here to tell you simply is not true with all that out of the way let's dig into some more specific details on the story here and what I liked and what I didn't for starters what I liked the way this Story begins both gets you off to a running start you have this tadpull you need it cured you know what to do and then act one is so chalk full of sort of interlacing options that it's really impressive and you can tell it was in Early Access for almost 3 years but act two which in combination with act one in my opinion makes up the sort of first half of the game already becomes I would say much more rained in in terms of of options and where you go from there a lot of the consequences of your choices in Act One have a handful of possible outcomes that result in a relatively narrow act two and you cannot move on from act two until you run into the deal with the Elder brain and the champions of the dead three and I'm fine with that overall as at some point they have to sort of tie the story together and at some point they're going to have to kind of slowly hem you in to make sure that you see that so you can continue the narrative in a way that makes sense and having played through the game so many times while well I can say I'm a little bit disappointed that there wasn't anything super unique about the way act two ends even though it kind of sets up the illusion of possible other outcomes there kind of just aren't any I accept why those limitations are there what bothers me however is actually when you switch from act two to act three as I mentioned this is where you find out that the person protecting you and all these dreams and everything actually turns out to be the emperor the Mind flare who's been protecting you what I don't like about this moment of the story is that it needlessly railroads you into a very specific choice because in the conversation where this is revealed you can choose to either accept that that's what's happening and help the emperor out as he's being attacked by gith Yankee who want to free orus the person he's trapped to help you with it also gives you the option to attack the emperor here and if you do that it just game overs you meaning that you have to help the emperor because you literally won't beat the game otherwise but what bothers me is that they made this a forc decision when it realistically could could have gone one of two ways you see just a little bit later in act three orus it turns out can be freed by an orphic Hammer which is where Raphael the cambian comes in who's trying to make a deal with you which I'm sure people have seen in promo trailers and the like and he has the oric hammer and you can deal with him to try to get it to free orus the thing is it seems to be implied that the emperor is the only thing keeping Orpheus chained up which is why he was about to break free when act two starts and in act three right before the end of the game you can free orus have him protect you while you finish the last bits of the game up and I guess for me I just don't understand why they didn't move that moment to act two and give you the choice between siding with the Mind flare the Emperor or Orphus right then and there because they force you to side with the emperor here only to then turn around and let you side with orus again later anyway and in a game that is full of choice and consequence for that one random moment to be so forced on you when they literally wrote a different route to it that they then give you like not even a few hours later is truly bizarre to me just a very odd decision and for me it's definitely the lowest point of the story it just doesn't make any sense and while I can forgive the sort of fudged up lore from the previous two games that are over 20 years old because admittedly you know it bothers me but it's whatever in the grand scheme of things this is just kind of a blatant plot hole in the middle of this game for some reason and it doesn't feel like it would have required much to just give you the same option a little bit early so whereas up to this moment where you certainly have times you're kind of forced into something for instance the boss of act two the final guy you have to fight right before you enter act three the champion of Merkel is invulnerable before you go do some quests and they'll let you attack him but I mean he's invulnerable you're going to lose or you're going to have to run away one and while that's technically a forc decision you have the option to fight that guy and fail run away and then kind of go do the thing you have to go do and I'm fine with stuff like that because it's some point you have to tell the narrative right but the fact that they managed to handle that in a way that makes sense but then messed this up like right after just feels super odd to me and then it doesn't help that and honestly I assume potentially why they did this is because of who the emperor was in act three if you do a particular side quest uh mostly Will's origin story specifically you can learn that the emperor is none other than beluran the person who founded balder's gate who then became enslaved to the Elder Brain before Breaking Free of its control which sort of led to this game which is a great little plot twist and everything but it all just feels very forced towards the end there and then that finally culminates in the endings and the epilogue or I would say kind of lack thereof in many cases so a lot of people especially right before release hyped up this news thing about how there was 17,000 endings and that is just simply not true there are not 177,000 endings to this game and while I would argue that there's a handful I would say that could be considered genuinely unique endings if you want to get really specific you could boil it down to basically good or bad if you wanted to where you either save the city or you don't and use the crown of carsus to become the bad guy and there's a variation of that if you're playing the dark urge where you do it for ball and the whole world gets destroyed but you know it's just the bad ending basically and while there's a couple I would say valid endings previously to the actual main ending for instance if you have Gail in your party at the end of act two you can actually have him detonate his orb and kill the Elder brain early which is not an ideal outcome but does technically solve the problem so there's things like that that you could consider extra endings I mean personally for me I would say there's about half a dozen that are unique enough to be considered unique endings now the reason people say there's 177,000 and you see that repeated still is because there are a ton of variations to the final cut scene but this is stuff like how each origin character's story resolved for instance a staran can either Ascend to become a vampire lord or be stuck as a vampire spawn and depending on your choice there in the ending cutscene you'll see what happens to aaran if he's a spawn he starts burning up and runs off for instance but if he ascended it's slightly different and this goes for every single companion and there's a ton of different combinations of what happened to those companions in combination to the main thing that either happened you either saved the city or took over control of the Elder brain and became a tyrant and because of that thanks to save scumming and things you really only need to play through the game a handful of times do a bit of saves coming and you can see the bulk of the options available to you like probably 95% of them though I will say the most impactful difference to the ending for me actually wound up being the romance scene for whoever you had romance throughout that particular playthrough based on who you romanced and what choices you made that then affect the outcome of that romance for instance if you have lazel and you saved orus she's going to go off to liberate her people with orus who is technically the rightful ruler of the gith Yankee so if you romanced her it's kind of like sorry but this is more important by so there's an example of a variation to the outcome for your character there and that happens across pretty much all the romances there's various things about them now a problem you might have heard about however comes with whether or not you didn't romance them or the specific decisions you made because well I had played through the game a couple times in a way that gave me a satisfying end to the game that is to say the cut scene represented the characters I cared about and what happened to them a lot of times it fails to do so and while Lan's been addressing that after after the fact especially in terms of carlac who had a pretty sad ending previously but even now is still kind of a bummer but in a lot of cases really all you get for the wrapup for each individual character or the people you've met along the way is just a couple of lines of dialogue in the ending scene you don't know what they went on to do you don't know what happened to them after the fact and in that way the epilogue of this game still offers very little in the way of closure to a lot of these stories in fact it doesn't even go so far as to tell you what happened to the previous areas you had been to and while you can lift the shadow curse from the shadow cursed lands and see that as you leave you don't as an example though get any sort of breakdown for what happened to The Druids Grove after the fact what happened to that area what happened to the city and as a result of that while sometimes you can play through the game and have I would say a pretty satisfying end to the game there are a lot of other times where you play through it and the epilogues and everything are really underwhelming so to summarize the game really doesn't have that many endings and depending on the choices you made throughout the culmination of all those origin character stories can be really hit or miss as to whether or not you even get to find out what happened to them in any meaningful way at least which can put a bit of a bad taste in your mouth after all the time you almost certainly spent playing this game which finally brings us to the end of this section and we can now finally move on let's talk about character creation a little bit character creation of course sees you defining what kind of character you want to make based on fifth edition D and D of course a lot of the rules from the play players handbook specifically are here with a few branching options into other places but most of this is just players handbook stuff so you either decide whether you want to play a custom character or Tav as they are known or one of the seven different origin characters who would normally make up your companions outside of the dark urge who is only available as an avatar character you then go on to pick your race any applicable subrace your starting class any options relevant to that class before changing your ability scores and being on your way I've explained a lot of this stuff in other videos that have much more time to go much more in depth so if you're curious about how any of this stuff works more specifically all of that is there for you but for this video a few important things to mention this is mostly just your starting point you can resp later pretty freely you're going to meet a character named Withers either early on into the game when you find him or if you take too long he'll just show up at your camp and that NPC who's related to the story and is probably jurgel the God who gave the dead three their power he's going to be able B to just let you Respec your character for like 100 gold which is super cheap so that in combination with the magic mirror which will let you customize the look of your origin characters or your hirelings means that a lot of these decisions aren't final and you have options to work around them and change your strategy a little bit which is going to prevent you from being stuck and I say that basically to tell you don't be too intimidated if you don't know what's going on here system wise now cosmetically speaking they gave us all sorts of options to customize our character along with their race and while it's not as free form is like letting you sculpt your face like you see in something like Fallout 4 all of the various preset options and how they can combine to make a character will almost certainly give you a lot to play around with and while I don't want to get too into the weeds of these things because as I mentioned I have videos that do that already if you're interested what I do want to talk about is that character creation is where if you're familiar with fifth edition D and D you're likely going to notice that laran made a lot of small subtle changes to the system to make it both translate to a video game better but also to just feel better at the same time they changed a lot of stuff in terms of how fifth edition DND D Works to just frankly make them more fun in a way that wasn't necessary to make them work for a video game but do make for better I would say implementations of those things and while that does cut a little bit both ways for instance a lot of the more socially oriented things from the tabletop version don't always translate super well they also made a ton of smart changes now while that is good for the most part and it makes a class like the monk who was normally very weak in the tabletop at least comparatively to what other classes could be have the ability to be a Powerhouse in this game and in fact in terms of just like single Target DPS it's one of your best options if you go the Open Hand route the problem with that is or at least the problem I have with it is that there is nowhere here in the character creation screen to click a button and pull up the progression and abilities that your race and class are going to get down the line which is important because laran has probably altered them in some way in many cases which means even if you're familiar with fifth edition D and D you're likely going to encounter a curveball playing this for the first time where they change things you may or may not be aware of and not having the ability to look forward when they've already changed the source material is I think a real missed point when you've seen other games in this genre do that previously via pillars of Eternity 2 or wrath of the righteous for instance and that's one of many ways I would say balers Gate 3 sort of drops the ball when it comes to the quality of life situation that hopefully they'll add in the future cuz I think it would just add a lot to the game for people who want all that information and don't want to have to go search it up in a Wiki as an example because while I'm happy to make money off making videos about these changes which I did quite a bit of it really shouldn't be necessary next up though I want to talk about the origin characters all seven of them alongside the companions but less so there now I do want to start this section off by mentioning that while I do think a lot of these characters are really well written have interesting narratives especially when you're playing as them and how you unravel those characters whether or not you're Romancing them or simply learning about them adds quite a bit to the game but as a personal note I don't really care about romances and video games I don't have anything against them but they're not really what I play games for either and given the fact that I would say much of the conversation around this game has been centered around those exact things I don't really feel it's necessary to comment on them but what I do want to do is talk a little bit about each character's individual Story how it relates to the main story my thoughts on it and what playing through the game as that character sort of adds to it as I played through the game as an avatar of every single one of these so let's kick things off with aaran our Elven vampire spawn companion who thanks to his tadpole is able to walk in the sun while finally being free of his master Cazador back in Boulder's Gate after suffering some pretty messed up torment at that person's hands aarian is loved by a lot of people uh personally I found his default attitude when you're talking to him and you're not playing as him to be kind of annoying it's not not the kind of person I would ever get along with but a lot of that from a narrative standpoint is of course used to mask a lot of the torment and deceit he's been living with trying to just get by and survive as a vampire spawn to a cruel Lord that definitely sees him more as a thing than a person so I admit while I don't like this character there is a lot there to unravel and enjoy if you do his main story as you might imagine revolves around dealing with Cazador now that you can kind of act freely on your own and kazador it turns out is using both aaran and many other vampire spawn in a profane ritual to ascend to an ascendant vampire which would let him walk in the Sun and have all sorts of stronger vampire powers aaran can stop this and kill kazador one way or the other but then has to decide whether to ascend and take cazador's place in that ritual or stay a vampire spawn forever the ritual though requires the deaths of thousands of people and aarian is forced to decide between his own selfish gains which he's been prone to or acknowledging the fact that he would be essentially becoming the person he hates the most by doing that and sacrificing all those people which makes for some interesting moments now when it comes to actually playing as a staran there's a few unique moments but two in particular really keep my memory and that is early on in the game a staran if he's just in your party will attempt to bite you in your sleep and this is how you find out he's a vampire for sure if you're playing as a staran this scene plays out a little differently where you have to choose who you want to bite and then whether or not they notice you though this is where it gets honestly a little funny you see if aarian is just in your party and you decide to just let him bite you he can actually kill you but you can then be resurrected by someone in your party and the game continues on there's even some funny dialogue about it however in Reverse if you kill someone while biting them while playing as him that character is just dead permanently which I was not expecting I kind of just expected funny dialogue in reverse and that really made that scene feel unique and have more weight to me now another scene I really remember from aarian playthrough is towards the end of it when you're deciding whether or not to ascend because while my playthroughs up to that point had largely been like indifferent to him as a character I would say that moment is what really got me to understand the story they were trying to tell with aaran because you have to decide in that moment to either become what kazador is and represents to you or let go of all that power and your long-term ability to walk in the sun even in exchange for doing the right thing and I think it's such a wonderful moment to play through as the character that I just really didn't feel much for when I was just looking at it from that third party view it added a lot to the experience though next up we have leel a gith yanki woman from cres kher which is to say the place she grew up more or less but the gith yanki hate mind flares they used to be enslaved by them I cover this more in that lore video I mentioned but it's essentially get Yankees sworn duty to hunt down and kill mind flares at any cost in retribution for the slavery they underwent they hate them somewhat ironically they've essentially turned into what the Mind flayers were enslaving people being this brutal race that looks down on others which is why the gith Yan or only one half of the gith race the other being the gith zarai who also hate mind flares but are a little more I would say concerned with not becoming essentially them so lazelle's position as the GI in a story that centers around mind flares is already pretty interesting and given what I told you earlier in the story section about how this culminates in finding out that their Queen vth has actually been lying to them and that the rightful heir to the gith crown is orus the son of the woman named gith who led the gith Yankee to Freedom is a very big moment for her it's World shattering in many cases and while lelle has a very tough exterior if you get to know her her romance is actually pretty well fleshed out as well and it becomes more clear that she's been lied Su her whole life and she has a lot to get to grips with and she probably shows the most character development in my opinion of all of these characters which makes it a real shame that playing through the game as her was not particularly interesting it didn't really come with any scenes that really stuck with me it was basically everything I already knew and it was definitely one of the origins where you kind of saw everything by just having her in the party and there really wasn't much to add from being her which was a bit of a shame because outside of the dark urge her story is probably my favorite that brings us to Gail though the wizard of Water Deep the Fallen Ark Mage Gail used to be an incredibly powerful wizard before his ambition got the better of him as it often does with Wizards who hunger for power of some form because despite being with mistra both intimately and more theoretically mistra being the goddess of magic by the way Gail decided that in order to impress her further he needed to seek out the remnants of cares which led him to the ne's orb which then attached itself to him and started eating away at his magic abilities basically Gail needs to eat magic now or he will blow up and take out a 2 m wide radius around him it doesn't help that after this happened mistra basically disowned the guy and he's been struggling to both saave off this explosion and work through his wounded Pride at the failing of his relationship with mistra at the same time so there's a lot going on here especially when you find out that the neth orb was actually part of the carsite weave and it is just eating magic completely and the reason mistra was so angry with him was because the carsite weave represented a danger to Magic everywhere which involves more lore than I have time to explain and a lot of Gail's story revolves around either making that sacrifice and setting off the explosion to deal with the Elder brain which results in you not even having to fight the thing or giving into his ambition for power and trying to get the crown of carsus off of its head so he can attempt to become a God just like carsus the person the crown is named after who it used to belong to also tried to do which is sort of the ultimate ambition for a wizard as it turns out and that Temptation by power largely colors most of Gail's Journey he can either be pretty mild mannered overly polite trying to do the right thing an otherwise morally good person in a lot of morally gray situations or he can definitely give into that temptation of power sort of blame everyone around him for everything that's happened to him and it can go one of a few different ways which makes for a pretty interesting story but I'm so so on gaale it didn't really speak to me personally a lot of it's pretty standard wizard stuff but when you're playing through the game as Gale you actually do get a few unique scenes with him both at the beginning and then a little later towards the end you also have to make the decision to detonate the bomb to take out the Elder brain in act two if he's with you but you could have done that anyway if Gail was with you so that wasn't really special now at the beginning of the game where you normally talk with Gail and try to give him magic items if he's in your party when you are Gail a lot of that is explained through the arrival of Tera the flying cat or tresum that Gail is associated with comes to track Gail down see how he's doing and gives you a unique magical item to help with this particular problem and this is here to replace that again normally Gail would be talking to to you about these things but they kind of need someone to bounce that conversation off with so they use Tera because all the other companions might get killed and it was a nice little scene that gave you something unique while playing as Gale and then the last unique thing I would say comes towards the end after you beat the game actually you get an epilogue of sorts where you can either choose to embrace power or repent yourself to mistra which then kind of gives you a better understanding of what happens to Gail specifically if you're playing as him though you don't see this if you're not playing as him if you are just using Gail in your party you simply get a scene where he kind of tells you whether or not he's going to go after the crown or not and depending on your choices with him up to that point it can be more difficult or easy to do so so playing as him did give a few unique things but his story felt a little flat for me in general so there wasn't too much there next up though we have shadowart Shadow heart is a cleric of sh the goddess of Darkness making Shadow heart of course the resident goth girlfriend now the thing is if you know about DND D you know that sh is the sort of opposite of saloon which is the goddess of the moon and they are in a rivalry with each other because of that it probably wouldn't be much of a surprise to you that shadowart who tries to help people here and there in your party in general even if she is very secretive has to decide whether to stay loyal to sh or convert to being a worshipper of saloon once she finds out that her parents were actually abducted by other worshippers of sh and then she was raised as a cleric of sh to further the unending war between sh and saloon I actually like this story but it is very on the nose it's pretty much exactly what you'd expect once you find out she wore ship Shar and while I don't have anything against it it is again well done it's just something I saw coming from a mile away though shadowart does have a very important moment in the story where she gets an option no one else does at the end of act two you have the option to either release or capture potentially the Night song which is the source of the invulnerability for cathc thorman Act 2 most characters can either set the Night song free or Dame alen as she's actually known or if they side with the bad guys Bazar in particular they can capture her instead shadowart is actually empowered by Shard to kill Dame Island who is otherwise Immortal and only able to be killed if another God wills it but in order to get that option you need shadowart in your party and in fact if you don't bring her along for this Mission she will outright leave and whether or not she chooses to kill the night or spare the Night song is the biggest determining factor in whether or not she worships sh or Saloon though there is more stuff to this a little later when you get to act three when you find out that her parents are still alive so all of that to tell you that shadow heart is pretty connected to the main story she's got a big moment that is unmissable it's tied to the main story there's a lot of involvement there but playing as her does again kind of not really give you anything unique in terms of her story it plays out pretty much the same way regardless if you have a good relationship with her you can push her towards one or the other and decide what she wants to do and you're not really missing much by not playing as her really the only unique scene she gets I would say is that in moments where she is talking to sh in your party you actually get to hear sh's voice acting which was certainly a nice touch but not really enough to win me over then we have will will is a warlock and servant to a fiend known as maora will entered into a PCT with maor who save the city of balers gate from dragon cultists and has has since made a name for himself as the blade of the Frontiers who tracks down evildoers the coast over and while people think he's a hero he is actually in service to a devil and initially this puts him into direct conflict with carlac another origin character as he wants to kill her per mazora which you can choose to do if you don't want carlac on your team will actually got some rewrites from his Early Access version they altered his story a little bit but in any event will is the son of one of the grand Dukes of balder's gate older ravenguard another character who personally knew abdol Adrien from the previous games or the canonical character from the previous games will being a folk hero of sorts or at least attempting to save the world naturally kind of just involves himself in the plot here and wants to save the city of balder's gate he later finds out his father's been abducted by this cult and wants to save his father as well and he has a lot of inner turmoil about accepting this deal and sacrificing his soul essentially for the sake of preserving the things he cares about in this world which gets a little further complicated later when maora ties freedom from his pact to the life of his father you have to either choose to save his father or let him die then will can either become the blade of a verice as he calls it who hunts down evildoers everywhere or he can Ascend to the throne of a Grand Duke and balder's gate which you can help with another interesting thing about Will's story though is that it puts you in connection with the plot thread that leads to the reveal that the emperor the Mind flare is actually baluran so Will's story has a lot going on but but it admittedly feels a little disconnected from the main story in comparison to a lot of the others and when it comes to playing as will you do get a few interesting interactions with your Patron maora especially as the few options where you defy or Embrace what mazora asks you to do per your pack will have more interesting effects for instance in act two it's possible to kill mazora but doing this kills will and if you're playing as will that's obviously a game over so little things like that and then it's hard to talk about Will without also talking about carlac as they are tied a bit together carlac is our final companion origin character who is the fury of aus a prior bodyguard to Lord Gort one of the champions of the Dead 3 we talked about before he sold her essentially into slavery in the first layer of Hell a verus where the arch devil there zerel implanted in her a demonic engine that fuels her Fury which is why she is such an effective Barbarian at the beginning of the game thanks to the nautiloid Yon briefly traveling through the plains of Hell Aus specifically carlac manages to escape aerus but she got Tad pulled at the same time meaning that in addition to this engine that's going to kill her now she's got this tadpole in her head will also wants her dead because mazora is actually a servant of arch Devil zerel by the way zerel is a super cool character and while she doesn't feature in this game easily one of my favorite D andd characters period now carlac over the course of her story finds out that being outside of a veres her genine is killing her it's going to destroy her if she doesn't return to a veres and while she's able to make some adjustments to make it last longer her choice ultimately winds up in either returning to a verice to not die but you know being hunted for the rest of her life or accepting her death with some Grace it's also technically possible for her to turn into a mind flare which fixes it which personally I found to bizarrely be the best ending for her but otherwise her story is a little Bleak she was added pretty late into the development from what I understand so outside of of being a bodyguard to Lord Gort and of course just having the tadpole she isn't super tied to the main story like the rest of them with most of her Quest specific stuff being around just trying to solve the problem of the engine which there isn't really anything they can do about and she either dies at the end of the game returns to a verus or lives the rest of her life as a mind flare which all aren't exactly ideal situations let's say and because of that I didn't find playing through the game as carlac particularly satisfying a lot of the scenes are the same some of the stuff she talks to your main character about is instead presented as uh conversations when you're sleeping in Camp but that's about as crazy as it gets so it wasn't really for me all in all that brings us to our final origin character though and this is the dark urge as I already talked about pretty thoroughly in the story section the dark urge is actually a bald spawn a child of the god of murder which means they are linked to a burning desire to murder and MIM people however when you start the game as the dark urge you are an amnesiac you don't remember anything so you don't even know what I just told you you just know that you have this urge to kill though realistically if you played the first games who described ball spawn as exactly that it was immediately obvious what this was so not a huge surprise but over the course of the game a butler UPS which again was from the previous games as well not this one specifically but the concept and this Butler pushes you to do all sorts of terrible things and if you do them you'll earn rewards such as an incredible cloak that makes you invisible after killing something and then in act two you're granted the ability to turn into the Slayer another thing from the previous games indicative of particularly spiteful ball spawn in which they could take on one of the forms of the god of murder ball the Slayer and use it to their own ends towards the end of act two and the start of act three you find out of course that your character was in fact robbed of their position in the temple of ball by Orin the red the granddaughter of saravak anev the antagonist from the main game now this is interesting because Orin sort of used your complacency to assur you she essentially ambushed you had you Tad pulled and thrown out if you are not playing as the dark urge then that character died but if you are the dark urge then you lived the dark urge prior to the start of the game previously was in on the plot with the Elder brain and the mind flares they wanted to plunge the world into death and Chaos for the sake of the god of murder ball Orin however thought she would be better suited to do this as she brought more Artistry to the idea of murder according to her and attacked you for it and while Orin and honestly you in this case were definitely both Psychopaths Orin isn't a true bald spawn which is something I haven't mentioned up to this point but children of ball spawn aren't a new thing there's actually one or two of them in the original games as well but those grandchild do not inherit the Divine Essence that effectively makes them a demigod so to speak like their parents did they don't inherit any of that so a grandchild of ball in this case is just a normal person outside of you know being a psychopath in orin's case and because of all that Orin is Ball's sort of second favorite so to speak and you can in the dark urge story take back the Temple of ball from her in a fight to death in front of the eyes of your father the god of murder and this leads to a unique ending for the ball spawn where you can either free the city like normal and save it or you can dominate The Elder brain and literally destroy the entire world by murdering everyone which is a little over the top but hey technically a unique ending now Main story wise in my opinion the dark urge is clearly the main character it directly connects to the previous games the most and outside of the obfuscated lore that they kind of bended and molded to make this story possible I enjoyed it a great deal you can either resist this urge and be the good guy successfully just like Abdul Adrien did before you or you can embrace it fully which is a great deal of what the original games were all about anyway and because of that to me the dark urge is the main character and seeing as you can only play the game has them that's pretty much the experience that said we're not quite done yet because there are four more companions to talk about these are just companions you can bring them along if you make certain decisions but they are not origin characters you cannot play as them but they can be in your party these are hon jira Menara and Minsk halson and Menara you're going to meet pretty early on but you cannot recruit them until act two hson is the arch Druid of the druid's Grove and Menara is leading the absolute forces in act one trying to find the G Yankee Relic hson I would say is the default option if you do the traditionally good path you're going to find and rescue hson he joins you in act two he's a druid big Burly guy has a unique connection with nature and I'm sure everyone saw the promo material with the be stuff that I don't really want to get into honestly I thought he was super dull personally but then we have Menara of all the non- origin companion characters Menara is my favorite but in order to get her you have to do some pretty messed up stuff in act one and then after after this you can find out that Menara wasn't even doing this of her own valtion she was sort of dominated by the Elder brain so to speak and forced to do it and she wasn't really herself and you can save her from a death sentence kind of literally in act two where she can then join your party Menara being a Dr has led a pretty messed up life up to this point that ultimately led her into contact with the Elder brain which is how everything kicked off she was a paladin of L initially though she swore an oath of Vengeance that oath sustained her after everything that happened happened to her and now she's kind of declaring Vengeance on the people that did that to her and she has a remarkably in-depth story despite what you have to do to recruit her now the downside to manthara is as interesting as she is and she is a romanceable character of course her story is not exactly finished it's kind of bugged out towards the end which can leave her feeling a little Bland but then we have jira and Minsk previous companions from the older games jira is a very important character from the first two games she's a druid and a Harper her husband was killed at the hands of the antagonist from the second game she was a romanceable character in that game as well once she kind of healed from her trauma even so needless to say she was very integral to the series up to this point and her being back is of no surprise to me personally but she's gotten quite old she is a half elf which is how she survived this entire time as she is well over a hundred in this game and she is admittedly pretty fan servy you can find her house in balers Gate 3 you can talk to a bunch of the kids she's taken in off the streets you can find her secret Refuge where she still has some momentos of her previous husband who died in the last game and there's a lot going on there jira however has a set of story quests that will lead you to Minsk Minsk is the last companion and he's really hard to recruit painfully so actually you have to do a bunch of quests to find out where he is what he's been up to and then when you fight him you have to make sure you don't accidentally kill him so you have to turn non-lethal attacks on and jira has to be in your party and if you mess up any of those steps jira will leave and Minsk won't won't be recruitable but Minsk is incredibly late in the game by the time you recruit him the game is just about over so he doesn't have a lot of characterization which is probably for the best because if you know anything about menk he's not let's say the most stable person but he does have a pet hamster that is also part of his character and if I'm being honest even as somebody who loves the previous games I find Minsk incredibly annoying he feels like attacked on addition that really didn't need to be here honestly as he adds very little to the title he's essentially comedy relief as a character and I just don't care for it if I'm being honest you could cut him out of this game and it wouldn't make a difference at all now that we have all of that out of the way let's talk a little bit about some I would say broader thoughts about the companions in general so for me an interesting thing about all these characters is that all of them are united by the thread of being used and potentially betrayed by all of the other characters involved in their story Gail is being used and betrayed in many ways by mistra carlac was used and betrayed by Lord gorash the dark urge was used and betrayed by Orin and the list goes on and that kind of brings together a lot of the core themes of the story with these companions being about trust and betrayal deciding who you can trust what the stakes are and how that relates to both them as an individual and the story at large and in that regard I think all these companions are really really well written now coincidentally that brings us to the camp system where all of these characters you have recruited will be gathering and you yourself will be finding rest at throughout the game basically anytime in game you can click a button hit go to camp and this takes you to a separate area where you can talk to your companions sort your inventory handle things like that set up who's in your party Etc this is also where you will long rest for the day as you have to rest to do things like restore your spell slots and abilities that return on either short or long rest Etc in between long rests at Camp you have a couple of short rests which are instantaneous little healing Buffs outside of combat that that will restore the appropriate resources as well and your Camp is an interesting thing because for instance if you are playing solo it will be pretty much devoid of life there's nobody there but if you are actively recruiting characters and even NPCs who might join you temporarily your Camp can be all full of life changing dynamically which brings little different events like bringing scratch Along being able to pay Fetch with him just to name a few so the camp and your ability to Long rest there which triggers a lot of the cutcenes between the party members is really where you're going to feel a lot of the interpart Dynamics of all these people come together which can result in fights between Lazelle and shadowart for instance alongside your party members being witness to important story events otherwise such as vth confronting LEL or will and carlac confronting each other and that sort of Camp system and the party dynamics that play out there felt very I would say Dungeons and Dragons to me it was when I was feeling the most like I was playing this party based RPG and I think they handled that really well but all of that brings us to the the progression systems of this game there's a handful of things I want to talk about here now I did already talk about I would say the most important element and that is that they made small adjustments to the system as a whole that is fifth edition D and D to make things feel a little bit better and this is really important when you're leveling characters up in particular because stuff that probably wouldn't see a lot of use in the tabletop is now more viable and vice versa things that are very useful in tabletop due to this being a video game might not be quite as useful such as lot of the illusion wizard type stuff I found didn't translate quite as well not to say that you couldn't because the game is balanced in such a way that you can play them even on normal and it's not a big deal in any way just something of note now your primary form of progression is leveling up we have a level cap of 12 compared to the normal level cap of D and D which is 20 but once you get above 12 and start hitting those higher level spells which can do all sorts of crazy stuff they have that much more trouble implementing them into a video game and while some games have tried this it usually results in them having to cut a lot of the reasons you would want to go to those higher levels anyway which wouldn't exactly feel satisfying in a game like bg3 but however you feel about that particular issue when leveling up you'll be brought to a character screen and you can also multiclass that is to say combine various classes together and while this normally has stricter requirements outside of bg3 here balers Gate 3 has largely removed a lot of those restrictions such as minimum certain stats and ability scores required to do so here here it's pretty free form which can allow you to do things that you wouldn't be able to do in the tabletop they're also just a ton of fun at the same time and that is a change I very much so enjoyed as you can tell they definitely tried to reduce the friction between you and the fun which I can always appreciate which is an idea that lends pretty naturally to the itemization of this game you see in Dungeons and Dragons things like magic items aren't quite as available and when they are available you have to attune to them whereas in balers Gate 3 you're going to find all sorts of crazy powerful Magic I items you can of course equip them in every slot You' got available which means stacking all sorts of incredibly powerful effects that simply wouldn't be available in the tabletop and just kind of leaning fully into that fantasy of letting you do these things as opposed to limiting your access to them I think really works in balers gate 3's favor and it is what allows a lot of those balancing decisions and approaches to actually work so while you'll start out with pretty basic gear over the course of the game you're going to find all sorts of magic items artifacts relics which are incredibly powerful that you're going to be able to use to gear up your characters based on what they are able to equip and if you know what you're doing and how to combine all those items you can have a ton of fun with that stuff there's even items that laran has added that have their own sort of unique effects with almost sort of loose item sets that work together in tandem to do something cool and you can tell they made just a ton of effort in applying all of that interesting itemization to what is normally a little more Bare Bones in the tabletop version now another part of aggression is potions and Scrolls in my opinion so in addition to all the gear you can equip you can activate an Elixir usually just one per long rest they override each other if you try to overlap them and elixir can have all sorts of effects that you can apply to your character such as giving you an extra spell slot for the day applying the effect of haste at the cost of a lost turn a little bit later or even just the effect of magic and Scrolls as a potion instead and what's more while you can find plenty of these potions just on your own you can also craft them if you're grabbing up all the materials that you find along the way you can distill these into extracts that you can then use to make various potions and using those potions in absence of a character that would normally do the magical effect you're trying to use is going to let you bypass a lot of situations and really unique ways that add a lot to the emergent gameplay here at the same time this is also kind of true of Scrolls while you can't craft Scrolls you'll find a ton of them you can buy them from many vendors which is also true of the Alchemy crafting ingredients and it is the wildly available nature of both of those things that can let you overcome the deficiencies of a party or character in a way that might not normally be possible which is in my opinion what enables things like solo tactician to work but I would be remiss not to mention probably one of the larger progression systems which is the ithd powers as we progress through the story and check things out we're going to be tempted by power outside of just the normal things our tadpole is going to try to get us to embrace more tadpoles to add them to our psychic power which is going to Grant you ithd Powers which are very strong abilities that can alter the course of the game these can give you a huge bonus to the first role against a character let you guarantee Critical Hits kill enemies once they are reduced under a certain threshold reduce their attributes group them all together and kill them and if you go all in on these tadpool especially on one character it can get ridiculous but we're not done yet because at the end of act two you can actually choose to become a half ilid which grants you access to even more of these powers and the ability to innately fly and if that wasn't enough right as the game is coming to its conclusion you can choose to let your character become a full-blown mind flare and while it doesn't have to be used specifically and you can avoid this fate as becoming a mind flare isn't exactly seen as a good thing it is an option that's on the table if you should so choose though your fate after the fact will certainly be quite a bit different once you make that trans transformation that is to say what happens to your character if you choose to do this is going to be different all of that finally brings us to the combat section now in many ways combat in this game is fifth edition dunen and Dragons with a lot of smart changes that make it feel and flow a lot better not just as a turn-based game but as a crpg as a whole I think they did some pretty remarkable things here that said this is ultimately a turn-based system which is going to emphasize things like strategy and approaches in a way that tends to be more reactive than proactive and what I mean by that is in comparison to a system like Pathfinder 1e where you have to buff up your characters and cast all these spells before you enter combat to be ideal fifth edition D and D is all about doing things in combat in the moment so you don't have to worry about all that pre-buff and stuff and can kind of just focus on the more direct approach you want to take and then executing on whatever it is your plan was alongside your other three companions which brings your group size to four to maximum and while I could focus on the ins and outs of this such as all the various resources available to you based on what class you're using reality is I've made videos about that stuff already including all the basics of combat so what I'd like to talk about instead here is really about what I think the most remarkable thing this game does in terms of the genre which is bring the crpg almost on par with I would say immersive Sim levels of combat approaches because of the way this game is built and how freely it lets you approach things like combat and the way you can just move around items and set things up ahead of time time combat can be this really emergent almost dynamic system that in some ways doesn't really have anything to do with the class you're playing and learning how those things work specifically can lead to a ton of fun that can enable things you might not have normally initially thought about thanks to the itemization and the systems in place in this game which brings us back around to that remarkable balancing I mentioned so for starters well this is a top down typically referred to as isometric although that is not entirely accurate to say the game is technically 3D which means there's a sense of verticality to a lot of the areas you'll find yourself in and this can lead to things like setting up enemies and then knocking them down off of things which can then result in Fall damage you can knock them into endless chasms where they will certainly die via things like knockback arrows Scrolls that will knock enemies back spells that will knock enemies back you can pick enemies up if you have the strength score to do so and pass the check and then throw them at other enemies you can do that with your allies if you want a lot of things in the environment are d destructible and can be used in this manner you can find explosive barrels position those near enemies and then blow them up and set off these huge chain reactions and that's to say nothing of systems like stealth or how invisibility works and all of those things combined to make a system of combat that you really just don't see anywhere else and while you can set these things up in real time and then shift into turnbas you can also turn a turnbas on outside of combat that allows you to set things up a little easier by passing real time and turns as well and all of that allows you to set up and do things as you think of them like you might attempt to do when you're playing a tabletop game of D and D as opposed to playing a video game because while I love this genre that is not typically the approach time or budget would allow in a case like this and it's things like that that really set balers Gate 3 apart from the rest of the genre which frankly just doesn't have a lot of those elements and that can lead to again just Dynamic gameplay and things like that that make this a very attractive game to I would say a more mainstream audience because because you think of something and then you can try it save scum your way back to it you can save scum in the middle of rolls beforehand and it's a game that kind of just lets you do whatever you want to do in this playground that they've built for you which is probably a pretty natural way to lead into the gameplay portion of this video so I want to talk a little bit about the gameplay in the world and how these things fit together which is mostly just some general stuff I wanted to cover that didn't quite make sense anywhere else in the video now gameplay-wise we are controlling our character of course and then moving through what is kind of like a big sandbox and then in certain places we can move on to the next big sandbox which the game considers a different region but there's no sort of world map or anything you can teleport in between waypoints you'll find which act as fast travel markers now the downside to that is that I think the nature of that makes it feel less like a big world that I'm exploring versus a more linear Adventure where I'm just kind of playing in one sandbox and then moving on to the next when I'm done which is a little I would say juxtaposed between the first half of the game in the second because while there are three acts to this game I would say acts one and two comprise the first half of the game and act three is the second half you see when you move on from act one to act two and step into the shadow cursed lands you can actually go back and do things you hadn't already done but as you move into that new region things will advance choices will be cut off so things will change essentially however everything you do in act 1 and two in whatever order you do them is leading towards that one Central Point which you need then to overcome and then enter act three which is the city and then act three the city is this big sort of dynamic open sandbox which has like crowd features which means there are generic NPCs walking around to sort of fill out the streets every house almost has something unique and interesting going on there's all sorts of stuff to get up to steal from people interact with and that part of the game feels more like a living breathing City and while if you play the game enough you can absolutely find the limits of that I don't think most people are playing this game quite as much as I am or have rather so I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to say but my point in telling you all that is to talk about reactivity versus choice and consequence within the game world now I would definitely say a game like this has a lot of choice and consequence but it is a bit different than I would say the way it's approached elsewhere as I mentioned when I talked about Divinity Originals in two quite some time ago from now but that game has an incredible amount of reactivity and balers Gate 3 is much the same the game will react to so much that you do and try to do which is where things like it's justice system come in you can get thrown into jail you can get attacked by guards you can turn into a full murder hobo and there's consequences to that if you try to kill everyone the game has backup characters in special cases for you and the game will definitely react to the choices you are making and often times that will have consequences to them but by that same token everything you do in that regard is leading towards one kind of central point like I mentioned and that's going to fence you in narratively until you get where you're going and you compare that to the choice and consequence of other games that set you on a completely unique path that is something you wouldn't see otherwise and I think you can get what I mean when I say it's a little bit different which means much of the game playay for balers Gate 3 involves entering the new Sandbox finding all the key players finding how you can interact with various points what the outcomes are what you'd like to pursue what you may be like to ignore making your choices and then seeing the outcomes to those choices such as one Ally versus another in the culmination of the final battle and a lot of that is formed through conversation and dice roles where we're going to be putting our skills to the test as well as all of our bonuses to those roles of course trying to coerce persuade or simply beat people to death on our way to our ultimate goal and that I would say is where the game play and all the systems and everything really come together to make what balers Gate 3 is all about they give you this big playground they tell you to go have fun with it however you want and you take the characters you've built and all these emerging gameplay systems and you throw them together to try to get the desired outcome and if you fail you can either roll with that and see what happens next is sometimes that can lead to an interesting result in and of itself or you can simply reload try again and approach things how you want so on the gamep playay side of this it really is I would say probably one of the best games at capturing what playing at a tabletop with your friends is all about where you just kind of do crazy Shenanigans and see how things pan out potentially or it's a more serious role playing Adventure and ultimately that choice is up to you because they've given you the systems and the tools in many cases to approach that the way you want to approach it which is why a game like this is going to be a lot of different things to a lot of different people now in terms of the world I do think they captured what the setting did really well which is what balers gate was supposed to be I think it's a little unfortunate we didn't get to see the upper City but even what's available of the city has tons of content there's all sorts sorts of interconnected branches of this world meeting at that Center Point that takes into account all the different lore from the setting all the different races you might run into such as dragon born and what they're getting up to in their day-to-day on top of the consequences to your actions against the backdrop of this big threat so all in all I would say both in its gamep playay and its World the game feels incredibly Dungeons and Dragons and I think that's most of what you could have asked for from a game like this and that finally brings us to our steam deck section before we will be wrapping this thing up so I always like to include the steam deck portion of my reviews here and this is no exception but I'm sure a lot of people know this information by now balers Gate 3 is verified on the steam deck it's got controller support it's got Cloud saves and it runs pretty well I did have some issues running in the actual City with patch 4 but otherwise it was pretty good you might have to adjust your settings to get an exact stable frame rate but even the default one is pretty solid and you combine that with the unique controller support that actually kind of changes the layer out and control scheme and how you move and interact it can actually feel very different from playing it on a mouse and keyboard so it's pretty obvious they put a ton of effort into making this playable on Steam deck and you can definitely do so and now we're going to talk about some positives and some negatives now the positives of balers Gate 3 for me are the production values it must be said I mean the level of cinematic quality here in a crpg is basically unheard of I mean it's Bar None it's kind of at the top of its class in that regard like that's just a level of quality you don't see in games like this but the other positives are of course the smart changes to fifth edition D and D they made a lot of just really solid changes to make that system more interesting and while I still prefer other systems overall if I'm being honest the changes they've made and how they've freed you up to do things like interact with all sorts of items which can combine in interesting ways with builds that aren't restricted by multiclass restrictions Etc all leads to a system that is more fun than I think tabletop fifth edition is and it's no surprise that a lot of those changes that I enjoy so much much then lead to different emergent and dynamic gameplay elements that really add so much to how you approach and Tackle combat and choices and consequences that other games in the genre definitely have not done but we have seen the beginnings of in Divinity original sin 2 which had similar approaches to a lot of this stuff but was still a very different game but as always there are a few negatives and in terms of balers Gate 3 there's a surprising lack of quality of life features I didn't talk about it too much but trying to transfer items to characters in Camp that aren't in your party is a pain you have to invite them to and from your party to access their inventory to change it easily to swap out equipment with someone and it's a big pain then it and then at character creation you can't see the changes that they've made to fifth edition D and to plan your build appropriately without going to a Wiki or just kind of seeing what happens when you get to that level and for a game that does as much right as this does to then drop the ball on very simple things that would have made made this game more enjoyable that other games in the genre have done is a bit disappointing though obviously not a deal breaker there's also the fact that the game lacks a certain amount of challenge I really do think this game could use one more difficulty if anything just an option to customize the difficulty maybe adjust some specific modifiers even to get to a challenge you feel comfortable with would be a very welcome change and while yes a game like this is very much so focused on the role playing the party the characters Etc there are people like myself who play these games to enjoy the systems that they are based on that is to say the tabletop rule sets and getting to enjoy the story and the party and getting to know them while also engaging with all those fun tactical elements is a big part of that for me at least and the game could stand to at least have the option to make it more difficult or customize that experience in some way but again a relatively minor problem and then for my final negative it is an interesting thing because on one hand I think laran has done better with it and in terms of this game than they ever have previously but it's still a bit of an issue and that is the quality once you get towards the later end points of the game which was a concern of mine leading up to the release and to their credit they got it patched up and working much better very quickly which is not something that could be said of divinity original in too which had to wait for the enhanced Edition to roll around and I'm sure some of it is absolutely down to everything going on in the city itself but once you get to that point in the game and especially when the game ends and you see the epilogues roll and it's just kind of not really big satisfying closure to the game itself and then you don't see the upper city outside of it just being destroyed for instance and it can have a problem with closing out this already Grand Adventure and while it is honestly certainly hard to complain about enjoying a game so much that it kind of eventually had to end and they had to at some point make that ending happen and I would just say that it's a game that struggles to bring a satisfying into all the decisions and fun you had along the way and that can lead to a bit of an underwhelming finish in an otherwise great game which brings me to my conclusion over the course of this very long review probably one of the longest if not the longest I've done I hope I've made it clear that there's so much about this game that I enjoy and that I love and that's why I played it for 11 playthroughs in like 500 hours but as much as people have loved this game I also don't think it's perfect I think they dro the ball on some places that other crpgs have gotten right for a long time I think some options just to make the game harder would be welcome and I've got some picks about the lore and the story here and there so while I think this is an incredible game I do think there's also things that other games in the genre do better than this one does but a lot of that is simply a matter of preference I admit and those nitpicks aside balage Gate 3 is truly a remarkable game which means recommending it is a foregone conclusion if you hadn't figured that out by now it's a wonderful game I think everyone who's even remotely interested in it should definitely try it out but perhaps what's more interesting to me about this game is something we'll just have to wait to see how it pans out and that is to say the game's Legacy what this is going to be remembered as what it's going to inspire in the future because in so many ways balers Gate 3 is such a unique title in both the genre and just on its own I think larryan themselves is going to have such a tough time following this game up because I just don't think it's something that could easily be replicated by any stretch of the imagination what's more is that as I've alluded to throughout this review other games in this genre are their own unique experiences that are very different from this so while I can hardly speak to what happens from here where the genre goes or anything like that or grandiose claims about how this has changed the standards of the industry what I can say is that I hope this game and its approaches to things and the success that it found in doing what it set out to do in a very specific way inspires people to try to make their own unique things in that exact Manner and I hope this game inspires a lot of people to check out the rest of the genre that I personally loves so much and while you'll hardly find anything that matches the you know sheer production value of this to be honest which is why a lot of them have struggled to find that mainstream audience but I hope this encourages people to try them out because it is just a fantastic genre that balers Gate 3 is an incredibly welcome and amazing addition too and to sort of end this video before I wrap it up there is kind of one last thing I wanted to mention and that is that The Balter gate series as a whole is a series that has had a profound impact on my life both you know simply playing the games The Originals when I was pretty young I was only like 10 when I picked up the first one and in terms of covering them I've played and reviewed the older games I've made videos about them how to get into them chances are if you're watching this video there's not an insubstantial shot that you might have watched those videos previously as they did exceptionally well around the release of balers Gate 3 and being able to make those guides and share the genre that I love while also being able to make a living off of it which I've been doing for a while I've been reviewing games for a few years which has been my full-time job has just been a wild experience as the baldder gate Series has always been such a catalyst to building up a community around the things that I enjoy and get an opportunity to talk about so much which was really exemplified by this game and in fact all of my videos and guides and everything did so well on the leadup 2 and after this game launched that the ad Revenue I earned off of those videos has put me in a position to pay off my house covering balers Gate 3 and honestly continuing to cover if they put out any big updates or expansions or DLC wherever they happen to go from here who knows but regardless of what's to come I can genuinely say that balers Gate 3 was a lifechanging game for me which is bizarre to say the very least so if you've enjoyed any of the content I've made on this game if my guides have helped you out on this or the previous ones and if any of those videos got you to hang around the channel and check out a myriad of other different games that are all their own unique and interesting experience with upsides and downsides all their own I wanted to take a moment to just say thank you to the community as it has been a pretty overwhelming experience for me and while I don't know what's going to happen in terms of larryan studios and where the industry goes what I can say is that for me I hope you stick around I'll be doing more reviews I love video games I love this genre and I hope people stick around so I can talk about more of them with you that though is going to do it for this very long video I hope you enjoyed it I hope you found it informative if you did like comment subscribe all the YouTube jazz but regardless of any of that truly just thank you so much for watching I really do appreciate it may you wander in wisdom and have an amazing [Music] day

Channel: Mortismal Gaming

Views: 313,485

Keywords: Mortym, Mortismal Gaming, Baldurs Gate, BG3, BG2, BG1, Baldur's Gate, baldur's gate 3 story, baldurs gate 3, bg3 story, bg3 gameplay, bg3 multiclassing, baldurs gate 3 multiclassing, bg3 classes, bg3 review, baldurs gate 3 review, baldur's gate 3 combat, baldur's gate 3 review, baldur's gate 3 new reviews, bg3 multiplayer, bg3 release showcase, bg3 monk overview, bg3 class overview, bg3 best classes, baldurs gate 3 best classes, bg3 class rankings, bg3 best subclasses

Id: owjosaOjhVs

Length: 84min 45sec (5085 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2023