I PLAYED Baldur's Gate 3 - My Honest Impressions

salutations everybody it is Maddie here today sitting down to talk to all of you about Baldur's Gate three I've put 15 hours into the final version of the game thus far many many more to go and I just wanted to deliver some impressions today we got review codes pretty late for this one just this past Sunday so I've had a handful of days with the game to chip away at it and really stick my teeth into it without rushing of course and I have absolutely been loving every single second of it even when the game is kicking my ass all over the place it's been absolutely phenomenal now we will be doing a full on review for this game probably later into this month or I would imagine more like next month look that's just par for the course with these layering games they're meaty they're dense they're highly replayable and I like to do all of that before delivering my review there's actually only one Divinity original sin 2 review on this channel and I dropped it in 2019. original scene 2 came out in 2017 if you need any type of reference so yeah ladies and gentlemen I know Larry puts a ton of time into these games to make them highly replayable so I like to give them the same respect back and put a ton of time into their game before delivering my final verdict so with that ladies and gentlemen if you're new here you're into Impressions previews or of course reviews you're in the right place consider subscribing let's begin with just airing out a couple of issues I have with the game so far just so you're aware of them I think that's important in a preview setting is to know what problems may or may not exist before I get into all the really cool stuff so first and foremost a little bit of performance issues here on PC where I'm currently playing the game performance jobs happen in areas with lots of things happening on screen particularly lots of particle effects there was one town I arrived in that was on fire and yeah the frame rate went right through the floor this is on my beefy rig over here that has a 3080 in it so it's no shortage of power that's causing all this that's what typically happens with this game is when things get busy the frame memory drops what I also noticed is generally it's just not a stable frame rate at all like I'll just be running around the world and it's kind of jittery is it super noticeable like you're dipping down to the low 30s not at all maybe you're fluctuating down to the high 40s low 50s but still I know frame rate is a huge thing for a ton of people as someone who plays a lot of retro games on retro rebound I don't lose my mind over it but something you should be aware of the other thing is the experience when navigating the UI has been improved compared to Divinity original sin 2 but it's still a bit messy especially when combing through your inventory it's awful I gotta be honest but this has always been a problem with their games and some people like the crunchy nature of taking time to sift through things I wish it was a bit more organized and layered better and then last but not least this isn't really a complaint but just a fair warning this game is going to filter a lot of people because it is super super difficult now I love that about these games I love that no single combat encounter in any Larry and game I've played is a cakewalk that is one of the best parts about it but a lot of people are looking at this thing and it's gonna be cutesy fun time and uh you're gonna get spanked so be ready so those are just a few things I think things that are nice and early now I'm gonna Fanboy my ass off for the rest of the video so let's get into that part so yeah the spirit of old school Golden Ages I like to call it BioWare is alive and well here in Baldur's Gate three these are things like the camp from Dragon Age Origins and generally speaking the presentation when it comes to dialogue in the game there's also skill checks of Plenty it's basically Dungeons and Dragons where you have tons of dice rolling and various Buffs and debuffs factoring into those dice rolls depending on builds you've made companions who are with you items you've picked up and it ties all this together to give you a ultimate dice roll that allows you to skill check past certain moments in the game convincing people to walk away from things give you money to give you items to maybe not fight you and still get XP all this type of stuff and because combat's so dangerous it makes these skill checks incredibly valuable and oh God do they hurt when you miss them so bad but this game just like d d you can gain inspiration and so there are times you'll be able to re-roll a failed dice roll and that's not necessarily saying that you're guaranteed to succeed but it does give you a second chance at life if you really want to bypass a certain area without saves coming now I mentioned the presentation being a big BioWare Factor here the motion capture for both faces and upper body gestures overall did impress me and completely added to the dialogue so instead of what you got in the original sin one and two where most of your adventuring and dialogue was done from the sky and even most of that dialogue was conducted in little text boxes at the bottom of the screen I didn't mind this as a crunchy RPG fan but for a lot of people again I mentioned filtering earlier this was something that made it not as much of an intimate experience now with this game Baldur's Gate 3 you can bring the camera in while you're adventuring over the shoulder the camera is naturally brought in during any form of dialogue and again the faces as well well as the upper body and their gestures as they're talking is very very impressive to me because when someone wants to make a point it didn't appear to me like they're using one of maybe 10 preset animations to cycle between and talking points like we see in so many RPGs I know it's not infinite but they're used in an intelligent humanizing way that makes it incredibly believable it makes these characters feel lifelike it aids in making them feel real and when you combine that with compared to past larian games more striking visuals it adds to the overall presentation package here this is not just oh they're trying to make a higher budget game like some people have sort of hand waved it away this type of stuff matters you can read the emotion on some characters faces now it's not always perfect there are moments where as your character who's not voiced responds to things with really awkward facial animations that's where it's not perfect but when characters are talking to to you and you see them kind of timing their words with dropping their finger like this sort of way that type of stuff light to fire under me I'm like that's cool you just don't see that often in video games and you may be thinking Maddie you are such a fanboy you are completely over exaggerating and I I get that but I promise you this is a big deal and makes them feel very believable and that was clearly the goal here and to me I feel mission accomplished thus far the dialogue in the terms of presentation has been elevated what you will notice because everything is of a higher production value the camera is being pulled in there's much more animation yeah you don't get a million in one dialogue options like you previously did in older larion games in original sin 2 you'd have characters speaking to you in theatrics very Shakespearean they would bust out a thesaurus for every conceivable word and then tie them all together somehow and give you these absolute novels of dialogue and then you you have a million to one responses it has been shortened a bit so a common number of replies you'll have in conversations is three to four which I think is a totally acceptable number but if you're looking for your five six and sevens except for characters that are major ones that you'll have multiple choices and approaches to certain situations and questions to ask you're not really going to see all that but again I think the trade-off here is worthwhile because you still have the depth of choice that you know is in a learning game with better more old school bioware-like presentations so it's a real meeting of these two worlds that I appreciate so much and again really makes me happy to see now speaking of dialogue and characters and facial capture and all that stuff let's talk about characters right because that's kind of what defines these games which by the way I've never played Baldur's Gate one or two and I know some people are like you're just sitting on those games I'm gonna try them one day but I have to admit the combat doesn't look like something that's gonna hold me I will be the one who gets filtered so I'm at four major characters Will carlak Shadow heart as well as Lazelle a lot of these are very early in the game let's talk about my girl Carla oh my God she is awesome she is amazing uh hot and cold devil who's both parts a fierce Warrior and a jokester her dialogue is just hilarious but at the same time she kicks butt she's a barbarian that absolutely rinses in combat we'll talk about combat in a little bit but she is awesome easily like instantly one of my favorite characters just the voice actress the spirit of the character you could tell this is probably like inside the studio favorite like she just has so much going on she's again this devil that is really nice but also just gets angry in a Flash and she has a Contraption within her which is a heart like a a mechanical heart it's a very interesting in compelling character with a lot of layers to her just immediately off the get-go and she's being hunted by paladins and you gotta help her out it's really great stuff I immediately thought this character was one that I had to learn everything about and it's going to be my party from start to finish will is interesting because he sort of feeds off of karlak in a unique way given their past Shadow heart is another really cool one love her voice actress I feel all the voice Talent they've picked is extremely unique here which I certainly appreciate but shadowheart has this pain going on in her hand and so she's kind of mysterious to me right now but because of that I'm intrigued I want to keep her around and learn more about her and Lazelle we might even be saying her name wrong but look bit of an uphill battle for our girl here because um look she she just has this typical prideful Warrior shtick this is where all the theatrical dialogue went to her into a Undead dude you'll find in your Camp just not grabbing me right now she's easily the one who gets kicked out the second I get someone more interesting but hopefully it's a nice deceiving twist and there's more to her there but so far out of everyone I've experienced and dove into their personal arcs and seeing parts of their character missions she's been the most predictable of the bunch however what ties this entire party together and why they're venturing together is a parasite in their head and so they can see each other's memories and learn about one another in Intimate detail and not really hide anything from each other and it also becomes a bit of a skill check that you can use where if you feel like one of your party members is testing you lying to you and you kind of want to stay in the right with them like Shadow heart was doing this to me and I was like I want to stay cool with Shadow heart I actually was able to read her mind without her knowing and realized she was testing me and then I navigated through that in the conversation and got her approval which was really cool that I could manipulate things like that so yeah the characters here are great but let's talk gameplay so far oh my God okay I know Divinity original sin one and two especially two were really difficult games but holy smokes this game is hard right now for me now the first couple levels of any d d campaign I I've experienced at least has always been the most difficult you eventually get more powerful spells and abilities and multiple attacks per turn and suddenly you're steamrolling for a little bit but right now in the early going again warning filter possibility for people who don't like hardcore RPGs like this it is tough and that's because of so many moving Parts you have your class subclass race specializations can trip spell slots resting Buffs debuffs there may be the possibility that when you fire this game up and you go into the Character Creator and you look at everything that you want to have attached to your camera character and then everything for your guardian and everything for every little companion you get oh boy yeah you're gonna do a lot of reading and you may take a while like I have getting out of that tutorial area at a certain point it is overwhelming and you do start to gloss over things especially if you've never played D before fortunately I and many of you out there have so things like can trips I'm like what is that I've never heard of that before right for a lot of players who haven't gotten to DND but this will introduce you to a lot of things in tabletop gaming and might do the adverse thing where you might actually want to go play tabletop after this game and experience all the cool campaigns that some DMS may be making for you so there's a lot to manage here and all those things I mentioned factor into the gameplay so yeah it's DND and the reason I say all that is it's not just the original sin 2 with another coat of paint yeah you'll see things in there that you'll remember from those games like archers doing more damage from High Ground having a better percentage chance of Landing their attack or the world being so highly interactive that you can solve your problems in a multitude of ways like I found a character who was in a house that was on fire and I just took out my bone arrow and kept shooting the wall nearby and I made my way in there and was able to save them through a skill check you can do these types of things and there were other ways I could have gone in there maybe with like a frost spell and taking out the fire or water spell taking out the fire you can do those types of things like you could in original sin too and there's even things like you better have a revive scroll on you because if a character dies they don't just come back to life at the end of the battle you either gotta hoof it back to a town that you've already gone to and buy a Rectify scroll there or have one on your party that you can then use to bring them back to life so yeah there's a lot of things going on in this combat it's difficult every encounter they just hit you with these impossible odds but when you overcome it it feels so good and again it encourages those skill checks where you know what like I ran into this one uh troll like character that was kicking my butt but I interacted with them in combat and was actually able to convince him to attack his own tribe so he helped me out and then I killed him afterwards and took his loot so it was cool that I could do those things so there's intermittent choices everywhere and the game encourages you to think a lot what I will say is for those of you who are watching this and excited for PlayStation 5 is right now I did this whole entire review on an Xbox controller and what I will say is the controller experience here has been for the most part really good these are things like when you bring up your ability wheel it's multiple wheels that you sift through with lb and RB and that works really well for me you can actually use your left stick to bring up a cursor when you're navigating the world and so you can pick and choose certain items you want to pick up just like in original sin one and two you could hold the a or x button and it'll create a radius around you and then it'll highlight everything and you can pick and choose what you want to loop from there that's easier and then you can even hold the right stick so when you walk into a room every item in there that's lootable has a label on it so it's all made really well for controllers I didn't feel like I was losing out on anything is it better on keyboard and mouse yes I would say so but there wasn't this dramatic drop down in quality by playing on a controller so console players I think you're going to be well taken care of here after tough battles you're likely going to need to rest unless you are God tier what you'll have to do is go back to your camp and what's great about this is it gives random food you'll find purpose so you'll find banana baguettes Apple etc etc all these items camp supplies are supplies that you will spend when you go to rest and so that'll restore your health it'll restore your abilities your spell slots so that you can take on the next tough battle so you want to make sure you're using your spells and abilities in those tough battles I was mentioning earlier when you absolutely 100 percent mean to if you're frivolous with it yeah you might dust a certain fight and you could keep resting and resting and resting but you're gonna blow through your supplies so you have to pick and choose when those abilities are deployed carefully it's not just oh let me restore or my Mana by sleeping at the nearest Inn you really got to think about this stuff now supplies aren't tough to find but what I like is it's kind of got that Fallout 4 effect where you're really picking a lot of things from the environment up that typically I wouldn't have messed with anyways in original sin one and two so that's a great Improvement there and while you're at the camp it gives you an ability to after a battle slow down talk to your party hey how are we doing what's going on here catch up with all of them and dialogue I should also have mentioned earlier is not super long-winded I'm totally fine with more long-winded dialogue I'm a Trails fan for God's sake so I can tolerate that stuff I know many other people out there can but again the trade-off you get when you add all this production value into the dialogue is you get better looking characters more motion capture and you get shorter conversations they're not all gonna go on very long here but this is why the resting is good you get to catch up with your party create you know an emotional attack Patrick with them get to know them better pick your romance as you would etc etc so with that ladies and gentlemen I have been enjoying this game a lot can I say bye wait for a sale or pass officially no I wouldn't feel super comfortable with that because I have yet to see a lot of this game but right now if what I am seeing is indicative of the final product I'm going to be all over this game and it may shoot up to the top of my game of the year list we shall see but ladies and gentlemen those are just some of my Impressions on Baldur's Gate three I'm looking forward to seeing your thoughts down below for those of you who played Early Access or are hotly anticipating this game please do fire away and with that take excellent care of yourselves and I will see you in the next video be sure to follow me on Twitter follow me on Instagram those links are in the description down below and a big thank you to all the patrons all the members who continue to support the heck out of the content here stay sexy stay active I love you wall purse

Channel: MrMattyPlays

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Id: yPZ2TTSj678

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 03 2023