The Most Amazing Thing About 'Baldur's Gate 3'

everyone knows that balers Gate 3 is amazing it's kind of a foregone conclusion at this point you hear balers Gate 3 you go oh yeah it's that awesome game that won all these Awards and deserved every single one of them right well one of the most common things that I've had to do recently with my friends and family is explain to them just why balers Gate 3 is so good because when everybody's saying that it's great it doesn't really do anybody any favors especially if you're already on the outside of that group and you don't understand why it's so great and when I'm live streaming over on Luke Stevens live my second channel for streams and clips and stuff which you should definitely check out when you get a chance I get asked this question all the time people coming in and wondering whether this is a game they should try what makes it so special blah Bluey blah blah so today I figured it would be fun to Showcase what I think in my humble opinion is the most impressive and amazing thing about balers Gate 3 the one thing it does that almost no other games in a single decade manag to to pull off and that is pure unbridled freedom and agency you see in any video game there's a balancing act that has to take place where the developers are trying to decide between how much Freedom they give the player and how many rules and like training wheels and safety railings they put on the experience to keep you going down the path that they need you to go down to have the best time the easiest example of this trade-off would be in say a narrative game like The Last of Us you have a lot of freedom and how you go through levels but at the end of the day you can't actually influence the story you can't kill off main characters that you might need for future story sequences there are limitations to what you can do but those limitations are put in place in order to service the overall experience of the game or in the case of other RPGs or open World adventure games there might be certain challenges or puzzles that you face but usually there's only one or two ways of dealing with those difficulties if you're playing a game like assassin's Creed Odyssey which is a massive open World adventure game in its own right you can be faced with a major boss fight and usually there's only two ways of dealing with it either you fight the boss and defeat him or you find another way to perhaps talk your way out of it avoiding a violent confrontation completely but in balers Gate 3 there are so many ways for you to handle any situation Under the Sun it frankly is headache inducing there was a phenomenal video put together by Momo O'Brien if you're not subscribed to her I highly recommend you go check out her Channel but she did this video how I got immersed in balers Gate 3 like 3 months ago breaking down why the game is so good in her opinion and it's a fantastic watch I'll have it linked below you should definitely check it out but one of the thing she breaks down is the goblin Camp encounter and all of the different varying ways you can take on that challenge and she asked her community for input on how it worked and and how they were able to overcome the challenge and their persp perspective and it's absolutely crazy the variability of options and approaches it it's absolutely mindboggling or should I be punny it's absolutely mind Goblin okay it didn't land I you know what it sounded funny in my head I was like bog bogling bogling Goblin it but it didn't land it didn't land but we're going to keep it in cuz I need to learn from this and grow so we're leaving it in as cringe as it is for example you can get through this Goblin Camp by poisoning the punch bowl in the middle of the camp you basically go in there drop some poison into it if you can sneak your way over there and once you've done that all of the Goblins will go drink after you give a toast to the camp and they all drop dead poisoned it's crazy or you can just Walt your way into the goblin camp and if you're a Dr they just let you in otherwise you have to pass a couple of pers uion checks and then you're let in like it's no big deal the Goblins can also tease you and try to trick you into smearing poop on your face and if you do that you'll be allowed in and everybody will laugh at you as they talk to you or you can use the horn given to you by the ogres that you meet in the blighted village and they'll be called in to assist you if you choose to go in guns of Blazing and take everybody out before heading into the inner areas to take on the goblin leadership I've seen other clips of people going and placing oil barrels all over the encampment and then launching One Singular Fireball at one of them causing everything to explode killing absolutely everybody in a huge Fireball of Glory like seriously if you can think of something and you're like maybe this could work maybe I could deal with that problem in this creative way it will work they have accounted for so many things it is frankly outrageous and because the systems they've built are so robust you can get away with a lot of stuff you probably shouldn't get away with but that makes it all the more amazing because at its core the thing that balers Gate 3 does best is that it allows you to break the game to use your player agency to come up with Creative Solutions to problems even if that might make the game like more fragile it can break you can ruin your save if you happen to screw up and end up killing somebody you need to progress the main story they let you do that because they want this world to feel real to feel as though you can actually make a difference in it and change it and it's so robust that you actually can quickly little like spoiler warning though not really for one of the Final Bosses of act two at the very end of it like seeing this is not going to spoil anything but if you didn't want to know what the arena looks like I guess consider this a spoiler but that being said let me show you what somebody was able to do four months ago that absolutely blew up the community to set this up you need to understand that a Starion can run with what's known as a Twist of Fortune mace it's a really simple object that doesn't seem that c crazy at first it's only a rare it's not like a very rare item it's just rare doesn't seem that crazy it has a heart stomper Smash and enemy's chest in possibly inflict chest trauma that's cool that will mean that they have disadvantage on Constitution saving throws and they have one less action that could be super useful it has concussive smash which can cause days on the target which is super cool but the particular perk that people found the most interesting was this one down here Blood Money strike out greedily dealing additional proficiency bonus piercing damage per 300 gold that the target possesses the gold will be consumed what does this mean well if the target has 300 gold in their inventory and you use this weapon it will deal an additional amount of piercing damage equal to the proficiency bonus for the character using the weapon you see where this is going yeah Somebody went in and pickpocketed a major boss for the end of act two and this is what's known as a reverse pickpocket where you pickpocket the target but you're putting something in their inventory instead of taking it out so they placed 15,000 gold coins into krick's inventory and then using the twist of Fortune mace they struck him causing an absolute monstrosity of damage one-shotting the boss and causing him to just drop dead like absolute Madness it's crazy another player also did this with the late game Boss and did some other boosts and perks to give themselves higher likelihood of Landing Critical Hits and after placing 87,000 gold into the endgame boss's pockets they did a total of minimum 1 d8 + one plus 1,160 damage to the boss which is enough to one-hot like pretty much anything in fifth edition of D and D and and as a result balers Gate 3 in addition the only way a boss could get out of this is if they had an armor set that did like a flat damage reduction for each individual attack coming in which for example Krick his armor does but after he changes form it no longer has that armor so then he just takes the raw damage but this number does not even include the potential for critical hits which would increase this number even higher to like, 1300 to 1,400 total damage taken with a single shot now granted it consumes the gold during the course of this and my understanding is that's something they patched in they still wanted players to be able to do this if they really wanted to but they decided that you shouldn't be able to just reverse pickpocket in like 87,000 gold coins into a boss's pocket kill them one shot and then take it back out of their inventory so it consumes the gold now when it happens it kind of burns up as a result of the piercing damage but still it's a crazy cool way that you could one-hot a final late game boss just because you came up with a creative way of doing it it's awesome but this is one of those things that a lot of other developers might like steer clear of allowing the player to do a lot of other developers might be like no this is the big final boss fight we've spent a lot of time and money developing this fight it's going to be awesome it's like five phases we're not going to let the player just bypass it all with a single shot but that's exactly what laran did with balers gate they're like hey if the player can come up with a creative way to One-Shot a boss and deal like 1,200 damage in a single blow they probably earned the right to just skip the rest of the boss fight that's just awesome so they let them do it and I think it's great now okay the next little thing I'm going to show you has since been patched out allegedly I have not tried it since the latest patch but it did work in the game for a good long while and I'm going to show it to you because it just shows how robust these game systems are that you can kind of push and prod and sort of Break Stuff and the game doesn't have any immediate fail safes they'll let you do it even though it's a little weird let me just show you so this has to do with our good friend carlac which uh this is a little gruesome a little little rough but it shows you just how cool and robust these systems are you basically are tasked very early on in the game with going and finding this character who's causing trouble for another NPC you find and they task you with killing her bringing her head back and then you'll get this cool sword really simple and straight forward upon arriving you realize it's carlac and if you've seen any promotional stuff for the game you realize this is one of your potential companions so you can either choose to still kill her and get that cool sword or you can let her go recruit her as a companion as a barbarian companion early in the game which is a huge benefit since the early game is very heavily like in favor of melee melee is kind of op in the early game so you can choose which way you want to go however players realized a few months ago that you could get kind of The Best of Both Worlds and also a really funny outcome as well you see what you do is you go up to the body after you've killed carlac with your party and then you have to select the remove head option and then switch to a different playable character on your team revive her switch back to the character that's currently in dialogue select to remove her head after she's technically been revived and then after the somewhat gruesome little sequence plays out you then switch back and you will see a version of carlac that is fully functional can talk and walk and do whatever without any restrictions but that no longer has a head and you could play through the entire game with a headless carlac without any issue like it would just work this is a video from Pickle Time who put this together uh like two months ago back in October and they did a great job just quickly showing how it works and I got to hand it to them it's kind of crazy now like I said since this they have patched it out you can no longer do it but if you were to play an older version of the game you could actually play through the whole thing my understanding is at least that you could do it with a headless carlac with her like delivering dialogue going through like emotional cut scenes and everything just without a head on top of her model which I find really really funny granted this was an exploit but it was an example of how the game was built in a way where it allowed for players to do things in Creative orders to bypass certain consequences and certain outcomes and I just find it really funny so even if it doesn't prove the point of this video that well I still wanted to share it and then this last one is something that I've experimented with and people are always asking me like what kind of games do you play in your spare time what do you do in your spare time when you're working on like critiques and videos and stuff and a lot of the time it's just me screwing around with stuff trying to break it seeing how robust the game actually is and if it will put up with my stupider decisions quick little spoiler warning towards the end of act two again I'm not going to go into any story details or anything revealing any major plot points but it is an area and you're going to see a character that you might not have seen otherwise so I'll just try to keep it vague but I I guess be warned that there are technically spoilers that you'll see so what you need to understand is at this point in the game at this particular save file we are dealing with with a big scary character over here players who have not done the sequence before will just see a big scary character and think that they're about to go into combat with him so I was like what would a player do here well they would probably try to get some sort of advantage against this big scary boss looking character that's right up in front of us right so I decided to have shadowart go and cast polymorph and polymorph as you can see is a level four transmutation spell and when it succeeds in other words when the target fails a wisdom saving throw that Target is transformed and polymorphed into a little baby sheep with three Health points which means that if this succeeds you can just straight up bypass entire boss fight so long as they don't have like immutable form which is a an ability or perk that a character can have in the D and D Universe which means that they can't have this happen to them they can't be polymorphed into something else but guess what our friend right here does not have that ability so I cast it on him and sure enough he fails the save gets transformed into a sheep and then when I walk close the cutscene triggers and I mean I'm not going to spoil it I'm just going to let this play and you can just watch as this this plays out with like dialogue and everything and then just a floating sheep randomly just randomly there just floating in the background you can see him but he's still there as a sheep sheep in the cut scene I like you can see the camera movements are still rigged doesn't quite make sense she's just drop kicking a sheep it's just outrageous the whole thing is outrageous I just when I got this working I was just genuinely stunned that it worked before you do anything and then he talks to you and then he talks to you I'm not joking there's like an entire dialogue sequence where you're supposed to be talking to the Mind flare but instead you're just talking to a gigantic monstrous sheep person so the dialogue will carry out with him as a sheep since he was transformed into it his skeleton and like rig will morph him into a standing up like humanoid looking sheep with his legs on backwards it's really really disturbing and disorienting but it works the game will let you do it and then this whole dialogue sequence plays out with him as a weird monster demon sheep and then he drops back down to nor normal it's just it's just so stupid and I love it so much but this is the magic of D and D except it's been translated into a video game and it still kind of works the crazy thing about D and D is that if you go I'm going to try this outrageous thing and I'm going to turn this boss into a sheep and then I want to Chuck the Sheep off the cliff the DM is like okay well I plan this whole boss fight but I guess you can try and then if you roll well enough and the opponent rolls badly enough that can happen there are no limit itations really in most instances on what can or can't happen it's just up to your imagination and that's also true in this game and before anybody asks yes of course I tried it with another boss as well and it does work with other bosses again story spoilers for the same rough general area of the game because I just wanted to see if they let you do it with all of these characters and you can in fact do it with all of them with this one we're in the middle of combat and I was like yeah you know what Gail died I'm I'm down to just try some wacky stuff so I tried polymorph on on our friend here that I will not go into too much detail on just in case you don't want spoilers he failed his wisdom saving throw gets transformed into a sheep and then once it's back to my player character's turn he shoves the sheep and is able to use a pushing attack and it succeeds and then he gets knocked all the way down into Oblivion and you would think hey maybe the developers would not let you like polymorph it so that it strength it stat drops such that now it's really easy to shove off a cliff but no they let you do it and it's freaking fantastic and I even tried it again before you engage him in discussion and dialogue triggering the big combat encounter where he brings all of these Undead to help him fight and you can actually cast polymorph on him while he's just there not aggroed on anything and if he fails his wisdom saving throw he gets transformed into the Sheep runs runs off and tries to fight you oneon-one as a sheep you can just like either try to pick him up and throw him or you can go and shove him off the cliff it's actually easier to shove than to pick him up and throw him but you could pick him up and throw him if you wanted to and once you've done that you can just shove him off he goes flying he dies it's over and you bypass fighting all of the other guys you just straight up skip a massive boss fight with tons of extra enemies helping him just because you did it in a different order so he's a sheep therefore he can't cast the spells to bring up all the undead so you can just buypass it and then you're just chucking a sheep off a cliff it's crazy but this is what I mean like just ask yourself when was the last time you played a video game and you came up with some way of doing something that you don't think anybody else has tried or you haven't seen anybody else try and it's just so crazy cool that you want to clip it and send it and share it with your friends like when was the last time you did that that maybe you had a really cool quick scope or something in Call of Duty maybe you you got the dub in fortnite or something like that but like it's a pretty rare thing to be playing a game and for something so cool to happen that you think of it for days and days or weeks I'm going to remember this for years no doubt I probably am never going to forget this like this was so crazy and stupid that it's just funny and very very memorable but listen that is the magic of balers Gate 3 that they enable players to think creatively and come up with crazy solutions to problems that you would never think would work and yet they do because they put the dice in your court or hands or whatever the analogy would require they leave it up to you to tell the story in whatever way you want if it's the way that they kind of broadly outlined it great but if you choose to go along and like delete one of the endgame bosses just yeus deletus him right off off of this astral plane because you came up with this really cool way of maximizing damage awesome if you decide instead that you don't want to use any of these other like combat perks and stuff or the ithd powers because it hurts your roleplay and you want to role play as somebody trying to remain pure and and unaffected by that you can do that and the game is just as viable as it would be otherwise and I think the thing that I find most impressive about all of this is that it shows a real confidence in the player to enable them to do whatever they want to give them all of these tools and to just let them play you know it shows that they have a lot of confidence in their player base coming up with Creative Solutions coming up with ways of dealing with these problems that they'll be presented with and figuring out how to get around those problems a lot of other developers it feels so often like they need to handhold everybody through every encounter because they don't trust that they'll be able to figure it out themselves or because they don't feel as though the player will figure it out unless they have 15 objective markers and all these explanations and tutorials popping up all the time and then an NPC saying oh by the way have you tried solving the puzzle this way try that like it drives me crazy but in balers skate they're just like no here it is go have fun figure it out and I understand why some people might find that sort of free roam gameplay design kind of overwhelming because frankly it is overwhelming but by God once you learn to embrace it and you learn kind of how the the tools work within the game itself it just turns balers Gate 3 into a massive playground where you can just do whatever you want where you can figure it out in any way you want and the replayability is off the charts and I just I can't stop gushing about it I could be here talking about it for hours and hours on end and I would never shut up so I will I'll stop there to save your ears from having to deal with my sick voice any further but let me know what your favorite part of balers Gate 3 is in the comment section below and if you have not tried it comment down below as well and tell the community what your holdup is what you like or don't like about it and who knows maybe somebody will be able to convince you to give the game a shot you never know I don't have any sponsors or anything for this video it's just myself so if you enjoyed it please hit the Subscribe button like the video and if you want a really cool Shir luk Stevens tv.com again luk Stevens tv.com just look it up hip makes you stupid never has a more true word been spoken than what I uh what I just said um hype makes you stupid it's kind of a catchphrase around here the only game you're allowed to be hyped for is balers gate 4 if that ever happens by gu can you imagine if we got a balers gate 4 anytime in the next decade I would lose it but that's all for me thank you for watching I love you all dearly again remember like subscribe blah blah blah I love you I'll see you in the next one hugs and kisses bye-bye

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 175,089

Keywords: luke stephens, luke stephens baldurs gate 3, luke stephens bg3, bg3, baldurs gate 3 critique, bg3 sheep

Id: 93zOJsWN4cQ

Length: 22min 57sec (1377 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 09 2024