Hello all you happy people! Josh Stoodley here with another blog post. This week I want to take about my take on Baldur’s Gate 3, having put in over five hundred hours in Early Access and close to another hundred after it released. My next post on No Blood for Business and the retcons it’s going to bring to The Standard Tech Case Files has been moved to next week. And, as always, if you enjoy my content you can support me on Patreon or buy me a hot chocolate.

First things first, this isn’t a review of Baldur’s Gate 3. I have a dim opinion of reviews and reviewers, both professional and amateur. Most professional reviewers do not play the games they review to any significant degree. At most, they may get one or two hours in before the deadline is due and they have to write something, anything, for their bosses. Amateur reviews are even worse. A quick perusal of Reddit, YouTube or Steam reviews will show that the average gamer ignores tutorials, basic logic and even the most rudimentary knowledge of gaming in order to post their ignorant views as quickly as possible. Reviews end up then untrustworthy and misleading at best, with many professional reviewers and gamers still promoting such godawful games as Skyrim, Witcher 3, Fallout and the upcoming-but-guaranteed-to-be-non-functional-at-launch Starfield. The fact that Todd Howard still has a job is, honestly, a major stain on the video game industry.

So this won’t be a review. Full confession time: I haven’t beaten the game either. Personal disdain for reviews and reviewers aside (I want my money back for Skyrim and Witcher, thanks), it’s unethical to review a product you haven’t fully completed. So this blog post will be a collection of my feelings and impressions of Baldur’s Gate 3.

Which brings us to our second point: I am not going to tell you whether or not you should buy the game. Again, personal opinions of reviews aside, it’s your money. Only you can truly decide whether or not you should spend it on an $80 CDN game. I can’t make that decision for you. What am I going to do is point out the things I enjoyed, the things I didn’t, and leave you to make up your own damned mind.

As a third point, I will try to be as vague and spoiler free as possible, but there will be spoilers so just be warned.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s talk about Baldur’s Gate 3

Full Release vs. Early Access

Like I said, I have over five hundred hours in Early Access. So I considered myself intimately familiar with Act One of Baldur’s Gate 3. I knew, more or less, where all the good items were, the optimal route for completing quests, the best strategies for clearing dungeons and beating bosses. I even had my party all planned out.

Now, Larian did say that they would change Act One considerably based on player feedback so that we who had played Early Access wouldn’t feel so burnt out. And I didn’t believe them. Companies never listen to player feedback, because a lot of it is stupid, not worth the time and money to implement, or because it would compromise their ‘artistic vision.’ At best, we would get some bug fixes and rebalances, and that would be about it.

I was wrong. Larian did substantially revise Act One, and not always for the better. Wyll was recast, and I gotta say the new Wyll is not as good as the old one. He just isn’t. Wyll’s story was also completely rewritten, partially to integrate new companion Karlach. Now, I think integrating companions into each other’s story is a good idea, but I think Wyll’s story lost a lot in the re-write. He is now much more disconnected from the plot in Act One, to the point where he spends a lot of time in cutscenes just standing around. It’s a sharp downgrade from Early Access, where Wyll’s trials and tribulations were a major driving factor in the conflict. Wyll does pick up again in Act Three, but that’s near the end of the game.

Something else that got it in the shorts is the Nautoloid tutorial area. The learning curve for BG3 is already steep as it is, to the point where I can’t blame new players for expressing their frustrations or assuming the game is too hard. It’s not like Pokémon, which is deliberately designed to be somewhat handhold-y: no, BG3 throws you in the deep end right away and keeps you there for a long time. Cutting the Nautoloid short, as they did in full release, only exacerbates the problem. Players start by fighting imps, devils, Intellect Devourers and armies of goblins, when you should really be fighting one or two goblins at level one. So that’s a major error there.

Another gripe is that the companions are far and away too forward with their secrets and amorous intentions in full release. We can forgive Wyll somewhat, as his patron shows up in the middle of camp one night to berate him. While this is a welcome addition (the patron was missing in EA), Gale has no excuse. He reveals he’s got a nuke for a heart in the middle of the first town! That’s really something that should have been reserved for a mid-game revelation, or at least early Act Two. Granted, some of Gale’s early revelations are due to certain… mechanics associated with his nuke, but that was also a bad story and gameplay decision so no points for that one, Larian.

And then there’s the romances. In Early Access, the companions followed the standard video game story logic of getting your first romance scene after the first major quest. In full release, many companions (I personally got hit on by Lae’zel, but other players have reported similar interactions with all the companions) will hit on you when your affection is still very low. The developers stated that they wanted to avoid typical video game cliché romances (which, after having suffered many of Chris Avellone’s attempts to do the same, I have no sympathy for), but man this is the wrong way to go about it. It comes across more like the companion’s dialogue is bugged, and is happening way before it should, than any kind of natural romance progression.

So is there anything I do like about full release compared to Early Access? Yeah, actually, there’s quite a lot. First off is our new companion, Karlach. Karlach starts off as a mighty Barbarian tiefling with a bubbly, happy and genuinely good personality. This is great, because until we got Karlach, our only other female companion (and fellow front-liner) was the racist, psychotic, evil and deeply irritating Lae’zel. That severely limited anybody who wanted to do good companion runs, effectively forcing them into a front-liner role because Lae’zel was just such a pain in the ass.

That brings me to the next thing I like: reclassing. The reclassing system in BG3 is the most extensive I’ve ever seen, letting you reset your companions all the way back to level one, changing their abilities, classes and subclasses. You still can’t change their backgrounds, though. The next most extensive reclassing system I’ve seen, that of Wrath of the Righteous, only lets you reclass the levels after level one. So if your monk companion starts out as a monk, they’re always going to stay at least one level of monk. That was kind of a pain in the ass. But because BG3 lets you reclass right down to the bone, you can make your companions any class they want! Want Lae’zel to be a Warlock? No problem! Want Gale to be a Fighter? Sure, why not? You can rearrange their stats so they fit whatever new class you want. It’s great, I use it to balance out my teams all the time. And it only costs 100 gold, which stops being a significant amount early in Act One.

Some other things I liked include the overhaul of armours and clothing in the game. In Early Access, Wizards and other spellcasters suffered from the usual limitations in their gear. All the robes were basically palette swaps of each other and the headgear was ridiculous. Honestly, martial classes didn’t have it any better. The best armour in the game was the utterly ridiculous Githyanki Half-Plate, which was only medium armour and not proper heavy armour. In fact, in Early Access, there were only three sets of heavy armour: one ringmail, one chainmail, and one adamantine splint. And they’re were still ugly pieces of fantasy armour, with their only saving grace being that they weren’t chainmail bikinis.

Full release, however, gave all the armours a massive overhaul. Robes often have very different designs from one another, such as the Poisoner’s Robe resembling a cassock compared to the usual Wizard robes. There are a lot more heavy armours in game, including sets of chainmail you can pick up at the first town. There are also proper wizarding hats, which is very important. Who ever heard of a wizard fighting bareheaded? They still run into some fantasy armour problems (especially the plate armours and the damned Githyanki… everything, really), but they are much, much better than they were in Early Access.

Of course, the major improvement we get in Full Release compared to Early Access is, well, the entire rest of the game. Act One is made substantially larger with the inclusion of the Githyanki Creche, but there’s also Acts Two and Three, which substantially expand the game and demonstrate why it’s called Baldur’s Gate 3 and not Some Random Adventure On The Sword Coast. In particular, we get two returning faces: Jaheira and Minsc (and Boo). Now, I haven’t recruited Minsc yet, so I can’t talk about him. But Jaheira is the same sass master that we all knew and loved in BG1 and 2. In my first playthrough, I reclassed her as a Ranger (in the original games, she was a Fighter/Druid, which is what a Ranger is?), but I have other plans for her for later playthroughs.

Weapon selection has also greatly expanded. In Early Access, you were limited to non-magical weapons, magical weapons with situation abilities and +1 weapons. Which is a whole lot more justifiable than the heavy armour situation. Magical weapons in DnD are supposed to be fairly rare as I understand it (I’m not really a fan of DnD, so some of my info may be a little out of touch), and they only scale up to +3 anyway. Now as someone coming from a largely JRPG background, that took a bit to get my head wrapped around, but DnD numbers skew quite low. Which makes sense: rolling a d20 is a lot easier on a tabletop than trying to roll any of the huge numbers in JRPGs!

Full release, however, has given us a much better selection of weapons, both in Act One and throughout the rest of the game. There aren’t many +3 weapons, unfortunately (which makes sense, seeing as +3 weapons are usually reserved for levels 15 and up as I understand it and we’re limited to level 12), but there are a large variety of +2 weapons and the variety of +1 weapons and weapons that have magical effects but no bonuses have greatly increased. Most of them aren’t even that stupid looking! Though there is the occasional egregious standout.

As always in DnD inspired games, magic users get the short end of the stick in gear, though this is justified by the fact that magic users are by far and away the least gear dependent classes in the game. Seriously, you can get by as a magic class with just your starting robes, quarterstaff and the umpteen spells you get. However, while magic users get less gear with stat bonuses (and can’t really use them anyway) a lot of the gear they do get confers abilities that are consistently useful, which puts BG3 up over a lot of other DnD inspired games.

Digital Foundry, Did You Even Play This Game?

Let’s get right to the point here: Baldur’s Gate 3 is unoptimized and buggy at launch. Anybody with more than two braincells knew it would be (though that didn’t stop fans from claiming or demanding a perfect launch), but that doesn’t change the facts. Hundreds of bugs have been reported on Reddit and I assume elsewhere, and I’ve encountered tons of bugs myself, including several that completely borked quests.

There are also severe graphical issues, even for someone playing on a 3060 Ti like myself. Now the NVIDIA 3060 Ti isn’t the greatest graphics card in the world, but it’s a heck of a lot better than the 2060 Super that Larian recommends for BG3. Likewise, my AMD Ryzen 7 5800X is light-years ahead of the recommended AMD r5 3600. And yet visual bugs abound on max settings. The worst is by far Baldur’s Gate itself, which has the worst slowdown I’ve ever seen in a game. It’s like playing a game in molasses! And that’s just the visual bugs. Side-quests are horribly bugged. In Act 2 alone, I figure anywhere between 10-25% quests don’t function, trigger at the wrong places, activate mutual exclusive triggers at once (so you can both kill and save a person) so on and so forth.

Pokémon: Scarlet and Violet, which released in a similar state, or Tales of Symphonia: Remastered, which released in a significantly better state, did not get the same praise.

Look, I love BG3. The humour is sharp, the writing is fantastic, the gameplay is awesome… but it has some real problems. Problems that will only be fixed through multiple patches and can’t be ignored. Fortunately, Larian has shown a willingness to respond to these problems and fix them.

So that’s it. My thoughts on Larian’s Baldur’s Gate 3.

I’ll see you happy people next week.