Baldur’s Gate 3 was an interesting game, and unlike any other I’ve played before - with that said, it’s still a mixed bag for me. Instead of simply reviewing it, I’d like to list what I liked about the game and what I didn’t like to avoid waffling.
Pros:
• The best part of Baldur’s Gate 3 is easily the combat/character building for me(until a certain point). Battles felt intense and tactical, and every level up felt important and impactful compared to other games where you would level up more commonly. I really enjoyed unlocking more feats, passives, spells etc for my build. The building system has a great complexity to it, but also a much needed accessibility to not drown in the meaning of eighty different status effects.
- Dialogue/writing, Bg3 had a great grasp on its characters and their purposes, with eloquent dialogue and narration. In my opinion, this game is much more successful in the small, situational aspects of the story than the larger scale ones.
- Sound effects
- Act 2 is the most well-trimmed part of the game, having a certain atmosphere and pace to it that Act 1 entirely lacked for me. Act 2 is interesting, it’s threatening to be in that world, and it’s main content (like finding the Nightsong) pays off just as much as it’s side content is fun to find and explore.
- Act 3 was a good break off from the first two acts in it’s more peaceful like exploration of the city and wrapping up a lot of previous storylines. It also had some of the best content, from the Steelwatch Foundry, Temple of Bhaal to the grand finale.
- Speaking of the finale, I thought the fighting and spectacle was great! The system to call in your allies wasn’t really that great though, and you only really need one or two.
Now we get into a list of negatives…
- Graphic fidelity/art direction: In my opinion, the art direction in this game was decent at best. I’ve played countless fantasy games, and a lot of areas in this game are uninspired compared to the magical worlds I’ve seen in others. There’s a sad absence of true environmental storytelling that I’ve come to love in the open-world RPG genre. The cutscenes in the finale of the game had half loaded in houses in the background with poor water textures, having this unfinished look to it as well. That could be an optimization issue with Xbox, but it’s the stronger hardware out of the two consoles so it wouldn’t be that much of an excuse.
- Looting might be my biggest concern with the game! Every RPG has a satisfying system of looting enemies when you beat them, getting that next big piece of gear to add to your build. This had none of that. Looting small enemies to daunting bosses was so underwhelming and really left me walking away from these epic fights disappointed.
- The level 12 cap. Are you serious? And we’ll never even get dlc to go further up in levels? Yeah, if anything really disappointed me was this. Level 12 isn’t even the highest you could get to, we did so many things after that I feel like I would’ve been easily level 15.

Overall, Baldur’s Gate 3 is a really fun game that I had an amazing time playing with my girlfriend cooperatively. It has its flaws, and many of those could be exclusive to my tastes, but it also offers an experience that I haven’t had in gaming before. It was a very memorable journey! To speak on my personal experience with the game, I was a Dragonborn Warlock with Gale and Jaheira as my main companions.
Rating of Acts:
Act 1: 5/10 (only the underdark redeems this part)
Act 2: 8.5/10
Act 3: 8/10
I will also close this out saying it was a bummer to hear we aren’t getting dlc. It makes me more reactive to my personal flaws with the game when I know there won’t be any future higher level cap, bosses, loot, or areas for example.

It’s hard to overstate the degree to which this article really crystallised a lot of my thoughts on this game: https://www.pcgamer.com/baldurs-gate-3-is-the-horniest-rpg-ive-ever-played-and-honestly-its-a-bit-much/

BG3 deserves commendation for its commitment to player agency and the kind of work which must have gone into the optionality allowed to the player. But there’s just something about it which rubs me the wrong way. Maybe not every party member should be pansexual and keen to bone you irrespective of your gender identity, character class, ethos, etc. Maybe you shouldn’t be able to defeat this many of the bosses by tricking them into killing themselves by passing a couple of easy charisma checks! Maybe not every toy in the playground should exist mainly to tell me I’m awesome and try to suck my dick! You know?

the more i think about this game the more i think is just kind of ok,dont get me wrong there is a lot of content and your choices matter,but it just doesnt do enough to set itself apart from past crpgs,this game just kind of feels like a big stock fantasy rpg,especially in its writing and gameplay

like this game def doesnt has the best writing in the world,but also the gameplay isnt that great,dnd 5e just doesnt transforms itself all that well to a singleplayer rpg,i would have much prefered if they would have just stick with dos2 gameplay

i still think the game is pretty impressive,but its just kind of forgetable,if you are new to crpgs i get how you would love this,but to someone more experienced in the genre,i dont really see what makes this game all that special

NOTA: 9,75

A mesma nota de antes e a mesma surpresa de antes, a segunda run de Baldur's Gate 3 mais uma vez em coop de 2, me fez entender ainda mais a grandiosidade desse game acabando com toda a duvida se ele merecia o GOTY ano passado ou não.

As diferenças foram tantas em relação à primeira vez que parecia outro jogo, diferentes aliados dessa vez, diferentes caminhos tomados criaram situações que sequer eu imaginava antes.

O que mais me surpreendeu é saber como cada backstory dos personagens recrutaveis de bg3 é detalhada, tão detalhada que várias das conclusões delas poderiam formar Dlcs ou até mesmo ser mais exploradas ou mais profundas do que a própria trama principal. Isso e o fato desse universo ser tão bem descrito que me faz querer que esse game fosse um RPG de ação são as duas criticas que eu poderia atribuir.

Porém, o fato dele ser um RPG tático é o que pode fazer varias desenvolvedoras entender que sair da mesmice e dar qualidade à um estilo de jogo que nem sempre agrada a todos pode resultar em uma obra prima, principalmente quando se trata de usar por completo o que o gênero RPG pode proporcionar.

Portanto, não tem como não recomendar essa obra, mesmo para aqueles resistentes ao combate, tentem esse game em especial em coop se possível, volto a dizer que essa experiência é o apice de uma jogatina coop para mim, capaz de proporcionar uma aventura que inclui uma interação sem limites, estratégia, humor e que vai te surpreender em algum momento sem dúvidas. Sendo simplesmente capaz de impactar o mercado de games.

No surprise this got game of the year. There really isn't anything anywhere close to this game that I've played or even heard of. I put 87 hours into my play through and now going to check out some YouTube videos about it, there is hours of content that I didn't see at all. It's bewildering how much stuff they've packed into this game. I want to play it again, but definitely need to put some time into other games first. Another 80 hours is a big investment. Also the story is really nice as well. You can play in a multitude of ways, but I thoroughly enjoyed the classic heroic adventure. Also, the amount of dialogue in this game is crazy. There were so many moments where I was like, "wow they really thought about everything" and it's all fully voiced really well may I add. Also the combat is super cool too. I took a very straight forward approach but even then it was very tactical, and now looking at challenge runs, it goes so much further. Just an absolute knockout of a game.

The game does a very interesting job adapting tabletop rules but I don't think this necessarily means it's a good videogame. It is terrible at explaining it's mechanics and asking me to manage 6 - 8 character's complex builds is too much. Combat feels slow and unrewarding, dice rolls get boring soon (and often force you to quicksave all the time, getting a bad outcome beacause you were unlucky is so frustrating). Different medias have different needs and I don't think this game really undestands that.

Baldur’s Gate III is a perfect replication of the tabletop RPG experience, in that it’s inordinately tedious and unbelievably time consuming. “Aha, Avery!” You might say. “Clearly, you are imploring a classic reviewer jape, where you start with a hyperbolic take and then walk it back in order to provide an enticing hook.” Alas, my dear reader, I am not. My playthrough ultimately clocked in at an utterly exhausting 101 hours and 52 minutes, according to the in-game timer (145.6 hours according to Steam) across seven months, and yet still there's a part of me that wishes I spent more time, combing through my inventory, analyzing stats and crafting builds, and devising clever strategies and workarounds for the game’s various challenges. That is to say that there's a distinct and tangible benefit to all of that tedium, which is that it imparts the player with a sense of inhabiting a utterly massive world, not just in a geographical sense, but in sheer density of detail and choice. It’s fitting for a Dungeons and Dragons game, a 50 year old franchise, which like Star Wars and Lord of The Rings stands as a cultural vortex wherein everything that came before is an influence for it and everything that came after is influenced by it. Featuring no glossary or codex, first time D&D players, such as myself, while find themselves overwhelmed not just by the wealth of mechanics that Baldur's Gate III offers as an immersive tactics RPG, but by the sheer amount of proper names, fantasy species, and lore references on display, but the thing that makes the game special is how it takes thematic advantage of that complexity to enhance its story and characters.

Every component of Baldur's Gate III’s is about finding agency under systems and power structures bigger than oneself, and deciding how to use the power they gain, ranging from the Breakfast Club setup, to the homogenizing mind control and body transformation powers of the antagonist Illithids, to each of the character arcs found in the companion quests. Karlach struggles against the existential weight of the potentially lethal body modifications forced upon her by her former captors, Astarion finds himself tempted by his newfound freedom to reproduce the abuse he suffered under, Lae’Zael and Shadowheart find themselves forced to question where their allegiances lie, and so on, all while the party endeavors to defeat (or control, should you choose to) a force that would subsume the free will of every character you encounter into its imperialist domain. Hey… wait a second! By God! They finally did it! They finally made a thematically coherent [Footnote 1] Mass Effect game! [Footnote 2] Of course, a strong thematic backbone is nothing without good presentation and delivery to back it up, and in this case, the writing and acting provide brilliantly flourishes of detail, eccentricities, and emotion, allowing the heady ideas to have a thoroughly human presence. For a game of this size to have nearly every component directed towards its thematic vision is truly a feat of great direction.

This brings us to the subject of combat, where the game most frequently and directly asks the player to make use of the choices available to them. Baldur's Gate III takes the format of a turn based tactics game, (the superior turn based format), and adds in an immersive sim level of choice, from spells, potions, a wealth of additional inventory options, class abilities, and the idiosyncrasies of each unit, there are hundred of options technically available to the player on any given turn. While it can never have the flexibility of a human DM, the fact that Baldur's Gate III can even replicate the wacky anecdotes that come from tabletop gaming is another feat to add to its list of accomplishments. Still, the combat is designed in such a way to satisfy less creatively minded players, such as myself, as a core repertoire of bread and butter tactics are enough to get through much of the game, and even more granular decisions such as positioning can have massive effects on the outcome of a battle. There’s even a sense of good game feel, impressive for a slow paced top down game; casting the massive Fireball spell and waiting with anticipation as my i7-10700K and RTX 3080 struggle to calculate and render the onslaught of damage number and the flurry of flames, accompanied by a satisfying whoosh foley effect as the attack finally comes out, just never good old. Better yet, on Balanced difficulty, the encounters are hard and varied enough to encourage creative thinking, so that you can experience the flexibility of the systems even if you aren’t inclined to constantly use them. That is, until Act III, where the game reveals itself to be actually for min/max perverts and trial-and-error sickos. I don’t use those terms in a derogatory sense at all, it’s just that I, unfortunately, can’t count myself among their number. Dropping the difficulty from Balanced to Explorer did remedy this, although there wasn’t as much friction as I would normally like. Still, by that point in time I was glad to be able to cruise through the rest of the games and I was comfortable enough with the systems to still get a little creative, here and there.

Still, there are some game design aspects inherited from Dungeons and Dragons that merit discussion and scrutiny in the context of how they were adapted for this game. The critical roll system means success and failure on narrative related dice rolls is always possible and, but the sheer length of the game and number of catastrophic failures that can occur, resulting in losing a beloved party member encourages save scumming, whereas in a more focused tabletop-esque experience like Disco Elysium I was a lot more willing to roll with the punches. Even aside from that I do wish there were moments where success simply wasn't possible, call me a masochist if you want (okay, I am, but that's not the point here) but I want my more dramatic stories to hurt, at least a little, because that’s what makes them memorable and impactful. Thankfully there’s a choice near the end with no clean solution, one that asked me to weigh my character’s values against her sense of self and individuality, and yet still slotted in nicely with a fun, kick ass ending provided by her romance with Karlach. Being realistic my first playthrough of Baldur's Gate III will be my last, so I'm glad that it resulted in a story that felt memorable, meaningful, and personal to me.

Footnote 1: Well, mostly. This is a game where one of the major antagonists is marked as evil for his willingness to defy death and resurrect his dead daughter, but I can pay my skeleton buddy 200 gold to revive my companions on demand. Video games are truly wonderful.

Footnote 2: Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Mass Effect: Andromeda have a combined 146.6 hours played on my Steam account, so it’s really more like they made a (mostly) thematically coherent Mass Effect franchise. In one game!

Had an amazing experience playing this with my boyfriend although I’m not sure if I would’ve liked this as much if I played it alone, every act has its flaws and the story wasn’t the best, pretty weak villains and so much sassy characters they all felt the same, Karlach is the best because she was kind of in between being really sweet and badass but also not afraid to speak up and disagree with you with something (nicely), how the hell do people like Astarion so much, much less simp for him, he’s like a 5 year old stuck in a man’s body, Shadowheart was pretty sassy too and I see a lot of girls calling her annoying yet then they love Astarion, make that make sense, I’m sure they warm up if you romance them but they weren’t that likeable without that element whilst Karlach was great to be with and had a pretty interesting part to the story, loved running with her through hell in the end 😌 anyways, still lots of great parts and location and it’s definitely a game type that I’m not quite used to, part of me would compare it to Diablo 4 or Skyrim a lot in moments that did things better but I can’t fault the things BG3 did that were new to me but cool, being able to talk to animals, or turn into one (like a dinosaur), change classes whenever (I changed mine 3x), having many many choices and influence in the game etc, although I can’t lie I did really want to side with the sleeping dragon but eventually finding out that we had no choice but to fight him was annoying, same with that vampire (I can’t remember the name of) who we brought Astarion to and YET still had to fight?? Weird.

There's no doubt that BG3 is a good, well-made game, however I personally wouldn't recommend it to anyone who didn't already enjoy D&D/Western RPGs. If you do enjoy them however there is a lot this game can offer you but as someone who isn't into them I really struggled to love this game, and I did try. I feel like at some point in the future I will come back to BG3, blast through it in a week or two and end up loving it without trying but for me right now I find it very frustrating. For context I played about 2/3s solo and 1/3 in a multiplayer party. My review is going to sound pretty harsh I think but I don't hate the game or anything, I just can't say I understand the immense level of praise it's gotten.

The worst element of BG3 in my eyes is the combat, I find nothing fun about it at all, there are classes and subclasses, weapons, enchantments, scrolls, etc. yet despite all that it feels like the combat encounters are all the exact same, the only thing that ever feels noticeably different from encounter to encounter is the number of enemies or enemy health. The spells used, weapons available, even the combat arenas should all be a factor but it never felt like they were. After 20+ hours of gameplay I'm not ashamed to admit I changed to the easier difficulty just so I could stop feeling like the combat was such a slog. I didn't find it particularly difficult, just boring and repetitive. Some fights can last 20+ minutes just because each enemy has to take a turn and you need to wait for each to play out. I don't think there are many people who would agree with me on this point, but I can honestly say I never enjoyed combat in this game.

I think what underpins why I dislike combat so much is the fact that the RPG elements in this game are so good. Combat felt like it got in the way, it would grind the pacing to absolute crawl when I was excited to meet the next quest-relevant NPC and engage in dialogue to try and complete the quest. I found it far more rewarding to utilize character abilities to outsmart people in conversations, or non-combat interactions.

The issues I have with BG3 though go beyond the combat. In almost every session, I would come across something that would frustrate me immensely. I would make my party leader jump from a ledge, take -10hp, expect my party members to follow only for them to stand there doing nothing, so I swap to that character and make them jump and take -10hp, only to watch my party leader jump back up at the exact same time, meaning they have to do it again now and take another -10hp. Yes, my fault for not unlocking the party, but why do party members just not follow in some cases and in other cases they are basically the party leader's shadow?
In my first playthrough I killed a vital character in my camp only for them to still be there and for it to break another character's quest as a result. Sometimes enemies would just pass through walls to attack me. The pathfinding/routing of character movement constantly bugged out. Equipping items/clothing wouldn't work half the time and would result in my opening and closing the inventory several times to try and get it to work. When I first tried the game it ran great but in recent playthroughs my performance has tanked for no obvious reason. This is just a sample of what's annoyed me about BG3 and when something goes wrong every time I try to play it really does spoil the enjoyment.

There's no doubt that Larian put a lot of work into the world and quests, they do account for how players may react in most situations but there are interactions that feel half-baked. For example, you can come across a woman who is secretly a hag, if you know she is a hag in disguise or if you just try to kill her then two other NPCs will just die randomly because I guess they hope most players will watch things playout long enough for the hag to kill them? That was the most egregious and even then it's not that bad, but in a game that tries to cover all the bases it really stands out when it fails.

TL:DR The game is made with a lot of passion, but has plenty of flaws. Combat isn't fun unless you're already into D&D mechanics on some level.