My issues with this game can best be summarized by the fact that i kept re-doing a mission over and over again, and looked up the best way to deal with it, and the only thing i learned was to just change my build and do something the way the game wants me to do it. I think customization has no purpose if you're actively punished for playing the game in a way that even slightly deviates from the optimal way to do things. Towards the end of the game enemy builds even start to get more unvaried, so i think the devs were fully aware that they were making a horribly unbalanced game in which around 60-90% of the equipment is completely useless. It has far, far too much busywork in it for a game that came out a month ago. It's mostly based on trial and error since you never know exactly what you're fighting until you actually play a mission, and thus have no idea how to pick the specific weapon the game wants you to use. It'd make sense if you had 8 weapons, not 4. It doesn't help that there is essentially no purpose to ammo as a mechanic, it's irrelevent 90% of the time and nothing but a nuisance the remaning 10%, it never challenges you, only irritates you, it's a mechanic made to punish you for playing too aggressively in a game designed around playing aggressively, it has a stagger bar for Christ's sake.

Coming back to it i can only see this as an even worse game now that they've patched the game to completely rebalance weapons and fundamentally change the way the game works, i've no idea how that became normalized in games because it's essentially just releasing another form of finishing a game after you release it.

I dropped this game because i found the first third of it to be quite enjoyable, the second third to be an extended derailing, and then i realized that that was all there was to it. I found the earlier parts of the game to be tense and gritty, while still having fun and presenting this aesthetic flair that just feels emblematic of what mecha stories typically are. I loved how it established this violent conflict on a hostile world and presented the player as this ambivalent mercenary that's only loyal to the paycheck, and also showed us glimpses of the characters that fought this war and served these various different factions, i thought it was building up to a greater conclusion, these opposing forces inevitably intersecting and the war coming to a close. Most of the actual worldbuilding is just set dressing that gives you an excuse to play the earlier missions until you get to this dull, trite, tonally oblivious plot of meaningless characters and stories told entirely through Gears of War-esque combat dialogue that replays endlessly across missions. I died to a boss like 12 times and i still don't even remember his name, and he was one of the characters i liked the most.

The game really does feel like a 7th gen game that would have gotten 6/10's at the time, it has the gameplay depth of The Darkness 2, a worse story than Inversion, and boss fights a little bit worse than Binary Domain. I'd be impressed by how banal it is if it weren't so bad at adding variation, boss fights based around waiting for them to turn around so you can shoot the weak point on it's back, hacking segments where you wait for a bar to fill, and rooms full of enemies that load in in waves. This game doesn't just feel western, it feels like what western games have outgrown, it feels like it'd be the third best game of High Moon Studios, there's just no creativity here.

I'd be open to returning to this game, but all i hear from people is that it just gets worse, with a multiple-phase final boss that makes you go back to the start when you die, that concept felt juvenile by 2008, i'm not sure why Fromsoft insists on doing it. Loss of progress means repeating the same parts of the game over again, and that just means you're using your own game as a punishment.

A game should feel like a reward, not a punishment.

My issues with this game can best be summarized by the fact that i kept re-doing a mission over and over again, and looked up the best way to deal with it, and the only thing i learned was to just change my build and do something the way the game wants me to do it. I think customization has no purpose if you're actively punished for playing the game in a way that even slightly deviates from the optimal way to do things. Towards the end of the game enemy builds even start to get more unvaried, so i think the devs were fully aware that they were making a horribly unbalanced game in which around 60-90% of the equipment is completely useless. It has far, far too much busywork in it for a game that came out a month ago. It's mostly based on trial and error since you never know exactly what you're fighting until you actually play a mission, and thus have no idea how to pick the specific weapon the game wants you to use. It'd make sense if you had 8 weapons, not 4. It doesn't help that there is essentially no purpose to ammo as a mechanic, it's irrelevent 90% of the time and nothing but a nuisance the remaning 10%, it never challenges you, only irritates you, it's a mechanic made to punish you for playing too aggressively in a game designed around playing aggressively, it has a stagger bar for Christ's sake.

A respectable attempt at offering a middle ground between the more classical style of RPG that Bioware started with, and the more casual style that they've found themselves making since Mass Effect 2 or so.

Character creation itself is probably the greatest strength of Baldur's Gate 3, as i find it to be one of the most engaging i've ever seen in an RPG, from race to class and everything inbetween. I find that there's actually a pretty good amount of variation in playing seperate character types, as soon as i finished playing a tanky paladin, i immediately made another character, a more stealth and dialogue focused bard, one who was able to get to some way higher leveled areas than i initially was able to, simply by sneaking past enemies with their invisibility skills. I found Baldur's Gate to be a game that made me love roleplaying again, i spent entire hours in the character creator to make more and more unique combinations with the options given, writing out their own lore and developing attachment to them.

When you get into the actual game, Baldur's Gate doesn't hold your hand but refuses the brutal newcomer-slaying of the earlier titles, and a lot of more hardcore RPGs. Characters can be easily re-spec'd, money comes just as easily, and you can save whenever you want. It's a light adventure, but one that has it's challenges here and there.

The world of Baldur's Gate 3 feels more like a sampling of what the DnD universe as a whole has to offer, going through light developments in a number of iconic locations, with similarly iconic beasts here and there. I can't say it uses these concepts to it's full potential, but one could also praise it for refusing to oversaturate the player on it's world. When you see a dragon in this game, it feels like a big moment, a monstrous and terrifying beast that towers over the player with it's double-digit level, you fear it, yet respect it's majesty. It's a very classical fantasy story in that case.

I'd say i could do with less of the combat, but maybe i was doing a little bit more of it than i had to, playing a combat-based character.

Overall it's a great game, possibly the best western RPG since New Vegas, i'd absolutely recommend it. You might want to wait until they iron out more of the bugs though.