Baldur’s Gate 3

[radiofloyd]

Reached Act 3 in 30 hours? Damn. How quickly did you finish Act 1?

 

I’m 70 hours in and exploring in Act 2. Currently exploring the eastern part of the map in the direction of the Risen Road.

[one-armed dwarf]

What difficulty did you play on mfnick? 30 hours is very fast.

[mfnick]

Explorer. Seeing as though I wasn’t enjoying the combat I just wanted to take in the story and setting. 
 

I spent an about 20-25 hours in act 1 - I actually explored everywhere I thought I could in that first map so I’m not sure how I missed so many quests or how people spend so long there. Act 2 I just really hated the setting but enjoyed the main story quest there so I basically mainlined that in under 10 hours. Act 3 I’ve spent 3ish hours in and just lost interest. 
 

I may return to it or just use a guide so I can see what happens but there’s just an overwhelming amount of shit to do in act 3 already & like I say I’ve lost interest so will probably just watch a video or something. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Tbh, a lot of the appeal imo is in having some friction in the fights as well. There's some fun strategy to be found. You could try a level above explorer maybe. Not trying to tell you how to play the game as such, but afaik Act 3 is like a massive endgame so you've kinda rushed through a lot of good stuff. I never even got to act 2, act 1 is massive. 

 

But if you're not enjoying the combat I'd move on tbh. The combat is one of the best bits and the mechanical tricks and gimmicks you can setup make you feel clever. Even less obvious things can make you feel clever, I really struggled with some fights in the goblin camp so at some point I just set those 

Spoiler

ogres who I owed a ton of money to against a lot of them, and they all killed each other. Which solved the debt problem and me actually having to fight all of them myself.

 

There's just lots of organic solutions to things like that. At another bit I failed a speech check and had to fight a room of goblins, so I put slippy shit on the floor and drew a bunch of goblins together with a thrown item that grabs them with gravity, had Gale fly over and push them on the slippy shit off the platform with a spell so they could fight spiders

 

[mfnick]

The problem with the combat as I’ve said before is I don’t understand half of what’s going on or what I’m capable of doing. I’ve watched quite a few videos and read a lot of idiot guides to it but I still just can’t grasp it. Doesn’t help it takes an age going through all the radial menus checking each ability. 
 

Like I say I can admire this game and what it’s doing but just not really for me and I’m past trying really. 
 

Also I really didn’t feel like I rushed Act 1. I genuinely don’t know what else I could have done. I had the whole map uncovered and spoke to just about everyone I care across but didnt have any outstanding quests apart from 1 or 2. 

[radiofloyd]

Put five hours into this today. Currently exploring the Githyanki Creche, which I may actually have been able to explore in Act 1, not sure.  My party is level 7 now. I temporarily swapped out Karlach for Lae’zel who is also a killing machine. 

[shinymcshine]

Started last night (Series S) and I'm actually amazed just quite how woefully poor it is in terms of giving you any particular tutorial explainations (outside of basic controls). I've played loads of CRPGs and this is by far the worst at not really guiding you through the early game mechanics. I get that exploration & trial/error are somewhat fundamental to CRPGs, but not even being aware of how you trigger ABC in order to even do XYZ is really bad.

 

So too it seems is how it commits you to making a skill check roll without any prior indication of the difficulty of the test (or showing you what modifiers you have that might aid you). Pathfinder Kingmaker & WotR always showed you prior to committing to test it's difficultly level and the character who had the best modifier, so you could then choose whether that was the best option to take or if you needed to potion up or level up before proceeding that way, but here it's really irksome that it doesn't (it's not even realistic that your PC wouldn't at least have a hint of an idea of this prior to committing).

 

Argh - rant over.

 

It all looks very nice and the first 3 hrs have flown by.

 

Fortunately my missus has played it for 100s of hours so is giving me some game mechanics guidance (what's that, press up on D pad to quick select jump.....)

[shinymcshine]

I'm about 8 hrs in now, and whilst I'm really quite enjoying it, the universal acclaim (and sweeping the board at the BAFTA Awards) is utterly baffling.

 

There's just so many poor interface decisions (maybe exacerbated by me playing on a console) and odd / poor gameplay mechanics - when compared to things like the Pathfinder, Pillars of Eternity, Solasta, Wartales or even D:OS. Feels to have got a bit of a free ride due to the popularity of the official licence and how really nice it looks.

 

The hidden skill check thing makes absolutely no sense when in battle you are clearly shown a hit % (why would you know that if you don't know the likelihood of passing other (non-combat) checks before committing to them !?!?).

 

Definitely not a bad game, but I do wonder how many people bigging it up have played many other CRPGs (albeit if they hadn't I don't think BG3 is particularly welcoming, with it's lack of clear system introduction). Notable perhaps that both Pathfinder games got 34 Critic Reviews on Metacritic, D:OS 39, D:OS2 46 whilst BG3 has 119.....

[one-armed dwarf]

I'm a bit confused by the thing you mention about hidden skill checks. It tells you things like if a roll is +2 or whatever and due to the physical rolling of the dice it sort of makes more sense to represent it like that than the percent chance

[shinymcshine]

It's more that you have no idea of the difficulty level until you commit to making a 'dialogue driven' skill test (R3 tooltips just give you your modifiers) - whilst for combat it shows you the % chance before you commit to an attack etc : so the game's own logic (in showing it for one thing and not the other) is somewhat illogical.

 

i.e. I've had a couple of skill checks that were difficulty 2 and others that are difficulty 15 and there's no indication, before you commit to taking the test, of what that difficulty level might be - and it doesn't seem to let to go back & avoid a test once you've picked it.

[shinymcshine]

OMG what an unholy mess the camera makes of trying to manage combat when it's split over different floors/levels.

 

Other games simply base this thing on a cube like grid, simply allowing you to move up & down floors/levels to select target areas, but here you just seemingly have to try to zoom in/out/rotate in order to try to hit the sweet spot..... bleh !

[shinymcshine]

FFS this game makes no sense at times.

 

I'm doing the Goblin Camp in Act 1 and because my MC is a Drow the goblins all act with a certain reverence and respect - which gives a Drow specific dialogue option to order the goblins to do things - all well and good.

 

Until (potential spoilers):

Spoiler

You get to the part where you find the Druid (as a bear) then even the small goblins chucking stones at it don't even acknowledge you're a Drow, and neither does anyone else in that area, as it clearly just wants you to have a big fight regardless.

 

It's just really poor in terms of roleplay and thematic consistency - you'd give your GM/DM a hard time if they tried to pull this off in a tabletop game.

 

[radiofloyd]

Back playing this too, put another hour or so into it. Still in the same place as I mentioned above, the Githyanki Creche. Around 75 hours in at the moment.

[radiofloyd]

Done some cool stuff in the Creche, found a Legendary weapon and forwarded some quests. This game is at its best when it gets story heavy. Now it’s time to head back to the Shadow Lands I think.

[shinymcshine]

Think I'm coming towards the end of Act 1 - got a pop up message when I went to head out on the Mountain Pass road that I needed to level up before continuing that way.

 

So it was back to merciless slaughter the remains of the Goblin Camp for exp (as I'd previously taken the fight at the Druid Grove Gate) - again it's super weird that the Goblins are just plain aggressive rather than "Oh no you killed the leader, you must be a mighty powerful Drow" but I'll just have to roll with that nonsense.

 

Then it'll be back to the Underdark.

[shinymcshine]

So I'm in the Underdark, and just freed Nere from the rockslide, and then, after a choice driven battle it drops even more poor gaming BS on me - really bad:

Spoiler

I'd sided with Brithvar and killed Nere, all well and good, with Brithvar and his allies helping in the fight.

 

I then pass a skill check, so I don't end up with zero loot, but then Brithvar wants to take to gnome slaves and I say nope - but fail the persuade check - and that's fair enough.

 

But then when it triggers the fight with Brithvar & his crew, then they are suddenly all back up to full hit points where I'm left in the same wounded state that I'd finished the Nere fight (it'd gone straight into cutscenes / dialogue).

 

What a crock of sh*te.

 

Good job the orge horn worked down there, esp. as Astarion got booted into the lava in the first round, and Gale was down on 1 HP (pending his weird resurrection thing), so I only had 2 functional party members, otherwise I'd have been right back to the save before the Nere fight.

 

Fortunately there's a number of good things in the game too !

[shinymcshine]

Is there any way of setting a party formation (i.e. who stands where, how your team move, set who is at what position when combat triggers etc) ?

 

This is such a fundamental thing is CRPGs but can't see anyway of doing it here.

 

It's even more annoying when walking in an open world environment with identified traps / area effects that unless you split the party and guide each through individually, on a group walk they'll just amble along setting off identified traps etc (the route finding algorithm not accounting that you don't want to do this) - even if I could put them in a single file line it might help.