Tobold's Blog
Friday, December 20, 2024
 
I finished Baldur's Gate 3

This is probably a year late, but yesterday I finally finished Baldur's Gate 3, which is to say that I got to the epilogues for the first time. This particular game lasted 141 hours, which brings my total time played up to 333 hours, much of which was back then in early access. Which is a bit of a problem, because my detailed knowledge of everything in Act I makes me hesitant to start another game. Maybe next year, with new subclasses in patch 8, and mods that at least change the loot and distribution of it, I might try again.

This playthrough was with a bard as main character, and I have a strong impression that this might be optimal from a pure min-maxing perspective. Over the course of the game there are a huge number of of skill checks, but they are very unevenly distributed. Lockpicking and trap disarming on the dexterity side, and persuasion/deception/intimidation on the charisma side together are well over 80% of all skill checks. The bard being good at both of these sides is a good choice, also because you don't have to constantly switch which character is triggering the dialogues.

I had stopped playing Baldur's Gate 3 over a year ago, when I had changed PCs. At the time, the general opinion of Act III was, that it wasn't quite as finished as the rest of the game, and I decided to wait for the final bit of polish. Now that I played it, I liked Act III better than I liked Act II, because I feel like Act II was a bit too much "on rails", and Act III regained much of the openness of Act I.

The downside of Act III for me was that I was playing the whole game with a bit of a completionist mindset. Act III has a lot of locations which are designed to finish the individual character stories of the NPC companions you picked up in Act I and II. Playing through all of them has disadvantages: You always have to change group composition to take the NPC(s) for which the story is designed to each location. And in a completionist playthrough you reach the level cap of 12 already early in Act III, which leaves you without further character progress for much of the act. The best part of Act III for me was the Iron Throne, because that was an encounter which was more of a puzzle than a combat. I replayed it several times until I had saved everybody.

What didn't really impress me was the "17,000 possible endings". I tried mostly to get the "good" ending for every one of my NPC companions, but for some of them the difference between good and bad wasn't all that obvious. I also made a few impulse decisions in Act III, based on wanting to get through it, and for example killed the flying elephant in the room because I found him so annoying, even if that certainly was the evil option. In the end, even the main choices at the end of Act III, e.g. Orpheus vs. Emperor didn't feel all that impactful. I had decided much earlier in the game to try out the illithid powers, so I went with the option that ultimately transformed me into a mindflayer just to remain consistent. But I feel that if I had stayed away from all those powers, the end wouldn't have felt all that different. I had last year tried out an "evil run" with a Dark Urge character, but even an evil run doesn't feel like a different game from a good run.

Over the whole game, what I liked most was the character progression and evolving tactical combat options that went with it. It isn't the fault of Larian if that breaks down a bit at the end, I feel exactly the same about any other Dungeons & Dragons campaign, digital or pen & paper. At level 12, the cap for BG3, your characters already have a number of "I win" buttons they can press in combat. I did a number of the final fights in Act III, which were supposed to be hard, hiding under a globe of invulnerability, which made these fights relatively easy. Also, within every level, after some experimentation one finds that some spells are strictly better than others, which leads to them being used repeatedly. I am kind of happy that the next Larian game will not be D&D-based, because it allows for a better balance of spells and hopefully a better end-game progression.

- posted by Tobold @ 1:32 PM Permanent Link
Comments:
The companion endings are definitely one of the areas where the lines between good and bad are blurred. Take Astarion for example. His "good" ending is definitely good aligned but isn't really all that good for him personally. Same for Karlach, and Wyll.

If you do replay the game I'd suggest picking an origin as for me the story meshed better with an Origin versus a created character. The Dark Urge origin is also a better story in my opinion when you actually play that it as a good person resisting the Urge. So much so that I actually believe the rumor that BG3 originally only had the Dark Urge as the player character. There are some plot points extremely relevant to the main story that you only find out as the Urge.
# posted by Blogger Bigeye : 20/12/24 17:42
 
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