THIS WHOLE THING IS SPOILERS.
I have finished the game and am making a post to talk about it. Everything beyond here is spoilers. I am going to spoiler tag the entirety of this first comment just to be safe but don't expect anything else from here on out to have spoiler tags on it. If you read deeper into the conversation you did it to yourself, I really don't expect people to use spoiler tags in a spoiler thread.
I just finished the game and felt the need to get a bit off my chest... BG3 may well be the best CRPG ever made, but I also don't think it does ANYTHING that hasn't been done before. It is simply an excellent execution (in most regards) of things we have seen before in Deus Ex, Mass Effect, and their own Divinity Original Sin. We've seen plenty of posts about how great BG3 is but I really don't see much chat about its shortcommings.
The relationships are trash tier. We are going backwards here, this is Mass Effect 2 era everyone is super horny for the main character because... well because you control them and you are horny right? Its so childish, depending on playstyle characters may have known you for mere hours before they are begging to bed you. And they don't stop, literally everything wants to fuck you. I had sex with 3 party members (would have been more if I didn't turn all the rest down) a succubus, a sex worker, and a fucking MINDFLAYER. This game needs to chill its silly and honestly took me out of it at times. We have so many things to be worried about and this mindflayer wants the D? Come on man...
The scripting falls apart in Act 3. I can't even begin to count the total number of sequence breaks I got from minor glitches (My journal said Halsin both hated and loved me simultaneously, neither was true he was kidnapped) to complete progression blockers (I found ancient dragon before speaking to Gortash, didn't bring Wyl to see his dad, somehow got a quest to tell Wyl's dad about said Dragon even though he was a thrall, kept telling me to meet him at camp, quest wasn't doable). I've had major bugs (my main character is permanently considered to be in Wildshape by NPCs even though he isn't, so everyone in the game runs scared from me) and the ending didn't even account for things as they actually happened with one character (the Emperor) just not showing up in my ending even though he was still alive, and Karlach literally burning to death in front of me even though I had completed her quest line and resolved that issue.
Even when it does work, the game has a classic Mass Effect/Deus Ex problem of needing to funnel you to a couple of different but basically the same ending options so the Emperor did something completely illogical and decided to join the Netherbrain at the end? Makes no sense, they just didn't know how else to handle me being loyal to them for the entire game but not being willing to kill Orpheus. I released Orpheus, became a flayer myself, and saved the world - all without killing the Emperor. Game doesn't have a solution for that so the Emperor is just implied to have been killed in the final fight even though I intentionally didn't attack him and left him alive.
I want to be clear in that none of these things make BG3 bad, just like similar issues didn't and don't make Mass Effect 2 or other games like this bad. But honestly I was expecting a bit more than another one of those with a D&D inspired combat system. *shrug* I'll probably give it another go once the inevitable Enhanced Edition or whatever comes out in a year and hopefully I won't have to play an entire Act 3 where I can't talk to NPCs or use traders.
Campaign Complete - I want to complain
Something I discussed with a friend and forgot to mention here, because the game is D&D inspired and you can think of the narrator/gameworld as DM controlled there is a little bit of forgiveness to be given to the way everything funnels you to the same ending (No matter what you do, no matter who you ally with, who you betray, who you are, it always ends with the same screen with two options - Dominate the Brain, Release the Brain, with some minor variants on Dominate) because a real world DM works largely in the same way.
When I have friends over for a session I just wrote and the Barkeep is supposed to give them the quest and my players roll up and one says "I'm actually a recovering alcoholic can we have our first adventurer meetup at the park?" and everyone loves that idea and goes with it, I adapt, I change the story so a frantic passerby grabs their attention because they're the only ones around..... and then I give them the exact same quest I was gonna have the barkeep give them....
So on that note, BG3 emulates D&D perfect with its.... fake choices. I just wish it kept better track of them all in the final act and was a bit more elegant in how it does the funnel. A few too many times the game has characters do kinda silly things to justify the plot going forward
Oh! And Gale's Ending! WTF was that? His ending is essentially off camera! He just asks which ending you want him to have (Give Crown to Mystra, use Crown himself, leave Crown in the ocean) and whatever you pick he's just like "Yeah, I'll go do that" and I guess it's just implied that he probably does? I don't know if I'm missing some way to see him become a God, maybe only if you play as him yourself or something but... yeaaaahhh that felt pretty weak. Wyl was glitched for me and just didn't have an ending, Karlach glitched and did her death ending and the rest seemed fine.
When playing Choices Matter games, I like to imagine, and I like the game to let me believe, that the way I played the game is the only way it could have happened and that everything I did had an effect on how things turned out.
With Telltale games, I always turned off the notices about which things I did had an effect. Until they stopped letting you turn those off, for some reason. It really ruins the immersion for me. It's like if the DM in a game of D&D said "You know that seemingly insignificant orc you just killed? I'm going to get their son to track you down and confront you later." You don't need to tell me which choices matter, you should let me believe that they all do. Why are you making this organic story and interactive world feel scripted and fake?
I feel like one of the things no one seems to be talking about is the absolute whiplash the game has when it comes to scope/stakes. Act 1 is largely ok, you get this grand opening hinting at bigger things but then you're put into this goblin vs druid conflict and you have this conspiracy thread going in the background.
Then you get into Act 2 and you have this cursed area with a necromancer in a tower and you end up saving/using an angel to help you. Things are scaling up a bit, but still fairly grounded and you still feel like you're participating in the world around you. Then BAM, big floating brain conquering the world. When I hit that moment I was just flabbergasted.
But then we just move on from that and move into Act 3 with a villain taking over the city, refugees suffering, and building a rebellion. However once you get into the city proper things just start going wild. One second I'm dealing with some thieves and bandits squabbling, the next I'm fighting the champion of a death god, then I'm having a quiet story moment with Jaheira and her kids to be followed up with a ancient vampire sacrificing a towns worth of people to ascend to some superior being.
I'm not usually someone to complain about the "ticking clock problem", but this dichotomy of grounded conflicts vs other-worldly villains in the second half of the game kinda broke the experience for me. I guess it kinda speaks more to the core DnD audience, but for me the amount of "non-sense high fantasy" just makes the experience too silly. Didn't really help that I find the main plot with the mindflayers etc to be fairly uninteresting and weak in the first place, and every time the big brain is involved I can't help but think of Futurama. When I hit the moment near the end where the Emperor goes "It's not longer an elder brain, it's a netherbrain" I was just done.
@efesell: For sure, I totally get that the game needs a big bad boss to beat at the end and that the stakes need to progressively become bigger. But going through the different encounters you have I think I could count at least eight different villains that could've carried the game all by themselves. It just becomes sorta ridiculous when you discover the third hidden cult and temple to an evil god inside the city.
It might've worked better if that's where the entirety of Act 3 went. I'm not opposed to some God of War-style "let's kill the Gods" ridiculousness. But it kept flip-flopping between that and more traditional adventurer stuff like the Gondians being enslaved or the haunted house, so it never really establishes exactly what the tone is supposed to be. I guess I enjoyed the more down to earth stuff more, which made me interpret that as the baseline (making the high fantasy stuff overbearing), but I guess it could've just as easily been interpreted the other way around.
My expectations might be different then a lot of people - but I think games of this nature should ultimately let you have agency in how your character feels about whats happening rather then try to contain the madness of spiraling choices in creating the illusion you have infinite control in WHAT happens. Im maybe 30 hours in and about to start Act 2 so I cant speak to if this game has delivered on that exactly, but I think its doing better then many. I'm eager to replay with the Dark Urge background as I think this contains more of what I'm looking for... but we'll see!
Some of my favorite scenes in the Mass Effect series are ones where Shepard gets to express himself. We know all roads lead to Saren/Collector Base/Star Child but getting to talk about WHY we are there or how we feel about it is key, in my opinion. Or the little ways your actions are simply mentioned on the news or you get a vid call with a character from your background etc. One of my favorite moments is after the lair of the shadow broker DLC you have a little debrief with Liara and she asks you how you're doing and comments about your crew. You can be weary, angry, optimistic etc. It helps you frame the narrative by expressing yourself.
Another game that I felt let me roleplay more then any other was Knights of the old Republic 2: Sith Lords. In a game that arguably has almost no player choice - the funnel is a mean one in that game and nothing is more heartbreaking in its disappointment then the Malachor unfinished ending... BUT there are SO many moments in that game where people just ask you little innocuous questions about what being a Jedi was like, why you left the order, how you feel about the Mandalorian Wars etc. As the game went on you were almost playing in reverse the background of your player character and with only the commitment of some well thought out prose could you make choices that felt meaningful without really having any tangible affect on which A, B or C ending you selected. Or in the case of Sith Lords which A, A or A unfinished ending you would like.
Just look at Atris, she could be a colleague, a friend, a rival or even a spurned lover who both worships and resents you. Pretty cool. Oh and she shows up with the lightsaber you described in the prologue of the game almost 30 hours later; pretty cool! Also entirely inconsequential to the gameplay and overall plot. I'm not a game designer but I have to imagine this is easier to commit too to create that DnD illusion then trying to craft a responsive narrative for an audience you can only speculate.
When I DM'd for my friends in college I always aspired to create a true simulation without falling into any of these pit falls but to concede my hypocrisy it was more a psychological examination of my friends and their interests that I would seed my stories with ideas and themes I knew they couldn't resist falling prey to as players. I don't envy any developer trying to replicate that intimacy with the faceless masses of their customers... but damn if I haven't seen ANYONE make a better attempt then Larian with this game, even if it isn't necessarily the way I would do it.
the endings were underwhelming but became way way better after they added additional content with the patches.
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