Welcome to yet another
Baldur’s Gate 3 article – are you fed up yet? If not, in this post, I will talk about some additional stuff that I left out in my review – mostly because of space, and to be honest, some things I came to think about after it was written. There won’t be too much about the story here, however, I will talk about it, especially the ending – so here comes the spoiler warning. It will mostly be about the game mechanics and things of that nature that I think should be mentioned.
Camp & resting mechanics
Let’s start with camp mechanics since I didn’t touch that at all in my review. As it works, to rest you need 40 supplies (80 on tactician). The supplies are not too hard to find, as every kind of food item you find in the world adds to the supply pool. However, they come with weight, but here is the weird part – you can circumvent this problem very easily since you can send all the stuff you find in the world through some kind of magical portal directly into your camp chest. I have to say, I find this decision a bit confusing – why to have restrictions when you can bypass the problem with weight just like that? It makes no sense to me. I think limitations like that are important for RPGs, as it asks you to be careful with what you pick up, but if you can just ignore it through magical means – why even bother having it?
The camp mechanics are also tightly interwoven into the narrative experience, both for the main plot and the companion’s storyline. The progression of the game depends on you resting in camp and how often you do it. This means there is a high chance of missing potential important cutscenes, especially when it comes to your party comrades. No resting, no progression, and with that you will miss important story beats. What is an oddity here, at least in my playthrough, is that Astarion is supposed to try to suck your blood during one of the resting periods (he is a vampire), but that scene was entirely skipped in my game. And I rested often, let me tell you, as I was playing a wizard with limited spell slots, yet, it never occurred. This caused some story issues, as later on in the game, my companions and Astarion himself made references to his vampiric nature without my character (as in me) knowing anything about this. Confusing, to say the least.
Resting feels a bit disconnected overall. Mostly you will be transported to a suitable location, but if you rest early in the game, you have this very posh camp already set up when your character might only carry a sword and some raggedy clothes. Where did all this fancy equipment come from? Later on in the game, it makes more sense, especially in the third act where you actually rent a floor in an inn, but I feel it never loses some of that awkwardness. Another example is when you decide to rest in the “enemy” fortress in Act 1, and apparently, you and your crew just cordon off a section of the fortress for your sleeping needs. I see what they were going for here, but I think
Pathfinder: Kingmaker made it much better, and believable. In that game, you just make a small camp in the area you are currently visiting. The game doesn’t transport you anywhere or anything, and you can still get attacked during the rest period. And when you want to talk to your comrades in arms, you do so in a designated safe zone, aka hub-area.
Difficulty, AI & combat encounters
I wouldn’t say
Baldur’s Gate 3 is a hard game per se since most of the fights depend on your rolls, which are heavily influenced by RNG. What I mean is luck is a major factor, even if the use of skills, and class knowledge is important. I started my first run on tactician, which I struggled with up until Act 2 when I finally made the switch to normal for a more “fun” experience. I’m no turn-based Dungeon and Dragon expert, so tactician mode frustrated me when I was playing my wizard, and in general, I don’t enjoy increased difficulty that comes at the expense of messing with the rules. According to what I have been reading the changes to tactician from normal are increased health for the enemies, easier hit-chance for them, and added special equipment – like fire arrows, elemental bombs, and scrolls. My main issue here was that my character was always the main target of the enemy. You see, the AI always goes for the guy in cloth armor, which many times meant that he got taken out in the first round, often by getting one-shotted. The added environmental mechanics are not much fun either, as it increases the risk of everything being coated with fire by 50%.
However, on my second playthrough, while even being 1 to 2 men down for the longest time, has been going much better. This time I rolled a rogue and started on normal from the get-go. Frankly, the game has been way too easy, except for the few boss encounters that had a few levels above my party, which often meant that the boss could terminate my dudes with one solid blast. So, I’m not sure what to make of the difficulty settings. I probably got better at the game, and maybe that warrants a difficulty increase, or I have just taken a much more optimal route through the game with my knowledge of it. What I can say though, is that the one-shotting of low health and low armor units during the first round in combat is frustrating as hell. Gale suffered the same fate as my wizard when I brought him along. The AI seems to make a beeline for these types of characters, as mentioned. Even taking reactionary attacks by doing so by my party members. That doesn’t make too much sense to me. I guess everyone in Baldur’s Gate has an intense suicidal hatred for mages!
The combat encounters are very varied and are for the most part more than just a room with angry creatures of various kind that needs to be dispatched. Often the encounters have something special to them, something that needs to be disabled, a guy that needs rescuing, or some dude hiding out on the other side of the map that needs to be killed quickly before he casts some kind of instadeath spell. These encounters do become more mundane, and a bit annoying in Act 3, like the factory assault at the docks. Even so, for the most part, they are a part of the main design throughout
Baldur’s Gate 3, which is pretty cool and adds a lot of different combat scenarios to the game. Especially the bosses since they always seem to come with unique mechanics. Yet, I must say, some normal tank and spank encounters would be appreciated, so you once in a while can feel like a badass without having to figure out a puzzle before kicking someone’s ass. This is a minor issue though.
The Ending
I won’t be talking about the specifics of the ending here, about what happened or anything, but still – spoiler warning. I found the ending satisfactory, in that you kill the big bad, and stand triumphed at the end of the day. Other than that, it’s a bit of a waste, and comes very fast, and a little bit out of left-field thanks to the twist. I will not say what the twist is, but it undermines the whole story to that point, specifically the action of the antagonists. It was all a lie, you see – very classic subversion stuff, however, it does feel a bit cheap that late in the game. The ending scenario got a couple of missions that follow each other, and one of the unique mechanics of these missions is that you can call in military support, depending on who you helped out during the game. I liked this aspect, and I thought it was a great mechanic, and it was fun to see the folk you helped finally spring to action.
However, it’s way too underutilized. Of the three final battle maps, you can only use them on two (from what I noticed), and the fights are over very quickly! I would have loved to see more use of this mechanic because it was fun to fight alongside the people you helped and to try to keep them alive since if they died, they were lost forever. Another problem with the ending is that it seems to be a binary choice ending, regardless of what you have done in the past. And there is no epilogue, things just end with the narrator proclaiming (in my case) that I was the
HERO of Baldur’s Gate, a city I didn’t care that much about in the first place. I hope this gets expanded in the inevitable “enhanced edition”.
World simulation
As I mentioned in my review there is no day and light cycle, or weather effects in the game, which limits the world simulation, as expected. The NPCs don’t follow any kind of natural routines, they remain in their place until the world shifts around them because of narrative reasons. This isn’t too different from many other RPGs, but I must say it’s a little bit disappointing still, considering how much sandbox gameplay disappears because of this. For example thieving. You will have to nick stuff in broad daylight while the NPCs do their business, and they never leave the proximity of important chests, or whatever you want to plunder. What they do react to though, is monsters, and well, dynamic interaction in the form of violence. I accidentally summoned a young beholder in the grove, and the shopkeeper and a few others left their place of work to come and help. Pretty cool stuff, but overall, the game is very static, and any NPC movement is a highly scripted kind of event. This is far from
Gothic level of life simulation, and it’s a shame not more development went into this aspect.
Flying & jumping
While both flying and jump is a great addition to the gameplay, particularly for exploration, it does come with some oddities. Jumping is not so bad, however, on later levels, the natural jumping for characters with high athletics and strength becomes cartoony, as they can jump several meters in either direction without any kind of spell. It looks ridiculous, yet I take it for what it is, a silly interpretation of the rules that becomes useful when exploring dangerous dungeons. What does not work so well is flying. It’s a pretty good way to go around of course, but how it works is a bit baffling and limits the use of the skill. It’s basically an extension of jumping since you can only reach places you can see. This means it makes it very hard to use it for its intended purpose – flying around anywhere and getting to out-of-reach places. Another thing with flying is that you can’t hover in midair. This makes it worthless in combat, beyond maybe escaping enemies. In
Solasta: Crown of the Magister (which is also a game based on DnD 5th Edition) you can hover in the air, and blast things from the sky. It makes it a much better spell, a most useful spell to escape melee-based enemies, which surely could have been needed when it comes to weak wizards.
Full game for 60 bucks with no BS
One of the more refreshing things (even if I won the game) is that
Baldur’s Gate 3 is sold as a full package, with no additional bullshit DLCs, or micro-transactions. It’s just like the games of old, and in this day and age that should be celebrated. What is funny too that ties into this, is that there are a lot of butthurt developers saying that this game should absolutely not be treated as the norm. That it’s an impossible standard and such malarkey. I call fake news on that one. In my opinion, all games should try to reach for excellence and to give the player an experience out of the ordinary. I think that should be the set goal for every developer, and if they can’t reach that, well, that’s another story, but they should try at least. According to a lot of them,
Baldur’s Gate 3 is some kind of one-off miracle, and it isn’t even that great. It just comes off as incredibly sour grapes, and defeatists, on top of being anti-consumer, which is an issue that has been a part of this industry for the longest time now. “We have to increase prices” & “We need to sell skins” in an industry that makes more money than both Hollywood and the music industry combined. Sure, I believe you, Mr. CEO of Big Corp Gaming Company.
That’s all I have to talk about this time around, I’m sure more things will pop up in my head eventually, so expect more
Baldur’s Gate 3 content on the blog in the future. Actually, I can already think about a few things, like how it’s Shadowheart’s game more than the player. Anyway, game on, and I will see you all next time.
Thanks for reading.
