izigame.me

This is absolutely my GOTY. One of the best CRPGs of all time, perhaps the best mainstream CRPG ever made. My playtime is real (minus the 12 hours I spent in EA), so you can see the game is HUGE. And all that playtime is filled to the brim with well-executed content.
So if you like RPGs, tactics, huge adventures, and bears, the game is a must-buy. It's not a question. The only real question is: is Baldur's Gate 3 a 97/100?
Short answer: Act 1 absolutely is. And Act 1 took me 56 hours. If the game only consisted of Act 1 with some sort of ending, it would already have been brilliant. Think about it: less than one third of Baldur's Gate 3 is already a better game than most other CRPGs on the market. How is it even possible?
Later, however, it starts to crumble under its own weight — and I don't just mean the bugs. Those will be fixed; the meaninglessness of many final choices and lack of companion interaction likely won't.
And it's a damn shame.
GAMEPLAY
Larian RPGs aren't simply RPGs, they border isometric immersive sims, and it's a great concept, brilliantly executed here. You have your ordinary RPG fare: classes, abilities, XP, lockpicking, traps. And then you have a simulated world that you can interact with in creative and sensible ways. Can't pick a chest? Just take it away to open in camp. A boss is too tough? Surround him with explosive barrels pre-encounter and blow to smithereens. Or befriend him — you can side and kill any faction in the game. Can't reach someplace? Aside from various teleportation spells, you can also just carry a bunch of boxes to build a tower wherever you need.
Traversal is a separate — and unique — feature of the game. Most CRPGs are flat, apart from terrain in some battlefields, sometimes. Larian uses the Z axis to its full extent. Baldur's Gate 3 has interesting jumping puzzles (what right does a CRPG even have to have those?). Some of its areas, like the Monastery, feel like legacy dungeons from a FromSoft game, and I mean it in the best way possible. They're fun to explore and find routes through, secrets in. It's a game as much about exploration as it is about story and combat.
(Not to mention that it uses verticality for spectacular visual impressions in some areas.)
Another critical aspect of Baldur's Gate 3's exploration is just how dense it is. Even the emptier areas are packed with content. You find characters, secrets, reactivity, small stories. Figuring out a secret sometimes requires unique interactions, like reading a scroll in a certain location or casting a specific spell. It's brilliant, and fun, and the best aspect of the game by far.
No other product on the market offers anything remotely comparable.
STORY
It's hit and miss.
I'd put it this way: in this game, Acting > Characters > Story. Baldur's Gate 3 is incredibly well-acted, I can't remember a single character, even minor, that would be presented as anything less than good, and most main characters are just charisma personified — to the point where I was disappointed I couldn't have more interactions with someone like Ketheric. So whenever a character arc struggles a bit (being too cliche or too melodramatic), the acting makes up for it. And since most characters are interesting enough, their personal stories make up for the less brilliant part of the overall narrative. So in the end, it works.
Writing has never been Larian's strongest suit. Since you can befriend or kill any character in the game, their writing in Divinity tended to be skin-deep — and it's definitely MUCH better here. So that's progress.
The tone of Baldur's Gate 3 would probably not be for everyone. It rarely takes itself too seriously — and it's at its best when it doesn't. The small comedic storylets (like with the smart orge) and characters (like Minsc) just ooze charm. The erotic scenes are honesly very cool — if, again, you don't take yourself too seriously. With many of them, you're not meant to.
It's also very black-and-white, almost outdated in this regard. You can absolutely have an evil playthrough, but do understand that "evil" means "cackling sadistic evil that enjoys splattering squirrels and forcing people to kill themselves with their own daggers in front of you." Good and evil are objective qualities here — and there is no grey area, no attempt at deconstruction. It's all fun if you go with it; just keep it in mind.
The game's pacing is also great. You need to rest from time to time, usually after harder fights. And most long rests launch cutscenes that explore one story or another: of your party members, weird urges, or mysterious Guardian. Companions also have a LOT of reactivity and interjections in random events. It's all mixed up to create a very natufal flow. I don't think a lot of players even notice it — rare occasions of unique reactivily (like characters having reactions to having been killed and resurrected by you) are flashier. But don't underrate the importance of overall pacing. Pacing can make or break a game.
SO WHAT IS WRONG HERE?
Act 1 is absolutely brilliant and one of the best games I've ever played.
Act 2 makes some odd choices, but at least they're clearly artistic. After a dense location filled to the brim with content and reactivity, you find yourself in a huge open area with trash mob ambushes. I appreciate the Bloodborne-esque aesthetics as much as the next gal, but why does the game willingly forefit its best assets: the interesting secret-packed exploration, the reactivity, the interlocking events, the verticality?
Hint for future players: defy your natural instincts and follow the main story in Act 2 instead of exploring everything before getting to it. It'll send you off to explore anyway, but in a more fun way.
Act 3 is... huge. It's probably bigger than Acts 1 and 2 combined — which makes sense, you expect the city to be lively. And the stories are still all right in theory, but — well, half of them just don't deliver.
The game fails to fulfill its ambitions.
You can side with Gortash and his sensible evil proposal — except all you get is the inability to finish some companion quests and discover perhaps the biggest twist in the story, you can't get a "normal evil ruler" ending. That deal with the devil you made? A short cutscene in the end and nothing more. A non-illithid can't control the Netherbrain, except if you make a treacherous choice in the final cutscene, where you suddenly totally can. It feels good to gather allies for the final battle, but each of them only utters a single phrase — less than random characters in the street!
Generally speaking, siding with evil never feels like an equal choice past Act 1. It feels like a way to skip a boss fight. You're never rewarded by content for it.
You can't even discuss the final events with my whole party — only the three characters you took with you! How does that make any sense! Not to mention that companions have little to say over the course of the whole act, and there are zero to none unique interactions between them (like the conflict between Lae'zel and Shadowheart in Act 1) — and this is in the part of the story where I want their insights the most, to see how they've changed.
Don't get me wrong, the final conflict is still... all right. It offers no surprises and has too many moving parts, and your mysterious Guardian plays a role too technical and not compelling enough. And you're very much railroaded into the good ending. But it's still interesting and epic compared to other games.
It's just that my expectations were set much higher. Because Act 1 was so brilliant.
CONCLUSION
Still one of the best CRPGs ever. Buy it. Play it.
Just temper the expectations Act 1 sets. The game won't hold to the same insane standard of quality, and honestly, it's okay. Even 50 hours of that quality is a treasure. I loved it.