izigame.me

Reviewing this game (and not recommending it) is somewhat frustrating for me. I've always loved the setting and the lore, and Owlcat did an excellent job with that. I don't think it's a BAD game, but there's a lot of things that someone could give it a bad review for and I wouldn't blame them. I want to love this game so badly but man, I keep hitting things that make me want to go play something else.
The dead horse of "so many bugs" has already been beaten to death here. Will Owlcat fix them? Probably. There was even a tiny update on Christmas morning (it may have been pushed out the day before) that fixed all of my visual tiles/layers/icons that were missing. But how long will bug-quashing take? I could see people waiting for a future sale and only buying it then, well after the bugs are fixed.
But what has made me want to quit multiple times are only what I might call 'potholes'. They're things that you hit (or see other people hit) and you end up sitting there wondering what is even going on. One of the first ones was the notorious Derelict Hulk. I think it was well made and overall was a fun encounter, but running into that very early on was an eye opener. Was it a conscious choice? Was it just an early game party and build check, maybe? Or was it just overtuned for when people tend to run into it? I left and came back much later, which seems to be what a lot of other people did. But I had no idea until I Googled a number of discussions about it, and saw I wasn't alone.
The mechanics behind Navigator points...I thought I understood what was going on under the proverbial hood...up until I hit the mission where I had to find a path to a system without a pre-existing path, and I had no navigator points left (you need 3). Once again I was off to Google, and found myself combing through various threads and discussions to try understanding what was going on. Did anyone else happen to notice *THE LITERAL FIRST TIME* they moused over a system, and seeing a message explaining how to create paths and such? Because I certainly don't remember seeing anything, but a number of people online insist that it is there but it only shows up ONCE. So in the end I learned about some random orange/red encounters giving out navigator points, reloaded a previous save where I still had a couple of points left, then warped back and forth until I got such an event (this took a while) and was able to reach that system. But none of this was obvious from within the game...it took some searching online to find a solution.
The most annoying for me was Act 3 and trading a stimm (?) for a pistol I did not need (it's a completely blind dialogue exchange where you don't know what you will even get anyways, or that you will need the original item later) and then playing around in that general area for hours before wondering why I couldn't manage to rescue a specific character. If you don't have VERY GOOD specific stats you can fail 2 dialogue checks (I was at a 0% chance to pass either of them, with Argenta who was also zero help), leaving me my only option...to use the potion/stimm that I had traded away hours earlier, and hadn't found more of...so that option was grayed out. So off I go to Google YET AGAIN, and sure enough...you can lose certain characters permanently in that part of the game. And of course I didn't save between all of the cutscenes/dialogue and trading that stimm away, sooo...I had to reload all the way back to before that storyline even picked up. Is there another solution? Maybe? But I didn't find anything and I 100% didn't want to just up and lose a character PERMANENTLY...so /golflap to Owlcat for that specific design choice.
I ended up talking to a few friends who by this point have all quit playing, and there seemed to be a somewhat common thread in the game for everyone: they all hit certain things that either weren't well explained, they were forced to reload and had to go back more than 30m, or were hit in the face with something that came completely out of the blue, and they all literally just exited out and went off to play other games instead. And FWIW, almost all of them have beaten BG3 (at least once) as well as having played all of the Pathfinder stuff.
Now add in all of the bugs, especially in the later acts, to ship combat that's really just a minigame (that not everyone likes, though I kind of do) along with a skill system that is just a rats-nest of junk that encourages premade cookie cutter builds for certain characters...and I don't know if I can honestly recommend it, even if I will likely go back repeatedly and stubbornly keep playing.
I'll change my review to 'recommend' at a later date if Owlcat goes back and fixes a lot of stuff, but at this point in time I'd tell people to just hold off until it's either on sale (next Christmas, maybe?), or Owlcat fixes a lot of the issues people are currently having.