Baldur's Gate 3

I've been wanting to play Baldur's Gate 3 ever since it was announced back in 2019. The developers' previous two games, the Divinity: Original Sin series, were my two favorite turn-based RPGs ever, and considering their success, I was hoping their next game would be even better and more polished. Definitely wrong of me to get hyped, but looking back at it now, it sure delivered, right? Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't really require me to say anything about it, as it's one of the most popular and highest rated games of all time now, not just among RPGs. I played through it in co-op with a friend. But what did I think about it?

Baldur's Gate 3 is a game that runs in real-time as you move about in the world, but once you switch to combat, everything goes turn-based. It is almost entirely based on the D&D 5e ruleset, and so I dare say has very traditional RPG combat. Thinking about it, I couldn't really highlight any elements of the game that were really unique to it. But then again, with how well everything is executed, it doesn't need to do anything unique to be appreciated.
I do have a problem with how directly it copied the D&D experience. See, D&D is a great tabletop game, because the rules are deep enough to allow for a myriad of different possibilities at the hands of a dungeon master, while being simple enough to be fulfilled by the players and the one running the game. I don't think they're a good fit for a video game though. Despite how many different outcomes and scenarios the developers wrote into this game, a program still doesn't have the creativity of a live person responding to the actions of the player - that is not the strong suit to play for in a video game. Meanwhile, the mechanics of tabletop game are simple due to necessity, not because that's the most interesting option. A video game could do much more by delegating work to a computer, and I feel sticking to closely to the tabletop rules fails to take advantage of that. And I write about this in such detail, because it's by far my biggest problem with the game. I believe that mainly due to this, the gameplay is not fun. It's fun experiencing the story, and finding creative ways to approach the problems it gives you, but I find the combat quite sub-par.

Now, arguably a bigger problem, although one that I don't take as seriously, as it's not deep-rooted and will hopefully be fixed, is how full of bugs the game is. The first act is relatively polished, but acts 2 and especially act 3 is where everything starts to break down. The most jarring problems being quests that are left in broken states, unable to be finished. The worst of that being the main story quest that prevented us from getting to the end of the game. With a bit of cheating through modding we managed to resolve the issue, but I'm quite certain more than 90% of the playerbase could not manage to do so, and would have been forced to start a new game.
Aside from the extra bugs, I found act 3 to be the weakest act overall. This was in part due to the game being far too long in total. When I heard it was a long game, I was expecting 90 hours, not the 150 hours it took us. By act 3, I was already slightly exhausted with the game, and with the quests now just being thrown all over the map with no clear order in which to do them, completing them felt all the more tiresome.

Despite all my negativity, I still liked Baldur's Gate 3. It's just that, as I said, it doesn't really have anything unique to talk about. It's really well made in general (bugs aside), and is the closest thing you could get to a giant, well thought out D&D campaign in a video game. I just feel the focus was too much on the story and the many ways you could go about it. That's not something I care about, and I even believe that the more branches you allow to the story, the less the maximum potential of the story is. Meanwhile the gameplay was quite uninteresting, and even too easy, despite playing on the hardest difficulty (on release, not the new Honor mode). All in all, I would still recommend it to anyone who likes turn-based RPGs, and especially to people who like stories in their RPGs.