Baldur's Gate 3: The illithid conspiracy

[Nich]

Baldur's Gate 3 is in Early Access as of today! What that means is: 6 of the 12 base character classes from the PHB, 1 of the 3 planned Acts for the story, and bugs aplenty. But it's the first attempt at making a D&D video game with the 5th edition ruleset--really, any proper ruleset since 3rd, since there inexplicably never was a 4e-based game.

And it works pretty well. If you've played 5e before, virtually everything you expect to be there from the classes and the rules you know is there. (One weird exception: if there's a way to take the Dodge action on your turn, I couldn't find it. Maybe that'll get implemented with the Monk class, which is still MIA.) From a story perspective, it starts pretty strong, with your hapless level 1 PC trapped aboard a damaged Illithid nautiloid, in Hell. Things settle down a little bit after that, but if you're going to open a D&D story, that's a much better way to do it than starting everybody off at an inn.

Since this is from Larian, makers of Divinity 2, there's plenty of environmental stuff and weird edge case interaction to mess with or take advantage of. I'm pretty bad at that, since I got ruined in one of the first real encounters after the nautiloid crashed. But I'll stick with it, despite the tragic lack of a Bard class here on day 1.

 

[MetManMas]

I really hope that Baldur's Gate 3 does well when it comes out proper 'cuz I'd really love to see some newer Dungeons & Dragons games other than gacha-based fighting simulators and that jank Diablo-ish F2P MMORPG that would really like me to pay $80 to be a dragon man.

 

[Exposition Owl]

(which is to say: my demand, verily it froths)

 

[Neo Skimbleshanks]

My heart is always impulsively purchasing D&D-like video games at MSRP but my brain knows I can barely get past the character creation screen, if at all. Feel like they're asking me to make too many big choices about stats, doesn't feel glamorous to have dump stats, and I don't like that humans are best in D&D. (maybe not this game)

I will love to read people's thoughts and a fleshed out wiki one day, for sure. I probably will still buy this, soon, even.

 

[estragon]

Coop Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2 with my husband was probably the best gaming experience of my life, so I have high hopes for this since it seems to build on those. I'm not going to play it in early access, but I'm excited for it when it's done.

 

[SabreCat]

I've loved the Baldur's Gate and Divinity games, but the fact that Mike Mearls was involved in this one makes me sad and confused.

 

[Neo Skimbleshanks]

Haven't looked too deeply but I appreciate what I know of the character creation process in terms of physical appearance. One stumbling block in playing games Like This is, I want my character to look nice and also, like their character portrait. Old D&D presented like dozens of weird portraits, mostly human, often seemingly class-specific, so I felt constrained. I don't think this game has character portraits and it seems they just scanned several dozen model's faces... a great step. Pretty people have the right to star in all media; I'm glad game producers are recognizing this.

I've seen a handsome githyanki with a pompadour fade... older games wouldn't have allowed this... and not just because that race didn't exist then? (I don't know)

 

[Nich]

I'm less sanguine on the character appearance customization. What's there is fine and well implemented, but noticeably absent is the ability to influence body shape or type in any way. Your 16 STR fighter and 8 STR wizard are going to have the same slender build, which is just weird. Also, no fat people allowed, apparently.

 

[MetManMas]

I realize that more in-depth body customization would mean a lot of work in making sure that gear fits different body rigs and such, but I seriously wish that more games with avatar customization would give you more options for body types.

I wish more games would take notes from Dragon's Dogma.

 

[estragon]

I've seen a handsome githyanki with a pompadour fade... older games wouldn't have allowed this... and not just because that race didn't exist then? (I don't know)

There were githyanki in the Baldur's Gate games (at least in BG2), but they weren't playable.

 

[Wheels]

Opening of the game had me wishing someone would let Larian make a Spelljammer game.

 

[Vidfamne]

Githyanki are extremely long-standing in D&D (dating back to 1e!) but they were probably deemed unviable as a PC race, not least because they get automagically eaten by the Lich-Queen upon reaching xp level 20 lol. I hear this was retconned in 5e, which is likely why they're available now, but I've never paid much attention to 4e or 5e.

The earliest appearance of githyanki / githzerai in any D&D video game was in Planescape: Torment afaik (with a githzerai available as a party member). I'm 99% sure BG1 didn't have them. There's also Zhjaeve in base-game NWN2 (another controllable githzerai party member; there's a good reason why the PC can't be githyanki in that game's story), but don't play that, imho.

 

[Destil]

‘yanki are typically evil, which is why I would assume they’ve usually not been front and center in games where you’re generally making a good aligned team.

Githzeri have been a popular playable race since at least 2e Planescape.

 

[MetManMas]

‘yanki are typically evil, which is why I would assume they’ve usually not been front and center in games where you’re generally making a good aligned team.

These games pretty commonly have Evil-aligned characters in the frickin' pre-made character options though.

 

[SpoonyGundam]

barrelmancer best class imo

Spoiler

 

[Alixsar]

I want to play this more than like...anything on Earth, but I don't want to play until the whole game is out, knowing that's years away...but ALSO my friends were playing a co-op game last night and had a BLAST and like fuckkkkkkkkkkkk

Coop Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2 with my husband was probably the best gaming experience of my life, so I have high hopes for this since it seems to build on those. I'm not going to play it in early access, but I'm excited for it when it's done.

I played Divinity with 3 friends and it was insanely fun, and the idea of more Baldur's Gate AND having that same experience again is like...almost too much

 

[Neo Skimbleshanks]

I've gotten further than ever in one of these games, post-character creation. (twenty minutes) This game is funny. *my character passes a medicine check to remove a brain from a skull**just reaches in their with both hands and pulls it out, as I, Neo Skimbleshanks, would* Great face acting. Unfortunately, I built this computer 6 years ago and do not think it is up to speed anymore. Always knew this would happen.

 

[Adrenaline]

I just want to say that it bugs me that elves and drow are separate races in this game

 

[Neo Skimbleshanks]

Why? I do not really know how elves/races work or are supposed to work in this franchise.

Anyway, have played for a couple of hours. Runs much better when I turn the graphics down just a bit... they were automatically set to "Ultra" for some reason. Looking for a sweet spot where the faces/hair look nice in conversation. Don't care about how anything else looks.

Like the voice acting. Will probably be more annoyed with the characters if/when their approval actually matters.

 

[Destil]

I just want to say that it bugs me that elves and drow are separate races in this game

I would guess to split out their subraces, but it's pretty ironic when 5E is the first edition of D&D in years to have Drow as a sub-race instead of their own race.

 

[Adrenaline]

Drow is an Elf subrace in D&D 5e. Any significant deviation from the rules in the RPG will bother me to some degree.

 

[estragon]

Why? I do not really know how elves/races work or are supposed to work in this franchise.

In the old Baldur's Gate games, Drow were basically just elves but called Drow. The ones you could control were exclusively pre-made NPC party members, you couldn't really make one as a protagonist. (You could use your imagination and a custom portrait, but NPC reactions to you wouldn't make sense and you wouldn't get the gameplay differences without doing some modding.) Their special Drow stuff (honestly mostly just some extra magic resistance) was treated as a quirk of that party member. (At least as far as your party was concerned, no idea how if enemy Drow were treated differently.)

Icewind Dale 2 (the dungeon crawler spin-off) let you explicitly make Drow that had more substantial gameplay differences to make them a discrete group (NPCs would know they were Drow, light/fire weakness, some special abilities, some extra INT, an adjustment to levelling as a kind of handicap for their various bonuses), but they were still presented as a subrace of elves.

 

[Adrenaline]

The weird thing is that BG3 has subraces built in so it's not like the system isn't in place to make non-drow elves and drow have different gameplay and story features

 

[Nich]

They were so faithful to the 5e rules in every other respect that I have to assume there's some weird, behind-the-scenes mechanical reason why they couldn't make it work.

 

[Alixsar]

I really enjoyed tinkering with the character generator, and I've jumped into friend's games and played some of their characters and had fun but like...I know it's early access so I'm not mad about it, but this thing is just unplayable sometimes. Cutscenes are missing animations and have weird jarring cuts, the screen freezes a lot, the game straight up freezes or crashes all the time...

Despite everything, it's fun, but I kinda feel like it's not worth it until they iron out a bit more of the problems. It's also kind of a drag playing it AFTER playing Divinity OS 2. I feel like the combat is a lot simpler, but I also have a small sample size so maybe that's not entirely true? At the very least, it's definitely more "grounded"; so far nothing even remotely close to the following has happened: one time I stabbed myself to make blood so my other character could make a blood golem, so my OTHER character could freeze the blood, which made the enemy slip, but didn't affect me because I put nails in my shoes before the fight. And that was an EARLY fight too, things only got more wild as the game progressed. I'm looking for more stuff like that and all I'm getting is "hey, I can shove this guy and then my other guy can shoot them with an arrow". It's just kinda...underwhelming in comparison. It feels like the D&D 5e rules are restraining Larian...but again, small sample size so maybe not.

Still, that being said, I want to keep playing more than anything. I just kinda can't keep putting up with the frequent bugs and jank.

 

[estragon]

This has a release date now, August 31st on PC/PS5/Mac, and an XBox release at some future point when it's coming along better.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1628868071019409408

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1629176592860602368

Based on how Divinity:OS 1&2 went and just the nature of the genre, my guess is that the back 3/4 (or whatever) of the game that isn't in Early Access will need a lot of bug fixes after release to account for all the different possible approaches their systems accommodate, so in practice playing this day of release will be an Early Access experience in all but name. But that's when the first version of the whole thing will be out, anyway. To be clear, I had a great time playing Divinity:OS 2 around release, so I don't mean to dissuade anyone who's interested, but that just seems to be the reality of Larian games, for better or for worse.

 

[estragon]

I've played an embarrassing and extravagant amount of this since it launched last week. I was a little worried about how couch co-op would function because split-screen local coop and controller support weren't in Early Access and local coop implementation is delaying the XBox release, but there have been no major issues with either so far. The framerate struggles a bit if both characters are in separate busy areas, but that split-screen works at all in a game with this much visual polish in such enormous environments full of intractable objects is kind of a miracle. There's just nothing like the split-screen couch coop RPG experience that Larian provides, even if Larian's sensibilities are much less appeaing to me than Pillars of Eternity or even the Owlcat Pathfinder games.

An extremely significant tweak that improves the coop experience this time around is that if player characters come up next to each other in the turn order, both players can execute their turns simultaneously! In both complex and simple encounters, this is a huge improvement. In a simple encounter, this just means the experience goes faster and smoother. You don't have much to talk through, and your actions are happening at the same time. There's much less downtime where you just watch another player take their turn. In a complex encounter, this opens up strategic possibilities and creates more interactivity.

Outside of coop, I think this continues Larian's trajectory of improvement from Divnity:Original Sin 1-->D:OS2.

They still have a tendency to a style of humor that I find a little grating, but it's even further toned down here. I was worried that fully voiced dialogue would bog the game down, but instead I think the restrictions of a fully voiced game on this scale and with more cinematic dialogue presentation has resulted in even more concise dialogue. To be clear, there's still a lot of dialogue, but it feels like they've pared down the excess and just kept the essence, without cutting so much that it loses all charm.

I think also that the D&D systems help to alleviate some of the problems with level scaling, number bloat, and randomly generated equipment stats in the Divinity:Original Sin games. An item is either normal/+1/+2/etc, or it's a unique piece of equipment with some unique ability. No more dozens of nearly identical versions of equipment randomly generated to match your current character level, no more waiting for the item with relevant affixes to pop up once a vendor's stock resets. I hope if/when they make a D:OS3 that they take some lessons how the D&D license pushed them to do itemization in BG3.

We'll see how things go once we get out of the area that had so much bug testing during early access, but it makes a strong first impression.

 

[Oathbreaker]

Between how Early Access character creation options were updated (including remodeling of faces and retexturing of skin), the new content in Act 1, the entire character we never saw and Wyll's narrative rework I feel like the Early Access build was significantly older than they were letting on. Even after playing a lot of the final early access build I can't get over how much stuff to do is packed into this game.

The one real complaint I have is that Mage Hand is... very bafflingly only usable once per long rest? And the Arcane Trickster rogue's version of it for some reason never got its special abilities like pickpocketing/lockpicking/etc implemented so there's not really any reason to ever pick that subclass right now.

 

[Adrenaline]

I decided to play this because I was tired of ignoring cool looking hardcore RPGs that came out. It's fun! Having a background in how the systems work definitely helps. Really feels like playing DnD.

 

[ShakeWell]

Yeah, this is definitely the most like actual D&D of any videogame I've ever played. I rolled up a version of a character I played in a recent campaign and it translates very closely.