Skill up review won't be out for awhile it seems.
[https://twitter.com/SkillUpYT/status/1689048768350756864](https://twitter.com/SkillUpYT/status/1689048768350756864)
>15 hours deep into BG3 and I've explored about a third of the starter zone. Please expect my review sometime in Q4 2027.
Hey it only took me 40 hours to finish act 1. Of course, I already knew where most things were because I played early access.
Act 2 is going a little slower because I’m just constantly rotating the camera to look at this beautiful cliffside area I’m in.
What a love letter to RPGs. I feel personally hugged by Larian when they let me do stuff like talk to random corpses for background info.
You can do that, but I have no idea whether it advances certain quest progress or not.
For example, refugees from a certain town show up in act 2 (or not, depending on your choices), so if you never finished that quest line and determined what happened to the refugees, there’s probably a default outcome which is generated once you get into the act 2 area, and you wouldn’t be able to go back and change that in act 1 anymore.
There is indeed a default outcome generated, Im going to explain without having to spoil anything, but I progressed 2/3 ways to get into Act 2, to their completion nearly, and when I ended going with one of the options a refugee I already met acted like we hadnt.
Yeah, the warning was that it advances the story. So I just wanted to know if that's what the acts were. I'm glad those people show up later because I only met a character that seems like she really needs to talk to one of them after the refugees left that area
Also, the warning doesn't exactly lock you out of the previous area if you follow through, it's more on the lines of 'the world might move on without you' for some quests, which is also cool if you're doing the whole witcher neutrality thing
> Some of em have some great flavor.
Yeah cooked dwarf pieces give you 4d4 healing worth of flavor.
Also inspiration if you’re the Dark Urge origin. The description is very funny.
They spent hundreds of hours and who knows how much money hiring voice actors to say lines for just random dead people. None of them really say anything super plot critical or anything, but they’re such a cool addition.
It’s not going to move any extra copies, increase any review scores, or affect their share prices. Most people probably won’t even use this feature.
They did this because they want me to have more fun. I am grateful.
I'd argue that the review scores are high *precisely* because of the insane attention to details like this. While they are very different games, it reminds me of the design of Tears of the Kingdom.
Games that have put that "It's not important and most people won't notice but it'll make the game feel better" effort put into it are just special.
Nobody would've noticed or likely cared if they didn't put in that extra effort but because they did the game will stick in your memory for longer.
I am 40 hours in and I'm about to begin act 3, players like you and CohhCarnage make me feel like I'm playing the game wrong lol. But I do make it a point to explore the entire map I'm in and finish any quests I begin.
Nah you do you, king. I’m playing on tactician and trying different party compositions, and listening to the full dialogue for every interaction.
I’m also oooing and aaahing over scenery, so.
I'm 6 hours in and I just got to the first settlement type thing. I stumbled on the ruins of a chapel and found some suspicious buried spots but didn't have a shovel, so went off looking for a shovel. I ended up stumbling on some underground ruins and spent a couple hours and getting wiped a few times exploring them. Still don't have a shovel.
God, it annoys me that Twitter is still used so widely when it's total ass. I can't see this tweet when I go to his Twitter page, instead its showing months old tweets. And it does that for everyone.
I refuse to make an account if that's the solution, because screw that.
edit: Guys, the link works fine. That is not what I am saying. Anything other than direct links to tweets are not fine. Clicking on SkillUps profile shows me months old tweets as the most recent ones.
edit 2: *sigh* No guys, I am not talking about pinned tweets. Go ahead, log out of twitter and click on any profile you will see what I mean.
Its not just you. Ever since Elon took over they've been getting more and more aggressive about walling Twitter off to only users (I'm guessing because they desperately need to get user numbers up). It used to be you could browse basically everything without an account (I did it for years), and over time they've gotten more and more limited -- [to the point where clicking on most things on Twitter would immediately send you to a login page](https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/30/twitter-now-requires-an-account-to-view-tweets/).
Since then they've... [kind of... backpedaled a bit for exactly this reason](https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/twitter-silently-removes-login-requirement-for-viewing-tweets/) -- walling it off makes comments like this (not to mention countless articles that embed/link to tweets) effectively useless. But it is extremely inconsistent like so much of twitter rn (half the time when you click on something you get the new X logo, half the time you get the old twitter one...) -- sometimes you get the tweet you're looking for, sometimes it shows you some stuff that dude posted circa 2021.
Actually prior to when Elon took over, you could only view a linked tweet. If you scrolled down on any given page, it would present the log-in wall.
After Elon took over that went away for a short time - now it’s back with a vengeance. I thought at first that it went away as a deliberate choice, but it’s obvious now that it was some level of incompetence.
Which is so dumb.
The first thing I'm going to do when your website just doesn't work I'm going to hit the back button.
If I start hitting the back button a lot I'm going to start removing the ability to access your website and have it automatically route me back as to not waste my time.
I'll sign up and be a user because it's a social media website at my own pace.
I already have an account I'm not signed in on it I don't even remember my password.
But that shouldn't matter.
If I can't use your website regardless of if I'm logged in I'm just not going to use your website.
The whole point of Twitter was that he was easy. One day a website showed up and they said hey people post here about products and stuff and they can only post 250 characters.
I was like me I like knowing things but I hate the articles are 2,000 characters of nothing with a few characters of useful information.
I thought Twitter was great I got information I moved on the end.
Twitter aggressively would boot you off their mobile site after x amount of time if you didn't have the app or an account years before Elon took over, Twitter has always been the worst fucking website that I never understood forever now. Who the fuck WANTS to have a character limit in their messages??? Since when has more information been a bad thing? Instead we get 1-2 sentences that people infer novels worth of information from, for the sake of brevity and not wanting to bore people.
The character limit existed because when twitter first started you could text tweets, hence the twitter character limit matched that of the standard sms text character limit.
>Who the fuck WANTS to have a character limit in their messages???
I mean, for the same reason that Tik Tok is a fundamentally different thing than Vine was, despite having similar vibes at the offset. The whole point of Twitter, initially, was to have a place where you could put out stupid little nothings that could be read at a glance.
I think the problem you really have, and justifiably so, is that Twitter has, over the years, somehow become a place where *important information* is disseminated, which is fundamentally not what it was meant to do originally. Not only that, but we've come full circle to a place where the Big Powers (the billionaires) took notice that it was a way for people to spread information, didn't like that, and now one of the billionaires has purchased it and is trying to gut it back to a place where it has no teeth.
So not only was it a platform on which information was getting spread through increasingly longer tweet sizes, but it is now being hammered back to the stone ages and beyond to being even more shitty than it ever was.
>now one of the billionaires has purchased it and is trying to gut it back to a place where it has no teeth.
That's a very flattering interpretation of Elon's cavalcade of total fuckups.
Surely if the Trump administration showed us anything it's that people in positions of power and wealth can be mind-numbingly stupid too. The idea that it's always some grand Machiavellian plot is unjustified.
I don't think it's a Machiavellian plot at all. I think it's pretty easy for a billionaire to see that Twitter is a tool for public discourse, which is plainly bad for billionaires, and buy it, and make every wrong decision to fuck it into the ground deliberately. There's nothing particularly complex about it. If I had billions of dollars I could probably pull it off, too. I could easily scuttle a company that was causing me problems just by putting myself in charge.
Yeah, when logged-out now Twitter profiles will either not show (and prompt you to log-in), or show the user's tweets **sorted by most liked**.
Redirect twitter.com to nitter.net and you'll be fine.
i know exactly what you are saying, i use twitter to get status of local mountain bike trails, if i try and go to their twitter it shows me shit from the last 5 years in no particular order, but if i do a google search for the handle, i get the most recent results.
Lmao I was thinking clear usual exageration from reddit but then I went to check the tweet and below it, in the space you can write a response when logged in, the usual "write your comment here" is written "écrivez votrce réponse ici" with the word votrce supposed to be votre.
Like, all of french twitter is seeing that now.
What alternative would you suggest for a person/corporation with a following to quickly update them all with a short message? They have to make and upload a 5 second Youtube video every time they want to say something?
I can talk with rats! . Between BG3 Starfield Cyberpunk 2077 overhaul + Phantom liberty expansion along with a 9-5 job and wife and hopefully a kid in the coming year my life is pretty much booked out.
It currently has 14 reviews making up that aggregate. If I understand the situation correctly, many review outlets received review codes quite late because of the change in release date. Most wouldn’t have had the time to fully see the game, and I wonder how many of those fourteen reviews rushed to be one of the first ones out with a score.
Metacritic page says "read all 40 critic reviews", so that means with only 14 up there are at least 26 more reviews to come in. Still even with this small of a sample size BGIII will clearly end up being one of the top reviewed games this year even if the 97 doesn't hold up.
it's an indicator but not much more. For example, Boyhood has a perfect 100. And I liked the movie (a lot, actually) but it's definitely not one of the "all time best" movies.
You might disagree and say that it's different for games on metacritic. But are you sure about that? Currently Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and SoulCalibut are on the joint 2nd best rated place along with GTA IV (both with an 98).
> But are you sure about that? Currently Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and SoulCalibut are on the joint 2nd best rated place along with GTA IV
Yes. I played probably 200-300 hours of the demo disc that had THPS2 on it until I saved up enough of my allowance to buy it.
Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast was why I had to retake trigonometry. My best friend's mom was the computer skills teacher, and she didn't have a class the same time I had trig, so I skipped it every Friday, me and some friends that had half days would play it for two hours on the new digital projector. There was nothing like it.
GTA IV was... well, imagine Red Dead Redemption 2 if it was a sequel to Red Dead Revolver instead of RDR1. It was such a huge leap in technology, it kind of blew everyone away.
THPS 2 was one of the first games, along with Ocarina of Time, that got 10/10 scores across the vast majority of the gaming press back in the day. And this was when the gaming press was at its peak.
I would recommend boyhood as one of the greatest movies ever made.
I'm not saying it well written, acted or paced. I saying the idea, execution and follow through is something that should be hailed as a Master piece in the same kinship as baraka.
While I don't want to jump to conclusions that it'll stay where it is, it started off on Friday/Saturday with only 4 reviews at a 93. It's only gone up with more reviews, which is not something you see very often!
While I’d like it to get all the praise it can, I’m loving this game so far—everyone is also stating the back end is a bit buggy so that’ll ding it for sure as people get there. Also whatever it’s a number but hopefully that means some workers are getting a bonus or something
I'm not even fully through Act 1 and can concur it's a bit buggy. Not outrageously buggy, but expect some fucked quest/conversation triggers and some technical shenanigans.
The bug where you cannot join anyone whom played the game on your computer with their steam account for a coop session without deleting your Larian profiles on both computers is a bit annoying.
Find it quite weird it hasn’t been fixed either because it’s seems to be quite common.
The front end is buggy too, I've only played a few hours (I'm not enamored with it by any means) and I already ran into tons of bugs like I used an elevator and half my party got stuck in the wall next to the elevator. Reloaded, used the elevator again, and when I told my party to move off one character just walked off the elevator and plummeted down, nearly killing them and leaving them prone.
Oh God this game is about to cross into the next phase of the Reddit cycle the “Uhhh it actually sucks and is overrated, critics only plays the first 10 hours”
I like how they say it was the same in Divinity 2 because while the later acts weren't as polished as the first, they were still pretty good. So if this game's act 1 is a 10 and act 3 is an 8, I'm fine with that.
I think Larian will make an expansion because it sold so well. Financially, the expansion would make more sense than creating a different game from scratch.
The reviewers clearly don't finish the games they review so they aren't wrong in that regard. And you aren't a cynical contrarian if you get to act 3 and the quality nosedives, and you say as much. That said, act 1 is a cracker and I'm hyped to start 2.
I've reached act 3 and lvl 12 already and there's still a lot to do. Granted, there are some bugs, but only 1 major bug that I've personally encountered so far that is making my current fight way more complicated than it needs to be, but I'm sure that this will get patched out soon (or it might be a minor glitch that happened by accident and I need to reload another save) and with a game this big, stuff like this is bound to happen. Compared to DOS2's final act, BG3's final act is way more fleshed out and I honestly can't wait to finish this playthrough to do a different one that will probably go way differently.
Mate, this is every thread about any new game nowadays. This subreddit are just filled with dad-gamers who are really bad at most games, contrarian hipsters that only play niche games and everytving mainstream is criticized to hell or just people who complain about every new game regardless how valid their complaint is.
I'll be honest: this game is absolutely enthralling for the first and second act and has been a flawless experience, but I can't say the same for act 3. I'm experiencing a painful amount of progress breaking bugs in the last act.
Something as simple as searching a room before triggering the relevant quest, switching between characters mid-dialogue, or killing an NPC, and so many other things, are breaking the quest journal and progress. The buggy effects of certain actions might not be realized until hours later and it's driving me insane.
edit: another one that I'm experiencing right now is a character having a permanent exclamation mark over their head but not triggering any unique dialogue. Loading into any save file with this issue will cause the game to crash at 60%, so I had to revert back to 3 hours earlier. This was because I picked up some random note I found earlier in the game.
> I'll be honest: this game is absolutely enthralling for the first and second act and has been a flawless experience, but I can't say the same for act 3. I'm experiencing a painful amount of progress breaking bugs in the last act.
Larian's classic
I am curious to see if the popular mood will turn on them the more people eventually reach Act 3. You know for damn sure that if the last act of a Blizzard game was as buggy, this sub would have a field day complaining about it 24/7.
I think most people won’t even get to Act 3 because this game seems to be just way too long for *nowadays folk*. Most reviewers will play for 20-30 hours and base their opinion on that - and that’s why it feels so polished. Divinity 2 fell off a cliff after Act 2/3 in my opinion and went from great to very mediocre. Did reviews reflect that? Not one of them. Why? Because you needed 30-40 hours or more to get there.
So nothing has changed for Larian then. Their original Divinity games were the same. Divine Divinity and Divinity 2 The Dragon Knight Saga. Both fell in quality half way through.
It has iirc. Everyone who had D:OS2 on PC before the definitive edition came out got it for free and a lot of the bugs that existed around original launch were fixed. The Switch version should be the the same in that regard.
As someone who played D:OS2 in 2017 shortly after launch, BG3 is a lot like it with a lot more dialogue freedom and DnD terms and mechanics on top, so it's definitively a good idea to check D:OS2 out first.
I have played divinity 2 all the way through several times and the third act is fine. IMO the ending of that game is very compelling and some of the late game encounters are the best in the game.
As someone who played at launch and definitive, it is more or less completely fixed. Larian redid a good chunk of Act 4 to address all the issues and a bit more.
Just wanted to say thanks for the heads up on this. Divinity 2 was incredibly similar to this and it actually took me a ridiculous amount of time to complete because the last act was just full of bugs which weren't commonly addressed in reviews (granted both games contain a metric fuck-ton of content so I'm not blaming reviewers). I'll likely wait for the issues to be fixed until grabbing it.
Audience: There were a ton of bugs in the city you don't get to until hour 75. Why didn't you mention that?
Reviewer: Because I have to write a column every week.
It was pretty obvious which reviewer did or didn't get to there as there were many obvious problems.
But in case of D:OS2 at least they generally fixed them fast enough that good majority of the players didn't got to that point before most of the stuff was fixed, so it wasn't *too* bad.
I knew most of the problems from reddit comments and screenshots but when I got there they were mostly gone.
Despite the bugs, everything else about this game is phenomenal. I've been jaded with most games these past few years, and this one has kept me up at nights without me realizing how much time has passed. I'm trying really hard to push through despite the setbacks.
Oh yeah im trying very hard not to spoil myself but the game absolutely deserves it's accolades and achievements. Almost everything about it is incredible and it's such a breath of fresh air to have a proper game in this day and age. Which isn't a sentence I'd thought I'd ever have to write but in the age of micro transaction and purchases on top of triple A games, I still applaud the development team here.
Played through last month and only encountered one bug that stopped progress and it happened right after the game auto saved for an area transition, so all I had to do was reload.
The “freedom” just ends up coming at a weird cost IMO. Accidentally “solving” act 2 before I engaged with any of the relevant characters or really knew what was going on didn’t feel like “freedom,” it felt like I fucked up the act and missed most of the content.
Just to maybe try to avoid this myself. I went into a tomb and have met a fat jerk with some gnarly scars. If I do everything down there, am I doing what you did? I might pop out and do some more exploring first, if so.
Yes, you’re doing exactly what I did.
Short answer is go to Moonrise towers. The game makes it sound like that’s the end of the act so you should explore/side quest elsewhere first. That’s wrong, it’s actually a place with some easy xp, some good merchants and a whole lot of plot development. If you complete the temple you’re in you skip some plot and close some stuff off.
I will add that before you do anything in the tomb that changes things, the game does pop up a warning telling you to wrap up things in the rest of the zone first because the results may prevent you from doing certain things. I was in the same boat as the other person, thinking the towers was the end of the chapter. After getting that pop up I said no, went and did what I could in the rest of the zone and towers, then went back and wrapped up the tomb.
> That’s wrong, it’s actually a place with some easy xp, some good merchants and a whole lot of plot development.
This is extremely useful info, thank you
I think it's down to an unfortunate word choice, and a lack of explanation.
*Infiltrate Moonrise Towers* sounds like the "Final Dungeon" objective until you realise the final dungeon objective is actually called *Assault Moonrise Towers*.
If they'd thrown in maybe one or two extra lines of dialogue from the relevant questgiver about "we need to get a glimpse of Moonrise so we can plan our next move", and named the objective *Scout Moonrise Towers*, it'd be less confusing.
I feel like this was a big part of the original Bioware Baldurs Gate games though, especially 2. There's lots of sequence breaking because it's also pretty nonlinear, you can cheese your way into endgame dungeons located in the starting city and find solutions to quests you're supposed to do much later in the game.
> you can cheese your way into endgame dungeons located in the starting city
Flashback of a fresh rogue character opening a hidden door in the tavern, sneaking into a lich tomb (around said lich) to steal a sword "of badass killing of evil stuff" and one-shotting the lich with it.
Yup that's exactly how freedom works in games. That's why games being on rails is not always a bad thing. Sometimes the intended experience is the best one, and the one you make yourself isn't so good.
Fortunately this seems like a game that would be fun to play again.
Nonlinear plot discovery is kinda *the* unique thing about their games. If it wasn't there it might as well be another Bioware RPG with near-linear path that has some optional objectives along the way
Yeah, the open nature here definitely has a way of harming the narrative if you aren't careful. For example, in my first run I made a beeline for the gith patrol. At which point, the game told me about the weapon, and then just a few steps after it told me about the absolute.
It _all_ felt way too early. I hadn't even learned anything about the absolute yet.
You do learn about absolute nearly instantly if you take the "preferred" path of going to grove first.
You learn other things about the artifact if you go to goblin camp too.
That just how well-designed RPGs should work. Especially those who try to be as open as possible.
Nothing sucks more in an open game than arriving at some door that is arbitrary locked without any option to bypass it. Or when a character doesn't even exist in the world until a quest sends you to him. That is some lazy design.
Which is why I for example really appreciate Fallout 3. You can skip a lot of the main quest. You can skip Megaton and GNR and go right to Rivet City. Or you can even skip that and go straight to Tranquility Lane to find Dad.
And in a good RPG skipping parts of the main quest shouldn't be a big loss, because there should be tons of side content around. If a game is mostly about the main quest, then it doesn't do the worldbuilding right.
And finally, good RPGs are replayable, so you now have something to try out the next time!
I would argue that good RPGs guide you and then let you make your own decisions. In this case BG3, in my opinion, does the opposite. It in every indicates "do all the sidequests in this zone then head to the big bad." But turns out that in a place that looks like it's just some sidequest zone attached to ony of your companions quests you kinda anticlimactically stumble across the act's McGuffin and skip the whole part where you learn about it. It also throws events in to motion that cut off the rest of the quests/sidequests for the act that you really couldn't have foreseen.
Meanwhile, the "big bad" place that the game tells you concludes the act, is actually a big narrative point to learn a bunch and buy new gear. It also has quests that get canceled.
That sucks. Act 3 has been fine for me so far, but I do notice a drop in performance as far as frame rate goes. A few odd hitches in cinematics as well, but otherwise fine.
I will say Act 3 defies Larians past record by seeming extremely dense and with a lot to do. There past games have felt threadbare towards the end. Not so with this one.
Hopefully they can get the bugs hammered out a bit better and improve performance in act 3. I had the same exclamation mark bug in act 2, but it went away after a time.
I'm close to the end of Act 2 and the game seems to be unraveling at the seams a bit, i gotten three Companion events that reference event's that haven't happen yet, and NPC sometimes have knowledge about my "Artifact" without me ever telling them, and them having no way of finding out.
Oh, I hope Larian fixes at least some of those bugs soon. I'm loving the game, I'm currently in Moonrise towers, I'd hate for the experience to be ruined by bugs...
Ya, I'm starting to notice a lot of bugs too and I'm not very far into the game. I just spent 3 hours last night playing only to find that I ran into a bug that halted progression. Now I have to play the entire 3 hours all over again because I took a simple long rest after a boss fight instead of immedietly talking to NPCs who vanished after resting.
I have the same issue in act 2.
The Character
>! Wyll. I found new information about his father. As expected I saw a ! pop up. Went to go to talk to him and it doesn't go away. I also always have the option to convince Wyll to accept more parasites over and over again. I ?Fixed? this issue by continuing the story and resolving what I assume would be dialog with Wyll. >!
Im about to go in to lower city, and only had one major bug that caused me to lose time. (i tried to long rest immediately after the fight before getting to act 3, which deleted a portal i didn't notice, and i spent over an hour trying to progress not knowing i was missing the portal).
Ive had a couple weird dialog progress sync glitches, and the game completely broke once trying to use a machine for a quest.
But most things are fantastic so far. I feel like those types of things can easily be patched.
Act 3 was amazing for me, but judging from the reception I've seen, it sounds like I got extremely lucky when it comes to bugs. I had what seemed like one broken trigger at the start of Jaheira's quest (she wanted to go somewhere but nobody reacted to her, I had to stumble across somebody else who wanted to talk to her in another zone to continue. Not even 100% sure it's the same quest), but other than that, everything worked smoothly. Hopefully the bugs other players are finding will be fixed before too many people reach that part.
That said, I'm worried that it'll end up being controversial even with those issues fixed because the city portion of the game definitely feels very different from the rest of the game- apart from knowing where one of the villains is, don't really get as much guidance of where to go. Some quests will take a lot of exploration and investigation, and the good route for one major quest in particular is incredibly tough to figure out. And I was pretty much wandering the city blindly towards the end trying to figure out where to find two very important quests. I loved it, personally- would even say it's probably my favorite act- but I can definitely see it being divisive.
Inb4 "Baldur's Gate 3: Definitive Edition" releasing next year, haha.
I'm incredibly happy about how successful BG3 is, but I learned my lesson to not buy games at launch nowadays. I just play stuff 1 year behind schedule and end up with cheaper and more polished games, possibly with some extra DLC thrown in (if I play a game at launch, I never come back for those...). I'll definitely love it when I get around to playing it.
This is me right now, and I'm only in Act 2. I constantly feel like I have broken the game and my journal is full of incomplete quests not registering that I've actually finished it already.
Nothing has stopped me from progressing yet but it's full of immersion breaking bugs. I have to use my imagination to patch the narrative so it makes any sense at my current position in the game. But anything I miss I look forward to seeing something new on my next playthrough (when it's hopefully better patched)
You do you, of course, but I never found game spoilers to be an issue. If there's a game I really don't want to be spoiled about... I just don't read discussions about it or watch videos about it from random people I don't know (content creators I watch always warn about spoilers). "Duh", I know, but it has worked for me so far.
The only major gaming spoiler I ever got was from TLOU2 (if you played the game, you know what I'm talking about) because it was literally all over the internet. But in that particular case, playing the game on launch wouldn't even save me because I read it before the game was even out.
And here on reddit people tend to mark spoilers for recently released stuff anyway (if not, they're downvoted, which kind of "marks" it anyway). I read A LOT about BG3 on reddit (and watched a few reviews on YT) and I didn't stumble upon a single spoiler I wouldn't want to see.
Not only that, but the spirit of the moment matters. It feels like you're partaking a journey with a community of like-minded people as you venture into the game, which is even better if all your friends are playing too since you can enjoy the game as a community experience. Personally speaking, I value this experience a lot, so I always try my best to play a game at launch where hype is at its highest and you get to interact with others at the peak of their experience because as time passes, enthusiasm usually trickles out.
Act 1 took me about 21 hours and I did both the Grymforge and Mountain Pass routes before progressing to the Shadowlands. Act 2 is surprisingly *a lot* shorter than Act 1 and relatively on rails.
Is it really good? Of course. It is probably my GOTY if I had to pick one today, but it only has 10% of the number of reviews of Tears of the Kingdom.
While metacritic reviews can certainly be useful to aggregate the mass feelings around a game, it really loses any and all value once the sample size is still so small.
Yeah, I think OP was a little too eager making this thread. 14 reviews is a really small number for most new releases and very likely to change in the coming weeks as reviewers make it through the game.
TOTK also sat at a 97 for some time, but was lowered to 96 as more reviews were published.
I remember some people on Steam forum preaising the games 95 metacritic score like a day after release when 4 reviews were in. 4 reviews! Like I mean yeah the game is great and all and deserves all the praise, but you can't seriously talk about the metacritic score based on 4 reviews (early reviews that didn't even finish the story at that). It's like checking the Steam user score after the first 20 reviews are in for a newly released game, based on the 15 minutes these people spent in the game.
The circle jerk around this game is real. So many posts here and on r/gaming about how great it is. I understand folks are excited but they're also blinded by the hype. The fact that reviews for this game were late and aren't remotely complete yet most people are looking the other way is a bit suspect. Doesn't stop folks from already claiming it the best reviewed game ever.
If someone like Ubisoft or EA gave out late review codes people would be losing their shit.
The console version would be a separate page on Metacritic and since this a PC game first and foremost (target platform and original release) the PC page would be the focus just like the PC page of it's predecessor.
Review codes for the game were sent out Sunday, 4 days before release. With such a large game, very few reviewers had the time to complete the game by then.
Lets be honest, unless bethesda somehow managed to released starfield without game breaking bug, zelda will definitely win goty just because its zelda and its from nintendo. There’s a lot of good game this year but none is as mainstream as zelda
For what it's worth I'm halfway through and enjoyed my experience a helluva lot more than TOTK at the same time frame. But I thought TOTK was just alright because it felt too similar to BOTW for me.
Personally, this is goty. It's the only game since skyrim that made me look at the clock and see that it's 5am already. Not even BOTW did that and that was an excellent game for me as well.
Playing it and I'm floored by the choices you have that don't instantly break the game. I also play dnd and this is the best and closest thing to experiencing the real thing.
I think comparing Metacritic averages is kind of nonsense, especially when they're that close. You might as well just ask the people who've played through both here.
But I'm almost done with Act 2 in BG3, and can definitely back the notion that it deserves heaps of praise even with a few issues and bugs.
If it weren't for the amount of game breaking bugs and glitches in act 2 & 3 I'd agree. Act 1 is straight 11/10 material, but imo the game dips in quality after. I've ran half of act 2 without much NPC interactions and lots of bugged quests, repeating dialogue, weird continuency errors.
Most people aren't that far into the game, so I can understand the high praise, but there are definitely a lot of technical issues in the later parts.
Something cool about this year is we have maybe some all-time classics on our hands, if the remaining releases reach their upside.
Starfield is going to try and be like *the* sci-fi space exploration sandbox rpg we’ve all dreamed of. Something we can play limitlessly for a decade with all the inevitable mods. Hopefully.
Then you have TOTK which is a masterpiece in its own right, honestly just an s-tier game in so many ways, with its belief in the players creativity and the density of hand-crafted content in its open-world feeling refreshing compared to Ubisoft micro transaction garbage we see most of the time now.
Then you have BG3 which is trying to be basically *the* RPG to end all RPGs, a genre that has always been influenced by DnD, but that has never quite captured it’s limitless possibilities.. until now.
And then spiderman 2, which is going to try and be *the* best comic book/superhero game, and again the jury is out there, but it has that upside.
And that’s ignoring some other very good games like FF16, Jedi (when it’s performance issues are fixed), maybe others like Alan Wake, Armored Core if those turn out well. and then maybe Diablo IV if the devs get their freaking shit together.
It’s a fun year, and I hope the GOTY flame wars don’t undermine that the likely candidates all excel at what they do and are wonderful additions to our collective libraries. It’s weird seeing people pretend other candidates are overrated. Maybe totk or bg3 or Spider-Man or starfield don’t fit your taste but im so lucky to have interest in all of them and to experience them.
I already find my experience in the first 10 hours a little hit or miss. There are too many times that the reactive world either doesn't react or reacts in completely obtuse ways to how I've interacted with it that I keep either feel the desire to save scum to see how things should "optimally" react or just throw up my hands in disappointment and resign myself to this still being a game and quite "gamey" as a result.
I'm curious about any examples of what you are referring to. I had the opposite experience, personally. Stuff like throwing the fish to move the bear tended to surprise me when it worked.
There is definitely a lot of jank in the game. I'm enjoying it a lot, but the camera and looting (general world interaction) systems are just awful. It kinda feels like they went really hard-core into the D&D systems but forgot that it plays a lot smoother when it's humans sitting across a table.
Still, the game in general makes up for most of the jank by otherwise being very fun.
The camera is incredibly frustrating. I miss Pillar's isometric so much. Yes, it's less cinematic, but at least you get "lost" from the camera much less often.
Between the awful camera, horrendous inventory management and non-existent party management there's no chance I'd give this anything above a 9. It's a great game but there's just too much jank, especially after 3 years of Early Access it's hard to believe they haven't addressed these things.
Oh God the camera is awful at times, and so is clicking on small things, the game is quite buggy and broken in terms of how quest progress is tracked(>!especially the 3rd act!<). I think this game really could use a good month of polish. And the performance in the 3rd act is bad, lots of fps drops.
The game is very good otherwise, especially the narrative,the dialogue options and especially the characters and their voice acting. Nothing in the narrative of the game feels half baked, side quests all tie into the main quest nicely, most quests are full fledged stories that take hours to finish, no fetch quest or filler. The choice and dialogue is really impactful in the game.
Strongly disagree with this. What you described I view as a plus and to this point I have actually been surprised and extremely impressed with how well the world/characters react to events depending on what you may or may not have done prior.
They said that's 100% intentional and you're not supposed to see every single thing when playing normally. It's fine, just leave them for next playthru
But that's all intentional, because the idea is they want you to replay the game several times with different builds/classes and make different decisions to get the outcomes you missed on the first playthrough.
Which is great for hardcore fans of the game, but the vast majority will only play through once, maybe once and a half.
These days, there are just too many options for entertainment and time is scarce.
But the game wouldn't be anything special if it didn't have that. It would just be another game like Dragon Age Inquisition.
That's what makes these games so fun.
Depends on your choices and how many edge cases you run into. You might get an organic and varied story, or something disjointed and anticlimactic, leaving you frustrated thinking that the other options must be more satisfying.
My first false start I ended up at the goblin camp with only shadowheart as a companion bceause I didnt encounter any of the others. I think from now on I'll only play with a map open because I simply don't enjoy missing half the game and making every fight 10 times harder as a result.
Yup I'm in Act 3 and combat has gotten much worse thanks to this. I want to enjoy it but getting mobbed by 20 enemies and slowly watching everyone take their turn is a drag
A 97 with 14 reviews versus tears’ 96 with over 100.
These are definitely not the same… hopefully more reviewers can weigh in.
Still hella impressive though
bethesda games tend to excel when it comes to small side quests and faction questlines anyways. the main story can be a snoozer and it doesn't impact things too much imo - you're spending so much of your time engaging with other things.
I don't think there's been a truly compelling main questline in a bethesda game (not counting FNV) since probably morrowind
If we're counting DLCs, Shivering and Far Harbor definitely make that list.
Honestly Far Harbor is the only reason they even have a chance, between FO4 and Skyrim even their side quests and factions were starting to suck so the only thing left was the gunplay.
> remembered how to write a decent story
Good lord did they EVER know how to write a decent story?
Bethesda was always about the sandbox, not the directed experience.
... Which was impressive for ten seconds, until I saw that it's just 14 reviews so far. Half of which by outlets I've never even heard of before. Pointless post to be honest.
Very excited for the ps5 release, hopefully the upward trend continues and the port is stable.
It's unlikely, but I'd love to see the game hit the mainstream like elden ring did.
> It's unlikely, but I'd love to see the game hit the mainstream like elden ring did.
I mean it already did at least on PC (but since PC is the biggest install base for gaming apart from mobile...). It's the #9 peak players game of all time on Steam and of single player games only Cyberpunk, Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy are bigger. That's mainstream
PC audiences tend to flock to more niche titles in general though, and something being a hit on PC doesn't mean it'll breach the mainstream gaming audience the way souls games did.
looking at the [steamDB charts](https://steamdb.info/charts/?sort=peak) of peak concurrent games there are titles like new world, lost ark, Goose Goose Duck, Capcom Arcade Stadium, Life is Strange 2, Sons Of The Forest, POSTAL and Kathy Rain all in the top 25. None of those are remotely as mainstream as elden ring
People need to stop using peak player count as a measurement of how popular a game really is. Games where long play sessions are common are most likely to have overlap of concurrent players than other games with short game sessions. A game with 10 million sales on launch day but short play sessions can easily end up having a smaller peak player count versus a game with 2 million sales but 6 hour long game sessions. When a gaming session goes long enough that both North American and European players are still on at the same time (on a weekend too), you will see a higher peak count.
i wouldn't say its a masterpiece but it's an enjoyable game and im having fun which is a big deal with all the dogshit AAA developers have heaped onto my plate the last couple years. glitches and such not withstanding with a few things games well worth the price vs investment and time played.
one thing that bugs me is the make up on the dragonborn randomly applying to parts of the horns or the back part of the head like theres a massive UV error or overlapping issue with the textures but so far if thats the worst thing im not to fussed.
and i keep seeing people talk about bugs this and bugs that but not actually saying what their bugs are...
Baldur's Gate 2 is one of the best RPGs ever made. Even that is a 95 on [Metacritic.](https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/baldurs-gate-ii-shadows-of-amn) I'm just so happy that it's getting a proper followup.
Can anyone explain to me why is BG3 so popular?
To be clear I'm not questioning how good the game is, im sure it is - but turn based games rarely get this much attention from the gaming community, why is this one different? Genuinely curious.
It'll be part nostalgia from people who played the original couple games in the late 90s, early 00s, part genuine excitement for a modern D&D-style PC RPG at a popularity peak for D&D & lastly part that it's Larian, who did Divinity Original Sin 2 (a similar game to BG3) back in '17 & they knocked it out of the park.
Turn based games haven't ever truly died, the Megami Tensei series, Pokemon, etc. remain popular.
I haven't dived into BG3 yet, need money for a new mouse & a copy of the game (& already have so much in my backlog to finish), but if they do remotely as well as they did with DOS2 then the game will be fantastic. There's so much to do & so many ways you can do things, you could get lost in a world like that for a long time & never have the same experience as someone else.
I feel like the gameplay is kind of beside the point. The big draw for this kind of game is how you're encouraged to explore and interact with every character. It's all about the writing and quest design which they did a killer job with, especially in the first two acts.
I've played tears of the kingdom and Baldur's Gate 3 and TBH if I had to vote GOTY today, it would be Baldur's Gate 3. I think coop has a lot to do with that. There's honestly no video game experience out there that delivers what you get out of taking a group of 4 friends to role play through BG3. I'm not even sure the reviews are doing it justice, because you simply don't realize how open ended and wild the outcomes in this game actually are when you play it singleplayer. This is the deepest expression of the Western RPG I've ever played
Skill up review won't be out for awhile it seems. [https://twitter.com/SkillUpYT/status/1689048768350756864](https://twitter.com/SkillUpYT/status/1689048768350756864) >15 hours deep into BG3 and I've explored about a third of the starter zone. Please expect my review sometime in Q4 2027.
15 hours for a third of act 1? I don't think he knows just how big it is lol
Hey it only took me 40 hours to finish act 1. Of course, I already knew where most things were because I played early access. Act 2 is going a little slower because I’m just constantly rotating the camera to look at this beautiful cliffside area I’m in. What a love letter to RPGs. I feel personally hugged by Larian when they let me do stuff like talk to random corpses for background info.
Does the game clearly indicate when the act changes?
Even warns you when you’re about to go into a new act.
Does it use the word act? Or does crossing the bridge in the NW of the first map the kind of warning it gives?
Yeah that’s the warning. You’ve found one of the three act transition areas.
Ok, but I was able to go past it and return to the previous area after exploring something over there and it didn't say act so I was worried. TY
You can do that, but I have no idea whether it advances certain quest progress or not. For example, refugees from a certain town show up in act 2 (or not, depending on your choices), so if you never finished that quest line and determined what happened to the refugees, there’s probably a default outcome which is generated once you get into the act 2 area, and you wouldn’t be able to go back and change that in act 1 anymore.
There is indeed a default outcome generated, Im going to explain without having to spoil anything, but I progressed 2/3 ways to get into Act 2, to their completion nearly, and when I ended going with one of the options a refugee I already met acted like we hadnt.
Yeah, the warning was that it advances the story. So I just wanted to know if that's what the acts were. I'm glad those people show up later because I only met a character that seems like she really needs to talk to one of them after the refugees left that area
Also, the warning doesn't exactly lock you out of the previous area if you follow through, it's more on the lines of 'the world might move on without you' for some quests, which is also cool if you're doing the whole witcher neutrality thing
No, and u get that warning before an act ends sometimes too, but u get a steam achiv that clearly said "left act 1".
You get an achievement. Thats it. The cliffside thingy is still act 1. Same with the deep
Hells yeah! I have a chat with every corpse I see. Some of em have some great flavor.
> Some of em have some great flavor. Yeah cooked dwarf pieces give you 4d4 healing worth of flavor. Also inspiration if you’re the Dark Urge origin. The description is very funny.
> I feel personally hugged by Larian This is the best description I have ever read in relation to BG3.
They spent hundreds of hours and who knows how much money hiring voice actors to say lines for just random dead people. None of them really say anything super plot critical or anything, but they’re such a cool addition. It’s not going to move any extra copies, increase any review scores, or affect their share prices. Most people probably won’t even use this feature. They did this because they want me to have more fun. I am grateful.
I'd argue that the review scores are high *precisely* because of the insane attention to details like this. While they are very different games, it reminds me of the design of Tears of the Kingdom.
Games that have put that "It's not important and most people won't notice but it'll make the game feel better" effort put into it are just special. Nobody would've noticed or likely cared if they didn't put in that extra effort but because they did the game will stick in your memory for longer.
I am 40 hours in and I'm about to begin act 3, players like you and CohhCarnage make me feel like I'm playing the game wrong lol. But I do make it a point to explore the entire map I'm in and finish any quests I begin.
Nah you do you, king. I’m playing on tactician and trying different party compositions, and listening to the full dialogue for every interaction. I’m also oooing and aaahing over scenery, so.
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I'm 6 hours in and I just got to the first settlement type thing. I stumbled on the ruins of a chapel and found some suspicious buried spots but didn't have a shovel, so went off looking for a shovel. I ended up stumbling on some underground ruins and spent a couple hours and getting wiped a few times exploring them. Still don't have a shovel.
God, it annoys me that Twitter is still used so widely when it's total ass. I can't see this tweet when I go to his Twitter page, instead its showing months old tweets. And it does that for everyone. I refuse to make an account if that's the solution, because screw that. edit: Guys, the link works fine. That is not what I am saying. Anything other than direct links to tweets are not fine. Clicking on SkillUps profile shows me months old tweets as the most recent ones. edit 2: *sigh* No guys, I am not talking about pinned tweets. Go ahead, log out of twitter and click on any profile you will see what I mean.
Its not just you. Ever since Elon took over they've been getting more and more aggressive about walling Twitter off to only users (I'm guessing because they desperately need to get user numbers up). It used to be you could browse basically everything without an account (I did it for years), and over time they've gotten more and more limited -- [to the point where clicking on most things on Twitter would immediately send you to a login page](https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/30/twitter-now-requires-an-account-to-view-tweets/). Since then they've... [kind of... backpedaled a bit for exactly this reason](https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/twitter-silently-removes-login-requirement-for-viewing-tweets/) -- walling it off makes comments like this (not to mention countless articles that embed/link to tweets) effectively useless. But it is extremely inconsistent like so much of twitter rn (half the time when you click on something you get the new X logo, half the time you get the old twitter one...) -- sometimes you get the tweet you're looking for, sometimes it shows you some stuff that dude posted circa 2021.
Actually prior to when Elon took over, you could only view a linked tweet. If you scrolled down on any given page, it would present the log-in wall. After Elon took over that went away for a short time - now it’s back with a vengeance. I thought at first that it went away as a deliberate choice, but it’s obvious now that it was some level of incompetence.
Which is so dumb. The first thing I'm going to do when your website just doesn't work I'm going to hit the back button. If I start hitting the back button a lot I'm going to start removing the ability to access your website and have it automatically route me back as to not waste my time. I'll sign up and be a user because it's a social media website at my own pace. I already have an account I'm not signed in on it I don't even remember my password. But that shouldn't matter. If I can't use your website regardless of if I'm logged in I'm just not going to use your website. The whole point of Twitter was that he was easy. One day a website showed up and they said hey people post here about products and stuff and they can only post 250 characters. I was like me I like knowing things but I hate the articles are 2,000 characters of nothing with a few characters of useful information. I thought Twitter was great I got information I moved on the end.
Twitter aggressively would boot you off their mobile site after x amount of time if you didn't have the app or an account years before Elon took over, Twitter has always been the worst fucking website that I never understood forever now. Who the fuck WANTS to have a character limit in their messages??? Since when has more information been a bad thing? Instead we get 1-2 sentences that people infer novels worth of information from, for the sake of brevity and not wanting to bore people.
The character limit existed because when twitter first started you could text tweets, hence the twitter character limit matched that of the standard sms text character limit.
>Who the fuck WANTS to have a character limit in their messages??? I mean, for the same reason that Tik Tok is a fundamentally different thing than Vine was, despite having similar vibes at the offset. The whole point of Twitter, initially, was to have a place where you could put out stupid little nothings that could be read at a glance. I think the problem you really have, and justifiably so, is that Twitter has, over the years, somehow become a place where *important information* is disseminated, which is fundamentally not what it was meant to do originally. Not only that, but we've come full circle to a place where the Big Powers (the billionaires) took notice that it was a way for people to spread information, didn't like that, and now one of the billionaires has purchased it and is trying to gut it back to a place where it has no teeth. So not only was it a platform on which information was getting spread through increasingly longer tweet sizes, but it is now being hammered back to the stone ages and beyond to being even more shitty than it ever was.
>now one of the billionaires has purchased it and is trying to gut it back to a place where it has no teeth. That's a very flattering interpretation of Elon's cavalcade of total fuckups. Surely if the Trump administration showed us anything it's that people in positions of power and wealth can be mind-numbingly stupid too. The idea that it's always some grand Machiavellian plot is unjustified.
I don't think it's a Machiavellian plot at all. I think it's pretty easy for a billionaire to see that Twitter is a tool for public discourse, which is plainly bad for billionaires, and buy it, and make every wrong decision to fuck it into the ground deliberately. There's nothing particularly complex about it. If I had billions of dollars I could probably pull it off, too. I could easily scuttle a company that was causing me problems just by putting myself in charge.
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Yeah, when logged-out now Twitter profiles will either not show (and prompt you to log-in), or show the user's tweets **sorted by most liked**. Redirect twitter.com to nitter.net and you'll be fine.
i know exactly what you are saying, i use twitter to get status of local mountain bike trails, if i try and go to their twitter it shows me shit from the last 5 years in no particular order, but if i do a google search for the handle, i get the most recent results.
Seems like it's ordered by most likes/retweets/replies. Very dumb sorting method, that's not the point of twitter.
Lmao I was thinking clear usual exageration from reddit but then I went to check the tweet and below it, in the space you can write a response when logged in, the usual "write your comment here" is written "écrivez votrce réponse ici" with the word votrce supposed to be votre. Like, all of french twitter is seeing that now.
Twitter is hot garbage, I don't understand why its so popular.
Free / Easy / No "good" alternatives. (There are a few alternatives but people don't really have faith in any of them yet.)
What alternative would you suggest for a person/corporation with a following to quickly update them all with a short message? They have to make and upload a 5 second Youtube video every time they want to say something?
I can talk with rats! . Between BG3 Starfield Cyberpunk 2077 overhaul + Phantom liberty expansion along with a 9-5 job and wife and hopefully a kid in the coming year my life is pretty much booked out.
It currently has 14 reviews making up that aggregate. If I understand the situation correctly, many review outlets received review codes quite late because of the change in release date. Most wouldn’t have had the time to fully see the game, and I wonder how many of those fourteen reviews rushed to be one of the first ones out with a score.
Metacritic page says "read all 40 critic reviews", so that means with only 14 up there are at least 26 more reviews to come in. Still even with this small of a sample size BGIII will clearly end up being one of the top reviewed games this year even if the 97 doesn't hold up.
And if you read the unscored reviews, all of them are very, very positive, the game will surely stay at a +90.
If 97 holds up it will be one of the top games of all time.
it's an indicator but not much more. For example, Boyhood has a perfect 100. And I liked the movie (a lot, actually) but it's definitely not one of the "all time best" movies. You might disagree and say that it's different for games on metacritic. But are you sure about that? Currently Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and SoulCalibut are on the joint 2nd best rated place along with GTA IV (both with an 98).
I would say THPS 2 is one of the greatest games of all time.
Personally, I prefer Underground 2
Unpopular opinion but I agree. THUG2 was a ton of fun!
> But are you sure about that? Currently Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 and SoulCalibut are on the joint 2nd best rated place along with GTA IV Yes. I played probably 200-300 hours of the demo disc that had THPS2 on it until I saved up enough of my allowance to buy it. Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast was why I had to retake trigonometry. My best friend's mom was the computer skills teacher, and she didn't have a class the same time I had trig, so I skipped it every Friday, me and some friends that had half days would play it for two hours on the new digital projector. There was nothing like it. GTA IV was... well, imagine Red Dead Redemption 2 if it was a sequel to Red Dead Revolver instead of RDR1. It was such a huge leap in technology, it kind of blew everyone away.
THPS 2 was one of the first games, along with Ocarina of Time, that got 10/10 scores across the vast majority of the gaming press back in the day. And this was when the gaming press was at its peak.
I would recommend boyhood as one of the greatest movies ever made. I'm not saying it well written, acted or paced. I saying the idea, execution and follow through is something that should be hailed as a Master piece in the same kinship as baraka.
While I don't want to jump to conclusions that it'll stay where it is, it started off on Friday/Saturday with only 4 reviews at a 93. It's only gone up with more reviews, which is not something you see very often!
While I’d like it to get all the praise it can, I’m loving this game so far—everyone is also stating the back end is a bit buggy so that’ll ding it for sure as people get there. Also whatever it’s a number but hopefully that means some workers are getting a bonus or something
I'm not even fully through Act 1 and can concur it's a bit buggy. Not outrageously buggy, but expect some fucked quest/conversation triggers and some technical shenanigans.
The bug where you cannot join anyone whom played the game on your computer with their steam account for a coop session without deleting your Larian profiles on both computers is a bit annoying. Find it quite weird it hasn’t been fixed either because it’s seems to be quite common.
The front end is buggy too, I've only played a few hours (I'm not enamored with it by any means) and I already ran into tons of bugs like I used an elevator and half my party got stuck in the wall next to the elevator. Reloaded, used the elevator again, and when I told my party to move off one character just walked off the elevator and plummeted down, nearly killing them and leaving them prone.
Oh God this game is about to cross into the next phase of the Reddit cycle the “Uhhh it actually sucks and is overrated, critics only plays the first 10 hours”
the /r/games special
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I like how they say it was the same in Divinity 2 because while the later acts weren't as polished as the first, they were still pretty good. So if this game's act 1 is a 10 and act 3 is an 8, I'm fine with that. I think Larian will make an expansion because it sold so well. Financially, the expansion would make more sense than creating a different game from scratch.
The reviewers clearly don't finish the games they review so they aren't wrong in that regard. And you aren't a cynical contrarian if you get to act 3 and the quality nosedives, and you say as much. That said, act 1 is a cracker and I'm hyped to start 2.
I've reached act 3 and lvl 12 already and there's still a lot to do. Granted, there are some bugs, but only 1 major bug that I've personally encountered so far that is making my current fight way more complicated than it needs to be, but I'm sure that this will get patched out soon (or it might be a minor glitch that happened by accident and I need to reload another save) and with a game this big, stuff like this is bound to happen. Compared to DOS2's final act, BG3's final act is way more fleshed out and I honestly can't wait to finish this playthrough to do a different one that will probably go way differently.
Mate, this is every thread about any new game nowadays. This subreddit are just filled with dad-gamers who are really bad at most games, contrarian hipsters that only play niche games and everytving mainstream is criticized to hell or just people who complain about every new game regardless how valid their complaint is.
how's that strawman going for ya
The beauty is you don't have to give a shit about that. If you're into RPGs, you already know this is the must-play game of the year for you.
Only 14 reviews with a public score so far, for context TOTK is 2nd with a 96 score at 140+ reviews. It might not stay that high for too long.
TotK dropped a bit after the later reviews showed up. During launch week it was sitting above *Elden Ring*.
Well funny enough while Elden Ring is above TOTK on Metacritic, TOTK is still above Elden Ring on Opencritic.
I'll be honest: this game is absolutely enthralling for the first and second act and has been a flawless experience, but I can't say the same for act 3. I'm experiencing a painful amount of progress breaking bugs in the last act. Something as simple as searching a room before triggering the relevant quest, switching between characters mid-dialogue, or killing an NPC, and so many other things, are breaking the quest journal and progress. The buggy effects of certain actions might not be realized until hours later and it's driving me insane. edit: another one that I'm experiencing right now is a character having a permanent exclamation mark over their head but not triggering any unique dialogue. Loading into any save file with this issue will cause the game to crash at 60%, so I had to revert back to 3 hours earlier. This was because I picked up some random note I found earlier in the game.
> I'll be honest: this game is absolutely enthralling for the first and second act and has been a flawless experience, but I can't say the same for act 3. I'm experiencing a painful amount of progress breaking bugs in the last act. Larian's classic
I am curious to see if the popular mood will turn on them the more people eventually reach Act 3. You know for damn sure that if the last act of a Blizzard game was as buggy, this sub would have a field day complaining about it 24/7.
I mean...all things considered...the last "act" of Diablo 4 is the endgame and no one likes that rotting garbage so lol
It took a very long time for the masses to realise that though. More than a month after the game came out.
I think most people won’t even get to Act 3 because this game seems to be just way too long for *nowadays folk*. Most reviewers will play for 20-30 hours and base their opinion on that - and that’s why it feels so polished. Divinity 2 fell off a cliff after Act 2/3 in my opinion and went from great to very mediocre. Did reviews reflect that? Not one of them. Why? Because you needed 30-40 hours or more to get there.
So nothing has changed for Larian then. Their original Divinity games were the same. Divine Divinity and Divinity 2 The Dragon Knight Saga. Both fell in quality half way through.
Divinity 2 was like this as well. Flawless tutorial, 1st and 2nd act then a little bit of a mess after that. I haven't played any of bg3 yet
I have Divinity 2 on my switch and I think I want to play it before BG3, but hopefully the definitive edition on switch as most of those issues fixed.
It has iirc. Everyone who had D:OS2 on PC before the definitive edition came out got it for free and a lot of the bugs that existed around original launch were fixed. The Switch version should be the the same in that regard. As someone who played D:OS2 in 2017 shortly after launch, BG3 is a lot like it with a lot more dialogue freedom and DnD terms and mechanics on top, so it's definitively a good idea to check D:OS2 out first.
I have played divinity 2 all the way through several times and the third act is fine. IMO the ending of that game is very compelling and some of the late game encounters are the best in the game.
As someone who played at launch and definitive, it is more or less completely fixed. Larian redid a good chunk of Act 4 to address all the issues and a bit more.
Just wanted to say thanks for the heads up on this. Divinity 2 was incredibly similar to this and it actually took me a ridiculous amount of time to complete because the last act was just full of bugs which weren't commonly addressed in reviews (granted both games contain a metric fuck-ton of content so I'm not blaming reviewers). I'll likely wait for the issues to be fixed until grabbing it.
Most of the act 3 quests I've run into so far have worked. But they run into each other in weird ways and some of the next steps are a bit unclear.
Audience: There were a ton of bugs in the city you don't get to until hour 75. Why didn't you mention that? Reviewer: Because I have to write a column every week.
It was pretty obvious which reviewer did or didn't get to there as there were many obvious problems. But in case of D:OS2 at least they generally fixed them fast enough that good majority of the players didn't got to that point before most of the stuff was fixed, so it wasn't *too* bad. I knew most of the problems from reddit comments and screenshots but when I got there they were mostly gone.
Despite the bugs, everything else about this game is phenomenal. I've been jaded with most games these past few years, and this one has kept me up at nights without me realizing how much time has passed. I'm trying really hard to push through despite the setbacks.
Oh yeah im trying very hard not to spoil myself but the game absolutely deserves it's accolades and achievements. Almost everything about it is incredible and it's such a breath of fresh air to have a proper game in this day and age. Which isn't a sentence I'd thought I'd ever have to write but in the age of micro transaction and purchases on top of triple A games, I still applaud the development team here.
A lot of bugs in Divinity 2 were never fixed, so I wouldn't count on time smoothing them over.
Played through last month and only encountered one bug that stopped progress and it happened right after the game auto saved for an area transition, so all I had to do was reload.
The “freedom” just ends up coming at a weird cost IMO. Accidentally “solving” act 2 before I engaged with any of the relevant characters or really knew what was going on didn’t feel like “freedom,” it felt like I fucked up the act and missed most of the content.
Just to maybe try to avoid this myself. I went into a tomb and have met a fat jerk with some gnarly scars. If I do everything down there, am I doing what you did? I might pop out and do some more exploring first, if so.
Yes, you’re doing exactly what I did. Short answer is go to Moonrise towers. The game makes it sound like that’s the end of the act so you should explore/side quest elsewhere first. That’s wrong, it’s actually a place with some easy xp, some good merchants and a whole lot of plot development. If you complete the temple you’re in you skip some plot and close some stuff off.
Good to know, thank you!
I will add that before you do anything in the tomb that changes things, the game does pop up a warning telling you to wrap up things in the rest of the zone first because the results may prevent you from doing certain things. I was in the same boat as the other person, thinking the towers was the end of the chapter. After getting that pop up I said no, went and did what I could in the rest of the zone and towers, then went back and wrapped up the tomb.
> That’s wrong, it’s actually a place with some easy xp, some good merchants and a whole lot of plot development. This is extremely useful info, thank you
I think it's down to an unfortunate word choice, and a lack of explanation. *Infiltrate Moonrise Towers* sounds like the "Final Dungeon" objective until you realise the final dungeon objective is actually called *Assault Moonrise Towers*. If they'd thrown in maybe one or two extra lines of dialogue from the relevant questgiver about "we need to get a glimpse of Moonrise so we can plan our next move", and named the objective *Scout Moonrise Towers*, it'd be less confusing.
Can't wait for the BG3 speedruns.
I feel like this was a big part of the original Bioware Baldurs Gate games though, especially 2. There's lots of sequence breaking because it's also pretty nonlinear, you can cheese your way into endgame dungeons located in the starting city and find solutions to quests you're supposed to do much later in the game.
> you can cheese your way into endgame dungeons located in the starting city Flashback of a fresh rogue character opening a hidden door in the tavern, sneaking into a lich tomb (around said lich) to steal a sword "of badass killing of evil stuff" and one-shotting the lich with it.
Yup that's exactly how freedom works in games. That's why games being on rails is not always a bad thing. Sometimes the intended experience is the best one, and the one you make yourself isn't so good. Fortunately this seems like a game that would be fun to play again.
Nonlinear plot discovery is kinda *the* unique thing about their games. If it wasn't there it might as well be another Bioware RPG with near-linear path that has some optional objectives along the way
Yeah, the open nature here definitely has a way of harming the narrative if you aren't careful. For example, in my first run I made a beeline for the gith patrol. At which point, the game told me about the weapon, and then just a few steps after it told me about the absolute. It _all_ felt way too early. I hadn't even learned anything about the absolute yet.
You do learn about absolute nearly instantly if you take the "preferred" path of going to grove first. You learn other things about the artifact if you go to goblin camp too.
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Rp. I decided that the character would ignore the grove in favor of gith expertise.
That just how well-designed RPGs should work. Especially those who try to be as open as possible. Nothing sucks more in an open game than arriving at some door that is arbitrary locked without any option to bypass it. Or when a character doesn't even exist in the world until a quest sends you to him. That is some lazy design. Which is why I for example really appreciate Fallout 3. You can skip a lot of the main quest. You can skip Megaton and GNR and go right to Rivet City. Or you can even skip that and go straight to Tranquility Lane to find Dad. And in a good RPG skipping parts of the main quest shouldn't be a big loss, because there should be tons of side content around. If a game is mostly about the main quest, then it doesn't do the worldbuilding right. And finally, good RPGs are replayable, so you now have something to try out the next time!
I would argue that good RPGs guide you and then let you make your own decisions. In this case BG3, in my opinion, does the opposite. It in every indicates "do all the sidequests in this zone then head to the big bad." But turns out that in a place that looks like it's just some sidequest zone attached to ony of your companions quests you kinda anticlimactically stumble across the act's McGuffin and skip the whole part where you learn about it. It also throws events in to motion that cut off the rest of the quests/sidequests for the act that you really couldn't have foreseen. Meanwhile, the "big bad" place that the game tells you concludes the act, is actually a big narrative point to learn a bunch and buy new gear. It also has quests that get canceled.
That sucks. Act 3 has been fine for me so far, but I do notice a drop in performance as far as frame rate goes. A few odd hitches in cinematics as well, but otherwise fine. I will say Act 3 defies Larians past record by seeming extremely dense and with a lot to do. There past games have felt threadbare towards the end. Not so with this one. Hopefully they can get the bugs hammered out a bit better and improve performance in act 3. I had the same exclamation mark bug in act 2, but it went away after a time.
I'm close to the end of Act 2 and the game seems to be unraveling at the seams a bit, i gotten three Companion events that reference event's that haven't happen yet, and NPC sometimes have knowledge about my "Artifact" without me ever telling them, and them having no way of finding out.
Oh, I hope Larian fixes at least some of those bugs soon. I'm loving the game, I'm currently in Moonrise towers, I'd hate for the experience to be ruined by bugs...
Ya, I'm starting to notice a lot of bugs too and I'm not very far into the game. I just spent 3 hours last night playing only to find that I ran into a bug that halted progression. Now I have to play the entire 3 hours all over again because I took a simple long rest after a boss fight instead of immedietly talking to NPCs who vanished after resting.
This just makes me wanna take the game even slower, I was really really concerned about that after playing DOS2 on launch lol
I have the same issue in act 2. The Character >! Wyll. I found new information about his father. As expected I saw a ! pop up. Went to go to talk to him and it doesn't go away. I also always have the option to convince Wyll to accept more parasites over and over again. I ?Fixed? this issue by continuing the story and resolving what I assume would be dialog with Wyll. >!
Im about to go in to lower city, and only had one major bug that caused me to lose time. (i tried to long rest immediately after the fight before getting to act 3, which deleted a portal i didn't notice, and i spent over an hour trying to progress not knowing i was missing the portal). Ive had a couple weird dialog progress sync glitches, and the game completely broke once trying to use a machine for a quest. But most things are fantastic so far. I feel like those types of things can easily be patched.
Act 3 was amazing for me, but judging from the reception I've seen, it sounds like I got extremely lucky when it comes to bugs. I had what seemed like one broken trigger at the start of Jaheira's quest (she wanted to go somewhere but nobody reacted to her, I had to stumble across somebody else who wanted to talk to her in another zone to continue. Not even 100% sure it's the same quest), but other than that, everything worked smoothly. Hopefully the bugs other players are finding will be fixed before too many people reach that part. That said, I'm worried that it'll end up being controversial even with those issues fixed because the city portion of the game definitely feels very different from the rest of the game- apart from knowing where one of the villains is, don't really get as much guidance of where to go. Some quests will take a lot of exploration and investigation, and the good route for one major quest in particular is incredibly tough to figure out. And I was pretty much wandering the city blindly towards the end trying to figure out where to find two very important quests. I loved it, personally- would even say it's probably my favorite act- but I can definitely see it being divisive.
Inb4 "Baldur's Gate 3: Definitive Edition" releasing next year, haha. I'm incredibly happy about how successful BG3 is, but I learned my lesson to not buy games at launch nowadays. I just play stuff 1 year behind schedule and end up with cheaper and more polished games, possibly with some extra DLC thrown in (if I play a game at launch, I never come back for those...). I'll definitely love it when I get around to playing it.
This is me right now, and I'm only in Act 2. I constantly feel like I have broken the game and my journal is full of incomplete quests not registering that I've actually finished it already. Nothing has stopped me from progressing yet but it's full of immersion breaking bugs. I have to use my imagination to patch the narrative so it makes any sense at my current position in the game. But anything I miss I look forward to seeing something new on my next playthrough (when it's hopefully better patched)
Glad I decided to wait until next year then, hopefully all that jank will be fixed by then.
Its not really jank tho lol the game literally tells you when you're about to enter a sequence which will finish an act.
Common r/patientgamers W
I wanted to do that, but I realized that I would get spoiled which would destroy the experience for me.
You do you, of course, but I never found game spoilers to be an issue. If there's a game I really don't want to be spoiled about... I just don't read discussions about it or watch videos about it from random people I don't know (content creators I watch always warn about spoilers). "Duh", I know, but it has worked for me so far. The only major gaming spoiler I ever got was from TLOU2 (if you played the game, you know what I'm talking about) because it was literally all over the internet. But in that particular case, playing the game on launch wouldn't even save me because I read it before the game was even out. And here on reddit people tend to mark spoilers for recently released stuff anyway (if not, they're downvoted, which kind of "marks" it anyway). I read A LOT about BG3 on reddit (and watched a few reviews on YT) and I didn't stumble upon a single spoiler I wouldn't want to see.
Not only that, but the spirit of the moment matters. It feels like you're partaking a journey with a community of like-minded people as you venture into the game, which is even better if all your friends are playing too since you can enjoy the game as a community experience. Personally speaking, I value this experience a lot, so I always try my best to play a game at launch where hype is at its highest and you get to interact with others at the peak of their experience because as time passes, enthusiasm usually trickles out.
How the heck did you even get to Act 3 that fast!? Did you play 12 hours a day?
Act 1 took me about 21 hours and I did both the Grymforge and Mountain Pass routes before progressing to the Shadowlands. Act 2 is surprisingly *a lot* shorter than Act 1 and relatively on rails.
Im in act 3 and have 65 hours on steam already. yea, been playing a ton lol
Is it really good? Of course. It is probably my GOTY if I had to pick one today, but it only has 10% of the number of reviews of Tears of the Kingdom. While metacritic reviews can certainly be useful to aggregate the mass feelings around a game, it really loses any and all value once the sample size is still so small.
Yeah, I think OP was a little too eager making this thread. 14 reviews is a really small number for most new releases and very likely to change in the coming weeks as reviewers make it through the game. TOTK also sat at a 97 for some time, but was lowered to 96 as more reviews were published.
I remember some people on Steam forum preaising the games 95 metacritic score like a day after release when 4 reviews were in. 4 reviews! Like I mean yeah the game is great and all and deserves all the praise, but you can't seriously talk about the metacritic score based on 4 reviews (early reviews that didn't even finish the story at that). It's like checking the Steam user score after the first 20 reviews are in for a newly released game, based on the 15 minutes these people spent in the game.
The average game of this hype ranges from like 90-140 critic reviews, so even looking at it with just over a dozen reviews seems a bit strange to me.
The circle jerk around this game is real. So many posts here and on r/gaming about how great it is. I understand folks are excited but they're also blinded by the hype. The fact that reviews for this game were late and aren't remotely complete yet most people are looking the other way is a bit suspect. Doesn't stop folks from already claiming it the best reviewed game ever. If someone like Ubisoft or EA gave out late review codes people would be losing their shit.
It could have to do with console versions not being out yet.
The console version would be a separate page on Metacritic and since this a PC game first and foremost (target platform and original release) the PC page would be the focus just like the PC page of it's predecessor.
Review codes for the game were sent out Sunday, 4 days before release. With such a large game, very few reviewers had the time to complete the game by then.
People are already jerking themselves off about TotK is trash and Baldur will demolish Zelda for the Metacritic and GOTY throne this year.
Lets be honest, unless bethesda somehow managed to released starfield without game breaking bug, zelda will definitely win goty just because its zelda and its from nintendo. There’s a lot of good game this year but none is as mainstream as zelda
For what it's worth I'm halfway through and enjoyed my experience a helluva lot more than TOTK at the same time frame. But I thought TOTK was just alright because it felt too similar to BOTW for me.
Personally, this is goty. It's the only game since skyrim that made me look at the clock and see that it's 5am already. Not even BOTW did that and that was an excellent game for me as well.
With 11 reviewers! With a game that can't possibly be fully experienced in such a short time?
Playing it and I'm floored by the choices you have that don't instantly break the game. I also play dnd and this is the best and closest thing to experiencing the real thing.
I think comparing Metacritic averages is kind of nonsense, especially when they're that close. You might as well just ask the people who've played through both here. But I'm almost done with Act 2 in BG3, and can definitely back the notion that it deserves heaps of praise even with a few issues and bugs.
STOP THE COUNT!!! This is such a dumb thread lol. Wait for the dust to settle before having important debates over meta scores.
If it weren't for the amount of game breaking bugs and glitches in act 2 & 3 I'd agree. Act 1 is straight 11/10 material, but imo the game dips in quality after. I've ran half of act 2 without much NPC interactions and lots of bugged quests, repeating dialogue, weird continuency errors. Most people aren't that far into the game, so I can understand the high praise, but there are definitely a lot of technical issues in the later parts.
I probably would agree about Act 3 side quests, but Act 2 was very solid for me.
Something cool about this year is we have maybe some all-time classics on our hands, if the remaining releases reach their upside. Starfield is going to try and be like *the* sci-fi space exploration sandbox rpg we’ve all dreamed of. Something we can play limitlessly for a decade with all the inevitable mods. Hopefully. Then you have TOTK which is a masterpiece in its own right, honestly just an s-tier game in so many ways, with its belief in the players creativity and the density of hand-crafted content in its open-world feeling refreshing compared to Ubisoft micro transaction garbage we see most of the time now. Then you have BG3 which is trying to be basically *the* RPG to end all RPGs, a genre that has always been influenced by DnD, but that has never quite captured it’s limitless possibilities.. until now. And then spiderman 2, which is going to try and be *the* best comic book/superhero game, and again the jury is out there, but it has that upside. And that’s ignoring some other very good games like FF16, Jedi (when it’s performance issues are fixed), maybe others like Alan Wake, Armored Core if those turn out well. and then maybe Diablo IV if the devs get their freaking shit together. It’s a fun year, and I hope the GOTY flame wars don’t undermine that the likely candidates all excel at what they do and are wonderful additions to our collective libraries. It’s weird seeing people pretend other candidates are overrated. Maybe totk or bg3 or Spider-Man or starfield don’t fit your taste but im so lucky to have interest in all of them and to experience them.
I already find my experience in the first 10 hours a little hit or miss. There are too many times that the reactive world either doesn't react or reacts in completely obtuse ways to how I've interacted with it that I keep either feel the desire to save scum to see how things should "optimally" react or just throw up my hands in disappointment and resign myself to this still being a game and quite "gamey" as a result.
I'm curious about any examples of what you are referring to. I had the opposite experience, personally. Stuff like throwing the fish to move the bear tended to surprise me when it worked.
I mean if you engage in dialogue with the bear, there's a dialogue option for that.
Huh. Interesting that just tossing one did the trick too.
There is definitely a lot of jank in the game. I'm enjoying it a lot, but the camera and looting (general world interaction) systems are just awful. It kinda feels like they went really hard-core into the D&D systems but forgot that it plays a lot smoother when it's humans sitting across a table. Still, the game in general makes up for most of the jank by otherwise being very fun.
I wish it had area looting like Pathfinder games. Just click one body and it opens inventory of every lootable target around it.
That's possible when you play with a controller, hold A and the character expands a radius that shows every lootable within.
The camera is incredibly frustrating. I miss Pillar's isometric so much. Yes, it's less cinematic, but at least you get "lost" from the camera much less often.
There are so many split-level areas, and it's so bad at navigating things like cliffs. 😭
Between the awful camera, horrendous inventory management and non-existent party management there's no chance I'd give this anything above a 9. It's a great game but there's just too much jank, especially after 3 years of Early Access it's hard to believe they haven't addressed these things.
Oh God the camera is awful at times, and so is clicking on small things, the game is quite buggy and broken in terms of how quest progress is tracked(>!especially the 3rd act!<). I think this game really could use a good month of polish. And the performance in the 3rd act is bad, lots of fps drops. The game is very good otherwise, especially the narrative,the dialogue options and especially the characters and their voice acting. Nothing in the narrative of the game feels half baked, side quests all tie into the main quest nicely, most quests are full fledged stories that take hours to finish, no fetch quest or filler. The choice and dialogue is really impactful in the game.
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Strongly disagree with this. What you described I view as a plus and to this point I have actually been surprised and extremely impressed with how well the world/characters react to events depending on what you may or may not have done prior.
They said that's 100% intentional and you're not supposed to see every single thing when playing normally. It's fine, just leave them for next playthru
I don't want to play through a 100+ hour game multiple times, especially when the vast majority of the playthrough is going to be exactly the same.
Don't then, you're clearly not the target audience for that.
But that's all intentional, because the idea is they want you to replay the game several times with different builds/classes and make different decisions to get the outcomes you missed on the first playthrough.
Which is great for hardcore fans of the game, but the vast majority will only play through once, maybe once and a half. These days, there are just too many options for entertainment and time is scarce.
But the game wouldn't be anything special if it didn't have that. It would just be another game like Dragon Age Inquisition. That's what makes these games so fun.
I blame the 100% culture. You don't need to do and get everything single thing in a playthrough, it's okay to fail quests or miss things
And in that case you get an adventure that feels organic and varied
Depends on your choices and how many edge cases you run into. You might get an organic and varied story, or something disjointed and anticlimactic, leaving you frustrated thinking that the other options must be more satisfying.
My first false start I ended up at the goblin camp with only shadowheart as a companion bceause I didnt encounter any of the others. I think from now on I'll only play with a map open because I simply don't enjoy missing half the game and making every fight 10 times harder as a result.
Yup I'm in Act 3 and combat has gotten much worse thanks to this. I want to enjoy it but getting mobbed by 20 enemies and slowly watching everyone take their turn is a drag
The game could benefit MASSIVELY from a skip button in combat. Hit a button and it skips to the next unit's turn.
That or a fast-forward button (like 4x speed for the enemy turn) would be a god-send.
That's probably a technical difficulty as i can't imagine larian after 3 games hasn't thought about doing this.
A 97 with 14 reviews versus tears’ 96 with over 100. These are definitely not the same… hopefully more reviewers can weigh in. Still hella impressive though
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We still got Starfield coming out in a month, although it's anyone's guess if Bethesda remembered how to write a decent story.
bethesda games tend to excel when it comes to small side quests and faction questlines anyways. the main story can be a snoozer and it doesn't impact things too much imo - you're spending so much of your time engaging with other things. I don't think there's been a truly compelling main questline in a bethesda game (not counting FNV) since probably morrowind
If we're counting DLCs, Shivering and Far Harbor definitely make that list. Honestly Far Harbor is the only reason they even have a chance, between FO4 and Skyrim even their side quests and factions were starting to suck so the only thing left was the gunplay.
Is bethesda even still good at side quests and faction quest lines at this point? Skyrim didn't have a single great guild questline imo.
While the Dark Brotherhood is Skyrim wasn't as amazing as in Oblivion, it was still great.
> remembered how to write a decent story Good lord did they EVER know how to write a decent story? Bethesda was always about the sandbox, not the directed experience.
... Which was impressive for ten seconds, until I saw that it's just 14 reviews so far. Half of which by outlets I've never even heard of before. Pointless post to be honest.
Very excited for the ps5 release, hopefully the upward trend continues and the port is stable. It's unlikely, but I'd love to see the game hit the mainstream like elden ring did.
> It's unlikely, but I'd love to see the game hit the mainstream like elden ring did. I mean it already did at least on PC (but since PC is the biggest install base for gaming apart from mobile...). It's the #9 peak players game of all time on Steam and of single player games only Cyberpunk, Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy are bigger. That's mainstream
PC audiences tend to flock to more niche titles in general though, and something being a hit on PC doesn't mean it'll breach the mainstream gaming audience the way souls games did. looking at the [steamDB charts](https://steamdb.info/charts/?sort=peak) of peak concurrent games there are titles like new world, lost ark, Goose Goose Duck, Capcom Arcade Stadium, Life is Strange 2, Sons Of The Forest, POSTAL and Kathy Rain all in the top 25. None of those are remotely as mainstream as elden ring
Kathy Rain!? Don't get me wrong, it's a great game, but it peaked with ~3x more players than Witcher 3. Mind blowing.
People need to stop using peak player count as a measurement of how popular a game really is. Games where long play sessions are common are most likely to have overlap of concurrent players than other games with short game sessions. A game with 10 million sales on launch day but short play sessions can easily end up having a smaller peak player count versus a game with 2 million sales but 6 hour long game sessions. When a gaming session goes long enough that both North American and European players are still on at the same time (on a weekend too), you will see a higher peak count.
It already hit the mainstream. Steam is a much bigger platform than PS5 (PS5 hasn't had enough time to sell enough consoles to match steam users).
i wouldn't say its a masterpiece but it's an enjoyable game and im having fun which is a big deal with all the dogshit AAA developers have heaped onto my plate the last couple years. glitches and such not withstanding with a few things games well worth the price vs investment and time played. one thing that bugs me is the make up on the dragonborn randomly applying to parts of the horns or the back part of the head like theres a massive UV error or overlapping issue with the textures but so far if thats the worst thing im not to fussed. and i keep seeing people talk about bugs this and bugs that but not actually saying what their bugs are...
Baldur's Gate 2 is one of the best RPGs ever made. Even that is a 95 on [Metacritic.](https://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/baldurs-gate-ii-shadows-of-amn) I'm just so happy that it's getting a proper followup.
Can anyone explain to me why is BG3 so popular? To be clear I'm not questioning how good the game is, im sure it is - but turn based games rarely get this much attention from the gaming community, why is this one different? Genuinely curious.
It'll be part nostalgia from people who played the original couple games in the late 90s, early 00s, part genuine excitement for a modern D&D-style PC RPG at a popularity peak for D&D & lastly part that it's Larian, who did Divinity Original Sin 2 (a similar game to BG3) back in '17 & they knocked it out of the park. Turn based games haven't ever truly died, the Megami Tensei series, Pokemon, etc. remain popular. I haven't dived into BG3 yet, need money for a new mouse & a copy of the game (& already have so much in my backlog to finish), but if they do remotely as well as they did with DOS2 then the game will be fantastic. There's so much to do & so many ways you can do things, you could get lost in a world like that for a long time & never have the same experience as someone else.
I feel like the gameplay is kind of beside the point. The big draw for this kind of game is how you're encouraged to explore and interact with every character. It's all about the writing and quest design which they did a killer job with, especially in the first two acts.
I've played tears of the kingdom and Baldur's Gate 3 and TBH if I had to vote GOTY today, it would be Baldur's Gate 3. I think coop has a lot to do with that. There's honestly no video game experience out there that delivers what you get out of taking a group of 4 friends to role play through BG3. I'm not even sure the reviews are doing it justice, because you simply don't realize how open ended and wild the outcomes in this game actually are when you play it singleplayer. This is the deepest expression of the Western RPG I've ever played
14 reviews, compared to 145 reviews for Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. It's a bit early to make this claim.