I finished playing Baldur's Gate 3
After more than year of playing three-to-five hour sessions anywhere from two to four times a month, my gaming group finished a run of Baldur's Gate 3. I wasn't the host, so I don't know precisely how many hours it took to finish the game, but my best guess is anywhere between 125 and 150 hours. That's a helluva long game! By the end, I was glad I played it with friends, but the experience reaffirmed my belief these kind of role-playing games aren't for me.
Probably the defining trait of the line of RPGs that BG3 is descended from is the ability to make a wide variety of choices. In a well-executed game, those choices have an obvious impact on the story, either helping you further define your character or affecting the game world. In a poorly-executed game, the affects are limited or even are illusory - I forever will chafe at Infamous setting-up a dramatic moral choice that promised to shape the remainder of the game, only for the next stage after the choice to be the same no matter what you picked. A good fifteen or more years on, I understand why that's the case - budgets and hardware constraints limit just how much of the game you can afford to create with the expectation that players won't engage with it - but presenting it as a choice grates.
That kind of illusion of choice is frequently why I don't engage with these kinds of RPGs. Either through play or just being familiar enough with how games are made, I start to see through the illusion. And inevitably when I do, the magic that the game promises - that my choices and decisions matter - wears off. Sure enough, that happened in BG3. It does quite the excellent job with providing small choices that matter - I still think about a moment in the first Act where you can either fight a trio of ogres who have just helped slay a town's inhabitants or you can persuade them to join your employ - but as the story trundles forward the big choices narrow. For practically everyone I know, this is fine and very often good. For me, once I see through the illusion and the magic wears off, I can't help but ask "Why aren't I playing a tabletop game instead?" There, outside the bounds of pre-written adventures (and sometimes even within those), the game reacts to my decisions better.
On the note of tabletop games, BG3 is a fascinating exercise in trying to fix the flaws of Dungeons & Dragons, 5th Edition. Larian Studios opts to take the approach of "more" in doing so. More magic items. More character techniques. And perhaps most dramatically, more dice rolls. Despite frequent cautions from the rulebooks and from anyone who has played a dungeon game for a few years, BG3 approaches choice resolution like a craps player desperate to turn a losing streak in Vegas around. Simple choices that could be resolved through a dialog option inevitably necessitate a die roll. And every die roll can "crit" in either direction - a 5% chance to always fail and a 5% chance to always succeed. Inevitably, you roll that failure that grates on you, and that sends you to load a save. And that especially grates in a cooperative game, because now you need to ask permission from your other players.
And it didn't need to be this way. Hell, it wasn't that way in Baldur's Gate. Perhaps because that game used the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition ruleset, which didn't codify or use skill checks in quite the same way as later editions, there weren't strings of checks to be made in every casual conversations. Instead, your dialog choices led to characters reacting to you. There are times I wish BG3 did the same.
The worst offender is midway into the expansive Act 3. You come across a magic mirror full of memories. As you view into it, you are prompted to trade - one of your memories for one of those trapped in the mirror. It's a phenomenal scene... and then you start to make dice rolls. Several. And if you fail, instead of making a neat trade and further defining your character, you get cursed and can no longer try again. And it didn't have to be that way. Just let the players do the cool thing!
Those are my big gripes. At this point I probably should find positives, because there are plenty. Individual character writing is great, especially in the incidental characters. The Forgotten Realms feel like the Forgotten Realms1. It's a lovely game and has a fairly robust character creator. I wish I had something clever to say about all these things, but I don't.
My understanding is there's at least one more large patch coming for the game. I don't think I'll pick my solo play through back up when it arrives - I feel content with what I experienced with the game. I hope Larian continues to iterate on this formula in their own properties, and I hope some of the crowd that learned of them by playing BG3 follow them to those games as well. As for me, unless friends ask me to play said games together, I'm content to take a pass and go back to games like The Secret of Varonis2 or the Dragon Quest III remake.
This may or may not actually be a positive. Thirty years into playing and reading D&D games and books, I've learned to appreciate what the Realms are, even if they aren't my setting of choice. Which are The Known World/Mystara and Planescape, for the record.↩
Varonis is my video game of the year. It's a nostalgia grab, but a exquisitely crafted nostalgia grab!↩