Baldur's Gate 3: Shagger's First Impressions

[Shagger]

This is a game that has blown up, big time. Praised universally for it's wealth of content, it's lack of microtransactions, being hailed as a new bar for RPG's. It's a game that's so good, that even other developers are feeling compelled to point out to the public that they shouldn't expect the same quality from them going forward. OK.. wait, what?

 

OK, I want to first make what every other news outlet and the "Court of Public Opinion" has made clear. That is bullshit. A new yard stick in the gaming industry is a new standard to adhere to, and people comparing future games to that games is both fair an inevitable. Even if it is "lightning in a bottle", it's still totally fair. It happened with Skyrim, it happened with Goldeneye on N64, it happened with Super Mario, Zelda and so many others throughout history. A new game setting a new slandered to meet, or better yet, try to surpass. Then somebody did, and the cycle begins again.

 

However, these "complaints" mostly came from indie dev's terrified of feeling forced to meet a new slandered with limited resources, and and I get that. Technically, Baldur's Gate 3 is an indie game. However, far too few people understand this, but an "indie" game is one that is independently published. This could mean a single nerd working in a basement with no money, as is the cliché, but it can also mean Skyrim, Oblivion, the earlier GTA games, Fallout 4, The Witcher Series, Cyberpunk 2077, The Assassin's Creed series and even the The FIFA franchise because "indie" means independent, as in independently published, as in being published by the same company who developed the game. The scale of the game in question is irrelevant, but unfortunately most people see it's an "indie" game, they see an underdog, like that one guy in a basement somewhere.

 

That is not Larian Studios. They are more akin to a Bethesda or an Ubisoft in this scenario. They have hundreds of employees, several cooperate holdings and many, many millions of dollars to play with.  So instead of berating actual small, limited developers for realistically saying they cant do what Larian did, encourage them to lean from what the did and whilst not expect the same level of scale, pursue the level of fun? What those dev's did, who I wont name, was stupid, I won't deny that, but people shouldn't feel the need to suffer to produce something at an unrealistic standard just to avoid being berated online.

 

And before anyone says it, I do own this game. In fact, thanks to @DC and "Bid for Rewards", I owned the game two and a half years ago as it was going into Early Access on Steam. Here's a screenshot as proof I did own and try it back then;

 

 

And if you need more, here is the post I made on this very forum (as one is required to do in the "Bid for Rewards "My Confirmation Post"), and I don't get it...

 

 

And honestly, I'm struggling to get into it. Even now that it's out of early access.

 

It's a tactical, turn based RPG, something that's not really ben my thing in the past. I wasn't a fan of XCom, so.... yeah. This, however, may be more annoying because chance has a role. Now, I get, It's very faithfully based on Dungeons and Dragons and the mechanisms that exist in the tabletop game, but I don't think I'm being a bitch by saying that in a video game having your fate decided by chance in certain moments as being a little unfair.

 

I get t, I do, and I am loving the combat. I also love how that "narrator" explains the upcoming situations, choices and consequences like an actual DM, but I just don't know if I could bear it. This makes sense in actual D&D, but in a video game, I'm not so sure...

Edited August 23, 2023 by Shagger