I don't play many PC games these days because of how woke a lot of the shit is. I got burned on Cyberpunk, so now I pretty much play FS2020 and that's it these days. The last game I played through was System Shock remake, which I found to be decent enough.
BG3 won game of the year from Worth a Buy, but I hear it has a lot of gay sex?
No, I'm going to defend your childhood here, Baldur's Gate 3 is incredibly average and actually has had quite a few problems with it including game breaking dialogue options. The problem is things have been so universally shit especially with the DLC policy of most major studios Larian Studios have cruised to an easy win because their competition is that terrible.
It's easy to bash and hate on the woke gay stuff and yes there is quite a bit but the problems with BG3 go so much deeper than that if you look at it in detail. It's worth pointing out that they even admit in the reviews the bastards are leaving positive reviews without even having gotten to Act 3. These people are the gaming journalists of steam.
Problems I found with BG3 that pissed me off and this is purely looking at BG3 as a game rather than the woke stuff.
. The pathfinding, they had way too many broken jumping sequences in that they clearly didn't design and test properly so you're constantly having to micro-manage party movement to get through sections and it's all totally unnecessary, because of how silly the pathfinding is at times you have to be very careful in puzzle sequences to always do manual and they haven't even got box selection coded probably for console support so you're clicking the portraits constantly and it's tedious and unintuitive
. Balancing is an issue ranted about this before, but it definitely seems like they've skewed things heavily in favour of the weird classes. Don't get me wrong, the classic classes do technically work, but aside from some kind of rogue character for dealing with lockpicking etc. you don't really need anything in particular and they seem to want you to play the quirky stuff more and the classic classes seem to be more of an afterthought in terms of what abilities they have, very uninspired
. They've patched some stuff in regards to this, but combat AI has been flat out broken in certain areas, meaning the only way you can get through it is with cheese methods, I'm not a fan of games that force you to do this, it's not difficulty it's bad game design
. Inventory grids are not that difficult to code once you break it all down, just a lot to get through, so I find it annoying that Larian couldn't make easy ways to sell irrelevant gear that clearly only belonged in certain chapters and are useless to you later on, also ranted about how they have important quest items dumped in your inventory that have weight and clog everything up, they didn't test this game
I don't understand what's so difficult about creating an array of booleans and having them activate based on completed quests, it's way more efficient than having a ton of junk in your inventory as well that a player might drop or glitch by accident. By the way this happens in one of the main storylines if you're not careful because the idiot devs allowed you to burn one of the quest related books you need.
. Towards Act 3 especially there have been broken dialogue sequences for some time that have only recently been fixed, should never have made it to release which awkwardly makes me praise Cyberpunk 2077 for at least being playable. They've also clearly cut out quite a bit or shuffled things around, difficult to explain but sometimes the dialogue and reactions of companions seems almost disjointed
. Another one I've ranted about in the past that people don't mention about the game is how jarring the NPC design is. Some retarded normie might go why do you care? But when you start noticing that every background NPC looks like some woke millennial face and hair inserted into every single one of them and generated into a mush it's Starfield levels of jarring
. There are no proper epilogues, it just gives you a shitty cutscene to imply an ending rather than give you a proper ending. The fact that people are spamming positive reviews on this game pisses me off, the negative reviews did mention this properly so those guys are the ones that played through the game properly all the way to Act 3
There were correct comparisons on steam made to Mass Effect 3 and how they handled their endings. Ultimately everything boils down to you picking a bunch of specific dialogue options and doing main quests it seems very much that nothing you do makes any kind of difference previously beyond giving you some combat advantages depending on who you side with
. I've barely mentioned story so you can imagine how this game makes me feel with all these issues but if there's one thing I have to point out as a major RPG enjoyer. I've played BG2 tons and I was actually upset at how jarring the fucking cameo inserts were, major spoilers they even 'brought back' Sarevok and completely ruined the looks of Jaheira she was the classic elven milf and fuck me did they beat her with the ugly stick, western devs are misogynists
Not only that they brought back Minsc and Jaheira completely unnecessarily when they should have stuck with an original story, it was purely so they could put their Baldur's Gate skin suit over everything and claim it was a Baldur's Gate game when it just wasn't. This turned into a mega post lol but yeah.
TLDR: Don't let shitty western game devs gaslight you into thinking you don't like video games anymore because they're putting out poor quality or average products
Oh I completely forgot to mention how much I hate the dice roll mechanic in the dialogue options, that shit can fuck off.
Also Virconia, not sure what her point was, I did not find a way to have her join me.
It had a ton of memberbarries, remember Sarevok, remember Jahiera (now old and weak), remember Minsc (with I think 10 strength?), remember the Slayer? It was all forced for nostalgia. So much focus on Jahiera being old as well, like she was half-elf she was not suppose to age worse then Minsc.
I felt used.
What they did to Viconia (and Sarevok) was complete bullshit and was the final determinator in my decision to not get this game. If the original characters don't deserve to have their redemption arcs, why the hell should any of Larian's get any?
Fyi Sarevok does get his redemption arc in Throne of bhaal even though the expansion wasn't that good it provided a lot of closure, Viconia can also have her alignment changed under the right conditions. The story had been completely setup and done for those characters, Larian defiled their graves to bring them back from the dead.
Even Viconia's non-romance, non-alignment-change ending implied a redemption for her happened, where she fell out of favor with Shar and assisted do-gooder Drizzt in saving Suldanessalar from a Zhentarim plot. Seems the writers at Larian really hated her and Sarevok and felt the need to go out of their way including them in a story that didn't require them just to assassinate them, character-wise and literally.
Jaheira was muh elven milf and they ruined her :(
I agree with everything you wrote but I don't think it was critical enough even tbh. I found balancing a big issue myself and the combat felt more tedious than anything. I felt confused at times at what I was even supposed to do to progress the story and then felt the options I wanted to take weren't feasible due to the difficulty and it wasn't easy figuring out how to improve my strength without ruining the ability to take the options I wanted.
The whole time I was playing BG3, I just felt like I'd rather be playing BG2 instead.
You're right there's so much more I can go into and I could write a dissertation on the problems with the game. The comment was meant to sort of reassure you but I accidentally sperged and turned it into a mega review post. It's not just you, I've been playing BG2 to lately for inspiration with an RPG concept I'm working on and it's simply superior in every way even with the problems the game has and every time I think about BG3 I immediately drift towards BG2 instead.
The joke is regarding combat sometimes BG2 is more broken and cheesy than BG3 yet it can be forgiven because at least the combat is entertaining and so is the story, there's nothing really all that remarkable about BG3 at the end of the day.
I actually preferred Tyranny if we're going to talk modern RPGs.