I'm back home now and back on the BG3 train! I'm afraid to give any more spoilers so I'll just post a few pics of the reactions of the only remaining party members I have to my most recent bloodbath.

How's the underdark treating you Satis?

Oh, I had no idea they were unique. I encountered one in one area of the underdark (which killed me at level 3), and then another at level 5 which I spanked. I just assumed there were several. I'll need to go back to that first area (which I avoided) and see if I can get a second. They're pretty scary. I did end up murdering my helper down there, so not sure how another encounter would go.

I haven't played in a few days, but I did pull back to complete other quests outside of the underdark. I'll be back soon though.

The face on that middle picture says it all

I think it's one and the same creature that roams the underdark underground (the rumbling in the ground thing). I barely survived my first encounter and then it burrowed, disappeared and healed itself partially, only to pop up again later with some missing HP. Possibly it escaped again and then reappeared once more, don't remember exactly. But I do know that once I killed it I didn't hear any more burrowing tremors or have any more encounters down there.

@ Pev: the best part is that I'm also romancing her She's actually ok with most of my minor indiscretions...but she clearly isn't too fond of spilling rivers of blood just because I felt like it. I'm trying to keep this romance going for as long as possible, but I don't think she'll put up with much more of these shenanigans.

I also forced Astarion to do something he really didn't want to do in exchange for a nice permanent stat boost for myself, so I may not be their favorite person in the whole world right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFmV2WA64tQ

Who wants to test if this works in BG3?!

I haven't tried it Pev I imagine there will be similar ways to break the game, even if probably not exactly like that.

@ Satis: remember what I said about strength for your rogues? Apparently there are weapons that might actually make it relevant!

I tried to do that today, no go on just moving stuff through people. You can throw stuff at people like that dude was tossing other barbarians.

I'm having serious "Larian" fatigue. I'm basically MMOing the game now, just skip skip skip most dialogue, powering through events just hoping it would end at some point. The game is too long and the story is a mess. It was the same with DivOrigSin2, never finished it, probably never will. Nor do I see myself ever replaying this game. While the game ticks all the important boxes, its like a Japanese car, somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Games imo have to follow the trinity of: story, loot, combat. One of these has to shine. BG3 story is lackluster with awful pacing, the characters in it try to convey an urgency which the game world does not support. Loot is okay at best. Combat is garbage. Out of all the hours played, today I had the first interesting combat scenario which was in a firework shop. It needed planning, positioning, preparation the whole deal.

I can live with the lackluster combat and loot but damn. BG was always about the story and the journey, bg3 really falls flat on this. It's become like a fucked up sandbox of gimmicks and virtual fucking. While the pathfinder games didn't make such a splash, their devs knew to keep the main story always a focus.

Baldur's Gate 3: The F8 simulator.

I have to say I'm glad I've waited. I'm seeing such a mix of reactions. One of the MMOs I play, a guy there is playing BG3, had it since early access, and he's said the same as you Peltz about the story pacing and urgency being off; a common thing in some open world games. I did watch one silly video on it yesterday so there weren't spoilers and it definitely looked fun but that could be due to the guy playing it... well... terribly Like not making any strategic decisions when he talked to people or created his char, just going for totally random stuff.

I haven't ever got out of the first town on Original Sin so I'm definitely going to continue waiting. In fact although I've played all of Larian's games except Original Sin 2, I've never completed one! But that's me with games in general haha.

Keep the opinions coming please, this thread is entertaining at least!

The urgency thing is definitely real. "OMG we gotta quickly go do"... something something, but then I just wander all over the map and take a bunch of long rests and that doesn't really affect anything. Funny, because occasionally you'll long rest after some event, and suddenly EVERYONE IS GONE. It makes sense from a story perspective that they would leave, but when and how "time matters" gets applied seems a bit random.

Combat I don't quite agree as much. Maybe it gets worse later, but having just started Act 2, though there are times when I just wreck everything, there are also fights where I really have to plan out what I'm going to do, how I use my skills, etc. There was a certain fight against a big guy in a forge area that had several mechanics I really had to utilize in order to beat. At another point I pulled a Shiny by yoinking a healing potion that was sitting out, only to be called out on it a few minutes later and having half the world aggro on me. That turned into a major fight that I barely survived.

Still, there's plenty of time for me to get ed

There is a companion quest fight where there are 20 enemies and the enemy toons do over 250 damage in the first round of combat. Killed my main, karlach, lae'zel in the first round, all lvl 11. And Karlach had 25ac but they use a disadvantage mechanic to bypass that. That is really really bad level design.

Still I did find another fairly decent fight down in the sewers involving memphits, slimes and totally cocoo wizard. Woohoo, that's 2 now.

Bug warning: When dealing with Orin and the captive you have to succeed through the dialogue if you want to save the captive. If you initiate combat out of dialogue the quest breaks and you can't talk to the captive.

Wyll questline completely broke for me as well.

Thanks for the heads up Peltz, l fully expected there to be more bugs in acts 2 and 3 than in the beginning of the game due to the early access focusing on act 1. Let's hope it won't so bad, and that they have had some time to patch out a few things already!

I disagree with your general take on the game, though. The urgency thing is a "yes, but" for me. It's true that you can faff about quite a bit while everyone is saying that time is of the essence, but there's really no winning here for a studio. There were RPGs in the past where you had an actual hard time limit to complete certain quests/reach a certain goal (original Fallout comes to mind) and those were generally maligned for potentially ruining a whole run for a player who mismanaged his time. So a hard time limit isn't really feasible if you want to appeal to a larger audience, and it's pretty hard to instill a sense of urgency while not frustrating slower players. In addition to that, the game does give you some hard barriers in terms of urging you forward. Once you make it into the main area of act 2, you can't return to the act 1 areas. Some other similar attempts or decisions you can take just see you die outright. So while the game isn't urging you forward so much, it is burning bridges behind you. So I'm generally ok with how they did it...in the end, nothing is stopping players from moving fast if they want to roleplay it instead of investigate every corner of the map and do all the quests.

I generally speaking love the writing and the characters and dialogue I've met, it's all very D&D with a bit of Larian to the side. I find the story interesting enough too - I've been guessing at what is going on based on characters' comments, D&D lore and books I read and it's pretty damn close to what I thought. So I feel it all comes together pretty naturally so far. It's not perfect, but hey.

As for the combat...it's gotten a lot better since the start of the game, now that I have more options and understand it more. I didn't hate it back then either, but I definitely like it better now. I do find that some enemies hit like a motherfucking truck. Rinox has great AC, a large HP pool, and even he gets smacked from full health to 30% health in one turn by one character sometimes...ok, the biggest bosses, but still. It's pretty crazy. I'll also say that act 2 has a very, very lengthy succession of combat encounters which I found poorly spaced or paced. Nothing I can't handle, but it just felt a bit like...ok yeah another battle, can I just get on with the story now?

Although keep in mind that my decisions to be an absolute monster have caused some of this...if I compare it to my friend, I have a lot more (and harder) combat encounters because I piss every faction off and/or don't have any allies in most big showdowns. Oh and I didn't have ANY shops I could return to towards the end of act 2. I couldn't sell any loot or buy any health potions or anything like that for a very long time. So yeah, definitely not making it easier on myself.

I've now finished act 2 and am at the very beginning of act 3. I'd love to tell you about my erhm, dark path, but there's some serious spoilage there. What I can tell you is I'm sure this won't cause any problems for me later.

There is a quest regarding a certain hammer, I suggest going the thieving route on this one as it leads to one of the best fights in the game. Bring your best though.

I'm on the outskirts of Baldur's Gate and I've already ended with 2 big bloodbaths because in both cases I refused to just walk away or to be smart. Not the best of starts. At least the stores are still intact.

Well I finally managed to reach the end. Overall I'm not happy/satisfied with the game, not much to add to the issues already discussed. I clocked in about 195hours so definitely not a short game.

The end.