Baldur's Gate III - Non Spoiler Edition

I've been playing a lot of BG3 lately. Started early January and I am approaching the 100 hour mark at this point (and I am in the middle of act 2).

I gotta tell you, I had a very hard time getting into this game. As someone, who is not that familiar with the D&D universe, I thought the entry was not super well done. It's a similar problem I had, when making my first character in Cyberpunk 2077, who was a corpo. That is: The character you are making is thrown into the middle of a world, that he is supposed to be familiar with but I, the player, don't know anything about the world yet. So I am bombarded with a lot of weird stuff (alien mind flayers, dragon riders, a brief visit to a plane of hell, etc.) and a lot of lore specific terms and names and I was completely overwhelmed with all of it.
It took me a particularly long time find my footing. I really had to force myself to play for the first 20 hours or so. I think as a result of the weirdness of it all, I also couldn't relate to the companions very well at first either.

I think Larian would have done better (with D&D newbies anyway) to make the start of the game a little bit more grounded. Look at Dragon Age: Origins as an example. They also have a grand opening with the battle of Osthagar, where the shit really hits the fan but before that, they have origin stories and the little quest you do for Duncan as kind of a very grounded prologue that eases you into the world and slowly makes you , the player, familiar with some of the lore and the idiosyncrasies your character should know. This way - at least for me - I could identify much more with my Dragon Age character than I did with my BG3 one.

Ok that was my rant about the beginning (and it's a pretty big issue IMO, I am surprised this wasn't mentioned more in the reviews when the game came out).

After 20 hours though, I had found my footing and now, the game really shines. One big thing that kept me going (apart from my determination to play such a highly praised story RPG) was the gameplay. This is really surprising to me because I don't like isometric party RPGs usually. Never really got into Pillars of Eternity or the Divinity: Original Sin games for that reason and I didn't even finish BG1 back in the day. Hell, even the Dragon Age games, I usually play on easy difficulty, so I don't have to worry about the combat too much.

But here, after some initial learning pains, I really started to appreciate all the possibilities. How you can interact with your surroundings is phenomenal and when you manage to choose your action really carefully in a turn to avoid damage or you drive the enemy into a choke point, you really feel clever. It's amazing that the gameplay was the part that actually kept me playing in those first couple of hours. And now that my party is approaching level 8 and I get more and more options and powerful abilities with each character, it only gets better.

The characters and the setting, while I got used to it now, they are still not 100% my cup of tea though. But that's a issue I have with D&D, so it's not really a BG3 thing. I just do prefer fantasy settings that are a little more down to earth. Also, here and there, I find myself wishing for a dialogue option, which I think would make sense for my character now but isn't there (this is something where BioWare really did a great job usually, especially in DA:O as well).

But I will say that the game mor than compensates by offering this huge variety of outcomes to any given situation. This is only my first playthrough, but even now, I can see how the reactivity of the plot to my choices must be huge. And also, the presentation is amazing. The amount of mocap, they have in there, even for little scenes is crazy. I still gape, when Gale counts something on his fingers or when Astarion uses a very particular handwave to go with his sarcasm. You can tell that those are all custom recorded animations and that's incredible.

So yeah, can definitely see why this is the GOTY 2023 everywhere. I have my criticisms, but all in all, this is a lot of fun for sure and I'll certainly finish this playthrough and probably replay in the future as well.

P.S.: Forgot to mention, I am playing this with the WASD mod, which allows you to play this on PC like a Dragon Age or Kinghts of the Old Republic game. In combat (or with a hotkey even outside of combat) it smoothly switches into the isometric game controls. Absolutely fantastic mod, if you want to feel a little more immersed while you are exploring. Can totally recommend it, wouldn't want to play without it anymore.