It's not just items, there's tons of content the devs just don't care if you miss or not. But i love that, it's a big part of the game managing to make such individual adventures for people. Forums and reddit have loads of posts with stories of people who have played hundreds of hours, finding out about something completely new to them.
Baldurs Gate 3
- Thread starter LiveOVErdrive
- Start date
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Bingo.
I'm with Werecrow here: I love the fact that you can't do EVERYTHING in the game in 1 playthrough. I know it's long as fuck but it gives me incentive to play through it again with new classes and try different things out.
Also, you mentioned it with LR but for the most part you can do them whenever and it doesn't cut you off from too many quests.
Plus how else am I gonna watch my wood elf pretty boy get snu-snu'ed by Karlach?
My wizard is also an elf with Karlach. I keep thinking he's going to get snapped in half
wankerness
Well-Known Member
Are you playing it on PC or PS5? What difficulty are you playing on? Tactician? The VERY early game seemed hard cause I was missing all the time due to garbage stats and taking feats I shouldn't have (sharpshooter, which massively decreases your hit chance in exchange for massively increasing your damage - very bad skill early game).
There's a LOT of huge bugs in act 3. Bad things can happen depending on order of quests, NPCs can bug out if you do conflicting objectives in certain orders, etc. Still, the game's way, WAY more ambitious than something like a Bethesda game when it comes to quest consequences so it's not too suprising. Maybe by the time you get there they'll have fixed some of them. Acts 1 and 2 seemed quite polished.
One thing I've been reading lately is how people that play this game are trying out Divinity: Original Sin 2 afterwards for more of the same, and are getting destroyed cause apparently that game is vastly more difficult than the "accessible" BG3.
I have like, 4 or 5 bosses left (stuff like Astarion's quest and the house of hope, then Gortash and the last boss). Did some of the hard ones already, like the undead dragon.
I'm playing on standard. Some of the boss fights have been rough, but nothing's taken more than two tries. I did sorta cheese one major act 3 boss cause the first attempt without attempting to blow her away in 1-2 turns resulted in my entire party getting blown away and feared in 1-2 turns. The main problem is that in act 3 they start giving a lot of the mobs stupid, unfair buffs in an attempt to keep the game difficult. Ex, you have to hit a monster/boss a set number of times before they can be damaged ("unstoppable" buff, each stack is a hit they absorb). Or sanctuary being on all the mobs (you can still AOE them with spells at least). Or a bunch of mobs spamming darkness clouds on top of you so your ranged/spellcasters are worthless without doing a big loop around the room to eliminate the clouds from their line of sight. But yeah, if it's only taking me one or two tries still I guess it was probably the right move to not make it TOO easy.
TedEH
Cromulent
I haven't actually read the thread before this, so I'll catch up later. Maybe.
I stuck with the default / balanced difficulty. But I've also been diving right into conflicts and obvious traps, so that might be why I'm seeing a lot of challenge. I immediately jumped into that first little ruin thing you can break into and got immediately attacked. Hadn't been expecting combat. I also have a bad habit of going into random caves and fighting whatever is in it.
Actually - that's a PS5 vs. PC difference. On PS5, I couldn't figure out how to jump into the hole. On PC it seemed more intuitive.
I'm also trying not to save-scum, even if I'm making good use of the quick-save button, since it feels like that would just trivialize the RNG aspect, and defeat the "role playing" aspect I think. I only reloaded one save so-far when my character did something I hadn't intended to do (I talked down a fight, then accidentally clicked on the character again, which instigated the fight anyway).
I'm a bit surprised it took me this long to come around to this one, 'cause a while back I had a weird "want to play Diablo 2" itch, and this seems right in that ballpark, at least for the reasons I'd want to have played it. I like the basic movement+explore+click on stuff+looting kind of thing. I'm a bit surprised I've not seen many people make the Diablo comparison. I think my hesitation before was expecting more BG1 and less Diablo. I bounced off BG1 reaaaally quickly.
I did the demo on PS5, but ultimately bought on PC. Went that way because my PC is a little beefier than the PS5, but also banking on the UI being a little easier to navigate. I didn't spend enough time with the PS5 UI to have a real opinion, but it seem pretty different.
I stuck with the default / balanced difficulty. But I've also been diving right into conflicts and obvious traps, so that might be why I'm seeing a lot of challenge. I immediately jumped into that first little ruin thing you can break into and got immediately attacked. Hadn't been expecting combat. I also have a bad habit of going into random caves and fighting whatever is in it.
Actually - that's a PS5 vs. PC difference. On PS5, I couldn't figure out how to jump into the hole. On PC it seemed more intuitive.
I'm also trying not to save-scum, even if I'm making good use of the quick-save button, since it feels like that would just trivialize the RNG aspect, and defeat the "role playing" aspect I think. I only reloaded one save so-far when my character did something I hadn't intended to do (I talked down a fight, then accidentally clicked on the character again, which instigated the fight anyway).
I'm a bit surprised it took me this long to come around to this one, 'cause a while back I had a weird "want to play Diablo 2" itch, and this seems right in that ballpark, at least for the reasons I'd want to have played it. I like the basic movement+explore+click on stuff+looting kind of thing. I'm a bit surprised I've not seen many people make the Diablo comparison. I think my hesitation before was expecting more BG1 and less Diablo. I bounced off BG1 reaaaally quickly.
wankerness
Well-Known Member
I don't know how it's done on PC, but, yeah, jumping is quite non-intuitive on PS5. You had to scroll through multiple hotbars to find one with "jump" on it, and then do it that way, unless you figured out that you could just press up on the Dpad (the game never told me that, I'm pretty sure I was well into act 2 before I figured it out. Same with stealth for the whole party with holding down).
Jumping is also weird cause your jump distance is determined by your strength (I think), so I have two characters that can make all kinds of jumps that my other two characters can't, so I'll be wandering around until I realize that wimp 1 and wimp 2 are still stranded back before the jump until I have to blow some cooldown or consumable to get them over (fly spell/scroll, enhance jump, misty step, etc).
I have not played BG1, but I would be surprised if this was more similar to Diablo than it. I mean, the combat is hardcore turnbased and extremely tactical, especially boss fights where you are having to wait a minute between your turns due to sheer volume of enemies that have turns. I guess it's real-time action when you're not in combat. Though sometimes it's beneficial to turn on the turn-based mode even when outside of combat, like when trying to do things with a timer or something, cause it basically freezes traps or lasers or whatever in time until you've "gone." But yeah I guess if you wanted to play diablo without combat then this would scratch that itch!
If you want to RP, then yeah, the anti-save-scumming thing makes sense. But I definitely do it sometimes when I feel like the game is just being an asshole. Like when you have some persuasion check that you blow all your insight on passing, and then you find out you get literally nothing from succeeding other than the narrator telling you some stupid fact. I like to know what I'm trying for before I blow all my consumables! Or like, when I am going through some section with traps, and have a 19/20 chance to succeed due to all my bonuses, and then I manage to roll three 1s in a row and my party all explodes. Stupid.
Another thing I discovered and loathe: (SPOILERS if you want to play as a paladin or respec one of your companions paladin):
Jumping is also weird cause your jump distance is determined by your strength (I think), so I have two characters that can make all kinds of jumps that my other two characters can't, so I'll be wandering around until I realize that wimp 1 and wimp 2 are still stranded back before the jump until I have to blow some cooldown or consumable to get them over (fly spell/scroll, enhance jump, misty step, etc).
I have not played BG1, but I would be surprised if this was more similar to Diablo than it. I mean, the combat is hardcore turnbased and extremely tactical, especially boss fights where you are having to wait a minute between your turns due to sheer volume of enemies that have turns. I guess it's real-time action when you're not in combat. Though sometimes it's beneficial to turn on the turn-based mode even when outside of combat, like when trying to do things with a timer or something, cause it basically freezes traps or lasers or whatever in time until you've "gone." But yeah I guess if you wanted to play diablo without combat then this would scratch that itch!
If you want to RP, then yeah, the anti-save-scumming thing makes sense. But I definitely do it sometimes when I feel like the game is just being an asshole. Like when you have some persuasion check that you blow all your insight on passing, and then you find out you get literally nothing from succeeding other than the narrator telling you some stupid fact. I like to know what I'm trying for before I blow all my consumables! Or like, when I am going through some section with traps, and have a 19/20 chance to succeed due to all my bonuses, and then I manage to roll three 1s in a row and my party all explodes. Stupid.
Another thing I discovered and loathe: (SPOILERS if you want to play as a paladin or respec one of your companions paladin):
If you get the killing blow on many sorts of aggressive mobs with your paladin character, you'll get a message that you broke your oath, and then your character loses access to some of their high level spells until they go back to camp and pay 1000 gold to an NPC to restore your oath. There's absolutely no warning in-game for what will or will not break your oath, so I just started avoiding ever getting the killing blows with the pally, just in case. Last time was one of the big watcher robots that will ruin your shit in the foundry. I mean, it's sort of cool in that you can then respec to OATHBREAKER spec and then be a powerful badass, but it's not good if in the beginning of a boss fight you kill an add and are suddenly locked out of all your healing spells permanently.
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TedEH
Cromulent
Realistically, IMO, combat was a weak point for Diablo, so if someone had said "Imagine you're playing Diablo 2, but you get tactics instead of click-until-dead combat" I think I'd have been sold much earlier, is all I meant to say.
I don't plan on being too picky about the save-scumming thing, more that I don't want to end up playing it the way I would some stealth games where every minor screw up is a re-load and try again. I'd rather let the game be "emergent" or whatever than defeat all the RNG. Feels like if I re-load every time I fail a roll somewhere, I'd be sort of fighting against the "spirit" or intent of the game.
Divinity: Original Sin 2 was in my top 2 RPGs before BG3, and i got used to how tough it is. The combat is brutal, and because of the high hit rates and armour system, the tactics are more like if A, then B happens, then C will happen, rather than the much more percentage based DND system. I think i prefer the combat slightly more in that game. You have to be a bit more thoughtful with the consequences of your tactics i think, and because of how sure it is that things can happen, you can easily get into a dead-end no-win situation in a fight, even if you've save scummed.
The character building is more like Skyrim as well, where you don't have an actual class. Because of that, new players can generalise too much, and get into a situation where you're actually not good enough to fight effectively.
Other than that, the freedom to experiment on how to get things done is very much there in the same way as BG3, with some significant choices as well (though not as many as BG3).
On my first playthrough, i did think of the combat as like the Dark Souls of CRPG. It can be pretty unforgiving, with a bit of bullshit sometimes.
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Lorcan Ward
7slinger
Scripted or not this was hilarious
wankerness
Well-Known Member
I'm at the point where I think I've done everything I still can besides Orpheus stuff and fighting the last boss, but I'm trying to see how many of the endings I can "save scum" and get. I'm just very apprehensive about doing anything that will lock me into the point of no return.
The last few bosses I fought have been the "hardest" (Cazador, Raphael, Gortash, Sarevok) and I've pretty much annihilated them, so I guess that's what happens when you're level 12 and have a few heavy hitters in the group. The two bosses that actually gave me some trouble were Ansur (all but 1 of my characters died) and the house of grief fight, but those were both done on the first try. The latter was probably hard mainly cause I was still level 10 or 11 then.
I just got that super, super overpowered 1h mace off the curse angels for Jaheira, my Paladin, so I think now I'll probably use her at the end, along with Gale (Evo wizard) and Karlach (barbarian/rogue with throwing weapons). As far as the rest of the party is concerned, I've barely touched Minsck so I don't know how good he is (Gloomstalker), I haven't touched Halsin since act 2 cause his horniness was too off-putting, Astarion seems like a crappier version of my main character, Shadowheart's really good at healing and really bad at everything else, and Lazael is incredibly good but only when I can actually get her to melee range. I might switch out Karlach for Lazael since I heard that there's something with the last boss that makes returning throw weapons not work, but that would be sad cause she's the one companion I've used for the entire playthrough.
The last few bosses I fought have been the "hardest" (Cazador, Raphael, Gortash, Sarevok) and I've pretty much annihilated them, so I guess that's what happens when you're level 12 and have a few heavy hitters in the group. The two bosses that actually gave me some trouble were Ansur (all but 1 of my characters died) and the house of grief fight, but those were both done on the first try. The latter was probably hard mainly cause I was still level 10 or 11 then.
I just got that super, super overpowered 1h mace off the curse angels for Jaheira, my Paladin, so I think now I'll probably use her at the end, along with Gale (Evo wizard) and Karlach (barbarian/rogue with throwing weapons). As far as the rest of the party is concerned, I've barely touched Minsck so I don't know how good he is (Gloomstalker), I haven't touched Halsin since act 2 cause his horniness was too off-putting, Astarion seems like a crappier version of my main character, Shadowheart's really good at healing and really bad at everything else, and Lazael is incredibly good but only when I can actually get her to melee range. I might switch out Karlach for Lazael since I heard that there's something with the last boss that makes returning throw weapons not work, but that would be sad cause she's the one companion I've used for the entire playthrough.
TedEH
Cromulent
Probably not worthy of spoiler tags since I'm pretty early into the game but
I made it as far as the first goblin camp that threatens the grove area. Rescued the bear guy and slowly decimated the whole camp. I guess now is time to decide if I try to go after the tower thingie (I found the underground tunnel thingie), or sidetrack and go looking for the creche thingie.
wankerness
Well-Known Member
Make sure you don't rush the main quests, you get completely locked out of entire zones based on main quest progress.
Similarly there are frequently important items that you don't get a second chance at acquiring on vendors that you can lose access to based on quests so you need to be careful about buying everything off vendors immediately. Really just equipment.
TedEH
Cromulent
So, it sounds like my instinct to meander around in this first area before going underground was the right idea.
wankerness
Well-Known Member
Yeah, make absolutely sure you don't take that underground path before doing all other quests you possibly can progress. There's a "point of no return" for multiple exits in the first zone. I think the one you can happen on really early is in the underground somewhere. I think you get a message that says something like "you're about to progress the game, are you sure you want to proceed" but has no detail or real warning that you'll never be able to come back.
Anyway, I beat the game, and then immediately loaded a save right before where I could decide to destroy the world or save the world and watched the evil ending, too. Basically the evil ending is like a minute long and the good ending is like 45 minutes worth of scenes and dialogue and hanging around with your friends ala Mass Effect 3's Citadel DLC. Clearly the game didn't want you to choose the evil ending!!!
Last section of the game is pretty stressful, I ultimately did it with my busted Oath of Ancients Jaheira (she usually couldn't even get to mobs on her turn, but when she did she was hitting for like 50 a swing with regular attacks with that 1H hammer), gloomstalker minsck (good reliable ranged damage, gave him the legendary bow), my busted sword bard player character (used the titanstring bow as soon as I got it and never used anything else, used the hill giant mace from act 1 for the 19 strength, the gloves for 18 dex, the neck with 21 constitution, and then specced all into charisma), and karlach as the throwing spec with the returning javelin for non-aoe and that explodey returning spear you get out of the djinn area in the carnival for whenever there was a group of enemies far away from my team.
I am going to go back and replay the last boss encounter
I think I'd like to replay this game, but god, is it a time commitment. My file had 120 hours on it according to the save screen, and the playstation tells me I spent 130 hours on it (the truth is somewhere between, I did a bit of save reloading which would have stretched the 120 estimate but I also left the game paused while doing other stuff around the house which would decrease the 130 hour estimate).
I am not sure if I want to play it again on easy difficulty for the DARK URGE path with turning into a slayer and whatnot, or if I want to play it on tactician and do some of the trophies I missed (mainly just saving some goblin three times, and killing 10 guys while drunk, and going on a date with Karlach). I don't think I can do the Goblin trophy or the Karlach trophy if I go full evil and recruit Minthara and give all praise to Bhaal or whatever, so getting the platinum trophy on this might be out of reach with just one more playthrough. And TWO more playthroughs just sounds nutty in terms of time investment. Maybe I'll wait for some more patches. While the game is buggy and Act 3 has some pretty large performance issues, it's not in any way busted (I mean, it's probably about as good as a non-fan-patched Skyrim is today, which is damning with faint praise). Well, unless you play on Xbox, though I've since read that was confirmed to be an issue that Microsoft has to fix that affects some other games, it's just way bigger of an issue with a hundred plus hour RPG where you want to be saving constantly.
Anyway, I beat the game, and then immediately loaded a save right before where I could decide to destroy the world or save the world and watched the evil ending, too. Basically the evil ending is like a minute long and the good ending is like 45 minutes worth of scenes and dialogue and hanging around with your friends ala Mass Effect 3's Citadel DLC. Clearly the game didn't want you to choose the evil ending!!!
Last section of the game is pretty stressful, I ultimately did it with my busted Oath of Ancients Jaheira (she usually couldn't even get to mobs on her turn, but when she did she was hitting for like 50 a swing with regular attacks with that 1H hammer), gloomstalker minsck (good reliable ranged damage, gave him the legendary bow), my busted sword bard player character (used the titanstring bow as soon as I got it and never used anything else, used the hill giant mace from act 1 for the 19 strength, the gloves for 18 dex, the neck with 21 constitution, and then specced all into charisma), and karlach as the throwing spec with the returning javelin for non-aoe and that explodey returning spear you get out of the djinn area in the carnival for whenever there was a group of enemies far away from my team.
I am going to go back and replay the last boss encounter
after transforming into a flayer to see what the difference is. I like how you can still make very big ending-altering decisions AFTER you beat the last boss (ex, I talked Karlach into going to hell with Wyll and there's a great scene of her smoking cigars and being a badass with him, ala Doom - I know there are much less happy endings with her melting down or whatever).
I think I'd like to replay this game, but god, is it a time commitment. My file had 120 hours on it according to the save screen, and the playstation tells me I spent 130 hours on it (the truth is somewhere between, I did a bit of save reloading which would have stretched the 120 estimate but I also left the game paused while doing other stuff around the house which would decrease the 130 hour estimate).
I am not sure if I want to play it again on easy difficulty for the DARK URGE path with turning into a slayer and whatnot, or if I want to play it on tactician and do some of the trophies I missed (mainly just saving some goblin three times, and killing 10 guys while drunk, and going on a date with Karlach). I don't think I can do the Goblin trophy or the Karlach trophy if I go full evil and recruit Minthara and give all praise to Bhaal or whatever, so getting the platinum trophy on this might be out of reach with just one more playthrough. And TWO more playthroughs just sounds nutty in terms of time investment. Maybe I'll wait for some more patches. While the game is buggy and Act 3 has some pretty large performance issues, it's not in any way busted (I mean, it's probably about as good as a non-fan-patched Skyrim is today, which is damning with faint praise). Well, unless you play on Xbox, though I've since read that was confirmed to be an issue that Microsoft has to fix that affects some other games, it's just way bigger of an issue with a hundred plus hour RPG where you want to be saving constantly.
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Definitely do the creche with a certain person who wants to go there before moving to Act 2. Even though it's an optional place, it has pretty large story connotations for her and in general. I clear out the underdark first (that's still classed as Act 1).
TedEH
Cromulent
Dumb question for those who have played much more - is it a mistake to avoid long rests? I managed to get as far as I did with only two or three long rests. One of them was the grove after-party thing, then once after - but when I did, I suddenly got . I had been avoiding long rests thinking that plot things could move forward without me, but maybe plot things are depending on those camp scenes.
the bug powers
Yes, very much so. They initiate and continue party member stories, and main story elements as well. In fact, i suggest you save the game and try resting quite a few times back to back, till you get one where nothing happens.
Some people have wondered if avoiding resting can cause bugs later down the line.
wankerness
Well-Known Member
Just loot all the food and supply packs you can find and you’ll never run out of long rests. And yeah a lot of companion quests only advance through long rests.
TedEH
Cromulent
I have a suspicion that might make life a lot easier. Maybe that's why I was seeing so much challenge. I managed to do the whole grove thing (including clearing out an entire troll camp), a bunch of side stuff, made my way up to the hag (but haven't done the last fight there yet), rescued I dunno how many people from caves and junk, but on a total of maybe 3 long rests within the ~30hrs or so steam says I've been playing. Lesson learned I guess.
narad
Progressive metal and politics
Kind of my complaint too. You could pop out and long rest, come in blasting fireballs in every tough fight, but it doesn't seem fair. Basically every long rest I did the whole game, the whole party was pretty much totally spent. I don't really like that the only calibration on the appropriate amount of long rests is just your own intuition about what feels right. I think in BG1 you would get ambushed during long rests seemingly whenever you really needed a peaceful one.
