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When this game came out, everyone unanimously started shouting that the small indie studio Larian, consisting of two and a half bear-dachshunds, had set an absolutely new, incredible standard of quality in the RPG genre. Unfortunately or fortunately, by this time I had long had my own internal "standard," which I wrote about here. Willy-nilly, I compared this new game to it. In a nutshell: I didn't experience the same euphoria, though there was no great disappointment either. By and large, BG3 is simply a good and high-quality game, but, apparently due to the obscurity of alternatives, a vastly overrated one. And here's why.

The hallmark of any such game is its companions. While I wrote many good things about the companions in WOTR, here the very first encounter with Larian cameos causes aversion and makes you give them the brush-off (going solo was a pretty sound decision on my part). Moreover, the aversion only grows the more these companions are forced upon you — and the forced nature, the Mary Sue-ishness, the attempt to divert attention away from the player character is felt in every breath. All the game's covers, posters, and banners feature the faces of companions in close-up, and only them (on the canonical WOTR covers, by the way, they tried to depict the commander — apparently technology too advanced for Larian). Their introduction is as spectacular as possible — but the developers, in most cases, didn't consider the player's motivation to take them into the party. Why should I recruit an unbalanced toad that attacks everyone? A suspicious priestess with a suspicious artifact who instantly tries to impose her opinion on you, even though you just saved her five minutes ago? A guy who suspiciously resembles a vampire and tries to slit your throat with a knife? Well, it's just assumed that since you're given this opportunity to travel with someone in a party, you'll apparently take everyone, because the devs worked so hard, wrote such cool stories for them...

Even when some companion is directly tied to story progress, they can't use their mouth to say it properly, instead trying to maintain a fake air of mystery. Shadowheart slobbered all over trying to prove she's absolutely necessary, that you must take her because "without my artifact you'll die there." When asked if she could just give the artifact without herself, she said no, she and the artifact are a package deal. In the end, the artifact just magically appeared in my character's camp under the pillow at one point in the story — see, to get into our camp at any cost, these people will stoop to any lie and baseness.

If you were unlucky enough to invite someone, thinking it would be short-term, then I'll have to disappoint that person: there's no "let's go our separate ways" option here. Any self-respecting game has one. After WOTR, I certainly expected it. But not here. The only option in that case is to manually walk up and kill them, roleplaying in your head (or not) that you parted ways; however, even this won't exclude the character from the final credits, and their corpse will lie in the middle of your camp for the entire game. In short, our companions are so good that even death won't part you.

An extra laugh: the game has a ton of scrolls of resurrection, and ideally it would be convenient to use them on those characters you actually need, say, for a quest. But — no. Dead means dead. A companion can be resurrected at any moment, and in fact even if the corpse is kilometers away from you, even vertically, and obviously inaccessible.

Overall, the game is praised for its freedom of action, but everywhere I go, I keep running into limitations and scripts. This isn't a flaw in itself, but it's a matter of how this entertainment is positioned. Why did they set the level cap at 12? The scale of events doesn't match it, and even if it did, they should have made it larger — that's all, because a computer adventure can easily be adapted for maximum progression. Shoving in various ways often decides the outcome of battles: but you choose the direction slightly poorly, and you're not shoving anywhere; many chasms are completely inaccessible to push into (it depends on whether the devs bothered to add a couple of strokes of a special mask to indicate a bottom, or forgot; and you can't push on slopes either 🤪). Sometimes you can jump and simplify moving to another level of the map, but in the temple of Shar in the first act, you can't jump, just because. Yes, you can cast Feather Fall and jump right to the gates, but the script will kill you 🤪.

I used to think WOTR had a lot of bugs or things perceived as such, like charge, which refuses to work at the slightest step or pebble in the way, and yes, it broke entire classes like the cavalier. The difference is that a bug in WOTR either had almost no effect, just slightly miscalculating a formula, or yes, it had an effect, but working 80% of the time, you could just use another mechanic to win your battles and forget about it. Don't like how charge works? Don't take a cavalier, take any other warrior, and you'll be happy. In BG3, it's a shame to give up shoves, because a significant portion of the time they work — but when they don't, which is also frequent, you experience an outrage I never even dreamed of in my anger.

Sometimes bugs or unfinished features appear in things I wouldn't even have thought of. The "Weapon Masterpiece" quest simply wouldn't complete for me because the interface for creating the special weapon didn't work. Sussur flowers are supposed to block all magic, so in the third act I was glad to find a use for them by tossing one at a djinn before it started its tricks... But the djinn didn't care, and the script played out normally.

Multi-level locations (houses with several floors) are a nightmare. The reason is the camera, which works extremely poorly and never wants to show you the level you need. Sometimes I had to climb ladders instead of flying, simply because to fly you need to click on the floor you want to move to, and you physically can't do it.

In short, what I want to say is this: BG3 is considered a game about variety and unconventional thinking — in reality, I felt the whole game that it's more about finding Easter eggs. The player is supposed to guess the "unconventional" things that the developers specifically built in for them — and, apparently, feel like a genius, but in reality, all this "unconventional" stuff is on the surface, while real flexibility is unavailable to you because it wasn't scripted.

The thing that disappointed me the most, it seems, was the ending. First, the final battle is nothing special.

Spoiler

Just a few illithids that aren't particularly buffed, and then some more spawn from the nautiloid. There was also a dragon, but a weak one. Honestly, from a huge, super-genius brain, you expect it to be able to annihilate entire cities with its psionic magic, without even resorting to the help of illithids on nautiloids, but instead the brain itself was a dud, doing absolutely nothing for most of the fight. Only towards the end do we get to enter a space with it, but even there its abilities are pathetic compared to previous bosses we encountered.

Second, the epilogues are even more pointless.

Spoiler

The good ending offers no scope in any of the options — you just become an adventurer or something like that. The bad ending is just some kind of power fantasy — lol, you and the brain just went and took over the whole world together. Given the fight I described in the previous spoiler, this really sounds extremely fantastical, not to mention that this ending just drops on you out of nowhere, like a piano from a bush; you literally had no villainous development in that direction, even if you played as a villain, because, in Larian's understanding, a villain is a maniac with a knife and nothing else.

Also, of course, the D&D 5e system itself seemed highly questionable to me for such a game. First, character growth in it is barely noticeable compared to Pathfinder; somewhere around level five, neither my battle strategy, nor damage, nor other important things fundamentally changed until the very end. Considering they're trying to sell us on the idea that we're deciding the fate of the world... Well, sure. Second, the variety is worse, since in WOTR there was a class for practically anything, for roleplaying any role; you can't do that here (or you install mods, but even with them it's worse).

What are the game's positives? Undoubtedly, the graphics. Out of curiosity, I went back a while ago to take a look at WOTR; yes, looking at it has objectively become harder, especially considering that a large part of that game was spent in an acid-dark palette. But even here it's 50/50, and you know why? Because the character... BG3 has a terrible character creator, just terrible — especially for a game that tries to make cool action cutscenes with close-ups. Even Morrowind with mods was better. I had the complete feeling that, for the sake of hype, Larian focused on entirely the wrong thing: instead of making normal faces, or even better, a face editor, at least like in Skyrim, they spent everything on advertising their genitalia; I'm speechless.

Body options? Choose between a tiny waif or a huge gorilla; no other options were provided. Sorry, but there's no logic — height sliders were invented about twenty years ago; was it really that hard?

And the emotions... I don't know who told them that emotions should be animated so disgustingly; it brings to mind memes from Andromeda. Even if you find a normal face among mods, it will still twist into some monster throughout the entire game.

Compared to this, let me remind you how it was in WOTR: maximally neutral models that can easily be made roughly suitable for a character, plus a portrait. Any portrait you want — download one, draw one yourself. Take a selfie in the mirror and put yourself in. Maximum flexibility. Surprisingly, it's flexible customization that people want from an RPG.

Alright, I've drifted back to flaws again... Merits, let's return to them. So...

"Us" is a cool animal companion. Scratch is overrated.

Sometimes you can have fun in the game, especially with explosions, or with Otto's Irresistible Dance.

Best moment in my playthrough

There are plenty of quests, of course, some interesting, some quests or items amusing. The logic, of course, is often a bit...

To summarize, running around as a bum in the outskirts of Baldur's Gate wasn't as interesting as being the pompous Commander of the Crusade; the latter's roleplaying felt much more alive, since it's cooler to make real historical choices instead of choices like "should I throw these lame goblins into the chasm or settle things peacefully." But as a checkbox, to get acquainted with the genre, partly for those very secrets, partly for the story and lore, I did it. That's how it is.

P.S. I forgot to mention that cleaning the same map with a fine-toothed comb for dozens of hours was also a questionable design decision after Pathfinder games, which invented switching modes from tactical to strategic. But I think I wrote about that already somewhere, and it should be intuitively clear that even if the mode itself is weaker, the fact of switching attention allows you to rest, and is therefore obviously beneficial. A mistake not to include it.