I own baldurs gate 3. But if im honest games with that much choice tend to make me feel overwhelmed since I don’t want to miss anything or ruin anything down the road.
People are clamoring around you in a huge chorus of it’s fine just roll with it but frankly, I think your point of view is totally valid. While Larian did a great job making every path a valid way to the ending, you can really only ever lock yourself out of content with your choices.
Go too far down one of two branching paths? Hope you can pass a big fat skill check or two, or that one companion will bail. Hope you didn’t like that character or want to see more of that content. (Oh, and if you do pass the skill checks, 10 minutes later the companion is like “ugh no it’s fine you were right, forget I ever wanted to go that way even though I’ve been obsessed with it for the last 20 hours” in the name of railroading the character back in line.)
Get interested in the wrong quest too early? Hope you didn’t want to finish the main side objective in that one area. No no, even though all the characters are still present, you don’t get to finish it. Because we said so. Shoo along to the next place. Go. Get.
And here’s hoping you don’t get curious about the “evil” path - you lose multiple companions and a whole-ass cast of side characters that are meant to follow you through the game and gain one (1) bit of interesting new content to replace them. Is it still interesting? Absolutely, but it’s a consolation prize compared to how much you lose.
It took me 3 playthroughs or so before I finally felt like I was on a save where I was having a good 80%+ of the intended experience. And yeah, you can replay it for what you missed, but not everyone has time for that, especially in a game this immense. I know I’ve started it up to make my fourth character about half a dozen times and Alt-F4ed during character creation as soon as I think about going through the parts I’ve thoroughly combed already.
BG3 is my GOTY by a long shot, but people should have more sympathy for this outlook. There are definitely right paths and wrong paths, and while they all lead to the end, the wrong paths have a lot less to look at and a healthy amount of rubbing your face in the fact that you did stuff in the wrong order (“Perhaps you could have…” ok thanks, narrator).
I feel this. I’m still in the first act and taking my time, but I’ve already lost Gale because I accidentally selected the option to not give him a magical item to consume after he asked a second time - I said I would, and then when I went into the selection menu I realized I couldn’t give him the item I intended, so I backed out and he said fuck you and left. So that’s great for me. Maybe he’ll come back later but then again maybe not. So that’s a whole character I don’t have any more because of an accident.
Oh, and I also never got Lazel because I never went to the area where she was captured until much later and she wasn’t there any more. I did find her (before that, funnily enough) as part of the cut scene with the Githyanki near the bridge but I didn’t know she was a playable character, plus she acted like an enemy and I was really low level and got destroyed so I had to reload. So that’s another character I don’t have and may never get, although I’ll have to go back now that I’m a higher level and see what happens.
My point is that it’s really easy to miss out on large parts of the game due to random or accidental decisions, so I do understand people who find the experience off-putting. Still, I’ve been lucky to have enough free time to be able to play through with my wife so I’ve been able to avoid a lot of the stuff I fucked up in my solo game, and I personally love the game despite the experiences I outlined above.
I’m pretty sure I missed out on the bear cock experience because of this. He’s down for the three way but it’s getting dangerously close to the end of the game and there’s no way to beg for it, haha. The thought of a whole nother playthrough just to see it has me dreading the goblin area.
Try to see it like a choose your own adventure instead of “gotta catch 'em all”. I find it helps to have a soft rule against savescumming for myself - if I make a mistake, my character made that. The only times I let myself reload is if the outcome of what I did was unclear, and went entirely against what I thought it would do.
That sounds like a good idea. Over the years I got so used to playing games where you try to find and unlock everything and where there’s an endgame you have to prepare for. It’s very hard to break that mindset.
I usually have the same problem as you when I play rpgs (or rpg-like games), but BG3 has been different for me. Part of that is that I went into it wanting to just let the game play out. The other part is that the game does an excellent job of making results ambiguous (in a very good way, imo).
You can choose to save/kill/sneak through something and “complete” it, but it often is not obvious whether you made the optimal choice. Most approaches seem valid and you may not find out the real consequences until later in the game. Embrace it. Accept your consequences. And keep going. It really is an amazing experience.
That seems like a much more enjoyable and relaxed way to go about it. I am trying to get back to the core of gaming i.e. just enjoying the ride. So maybe this really is the game I need to just sit down and play.
to add to this great suggestion, I usually tell myself it’s okay that my first game is a blind run and I can always adjust/ change course the more I go into the lore.
Some games are worth a second run and it will show.
I follow the same philosophy. Avoiding spoilers, there was a part of Act 2 that I thought was just the next conversation in a series of conversations, but it triggered a significant event that blocked me out of several things I had on the to-do list. I had no idea it’d trigger that, and imo I don’t think it’s reasonable that it would happen, so I did scum that.
That happens a lot in this game. The unclear outcomes. F5 a lot, cause auto save is practically non-existent.
I feel like that in most games but not in BG3. I do still reload sometimes if I fail a check, but BG3 makes failures fun! It’s rather rare that you’re actually locked out of something, and often times a failure leads to interesting outcomes.
I’m sure there is also a lot that I’m missing and don’t know about, so there’s no sense of FOMO. I really do appreciate that the game doesn’t many things. There’s no tracking that you’re attained 45 of 53 powers, or 237 of 245 hidden biscuits, or that you’re missing that last upgrade point to unlock something cool. I also haven’t come across any annoying skill quests where you have to take down 14 enemies in 12 seconds while hopping on one leg.
Larian has done a great job of writing interesting content for pretty much every outcome, and it’s one of the few games that I feel I will want to replay to see a different side of things. There’s a whole quest line in act 1 that you can only get if you fail a random check. I found that pretty novel.
Yeah multiple runs is def the kind of game it is. My first was a Durge and I thought I really explored most of the nooks and crannies. My friends are behind me still on their first one and regularly ask me about stuff I had no idea I missed once or twice! Started run 2 as a good character and it’s like a whole new game.
I’m usually the same way with open world games like The Witcher, GTA, RDR, etc, but BG3 puts the story enough on the rails to keep me focused while still letting me make critical choices and enough freedom to explore so it feels amazing when I find little secrets or Easter eggs.
My buddy has played through it twice with 40 hour runs each.
I’m still on my first playthrough at about 70 hours and close to wrapping up act 3.
They really did a good job ensuring that you won’t totally screw up based on your choices. So just roll with it.
I rarely replay games, but this is one I fully intend to replay with a different/bigger party (currently playing with one friend, but I’m gonna get two more to buy the game for the next run), a different class (currently playing cleric, thinking about barbarian or bard) and on the highest difficulty.
I think you technically miss quite a lot of content as some choices make other things impossible to pursue. I also take it as it comes, by that I mean I don’t reload save states because I failed a dice throw or made mistakes.
I can highly recommend this one :)
I am trying to get back to just enjoying games more. I dont know when I went from enjoying the ride to being so competitive in wanting to unlock and complete everything I can for everything. It used to be there to a certain extent when I was younger but I think my playing WoW with raiding and everything got me locked into this completions, min/max mindset. Which is fine for some things but tiring when it ends up being the mindset for everything I play.
It’s not about unlocking everything for me. Even with a second playthrough you’re probably far from seeing everything. Sure, the main storyline somewhat repeats itself, but there are multiple companion side stories and all kinds of other stuff you can stumble upon by accident that you then incorporate into your playthrough.
This is probably one of the best games for you to just enjoy, because you can still continue when failing something (unless your party is completely wiped, but fights aren’t really that hard in easy and normal difficulties). It’s a pretty personalized experience.
I’m the same and I studied every nook and cranny during my first playthrough because FOMO was real. Guess what, I still missed enough things to make a second run no less entertaining―especially if you play a polar opposite of your original character. This game accommodates to pretty much every stupid decision you can throw at it and it’s amazing.
If by “geometry stretching” they mean polygons being rendered all over the place, that being fixed means Vulkan should be the better choice in most cases now.
I hope they optimize performance in act 3 though. The amount of NPCs and stuff going on in the world causes severe frame drops, even with my 7950X3D.
Have you tried setting the process priority to high? (Task Manager -> Details -> Right click BG3 -> Det priority to high). This got me a relatively smooth experience.
I wouldn’t do this anymore if you’re on windows. They defaulted task manager to normal priority now (used to default to high). So if you set any task to high priority and it freezes/locks, you’re going to have no hope of getting task manager open.
At least if they’re both normal priority, there’s a chance for the OS to give some CPU time to task manager to open.
Oh really? That seems like a weird move… I’ve at least kept it in the background, on a separate screen, at all times (though I’m not sure how much that would help…) But I’d probably use this anyway to get rid off the worst lag, it seems to be the most consistent way to do it.
https://youtu.be/1YGD94lSor8?t=175
It is a weird move. The original developer of Task Manager doesn’t understand why they changed it. His best guess is that the high priority on task manager hurts benchmarks or something.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/1YGD94lSor8?t=175
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
