12/30/2023 0 Comments Baldurs gate 3 review 2021There was no in-universe reason why Mortimer would drag an explosive barrel into the middle of a group of not yet hostile NPCs. The winning strategy in such cases was to reload a save and try to cheat as much as possible. One thing I swiftly learned was that whenever negotiation broke down and a conversation turned into combat, I would usually get a lot of little goblin-sized bootprints all over my buttocks because deceiving and weaselling out of combat only worked often enough to make me completely bloody unprepared for the unavoidable fights. Something I was able to exploit to my favour during one combat sequence where I kept moving to the other side of a huge pit and causing two minotaurs to keep getting confused and changing direction like we were chasing a nervous bride around a honeymoon suite coffee table. The world is extremely flexible with letting you make crazy jumps to bypass obstacles, but the pathfinding frequently has trouble keeping up. If you don’t go through them all individually telling them to go into stealth mode they’ll blunder in after your sneaky ass like three embarrassing parents coming to pick you up from the school disco. And as the ground level gameplay kicked in, it soon became clear that the game wasn’t going to let me hide at the back of the party plucking my fantasy banjo and slinging the odd Vicious Mockery like the most infuriating little tit at the hoedown contest, you’ve got to micromanage all your party member’s actions and levelling choices. Turns out everyone’s got squirmy worms in their brains that will turn them into the purple squiddly dudes within days if we don’t find a way to hack them out, and so we’re set loose to adventure our way through that problem by dealing with five hundred different ones. We also swiftly load up the party bus with a bunch of fellow escapees and adventurers, all with diverse classes and complex backstories but more importantly representing a nice convenient meat shield for Mortimer to hide behind. Forests, embattled villages, dungeons, can’t move ten steps without hitting a trap or a gelatinous cube. And I’m all like “Sorry, did we come in the wrong door? I’m here for Baldur’s Gate, why are in the last mission of an XCOM game?” But then we get away from the crash site and we’re in more traditional D&D land. So, the game starts and we’re on an alien spaceship that crash lands for various complicated reasons and we have to fight our way out of the wreckage, fending off purple squiddly dudes in robes. On that note, I also thought it best to try out the game’s flexibility by role playing as my existing D&D character, Mortimer, a weaselly con artist who min-maxes deception in order to weasel his way out of problems because’s he’s as much use in a fight as an actual weasel. View Full TranscriptĪnd I could go in already knowing things that both Baldur’s Gate 3 and D&D generally are really sodding bad at explaining, like how the cocking Sneak Attack works. Ooh, you mean you can break doors AND stack crates? And the second factor was that since the last D&D-based video game I have become a D&D player IRL, tune into Adventure is Nigh every other Saturday only on the Escapist plug plug, so when I started the game and the screen became deluged with icons like it was being subjected to the wrath of Windows 95, I understood what some of them meant. So I hear the new Baldurs Gate is making bank like a knicker elastic shop next door to a French burlesque club – I don’t know, it made sense in my head – and a lot of people are going “Oh! Finally gamers send a clear message that they want good single player games with strong design and narrative, not just fancy graphics and live service twattery.” To which I reply, “You mean besides the previous twelve times they sent that message?” I mean, Christ, at this point it feels like saying “Prisoners in basements send clear message that they’d rather not be sodomized with a six inch wooden dowel.” But is Baldurs Gate 3 actually good or just riding the wave of the metaphorical demand for dowel removal and soothing bum cream? I’d never been one for this sort of top down clicky RPG before, but a couple of significant factors drew me to this one: editor Nick strongly suggested I give it a look, saying it’s doing some full on immersive sim stuff that sets it apart.
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