BG3: The 3-years-running preamble

"You're sitting in the same spot, you wanna go home
But there ain't no home but home on the range
You've forgotten what you look like and it looks like you've forgotten
That the look inside your eye is very strange"

 

Scatman John - Quiet Desperation

 

 

Welcome to "Jugs", or Bidonville the cRPG.

 

Having described in my last post what I think are relatively high stakes for Baldur's Gate 3's success, let's see about that "early access" teaser everyone used to talk about. After my scheduled ocular exam from a cave squid (I didn't remember eye drops being so viscous/vicious) we proceed to character creation, and I already hate this. Every glimpse I get of D&D5e is an advertisement for letting D&D finally die in favor of better RP systems... but that's a topic for another day.

For now I made a throwaway Strongheart Halfling Barbarian with scores 14/14/14/12/8. (edit: it saw me through most skill checks just fine in chapter 1)

(Side-note: even in a fantasy world, you're not "non-binary" if you come from a sexually reproducing species, any more than hobbits are made of candy. I'm mean, they'd LIKE to be made of candy... but wanting it don't make it so.)

The "who do you dream of" step needs better explanation. I had to google it to find out it's not a real character. (Incidentally, I made a smokin' hot little hobbita)

My first 2 impressions:

1) This is obviously a re-skinned Original Sin, from terrain to animations to object interactions, which was to be expected given how rapidly Larian cranked out the "early access" version while still patching D:OS2. Even the beach landing screams "welcome to Cyseal" along with lugging around a gratuitous shovel for treasure digging. Whether it eventually turns into a BG3 or OS3 remains to be seen.

2) Much like Skyrim, the overly-flashy intro caters to subhuman retards who want the action cranked to 11 nonstop. (Granted, the dragon-on-skyship action DOES look great but still, save it for act 5.) Insta-bake Illithids don't help matters, though that one's probably Wizards of the Coast's fault. As another example, NWN's most memorable first act fight was against an intellect devourer. One. Uno. Ein. Un. Ichi. That number right there -> 1. It was a pitched fight against a weird and difficult enemy. BG3's very tutorial has you mow down a baker's dozen of the damn things. Instead of an homage, it merely registers as meaningless third grade one-upmanship: I got a million points! Nuh-uhhh! I got ten million!

Goes hand in hand with power inflation. Cantrips with 1d10 damage? 4d6 for a lvl 1 spell? Magic spear at level 2?

Nonetheless I was pleasantly surprised at both the scale and detail of BG3's first chapter, and the stunning amount of work going into it. 

No, seriously, hat off, one thing I cannot accuse the developers of is shirking their work. A rare display of professionalism in an industry which by tradition pockets your money and moves on to the next project as quickly as possible.

In contrast to my complaints of, for instance, Tides of Numenera, the overland zone is huge, nesting proportional underground/indoor zones. As in D:OS2, pretty much every NPC is individually voiced, and rather well to boot! (Though, couldn't you get some native latin-root speakers for the chanting druids? Their pronunciation is horribilis!) The writing, at least on a line-by-line basis, sounds competent for once, with even the many, many minor characters displaying personalized affectations and inflections. Dialogue interactions integrate character traits with pleasing frequency, and the quests so far have boasted an impressive array of diverging/interweaving combat/stealth/dialogue paths building on your previous choices without locking you into a single gameplay style. And the visual artists come up with some inspired gimmicks.

Writing, voice acting, 3D modeling, level and mission design, there's a lot of expertise displayed. The individual talent is there, across all categories.

But the central direction is off.

 

Larian has not yet shaken its fifteen-year history of knockoff "action" Diablo clones, nor the casual fairytale atmosphere that goes along with that. As good as their individual encounters may be, their disdain for an overarching plot or power curve tends to kill tension, immersion or the memorable epic buildup of roleplaying. You just adventure, because that's what you do because you're an adventurer and adventurers adventure.

 

Even NWN2, with its painfully generic setup, justified your various side-quests with varyingly flimsy pretexts. But in BG3, despite setting out with the imperative "we must find a healer, we must find a healer" I immediately digress into killing thieves and exploring an ancient temple with no explanation. And despite crashing in the middle of nowhere from another dimension, I met literally scores of locals without a single line of dialogue letting me ask where the hell am I?!? There's zero sense of the player setting out on a journey, planning out a course of action. You're just another 3D model the developers throw at random encounters.

Another example: the folks at Larian love puzzles. Too bad they're not very good at crafting them.

Not that it was likely even meant as a puzzle, but here's something buried under the rock. Can you dig it up with your shovel? No. Can you use your character's "shove" action, maybe combined with a strength check? No. Can you lift the rock, possibly using some sort of lever to let another party member grab the loot? No. Just click and drag. Why the fuck do I have all these tools at my disposal if all I needed is the trusty old MS Windows pointer?

An actual puzzle gives you a magically locked chest next to an statue/altar surrounded by candles. You find a prayer sheet. Given the deity in question is light-related, I tried lighting all the candles. I tried snuffing out all the candles. I tried reading the prayer, but it gives no description of actions to undertake and no hint it performs any action. I wondered if maybe I should return at night. I tried reading the prayer while standing in front of the statue as a ritual. Give up? Read the prayer at The Loot. Because you're expected to be so hyper-focused on The Loot as to ignore any context and simply mash your inventory against The Loot until you get The Loot, like a brainless fucking chimp smashing a rock against a tree to make it grow fruit.

 

Another "puzzle" has you trying to open a typical secret passage behind a bookcase. Granted, a candelabrum lever right next to the case would've been too obvious, but Larian's attempt at originality is smashing apart a random box in another corner of the same dwelling, among dozens of other nondescript boxes, barrels, jugs and trunks littering the room. Which brings us to the biggest problem: so far, BG3's all about the jugs

 

 and more jugs

and more jugs

there are literal thousands of containers and pieces of trash loot to sift through in the first chapter alone. Take the same idiocy from D:OS2 and square it. While interactable forks and mugs are common enough in The Elder Scrolls, what looks immersive from a first-person perspective is teeth-grinding clutter from a tactical viewpoint. Worse still, you really do benefit from collecting as much trash as you can early on for cash value. Spending all my time stockpiling bottles and cans really puts the hobo in murder hobo, in jarring dissonance to the overblown power fantasy with which the actual story opens.

You don't have to look far for other signs Larian's really ladling on the idiot appeal:

- the overblown animations (even basic actions like dash and jump have spell-like special effects, and the barbarian's rage looks like a fucking Implosion)

- the teleportation, which though not yet quite as absurd as in D:OS2, includes the 2nd level spell Misty Step (more WotC's fault, again) and free cross-map teleportation out of combat*, letting you cheat your way out of some troublesome locations like the final temple, and of course the first spiders you encounter are phase spiders

- fitting that same lack of forethought, the D&D alignments are simply removed without any attempt to replace them, no stated ethos for the player to follow**

- fetishizing the hobby (much like Solasta) with rolling dice animations for skill checks

- romance options. That nonsense needs to die. 'Nuff said.

- the camera is absolutely infuriating, straightjacketed to both your current position and to the terrain, never letting you get your bearings, and the map useless across multiple z-levels. Don't plan ahead. Just beach-comb.

- (edit: plus, the lack of highlighting for many interactable objects turns much of your time into that lowest of genres, a hidden object game)

- the general encounter design philosophy of throwing random shit at the wall to see if it sticks (to quote my IWD2 playthrough "sounds like you ran out of ideas and defaulted to leafing randomly through the monster manual") with just the first chapter being a pot luck of goblins, wargs, ogres, bugbears, harpies, hyenas, gnolls, gith, skeletons, bandits, druids, tieflings, intellect devourers, witches, owlbears, bears, devils, demons, dragons, mind flayers, vampires, giant spiders, drow, ents, imps, fairies, etc. Plus a frog. All scattered pell-mell across the landscape. Granted, Larian was trying to show off its range with demo content, but still, would it have killed you to stick to a central opening theme like mortuary, swamp, snow or plague?

But the worst of these is the endless, mind-numbing loot sifting, with no indication of potential utility (rope? hammer and tongs?) random amphoras scattered across dunes, woods, mud and hills, and a big redundant pile of +1 weapons by level 4, obviously banking on sub-sapient gambling addiction to keep players clicking jug after jug after jug. Power creep, specialness inflation, no sense of proportion, appealing to mindless degenerates incapable of forming coherent plans, who must be fed cheats (teleportation) and can only react to a constant stream of animalistic reward stimuli (loot) as conditioned reinforcement. All the evident talent and effort this company has mustered is directed toward treating their customers for a tactical RPG like the same mindless trash hack'n'slashing 10,000 rats in "action" games.

 

At first I was afraid BG3 would fail. Now I'm even more afraid it might succeed, and irrevocably redefine RPGs as a genre for those with no attention span, completing the work of Diablo clones.

 

 

 

_____________________________________

 

* Why not go the Solasta route instead and implement fast travel over the map, capable of being interrupted?

** If you don't think the old alignments could be applied to BG3, consider that I as Chaotic Neutral would gladly let myself get transformed into any number of monstrosities... but never a slaving mind-controlled mind controller.