My Life as a Drowid, 5: - and a dagger up your strat

The hour grows late. Our winding trail closes in upon itself, the doom scribed by our adventure's inception now calling as with audible voice for its own consummation. Be the planes perverse as some would have it, hold this as proof: that plans should demand so much yet yield so little. What forgotten temples were ground asunder to supply mortar for this?

Murder's child and blood's father, tyranny's toys and hope's martyr, let the hammer not falter. Each temple to ambitions years or centuries in the conniving shatters and rolls along its fellows, but who shall scatter fresh seeds among this rubble? Does the path of the chain-smasher not itself stretch unbroken, link by link past the brink of forgotten free fall, until its rattle knots meaning into an inescapable mantra?

But, Och! I backward cast my e'e.
On prospects drear!

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Some spoilers for various specific fights and quests in BG3 up to late Act 3 follow.

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Would you like to see the exact moment, early on, when I realized I couldn't hate Baldur's Gate 3?

"they kitties can walk anywhere" indeed

In Act 1, upon having barely stepped into the Shattered Sanctum, intent on burglarizing what I could to buy more gear before getting into fights, I noticed a crack in a wall. So, on an exploratory whim, I burned a shapeshifting charge on cat form and found it allowed me to bypass an ogre guard... and discovered an abandoned temple with a floor puzzle. Curiouser and curiouser. So I solved it, and down I went, and found myself in the Underdark. An entire new zone, a level or two beyond where I should be. But my path onwards was blocked by a minotaur... until I saw, to my delight, that my tiny cat form could not only squeeze through designated shortcuts but through the bars of otherwise locked prison cells. Breaking into prison for safety? Yes, please.

After whittling the guard down with the always useful Halo of Spores I teleported my group in to explore and loot the underdark's easier encounters before tackling harder ones topside.

Want to see the exact moment when I realized I couldn't love BG3?

I carefully set up the gnomes' prison break in Act 2 by sneaking up through the rafters to steal the proverbial tunnelin' spoon and toss it to them, then quietly assassinated the closest patrolling guard, dropped down into the cage and opened it for the rest of my party as we all made a break for the exit. Did it work? No. Because the alarm will sound regardless, at which point the gnomes STOP ESCAPING and the game forces you to fight, regardless of the fact you're already at the damn boats two turns before the first guard arrives.

Apparently it is possible to escape by stealth if your party leaves by another route, but damned if discovering my last hour of gameplay was invalidated didn't put me in a mood to kill everything in sight.

 

BG3 shows not only staggering scope but attention to detail, with almost every quest and every fight offering more than one solution. I've found my druidic crowd control in demand quite a few times, whether it's mummies, grunts or puppies

 

deceptively simple utility items like arrows of darkness can deny enemies useful positioning

and knockbacks into bottomless pits, whether via arrows of roaring thunder or simple shoving, are weighed into many otherwise potentially unwinnable fights like Orin or your first encounter with the hag

 

I was especially gratified to discover lugging a couple jugs of water around all this time yielded a solution to opening the vault door for the Stone Lord quest. Call Lightning, after several levels of being left by the wayside, made short work of Gortash's defensive machinery. Us has helped open doors for an invisible Astarion so he doesn't break his spell, and even humble little Scratch the plucky rescue dog was instrumental in defeating Sarevok, repeatedly "helping" me back up to force Sarevok to run back and forth eating opportunity attacks from Minthara and arrows from Astarion while he downed me ten times over. Even opening fights can usually take more than one route, and once you reach the city proper, rooftop access bypasses several locked doors (e.g. the newspaper or the fireworks shop)

 

Surprisingly often, dialogues even acknowledge you taking alternate routes, like Helsik chiding you for stealing from her or the hag support group all having diferent lines if you kill the hag before meeting them - which I did, stumbling into her lair by accident while exploring some random cellar. But the sheer number of mechanics end up tripping over each other. Sometimes it's direct.

Clearing Hope's prison annoyed me, as the enemies are deliberately given knockbacks to insta-gib you with falling damage, and surprised me when I tried pulling them to a choke point by flying beneath the floating platforms instead. But, as it turns out, the same positioning-aware algorithm leaves them loathe to surrender their initial advantage, meaning they're counterintuitively (for wardens) less disposed to patrol or investigate invisible enemies. So I just had Astarion solo the entire room, potshot by potshot - and it took fewer reloads too.

Again: those useful little arrows of darkness, this time defensive.

An act earlier in the temple of Shar, luring merregons out of their reinforced position proved more effective than I'd even anticipated, as they're programmed to send down one scout at a time.

Which scout I promptly bumrushed, round by round, while ducking behind pillars in the displacer beast's room. And then there were none. Too often you lose track of the line between legitimate strategy and just cheesing a fight. For the uninitiated, in the screenshot opening this post, an ambush is programmed to teleport in before you reach that fallen column bridge, with the challenge being to kill its leader. Okay. So reload, turn invisible and climb up to spawn-camp the leader. Hurray... strategy? I guess? Inasmuch as reloading may be termed strategic?

Quite often the problem comes from Larian not advertising WHICH routes are potentially available. (Compare to Iron Tower's games, Age of Decadence or Colony Ship: often infuriatingly convoluted and difficult, but at least you have some notion of whether TALK or HIT or SNEAK or SABOTAGE is supposed to be viable.) I've complained about this earlier in this series, but I don't agree with the interpretation of "adventure" as blindly stumbling forward on gut instinct and presumed storytelling conventions.

 

The same holds for wandering around otherwise pleasingly gigantic locales pixel-hunting for chat bubbles or highlightable terrain interactions when you're really only looking for one specific quest step advancement. Rogues are exceptionally well integrated into BG3 (especially compared to older fare like NWN2 where Neeshka got one token stealth mission) but even here it's rarely clear what you should be roguing. After blowing up Gortash's mechano-man army I found Wyrm's Rock fortress' bridge drawn up on the Rivington side. Fine, be that way. I decided to sneak Astarion back in from the cliffs to find the mechanism lowering the drawbridge once again... which mechanism, far as I can tell, does not exist. Instead you can reactivate the teleporter inside to TP your party in. Instead of an elegant, in-character and medieval-appropriate solution, you're forced into abusing Larian's idiotic obsession with constant and therefore cheapened teleportation. Other times, what looks to be a stealth mission is hamfistedly negated by GM decree.

 

Umberlee's temple has an area off-limits to riff-raff. Fine, send Astarion in again (vampires: a thousand uses and counting) except it turns out the priestess has infinite DC stealth detection with her back turned for no particular reason and without needing to cast anything. Fine. Supreme Sneak invisibility works... until you loot one pile of chests, at which point the goddess herself tells you off and turns the entire temple hostile, with extra fish-folk icing on top. Soooo... what was the point of that then? Not that the ambush isn't easily discernible for anyone with the slightest bit of metagaming experience, as the devs would only put a pool of water there (with no other objects in the room) for the fish monsters to jump out at you. It's like seeing those different colored wall patches in old cartoons: you know just where Wile E. Coyote's gonna flatten his nose. (And yeah, you can cheese this one too - just teleport out before closing the chest. Don't forget to blast the wall in the back beforehand.)

 

Lastly, let's not forget the times when the developers just got lazy and threw in a generic "fuck you":

Tacticianing the shit out of rolling those dice

Honestly, for enabling different class abilities and spells and quest solutions, BG3 leaves any of its older competitors in the dust, and I can't but congratulate them for it from the bottom of my sneaky cat form to the top of my body-slamming owlbear, from my deepest sporulation to my loftiest super-cooled ice storm. In this respect at least they've more than earned their accolades and skyrocketed sales figures.

But if you've played it (especially on higher difficulty) be honest: you've spent your avatar's every step mashing the quick-save button. As countless reddit threads will attest, this is overwhelmingly not because of "difficulty" in the sense of meaningful, interactable challenge rewarding preparation and foresight, but because the otherwise welcome tangle of options also blindsides you with red herrings or an order of operations you couldn't be expected to know without seeing the equation's answer.

Which is to say: reload.

While some blame lies in poor communication and deliberately abusing reloads to pad "hours played" advertisements, it's also another example of just how little experience the industry as a whole has in letting players drive the action, in designing any gameplay beyond hitting the thing in front of you.

Where's that drawbridge winch, Larian? Where is it?!?