 This video is brought to you by Skillshare. You know, I was planning on making a video about how bad Baldur's Gate 3 is. When it came out, I was uninterested. Then after it got ungodly amounts of hype, I started to scream it. It was fun for a while, then the many flaws started to compound, and eventually I reached a point where I was wrestling with the controls just trying to get my party to walk across a floor, and I finally gave up and swore to never touch this game again. It won Game of the Year, though, and that irked me enough to make this video, so I reinstalled it, finished playing, and while doing so, I realized that it was actually amazing. Yeah, I loved everything here. I was wrong. Everything here is perfect. Goodbye. Thanks for watching. Be sure to like the video, comment, and subscribe. Okay, has enough time passed? Have all the people who only clicked the video to hit dislike and tell me to kill myself left? Great. Yeah, the title here ain't a joke. Baldur's Gate 3 is bad. Bad to the point where I have difficulty even seeing why everyone else seems to be in love with it, it's just a poor attempt to translate the adventure of a tabletop campaign into a single-player video game by people who seem to misunderstand the appeal of both. The lows are so low I found myself wondering if anyone on the development team knew what a video game is, and the highs are what I would consider passable for a video game in the modern era. I only played two games that released last year, and I have to say, Hogwarts Legacy was leagues better than this one, and that game was only slightly above average to me. I spent 32 hours of my life not just playing Baldur's Gate but streaming it to an audience, and at first I was enjoying myself. The opening is fun. The first 10 hours are a strong opener to the story. Then the next 10 hours are a bit of a drag. Then it just keeps going. And going. And the story slows to a crawl. And you must trek across a gigantic, nigh-empty map with magical darkness that doesn't just kill your party but keeps pausing the fucking game no matter how much you beg the thing to just work the way it's supposed to. When I went back to the game to make this video, I thought maybe I hadn't given it a fair shake. I find streaming to be mentally taxing so maybe that was coloring my perspective. I finished that playthrough on my own, and no, it's still shitty. The short version of my hatred is that this game is a dysfunctional mess that, even if it worked properly, would be little more than a gambling simulator with a subpar story attached. The only benefit to this game is that making content from it means it becomes a business expense and I can write it off on my taxes. I don't really care if you liked this game. You're allowed to disagree with me, and I'm happy that you got some enjoyment out of this. But just as I'm respecting your opinions, I ask that you not act like an ass while disagreeing with me. Also, yes, I know my channel is focused on books, but it's my channel and I'll put what I want here. Before that, though, let's hear a word from this video's sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is by far the world's biggest learning community for creatives and professionals, offering courses taught by experts in film, illustration, programming, and more. Now that the new year has started, why not invest in yourself? You can take your career, hobby, or even side hustle to the next level. Do you have a goal in mind that you need to learn something in order to achieve but you're unsure where to start? Then consider using one of Skillshare's learning paths. Learning paths are curated, sequential class selections to master a specific skill or competency. They're meant to be taken in order and progressed from beginner to expert level instruction to ensure that you discover all the needed information and have an understanding of the topic. I checked out the pricing and negotiation for Creative Freelancer's learning path and the Getting Paid for Your Work class with Jennifer Nelson, since I'm someone who has to deal with companies for things like sponsorships. It's a great class to take if you ever receive any sort of professional offer. There's great advice here on how to say no politely, how to accept an offer graciously, and how to make an informed decision about what sort of payment and what level of payment is acceptable for you. This learning path has helped me figure out exactly what I and my work are worth, preventing me from getting taken advantage of by any potential business partners. You can save time searching, chart your path forward, easily track your progress, and discover new teachers with learning paths just like this one. They've got other classes I'm also interested in that cover topics like creative writing and self-care. Almost anything you could want to learn can be right at your fingertips. All you need to do is join Skillshare. So join Skillshare using the link below to get started right now. The first 500 people to use the link will get their first month of Skillshare 100% free. 500 is a lot, so if you're worried that someone might have gotten your spot before you had the chance, don't be. Go ahead, click the link. Do it. Get started today. You've got nothing but time. Part one. Fuck the dice. Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition is a fun tabletop RPG. It's not perfect, but it's fun and I've been playing it for years. However, putting the problems of D&D into a single-player video game exacerbates the bad parts of the game system and stifles the good parts. For those unfamiliar, D&D is a game where you and several other players create characters and set off on a campaign. The campaign can be anything, from slaying an evil dragon for its treasure to trying to prevent a war between kingdoms. The campaign is controlled by another person called the Dungeon Master, who is basically the narrator for the story who informs you of what's going on and ultimately determines the direction of the story. They have to be good at improvising since a lot of this stuff springs directly from their mind. It's just playing make-believe for adults and to prevent that one guy from just saying that he has an impenetrable force field any time he gets attacked, there are some limitations placed on the players. Some of that comes in the form of ability scores for characters, things like strength and intelligence. Some comes in the form of proficiencies for skills, such as medicine, deception, or stealth. The bulk of it comes from the dice, though. When your character wants to do anything except for the most basic of actions, you have to roll a die, usually a 20-sided one, to determine success or failure. Sometimes success requires a low roll, meaning there's a high chance of success, and sometimes it requires a high roll, meaning a low chance of success. Your score is also affected by your character's stats, so it's not completely random, but Chance still plays an outsized role in doing everything from attacking in combat to calming down a wild animal or trying to persuade NPCs to help you. The hardcore gamers among you might see the problem with translating this into single-player already. Random number generation is rarely a good idea or something that leads to fun. Getting a bad roll on the tabletop is annoying and can be frustrating. If you're just playing with friends, though, it's not the end of the world. You just failed to convince the shopkeeper to give you a sword for free, or you failed to climb that tree. As long as you can conceive of another solution to the problem, there's no issue. And even if you fail, you're just there to play with your friends anyways. You can't lose at D&D, as much as some people act like you can. When you're the only person playing, and there are only a few solutions to the problem, and the problem is unavoidable, and the consequences for failure can be permanent, well, things become annoying quickly. If I'm unable to convince Shadowheart to spare Lazelle and she kills her, that could ruin my entire playthrough. I'm without one of my frontline fighters for the rest of the game. Now combat has become much more of a problem than it already was. It would be one thing if I failed at something and there were permanent consequences, if I failed at a minigame, or I mistimed my dodge, for instance. But in this case, I'm not failing. A computer program generated a random number that wasn't high enough. In a real D&D game, this sort of inter-party conflict would likely be solved by the player's role-playing until they came to an agreement. No dice rolled at all. In this, though, both Lazelle and Shadowheart are NPCs, so you can't do that. Everything goes through the player. Any skill check that is done with a D20 can succeed or it can fail. If your character is a master of persuasion trying to get the bar made to give him a discount, he can still roll a 1 and fail. Likewise, the most uncharismatic prick in existence could roll a 20 and pull it off. You always have at least a 5% chance of failing and at least a 5% chance of succeeding. All your character's stats do is move your chances lower or higher on that spectrum. So a character with great stats who is built around charisma could still fail to convince Shadowheart not to kill your companion, or you could just reload a save over and over until you get the desired outcome. It's remarkably unsatisfying, even if it's a valid way to play. So no matter what sort of character I build, I have to plan my playthrough around RNG. Fallout New Vegas has the best version of skill checks I've ever seen. In order to pass a speech check, you need to have a high enough skill. Without that, there's nothing you can do except purposely choose the wrong thing to say. But more than that, there are checks for other skills in the game too. Things like barter, medicine, science, and guns can give you an advantage or provide unique insight in certain situations, which is, you know, how that would work for a character with that sort of knowledge. You can use your medicine skill to give advice to doctors or use your stealth skill to help townsfolk plan an ambush against some bandits. If you don't have high enough skills to do that, then you have to use one of the many other avenues open to you. This helps make your created character feel more unique, like they're going on a journey and trying to find any possible way to reach their goal. Whereas if you give players a dialogue option with a chance to avoid the boss fight, the player will probably try it, even if it has a low chance to succeed, simply because it's the path of least resistance. Then every player will try the same thing, meaning their journeys aren't different from each other. There's a part of Baldur's Gate 3 where you meet a devil named Yurgir and you have to defeat him. Before the fight, there are three separate persuasion checks where you can try to convince him to kill his allies, his pet, and himself. If you fail at any, the fight begins. When I played, I was able to convince him to kill his allies and the Displacer Beast, but not himself. So I had to fight him, but by himself he wasn't that difficult. However, my character, whose name was Chad, was a charisma build, so it made sense that he could do that and it felt like a culmination of my efforts up until that point. If a wizard with a charisma score of six can take down most of the baddies without a fight, they'll probably at least try to do it. And their success or failure is up to chance. But if you need a high enough stat to succeed, then convincing the boss to give you what you want without a fight is not the path of least resistance because you've spent the entire game crafting a character that can do that. You've given up on the opportunity to do things like throw fireballs or tank through attacks in heavy armor or hack into computers. In exchange, you're good at convincing people to do things for you. This adds replay value too since you can go through the game with one type of character and then when you go back through, it's almost like a different game altogether. When you replay Baldur's Gate 3, it's a different game, but mostly because much of it is completely random. Chad Thundercock was very limited in what sort of spells he could use, but he could wear heavy armor, deal a lot of damage in melee, and he was good at talking. That's the sort of trade-off you have to endure because being able to do everything removes all challenge and therefore all fun. And it should go without saying, but all of this applies to combat too. It's hard to strategize when you don't even know if the abilities you're using will even work when you attempt them. There's very little more frustrating than losing a fight because a goblin got six critical hits in a row while your party members suddenly developed Parkinson's. Failing because you chose a bad strategy for a fight is one thing, because you can try something new next time. This way is awful because you can just try the same thing over and over and over until the dice are in your favor. This applies to whether or not a tax land, but also how much damage your party and enemies deal. By the end of my playthrough, Gale's Firebolt cantrip dealt between 3 and 30 damage if it landed, not counting any resistances or weaknesses the target might have. That's a 90% variance. How am I supposed to know what abilities to use when I only have a vague idea of how much damage it will do? If I had a nickel for every time one of my party members landed a hit on an enemy and it had 1 HP left, so on its next turn it took out a party member, I'd have enough money to buy a much better video game. Should I use one of my limited spell slots or try something else? Should I attack this enemy to maybe kill him right away or attack this other enemy to maybe disrupt his concentration spell? It's all gambling, no way to plan around what might happen when there's no way to predict it. I love the idea of needing to strategize and plan ahead carefully before and during combat, that's almost impossible to do when all outcomes are unpredictable though. The tabletop version of D&D has many of the same issues, however that has the benefit of being malleable. If the DM decides that the fight is going really badly and wants to keep the story moving in a dramatic player controlled direction, then they just have to fudge a few rolls or lower the enemy's HP or allow a skill check to succeed even if it shouldn't have. Because in the end, the only goal is to make sure everyone has a good time. You can't adjust a video game like that on the fly. You can't win or lose at D&D. You can lose at Baldur's Gate. And much of that losing comes from a computer program generating random numbers. I could have taken the $60 I paid for this game and played a slot machine with it, then winning would at least result in something worthwhile. Part two, lack of freedom. The simple fact that this game had to be programmed is limiting. You can only do what the game allows you to. On the other hand, it doesn't matter how weird or off-topic or creative you are, the only limit to D&D is your imagination. In Baldur's Gate 3, you'll spend a lot of time in conversations with NPCs and party members. This is where you can determine your character's personality since their actions in terms of how they can interact with the world are limited. This is when I decided that Chadrone Thundercock hated racism and had sworn to fight it everywhere he saw. Any time someone tried being racist around him, he would put them in their place. At least, he did when the developers decided he was allowed to. In conversations, you only have as many options as the developers came up with, meaning you can say, at the absolute most, six or seven things. There were several points when I came across NPCs who I thought I could bribe into doing something for me, or when I decided I didn't care what they had to say and wanted to walk off, but that wasn't an option. There was even a point where I wanted to blow up a pile of rocks without hurting anyone near it, so I wanted to tell them to move and it just wasn't an option. I just placed the bombs and they moved on their own, so it worked out, but it was a strange moment. No matter what dialogue options there were, there weren't enough. Chadrone Thundercock, hater of racism, could only refute racists at certain points. He never had the opportunity to truly tell Shadowheart off for her hatred of Githyanki, nor could he offer to pay local thugs to help him fight the forces of the absolute, nor could he try and tell the people of Baldur's Gate about how their new Duke was working with the absolute. The entire game is a series of decisions, but the only decisions you can make are the ones other people thought up and approved of. Having the option to attack at almost any time in conversation is great though, and I wish more games had that. Baldur's Gate 3 is putting limitations on something that was designed to have no limits. It's impossible to ever make a video game that allows you as much freedom and control as a TTRPG, and this game didn't even try. Instead, we get what so many video games have now. Stuff. Places to walk around, NPCs to talk to, loot to try and discover, just stuff. Who cares if a lot of this stuff is similar to all the other stuff in the game? There's a lot of it, which instantly means it's good, is what I would say if I was a Ubisoft executive. My real thoughts are that while most of this stuff is fine, other than a few funny or otherwise enjoyable quests, it's just there to pat out playtime. The first time I went off to a new part of the map to look around was exhilarating. After that, it felt like delving into my 1,000th Skyrim Cave. Just more of the same, more crates filled with worthless loot, more battles against weak enemies that all get amazing dice rolls and suck away my party's HP, and more time spent wrestling with the controls. The only area where this game gives proper freedom and player choice is in the many different ways you can find and finish quests. For example, when you're looking for one of the main story villains in her hideout, you can find it by simply wandering around until you come across it, you can investigate murders to join her cult, or you can kill her underlings to find and gain access to her temple. And very little of this is spelled out to you from the start. It's something you have to think of on your own. Having a bunch of paths open to you, not all of which are immediately obvious, is fun and allows players to forge their own destiny. It feels like you're making your own story instead of simply following one laid out by others, which is the whole point of D&D. When it comes to giving players freedom, Baldur's Gate 3 is better than most open world games, but that's like saying heroin is better for you than fentanyl. Being the best doesn't always mean you're good. Part 3 Combat, Gameplay, and other assorted atrocities. Combat is... Well, not good. I don't hate turn-based combat. In fact, I love it. I wish more RPGs still used it. The biggest problem is the randomness of dice rolls, as I mentioned earlier. That randomness makes waiting for your turn a chore. If Chadrone Thundercocks, Slayer of Pussy and Hater of Racism, misses a swing and the enemy doesn't die, then I might wait for 10 or 15 other people to do something before I can have him attack again, or do anything else for that matter. Much of the combat is unavoidable, too. Some of it can be avoided by sneaking around or talking your way out of it or taking different sides in a conflict. Most of it is inevitable, though. You're guaranteed to fight everything from bands of goblins to wild animals to cultists of the absolute. And since so much is left to chance, you're basically guaranteed to take damage or use skills that require rest to recharge or consume expensive items such as potions. This makes combat a constant choice between losing one valuable finite resource or a different valuable finite resource. Do I expend a spell slot in hopes that it finishes off our opponents before the party takes any additional damage? Or do I save it for the upcoming boss fight and hope that the enemies miss their attacks next turn? What if the spell is successful, but the damage roll is crap and it doesn't kill anyone? Many RPGs have run into the issue of making combat artificially difficult by simply making players go a long time without being able to restore their party. It turns the difficulty of the game away from combat and towards managing your resources as you slog through dungeons. D&D 5e has healing in several forms. Potions, which are finite. Healing spells, which are also finite and if you use them you can't use those spell slots for anything else. Short rests and long rests. Baldur's Gate 3 carries all those through. You only get two short rests and one long rest for every day that passes in-game. Short rests restore half of your party's total HP and recharge certain abilities. A long rest completely restores everything but it requires camp supplies e.g. food and drink. Camp supplies can only be found or bought out in the world meaning you need to go around adventuring and exploring to find more resources which often results in you getting into more fights and needing more resources. This is like the hardcore mode found in other RPGs where you need to keep your characters fed and hydrated like Fallout New Vegas but without the option to turn it off. Combat is a very costly thing to go through yet it can't be avoided. So rather than using everything available to you you have to constantly fret over what is worth using in every situation. There's no excitement here only frustration and anxiety. That's only half the problem though. In a regular game of D&D you only need to keep track of and understand your own character. You only have control over them. You can ask other players or NPCs to do something in or out of combat but the final decision rests with them. End of the day you're just one member of a team. It's like being a member of a real adventuring party. I know myself and my own strengths and weaknesses. Over time I learn about my friends and all their strengths and weaknesses but I don't need to be intimately familiar with everything they do. I'm playing a single role both in and out of combat. Baldur's Gate 3 involves doing everything myself meaning I have to know exactly how everyone's abilities work, how I want them to evolve as they level up and I have to keep track of all their items and health and spell slots during fights. If I'm doing everything I'm no longer playing as Chad Rhone Thundercocks, lair of pussy, respecter of women and hater of racism. I'm just myself directing a group of soulless puppets. The only difference between Chad and the others is that I have more control over his stats and he doesn't have any voice acting. Controlling the whole party forces the player to remember that they are indeed playing a game and that all these characters are just collections of code and audio recordings. There's surprisingly little role-playing in this role-playing game. This might be fine on its own but the element of randomness completely ruins it. Gathering a team that can deal with situations combat or otherwise is more about minimizing the possibility of failure than maximizing the chances of success or even just playing in a way that you find fun. In the Mass Effect trilogy you always have a squad of three including your created character so you craft your own guy to be good at the sort of things you want to do during combat. Then you pick your party members based on covering your own shortcomings similar to Baldur's Gate 3. But if you like or dislike specific characters more than others and you want to spend time with them or if you just want to play in a way that's not optimized you can get away with that. You might have a bit more trouble in some situations but you can pull through by being good at the game. You technically can do that in Baldur's Gate 3 but you'll be almost entirely relying on luck. A party full of bards is going to have a nigh impossible task ahead of them unless the dice are completely on their side. A party of three tech experts can still take on the reapers and save the galaxy if you're good at the game though. Maybe that's the problem. You can't really be good at Baldur's Gate 3. You can be bad at it if you don't understand how things work but you can't be good at it. You can only pray to the dice. I haven't even touched on how shitty the controls and performance of the game are. Just trying to get your party to move to the proper spot isn't ordeal. Rather than following the path you take your party loves to run around randomly completely disregarding things like traps. Sometimes they just stand in place and refuse to move around obstacles no matter where you move. My playthrough of this game was a little over 50 hours. At least one hour of that was just desperately attempting to get my party to walk across the floor. That's around 2% of my total playtime. What the fuck? On top of that your party members love to randomly stop following you with no warning so you can wind up in combat and suddenly notice that your best fighter is on the other side of the map. Trying to select anything and move your character around is fine when there's very little in the environment. When there's a lot of stuff around it becomes a nightmare. You want to click on that item? You'll have to click about two inches to the left of it otherwise your character will just walk up next to it. Want to talk to that NPC? You better hope they're holding still because the lag on clicking anything will result in them moving 10 feet ahead of where you thought they'd be and you walking up to the spot they were a second ago. Want to fire a crossbow at that target? Fine. Want to do it a second time? Tough shit. We're going to zoom the camera in and out at random so you just send that character walking into the middle of a group of bad guys and now they're out of movement for this turn so you better hope they don't die. This is substantially worse when there's anything overhead. Sometimes the game will make it transparent other times it won't forcing you to spin the camera around and zoom in or out until you can see where things are. The worst part of this is when the game wants you to place objects somewhere specific. That mechanic feels like someone at Lyrion just hated their job and wanted everyone who bought the game to be miserable. In The Gauntlet of Sharr you have to place a book on the pedestal to open a secret door. When you click the pedestal an empty box appears along with a prompt to select an item to place there. When you click the box your inventory pops up. When you click on the book you want to place on the pedestal nothing happens. The book doesn't vanish from your inventory. The door doesn't open. You just sit there clicking fruitlessly for several minutes. To drop the book you have to bring up your inventory drag the display to the edge of the screen then drag the book and drop it on the pedestal all with nothing telling you this is what you're supposed to do. Later you have to do the same thing to put magical gems onto pedestals deeper in The Gauntlet. And if I hadn't done this already I'd have had no idea how to progress. This is possibly the most annoying lack of communication from a game I've ever gotten. And keep in mind it's not a side quest this is part of the main story. I could go on all day the point is that just moving around and trying to play the game is like pulling teeth. Even when I was interested in what was going on the sheer amount of time I spent fighting the game itself made it impossible to not be in a bad mood. The game's performance is also lackluster to put it mildly. My footage here is low quality because I set it to low quality to ensure that it ran smoothly on my PC and by smoothly I mean about 10 frames per second if I was lucky. I've seen other people with high end gaming rigs play the game and they had shitty frame rates too so it's not just bad equipment on my end. This game just has a terrible frame rate. And it gets substantially worse when you enter areas with a lot of activity like the city of Baldur's Gate itself. It felt like the entire game was trying to load at the same time dropping things to about one half of a frame per second. So much of the game just stopped rendering after a while? For a large chunk of Act 3 I was looking at characters with invisible torsos walking across pure black parapets. Even when things rendered they didn't do it all the way and they had no texture. It just makes it hard to take anything seriously when it all looks like a half finished student project from 2010. If I shipped a game in this state I'd be ashamed to have my name attached to it. Lyrian getting nothing but love for this game has convinced me that all hate for Bethesda is performative. So yeah, I didn't like playing this game very much. It's the video game equivalent of your boss calling you at 5am to tell you on your day off that you need to come in today because it's busier than he thought it would be and even though he approved your time off a week ago he's taking that back but because the system your company uses to record your time sheet is terrible you still lose that PTO. And you know this probably violates the law but you can't afford to lose this job because your landlord is planning to raise your rent next year and your wife needs access to your health plan to treat her chronic illness and you're starting to feel like she's changed since her mother died and you don't even love her anymore but you can't just abandon her in her time of need so you get out of bed and drive to work but when you get there you realize that you forgot your badge and you can't get in the front gate. The gameplay of Baldur's Gate 3 isn't very good is what I'm getting at. Part 4 Story Companions and other stupid bullshit. One of the things that everyone seemed to love about this game was the writing. That's a pretty broad thing to praise since everything from the scenarios to the quests to the characters comes back to the writing. It seems like everyone specifically meant that they loved the dialogue and events of the game though. They talked about some of them online extensively trying to get everyone else to play by promising them tons of memorable moments just like a real D&D campaign. Most of the moments everyone seemed to love were moments that were weird and silly. Oh look I saved the gnome but then I accidentally killed him with the windmill. Whoopsie. Oh look I'm having sex with a bear. Isn't that just wacky? Oh look Volo is trying to perform brain surgery on me with a needle. Waka waka waka. These moments are funny but they're a small part of the experience overall. In between those clever funny moments are many hours of exploring, conversing, and fighting. So what's the meat of the writing like? The story begins with the player character and a bunch of others being kidnapped by mind flayers and having a magic tadpole placed inside their skulls. This tadpole will soon transform them into a mind flayer making them a soulless husk a single member of a hive mind. But the player manages to escape and go searching for a cure to their condition. Along the way they realize that they aren't changing and there are a lot of other people with tadpoles that are worshiping some sort of god called the absolute. From there the story unfolds. You uncover a big conspiracy revolving around the absolute that seeks to conquer the world. Act 1 is largely about introducing the player to the stakes and letting them know that getting a cure to their condition won't be easy. You also learn about a guardian spirit of some sort that is keeping you from being transformed into a mind flayer. Act 2 is when you're first introduced to one of the chosen of the absolute an immortal man named Ketheric Thorm who commands an entire army of followers. This act is about taking him down to weaken the absolute who you're led to believe is his master. You also learn that your guardian spirit is actually a mind flayer that maintained his individuality and calls himself the Emperor. Then in Act 3 you go to the city of Baldur's Gate to kill the other chosen and bring an end to the absolute and its cult forever. It's a well structured story up until near the end and it does a great job of drawing players in and making the escalating stakes clear. Anyone hoping to write an epic could learn a few things from this game. At the end of Act 2 we get a massive twist. The absolute is an elder brain an evolved form of mind flayers that possesses enormous psychic powers but the three chosen aren't underlings the absolute is really their puppet. They control it with a magical artifact called the Crown of Carcass. Or so it seems for a while. When you defeat all the chosen the elder brain or nether brain as it becomes known reveals that it was manipulating you and them the whole time. Reverse twist. That don't make no sense. So the three main antagonists of the game the people who have actual personalities and connections to our party members are cast aside in favor of this random world devouring evil entity that you spend the last couple hours of the game taking down. That twist was overdone when Final Fantasy stole it from Dragon Quest back in the 90s and even the first time someone did it it was stupid. Ketheric, Oren, and the other guy hounded us from the beginning of the game. They came up with plans. They had unique strengths and weaknesses. Backstories. And they had motivations beyond wanting the whole world to be mindless drones. Plus Ketheric was voiced by JK Simmons which makes him a great villain by default. The absolute is just a powerful, evil being. That's it. It wants to control the whole world and turn everyone into thralls. No motivation, no backstory, no depth. It's just an evil thing for you to beat into submission. This might have been fine if it was the villain from the start but it isn't. We thought the villains would be more interesting than that and then had that ripped away from us. It's like if the T-800 in The Terminator was killed right before the climax and then a different killer robot that never talks appeared. It doesn't give the audience any chance to feel anything towards the new villain except maybe annoyance. Sympathy, fear, curiosity, those are all cast aside in favor of giving the writers a chance to show off how smart they are. Even setting that aside, this reverse twist doesn't add up. The absolute was the one who freed the Emperor from its control so that he could protect the player character and their party and then they would go off and fight the Chosen. It manipulated events from the start to free itself from the control of the Chosen and take command of the Crown of Carces. How was it able to do that when it was under the control of Ketheric and the other two? They were giving it orders the whole time. Was their grip too weak? Did the Crown have a weakness the absolute could exploit? No idea. It was just under their control when the story needed it to be and then out of their control when the story needed it to be. This is the worst type of plot twist. One put there simply for the sake of having a twist. Making sense is a distant secondary concern. This feels like the writers wanted to have a big epic showdown to cap off the game and they wanted that showdown to happen no matter what your choices were or what order you took down the Chosen in but they couldn't think of a way to do it. It would have been better if the players had to defeat Orin first before moving on to whatever the fuck this guy is called for the climax. You could still have him summon an army and destroy half the city with the absolute under his control. All the same choices about how you defeat the absolute and what you do with the Crown of Carces would be there too. It would restrict the player's choices in how they deal with the last two chosen but it would also give us a more developed antagonist and a more focused third act. And as we discussed earlier most of the combat in this game is determined by RNG. In my playthrough right before I reached the final battle Gale said he wanted to go up alone and blow himself up to save the day. I said no and went up to defeat the absolute but the fight is terrible. It's completely determined by what numbers are generated by this computer program. There's also a big dragon, several mind flayers, some tentacles that pop out of the ground and some thralls that are counters to your party members. Then after a few turns a Nautiloid appears and starts launching artillery at you. It's hard in an aggressively artificial way. Since life is too short already I gave up after two hours of this and just let Gale save the day. His sacrifice is an emotional scene. It's also the easy way out and it leaves the game without any big final confrontation. All this epic imagery of the city burning and the mind flayers swarming the population ends with an unceremonious thud unless you take the much more difficult path. Yippee. Once again, Hogwarts Legacy is not an amazing game but at least it ends with a confrontation with the big bad. His plan is about to come to fruition and if the heroes can't defeat him then a lot of bad things will happen. Then he transforms into a dragon and there's a big battle. You have to work hard for your victory. After the final battle or just letting Gale kill himself there's a cutscene where the people of Baldur's Gate defeat the Absolutes army and then you have a conversation with all your companions to say goodbye. For me Gale sacrificed himself to defeat the villain and Karlak burned up rather than return to Avernus. Those were both touching scenes and it would have been a solid way to end things. Instead it cuts forward six months and your party all gets invited to a get-together where they can all reminisce. So you can wander your camp and have a few short conversations before the credits roll and since this last scene comes after the poignant moments on the dock it feels superfluous. Knowing when to end a story is just as important as knowing how to end it. The credits should have rolled after the party's final moments on the docks. Everything else is just a drawn out way of them saying yep we went out and did the things we said we'd do. If the developers wanted an opportunity for the players to say their last words to their party members they should have put it before the final battle. That's what almost every Bioware game good and bad does. Saying goodbye to all my companions that have been with me through thick and thin before the final assault in Mass Effect 3 is one of my fondest gaming memories. It really makes things feel like they're coming to a head and lends gravitas to everything that comes afterwards. Putting the thing that makes you care about what's happening happens is so backwards I'm almost impressed. What about the companions though? Those are the greatest part of most well written RPGs. I'm happy to report that I don't have much negative to say about the companions in Baldur's Gate 3. They're way better than the story at least. I'm not going to go over each in detail although I easily could. They all have developed personalities, backstories, and questlines that add a lot to the world the stories and the characters themselves. The voice acting is phenomenal too so even when the animations were stiff or the game was bugging out I could still get invested in what they were saying. My only real issue is that they all feel like companions I've had in other RPGs. Specifically other Bioware RPGs from back when Bioware RPGs were good. Carlac is a boisterous warrior with some betrayal and darkness in her past like the Black Whirlwind in Jade Empire. Lae'zel is an honor bound warrior from a strange culture like Sten from Dragon Age Origins. Will is an estranged son of a nobleman with a strong sense of justice that makes him do stupid things just like Alistair also from Dragon Age Origins. There's clearly passion here there's just not much creativity. I knew the writers were out of ideas when they gave you two separate party members who each have some chronic magical illness that will cause them to explode one day. Only one gets a chance to heroically sacrifice himself though. Maybe they're just racist and hate tieflings. For shame Lyrion. And since this is a game my opinion of my party members is influenced by how useful they are during gameplay. I didn't feel bad when Will got dragged to avernus because he was almost worthless in combat and kept missing every attack. Gale on the other hand was so great at clearing out mobs of foes and dealing massive elementals damage that I got more attached to him than I otherwise would have. There's probably a longer conversation to be had about how the interactivity of video games affects how they're perceived by the audience but that's a subject for another time. All that matters here is that players will spend a lot more time exploring and fighting with their party members than talking with them so that Will affect how they feel. That can be good but being forced to take party members you don't like into battle for the sake of optimization is never fun. There's not a good place to put this but I do appreciate how unapologetically horny the game is. These characters are caught up in a lot of stressful situations. They would probably want to burn off some of that like Olympic athletes and letting your character be whatever sexuality you feel like giving them is a nice touch that lets you do some actual role playing in this alleged role playing game. Conclusion so yeah I don't like bouldersgate 3 it's a turd so shiny that others were completely blinded to the fact that it's a turd. Clearly most people got something out of it that I didn't and if you're one of them fine I'm happy for you you still need people like me to voice our contradicting opinions though. If Lyrion never heard any feedback other than players telling them how amazing they are they'd start to forget how fallible they are. When they work on their next game concerns about the direction the project is going in would simply be dismissed. They'd stop caring about balance and whether or not their stories make sense they'd just barrel ahead and assume that everyone who criticized them either didn't get it or was just a minority voice. If you don't believe me just check out what JK Rowling has been up to ever since the prisoner of Azkaban. It ain't pretty. Negative feedback is necessary for even the best artistic types if you want to keep them from shoving their heads of their own asses. So even if you hate me for talking shit on your favorite video game ever you need me around. Especially when you consider how obsessed with chasing trends the gaming industry is. Baldur's Gate 3 was a commercial success meaning we're going to get a slew of games trying to cash in on the appetite for classic RPGs in a few years. And the more those developers hear about what works and what doesn't the better they'll do. You're welcome. Is there any benefit to having Baldur's Gate 3 around? Well, you don't have to wrangle your entire gaming group and find a time that works for them. You can just boot it up and play whenever you want. That's kind of neat. But a good game convenience does not make. By the end of all this Baldur's Gate 3 just felt like a D&D campaign run by a DM who barely cares about the story and is actively trying to kill the players. In other words a DM who thinks you can win at D&D. And if you're playing with someone like that you may as well be doing something more productive. Thanks for watching. Like the video, comment, subscribe, and don't forget to check out Skillshare. Goodbye. Oh my goodness. I love all of you so much. If you want your name on here then consider donating to my Patreon page. You also get early access to videos and some exclusive content which, you know, if you actually like me for whatever reason then, you know, that's probably beneficial. And if you don't feel like doing that then, you know, just like the video, comment, subscribe, to the channel. That, you know, all that stuff. Goodbye.