malvasia bianca

I was really looking forward to Baldur’s Gate 3: I’m a big BioWare fan, and while Baldur’s Gate 3 is of course by Larian instead of BioWare, it sounded like Larian had brought over many of the same virtues (e.g. rich party interactions), and added more of their own (a wide range of techniques to make your way out of tricky situations). I do prefer the way BioWare has moved in more action RPG direction, and I don’t actually play D&D, so that’s a bit of a downside, but I listen to enough D&D podcasts that it should be familiar enough. It’s pretty rare that I play games right when they’re released, but this would have been an exception, except that I was going to play it on the Xbox and its release for that platform was delayed by several months.

Wtih a paragraph like the above, I guess the expected thing for me to say next is: but I actually didn’t like it. I did actually like it quite a bit, though; just not as much as I was expecting to. Definitely happy to have played it, and I basically enjoyed my whole time with it; went on a little longer than I would have liked, but that hardly makes the game unique.

Its D&D-ness was a litlte more offputting than I expected at the start. I decided to play a bard, because I wanted my interactions with people to go well; but there’s a lot more fighting than talking at the beginning of the game. And your special moves require spell slots or other similarly limited use resources (extremely limited, at the start of the game); so there’s pressure to avoid using any special moves at all during most combat encounters.

It took me a little while (not a long time or anything, but a couple of play sessions) to get a feel for when a combat encounter was big enough to be worth using spell slots on at all; and while I’m sure there were alternate solutions to those early encounters, the ones I tried (e.g. talking my way through one of them) didn’t work. And, over the same period of time, I was getting used to the economy of long rests: they’re presented as something that’s at least somewhat scarce, with you needing to spend food to engage in them and with them not available in all locations. But, in practice, I always had food, and it was rarely the case that I couldn’t take a long rest if I really needed to.

So, after a bit, I fell into a rhythm that seemed not super dissimilar from what I’d hear in D&D podcasts: use a few spells on minor encounters, go all out in larger encounters, and trust that I’d be able to rest after those larger encounters. Which worked well enough; not always, in particular the Halsin rescue really didn’t want to give you long rests between battles, but even that one was willing to grudgingly let you rest if you really insisted.

That’s the rhythm of combat. Which was more present than I would have liked? In good actual play podcasts, people are doing a fair amount of creative problem solving in ways that don’t involve fighting; listening to people discuss Baldur’s Gate 3, I’d hoped that there would be alternate routes around problems, but I didn’t see as many of those as I would have preferred.

Though the truth also is that I just didn’t engage that much with objects in the environment; for all I know, I could have avoided a bunch of fights by doing that more. Which is maybe a sign of a larger aspect of how I related with the game: I just didn’t interact with systems that deeply at all.

Which is in large part on me, I suppose. Though also there’s a lot to think about when leveling up an entire party’s worth of people and figuring out what possibilities that enables, given what all D&D enables; I don’t know that I would have done a great job of mastering the possibilities of my character if I’d just had the one character to deal with, but at any rate dealing with all of those characters was just too much. Just trying to figure out all the little specialization options for one character is something I don’t know that I would have succeeded at, given the game’s UI: when I was at that screen, I only had a vague idea of what weapon specializations I had, for example, or of what weapons fit into which bucket.

Still, very far from a deal breaker, more of something that I needed to adapt to. I started the game playing in Normal and Liesl started playing in Easy; watching her, I got the feeling more and more that she had made a better choice in that regard. I stuck with Normal for quite a while, out of stubbornness; finally, though, when I got to the final battle of Act 2, I played through it maybe four times with two or three of those times ending with me literally one attack away from winning the battle. And that convinced me that Easy was the way to go; at which point the battle became exciting but something that I succeeded at just fine. And I stayed with Easy for Act 3; definitely the right choice.

I didn’t really go into the game wanting combat or environmental interactions, though: I wanted party interactions, I wanted towns with people to talk to, I wanted an overall plot to pull me through. And the game was good in that regard, good enough that BioWare was a reasonable comparison. Party members had character, I liked talking to them, I liked where their stories led me. Settlements were dense enough and had interesting enough people to keep me happy. The plot was fine; not entirely to my taste, maybe in part related to its D&D-ness, but not bad.

Navigating through the interactions was a little less prescriptively structured than I’m used to from BioWare games. I actually almost completely missed one of the companions until I went back to the start area and did a thorough sweep; and there’s another companion that I ran into at what seemed like a normal enough time, but other parts of the game had advanced by then in ways that affected interactions with her. (I’m pretty sure that I’d inadvertently closed off romance options with her by the time I met her, though the game didn’t make that particularly readable.) Which, on the one hand, felt a little odd from a visual novel point of view; but, on the other hand, that’s more like the way life works?

And actually the romance interactions were unusual to me in another way, too: there was one character that I wasn’t into at the start of the game, but as the game went on and we went through stuff together, our shared experiences had me liking her more and more. So I would have been curious about starting a romance with her later; the game wasn’t free-form enough to allow that, though. But, again, that’s fine: nothing wrong with having somebody that you respect and enjoy working with more and more but whom you remain friends and coworkers with rather than romantically involved: that’s a healthy sort of relationship in real life and so it’s kind of nice to see that in a game! Kind of weird to be playing this kind of game and not end up romancing anybody at all, but I’m not complaining, it was an interesting change of pace.

Good game. Didn’t quite scratch my BioWare itch, mostly because I prefer the BioWare that’s moved away from D&D, and the second act wasn’t entirely to my taste and the game had gone on long enough by the time I reached the third act that part of me was kind of waiting for the game to be over by then? Though, well, there are aspects of recent BioWare games that I’m not entirely thrilled with too! For all I know, the Dragon Age game that’s coming out in a few months will show that BioWare as I think of them simply doesn’t exist any more…