Baldur's Gate 3 Wins Game of the Year at the Game Awards
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
On a personal note, this was the first time in my life I got to play a game at launch. The hype and excitement of playing alongside everyone who was discovering the game at the same time as me was magical.
BG3 however has been a joy. What a great experience from the moment you boot it to every interaction and scenery. Definitely deserved. Overall its been a amazinf for RPG players this year.
I put CP2077 as a clear winner mostly due to stiff dialogue in Starfield and poor choice corralling. If they put 3+ years into polishing SF, I can def see it turning into a clean masterpiece.
It's an interesting experience, a situation where I can acutely detect the bar getting moved for what I expect a game to be. I hope recent progressions in AI will bring us more interactive stories a la BG3 in glossy and well-funded packages a la Cyberpunk 2077.
Baldur's Gate 3
Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Super Mario Bros: Wonder
Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty
Alan Wake 2
Hogwarts Legacy
Metroid Prime Remastered
Pikmin 4
Starfield
Jagged Alliance 3
- Aliens: Dark Descent
- Last Train Home
- Like a Dragon: Ishin
- Chants of Senaar
- Diablo 4
- Resident Evil 4 Remake
- Talos Principle II
- The Expanse
- Age of Empires II: Definitive
runs off to steam
Been playing it for like 6 months and really enjoyed it.
E: Oh its a Telltale one. Dang.
I‘m playing on PS5 and Switch, where no title came out I enjoyed until Tears of the Kingdom.
But even that game had me a little disappointed, because the recycling of the map kills the wonder of discovery. I stopped somewhere in the middle.
Mario Wonder, Spider-Man 2 are ok, but no GOTYs. I didn’t play BG3 yet because I‘m no fan of turn based RPGs.
Due to the weak start of the year I played Bloodborne for the first time and it is my GOTY.
Unless the new AC does something different, I would always classify AC as a niche series.
You classify AC as a niche series because you don't like the controls?
that's not nearly what niche means.
the newest release is the least niche AC ever gameplay-wise, similar to newer MechWarrior. The controls now play similarly to an over-shoulder shooter rather than being pan/scan limited and tracking focused, and not much maneuverability is lost during any high speed segments like boosting/etc.
those control differences in the past excluded a large player-base due to perceived awkwardness, thus the reverse-controller meme associated with the franchise. Understandably a lot of fresh blood has joined now that it plays more similar to what is expected in gaming trends.
and if we're just nitpicking due to the meaning of niche, i'd argue that the entire mecha segment of entertainment is niche.
It’s my understanding that a -lot- of people were historically intimidated by the controls of the AC franchise, not just myself.
> Unless the new AC does something different, I would always classify AC as a niche series, implying that your decision to consider it niche is predicated on the control scheme.
IDK watch some yt clips of the early levels, I bounced off the old AC series too and enjoyed this one.
I enjoyed the game for the technical design and world-building and so on, but the gameplay left me on the shore, and I missed the tactical aspects of ACV.
They basically kept the myriad of weak but hard-hitting enemies over large maps, though there's a stronger focus on duels, and melee is now viable but optional.
I‘ve read it‘s mainly about the right load out to defeat the bosses. Not in the mood for that kind of game right now.
but I suppose it's one of those "add a star if you've played every title in the Zelda franchise since 1990" kind of things
it helps that the dev studio is based in Belgium where loot boxes are banned by law :)
As a relatively busy working adult, this actually ruins games for me. It creates FOMO and people rushing to beat the game to post their DAE low brow moment on social media.
I'd rather play it patched at my own pace, 2 years later.
Eventually there was a sex scene, and the host graciously enabled the setting to let us all watch.
"Multiplayer voyeurism" wasn’t on my bingo card for 2023, but it was an interesting experience.
When I was 11 or so, I used to play StarCraft 1 custom games. Some of the maps rewarded the players by revealing a smutty image in the minimap if you won. It was funny seeing everyone suddenly go idle for a couple minutes after winning the map. Usually everyone disconnects right away. Somehow this reminded me of that.
Wasn't that more akin to watching a porn movie together with your buddies? "Voyerism" means you're watching as someone is having sex, not watching a recording of someone doing it in the past. (not to mention that here actually no one was having sex, it's just pixels in a video game).
I used to play an old game called Underlight, where you weren’t allowed to break character. There was a lot of sexting, which got the tongue in cheek name of QRP aka Quality Role Play. Back then we had to imagine https://underlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/UthyTrial.... as something sexy, which in retrospect was quite a feat given that the avatars were from the original Doom engine. So we didn’t even have pixels in a video game, just our imagination; the ultimate mod.
please respect language a bit more than that, words have meanings.
zomg, that must be voyeurism because being able to control is a part of ... ummm ... wait...
> Eventually there was a sex scene, and the host graciously enabled the setting to let us all watch.
It took you eight hours to get to a sex scene? I learned about the game's obsession with sex the second time I camped.
Kind of put me off playing it, since that just keeps happening whenever you talk to anyone.
One wonders if they used mocap animation. There were about four different positions during the ~3min scene. Bravo to the animators.
I think that was about four hours in. We eventually got to a spider nest, and somehow just barely won. Then we ended up in the forest hag’s lair, and got our asses handed to us five times in a row, at which point we all passed out from exhaustion.
That was probably the most fun I’ve had in a game in a long time. There were a bunch of memorable things. E.g. I was playing a berserker, and they told me to take off my armor because otherwise I wouldn’t get a special damage boost unique to berserkers. So I stripped off my breastplate and leggings, and then realized I could take off my bra and underwear too. They all burst out laughing when I stormed in to the next fight naked. (I was playing as that devil-looking woman that normally you recruit a few hours into the game, since I didn’t feel like setting up a character from scratch.)
The romance has basically no agency and it’s weird that multiple side characters want to fuck you out of nowhere before the person people are identifying as your partner. Frankly the sexual tone of the game is super weird. It’s very tame despite how horny everyone at least for the characters I chose.
The story doesn’t offer you many forks to branch off of. Act 2 is particularly disappointing in this regard.
Act 3 is kind of slog of ticking off boxes and losses the appeal that Act 1 offered imo.
Stopping leveling up at level 12 near the beginning of Act 3 was super lame.
Several character arcs felt extremely underdeveloped (mol, Arabella, zevlor, karlach).
It’s still pretty good though. Good writing and good production values can carry it. Divinity 2 with BG3 production values would have been much better though imo.
Which is probably why you and the OP had such different experience.
other than that i do remember the companions being really horny for me at the big camp party in act 1. i did find it jarring but one perspective that i liked was that you could look at it as casual sex - games usually treat sex as an end goal for relationship mechanics. its still hard to square it up with almost everyone wanting to get in your pants - but i think that's a by-product of making sure players have choice and i can live with that. it also only happened to me once and once i turned everyone down i wasn't interested in they left the matter alone ( except Gale lol )
I found it outrageous that shadowheart was so reticent, while simultaneously encouraging polyamory and saying she was down for a hooker foursome. Three side characters offered to fuck before shadowheart. Felt like those narratives either should have been much longer and deeper or not there at all.
Split screen did seem to have some bugginess whereby side characters would randomly decide they wanted to fuck whichever player talked to them first, regardless of past interactions.
Are you serious that the "authenticity and believability" of a fantasy RPG have been compromised by some gay romance?
It's a fucking RPG in a medieval setting about a sadistic world full of actual dungeons. Where are the leathermen? Why are wisened bosses of dungeons not called...Masters?
(I'm jello-sexual. Don't knock the Cube.)
I don’t know what you mean by your gay comment. Appearance of the character creator??
I wonder if that will happen - Larian never released any DLCs for their games, even for successful ones like D:OS2.
Divinity 2’s fighting was very unusual but I think it was great in retrospect.
I think this happens with a lot of older games too. Games like Bastion or FlatOut 2 sometimes don't get criticized enough for any bugs they may have had, and people look at them with rose-tinted glasses. It definitely happens a lot less with more recently released games.
That there seemingly is no great story shouldn't be that much an issue to me, it doesn't always matter to me, but with the battles not being engaging, character progress nonexistent, exploring not being exciting nor rewarding, there's just nothing that makes me want to come back. Now i do have a great dislike for open-world games, and it seems bg3 just has all the elements that makes me dislike it, too much make your own adventure. I don't recall the earlier baldurs gate games being this way.
Sure maybe they could have included a little more education on how stuff works in game, but it’s not too bad.
What has me most entertained about the game is that your choices and dialogue options have real impacts on your path through the game. Unlike most games that feel like they are on rails.
What an incredible piece of art that team made.
1. Last act was mostly a chore
2. The plot was a mess, you don't have to tie everything into a single path ending up having to come up with ridiculous shenanigans. Also they threw every part of Forgotten Realms lore into a melting pot.
3. The writing was quite disappointing most of the time as well. I can't stand characters in a medieval setting saying "Wow" multiple times in a row or "f*ck" and acting like emotionally stunted teenagers. Also the fact that every companion wanted to have sex with my avatar for no reason was very annoying.
4. Even though it's praised for its polish, it has a LOT of bugs. Some of them game breaking or locking you out of storylines/options.
Mind you, BG2 is my favorite game of all time.
If you're referring to DRM like Denuvo though, I don't think BG 3 has anything like that. Which is good for us because things like Denuvo heavily impact performance.
EDIT: I was wrong. It does not have any DRM.
..and I don't quite get your comment? Games sold on GOG are meant to be DRM-free. It's a requirement for them to be on GOG, not something they do out of the kindness of their heart.
If they were praising BG 3 for choosing to be on GOG as well as Steam then that'd have been a very valid point. But saying that there is no DRM associated with the game is false.
EDIT: I was wrong. There is no DRM.
The developer is in charge of what happens when the game is launched and the player does not own the game on Steam. Steam does not require you to shut down the game immediately. For instance, the games we port will just run fine in, what we call "DRM-free" mode, when the Steam API cannot be initialized.
After that I thought, why not try some other "newer" games? Since then, I picked up and played Cyberpunk 2077 + Phantom Liberty, Persona 5 and Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Each close to 100 hours, and each far exceeded my expectations. What a blast! Thank you, BG3.
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/shawwn/89fb2935b2f4ae3a10...
I’ve seen the infinite cloudflare captcha problem before, but I can’t remember anything about it. If anyone knows or if you figure it out, post some info here.
The turn-based combat made the game really tedious. The 3D camera made me want to throw something at the monitor. The story is awful. The companions are unlikable and hypersexual. The environments are often so over the top they wrap around into boorishness. The reddit-style humor (like the "poop knife") was just completely inappropriate. The unfinished state and constant patches made me feel like I was doing QA for free.
I loved BG2, but this wasn't what I wanted at all.
Each to their own.
It was an incredibly stale game awards, nothing really has been stand out shown to be fair, except 1 or 2 titles.
> The reddit-style humor (like the "poop knife") was just completely inappropriate.
Larian games tend to do this. Note that intersection of sets of people who worked on BGs 2 and 3 is most likely an empty set.
I would rather complain that it wasn’t more like divinity. Divinity’s game design was vastly superior to 5e. But it clearly is a BG sequel. The plot connections are pretty strong. Perhaps more than ought to have been expected
I didn't list any complains besides perhaps commenting on Larian's humor.
> The plot connections are pretty strong. Perhaps more than ought to have been expected
The plot has been concluded in ToB. Just sprinkling around random NPCs from previous games doesn't make it a sequel.
Sure. But if it's Baldur's Gate, why isn't it 2nd Edition AD&D? It's far superior to Divinity, it's what we expect from BG, and it would win points for nostalgia reasons.
As bad as 5E, 2nd is far, far worse. There's basically nothing for martial characters to do any round. Shoulda rolled a wizard. Hope you like making save or die rolls in high level play.
We've had 35 years of experience with tabletop and CRPGs since then, both with systems that tried to stick closer to D&D and with ones that tried new things altogether.
The Divinity system isn't perfect by any means, but I can't imagine how rose-tinted your glasses must be to think that THAC0 and the golden age of Linear Fighter, Quadratic Wizard are better.
Having them try to pretend to be 1990s/2000s-era Bioware would have been a disaster (even today’s Bioware wouldn’t be able to do that).
I think it is. They should have refused the "3" in the name, then it would be completely fine (we already had Dark Alliance).
Just because there's a '3' in the name doesn't mean it should feel like a clone of '2', especially when the studio changes. Dune II was a completely different game from Dune. GTA 3 was completely different from GTA 1/2. Armored Core. Max Payne. Wasteland.
Sports game and certain shooters are widely mocked (among nerds) for being basically identical release after release.
Absolutely is if you are pretending to make a sequel to someone else's game.
> Just because there's a '3' in the name doesn't mean it should feel like a clone of '2', especially when the studio changes.
You got that the wrong way around. The original team wanting to go in a different direction is one thing. But a completely different studio wanting to create something very different from the original game should just do that and create a separate game instead of a purpoted sequel. So yes, a different studio being given the license for the sequel (which is already a very questionable practice that rights holders should be called out for) should strive to mimick the feel of the original game very closely.
> Sports game and certain shooters are widely mocked (among nerds) for being basically identical release after release.
What an absurd comparison. Literally taking the infinity engine with BG2 systems and creating a new campaign with that would not even be close to the yearly EA rereleases. And no, I'm not saying that there can't be any changes at all but Larian went well beyond what would be needed to update the game for $current_year audience.
I'm just going to have to fundamentally agree to disagree. I would 100% endorse this quote if we were talking about novels or theatrical plays, and maybe 50% if talking about movies (Godfather? Yes. Alien? Nah).
But a game, outside of odd niches like visual novels or 'walking simulators', is a much more open-ended experience, and the expectation of a sequel is not merely to continue the story - that's typically called an 'expansion', a concept that doesn't exist in novels or movies. A sequel is generally expected to innovate, and the longer since the previous title the more innovation is expected.
"BG3" on the otherhand innovates on Divinity: Original Sin 2 instead and then slaps a Baldur's Gate paint on the result.
I also don't see why games should be inherently different from other media in this respect. Yes, games are often seen as lesser art compared to more established forms but this is (in part) a result of them being treated as products first and not a justification for it.
Do you think that the setting, themes, story, and RPG rules are just 'paint'? Is the Infinity Engine so much more important than the Forgotten Realms?
> I also don't see why games should be inherently different from other media in this respect.
Because games aren't media: games are media generators. The same game can be a tragedy to one player and a comedy to another. So you can have two different kinds of follow-ups: ones that simply generate more media in the same way ( = expansion), or ones that improve on how the media is generate ( = sequel). The distinction doesn't make sense for fixed media like novels or films.
Note that I'm not talking about video games in particular, it applies to any kind of game. If I publish a book that adds a new secret level to the crypt of Acererak in the same style as the original, it's an expansion. If I publish a story about a different crypt that feels connected to the original but with its own unique design choices, that's when I can call it Tomb of Horrors 2.
It's amazing that we have two great games that modernize the formula in different ways - Pathfinder showing how to do the old style with modern tech and BG3 interpreting it.
And that doesn't even include all the other games you've mentioned (or Larians previous Divinity games) or Solasta or others... we're in golden age of CRPGs again.
Also, "cash grab"? Huh?
For each turn on the turn based combat, there’s overhead and waiting required. The characters slowly accelerate as they start to move and take their turns. Sometimes it feels like forever by the time you get control of your characters again.
Some of the battles are so one-sided against you. You have to come back later after grinding everything in the map.
Inventory management is horrible.
I could go on, but I’d be preaching to the choir. But I’ll just say it is an unfinished game.
I had the same experience at first but it really just comes down to using all resources the game gives you. For me it got significantly easier once I stopped hoarding items. The difficulty seems very dependent on playstyle and motivation to optimize damage, I've seen people destroy bossfights with 10+ enemies in one turn with a single playable character.
I did expect BG3 would have an NSFW on/off setting though - if only for the benefit of streamers. I guess not one thorough enough for okasaki?
I was more responding to their complaints about turn based combat. BG3 nails that aspect, and it's strange to me that people don't like it. It's literally a turn based rpg.
I'll recommend it to my wife if they ever add a "tourist mode" type thing which dramatically speeds up the fights, she's got a lot less patience than me.
These games are mostly about exploration, stories, decisions - there's a lot that's not turn-based combat. I also liked the Banner Saga games - same. I love XCOM, which is way more turn based, because the combat is quicker and more fun.
The other poster was pointing out that table-top is also turn-based, they made no claims about both being exactly the same in every respect.
And I guaran-fucking-tee you someone, somewhere, has roleplayed sex in a tabletop session.
That's not in their response as written. Could be they play at a boisterous table, with boorish jokes, a hypersexual bard, constant efforts to troll the DM, and tedious combat.
> And I guaran-fucking-tee you someone, somewhere, has roleplayed sex in a tabletop session.
Which is why I only claimed 90% of in-person D&D groups don't, rather than 100% :)
It is, it's just not explicit.
> Which is why I only claimed 90% of in-person D&D groups don't, rather than 100% :)
heh, fair.
I don't think the pseudo-RT pause-unpause gameplay of BG2 would show up in AAA either.
I do hope this combat mechanic becomes more widespread, the added tactical depth here really beats the usual RTS hassle. Tabletop D&D is turn based too so it was very puzzling why the old BGs and Neverwinter Nights didn't do it this proper way.
https://gamingbolt.com/baldurs-gate-3-has-a-triple-a-budget-...
Even without the sex and romance, I would rank it as the best single player gaming experience for me, since Arkham Asylum.
If you've played DoS2 you'll find yourself sometimes conflating the two quest lines sometimes :).
D&D is a crap system though, which drags BG3 down (but hey, I've made my peace with D&D's vancian magic at this point in my life).
To be fair though, we had our second child in September, so I'm just at the end of Act One (hoping to get some time to finish it over Christmas).
I definitely recommend it
The other strategy/sim nominees were Fire Emblem: Engage, Advance Wars 1+2 Reboot Camp, Company of Heroes 3 and City Skylines II (sim).
Note that StarCraft is called a "real-time strategy" game to differentiate it from the existing category of "strategy games", which has now been relabeled "4X".
Based on your list, Giorgi appears to be correct that there were no strategy games nominated in the "strategy" category.
StarCraft is called real time to differentiate it from turn based strategy games like Civilization or Fire Emblem.
The same genre, considered at the time, also included games like Empire, which is more of a 3X game. I was interested, rereading the manual to Empire Deluxe recently, to see that it obviously considered itself to be competing with Civilization - I never considered the two games all that similar.
Abandonware Dos right now also includes board games under the "strategy" category. (RTSes are in there too.)
Plenty of strategy games prior to Civilization that weren't 4X or 3X, Fire Emblem, North and South, Nobunaga's Ambition, etc.
A contemporary review of the first Fire Emblem game to release outside Japan shows one reviewer referring to it as "turn-based strategy" at the same time that another reviewer (writing in the same magazine, possibly cooperating on the same review?) says it's a "tactical RPG". That second description matches the uninformed impression I had of the series and also matches how it's described on Wikipedia. Plus, this isn't exactly an early usage - Fire Emblem first released in 2003.
Nobunaga's Ambition seems like it would fit perfectly in a genre defined by Civilization and Empire; I'm not sure why you're saying it's not a 3X game? And the same appears to be true of North and South.
4X games like Civ have exploration as a key element with players starting off on the same foot. Grand Strategy games like Nobunaga don't. I guess it could be "3X" but it depends what X you remove.
Right, the Japanese release date isn't relevant to what it was called in English.
Sure, there was a time before 4X was a term when games that would now get that label would not have a narrower subgenre label than “strategy”, that doesn't mean that what strategy meant then was what 4X means now, it means that there weren't enough 4X games to distinguish them within strategy (nor enough turn-based strategy and overlapping label to 4X -- but not all TBS are 4X, and there have been realtime 4X games -- to segregate those out.)
RTS wasn't coined to distinguish StarCraft, etc., from “strategy” which label later evolved into 4X, it was to distinguish it within “strategy” from TBS, which also didn't need a label until RTS was common enough to distinguish the two.
Its nice companies give us such obvious indicators of quality.
I don't like paying to be a beta tester and programmer. That is my day job.
The game launched yesterday on Xbox and those folks are going to have a blast. :)
BG3 was "finished" on release. If it never saw a single update after that, I'd have been happy with it anyway. What they're doing is providing excellent ongoing support to an already solid product.
If you’re as keen on Linux as you seem to be, then Proton is your friend. We may never see native builds, but already developers are putting way more effort into making sure the Deck (meaning Linux) experience is good.
Here’s a video of the head of Larian Studios talking about how they’re viewing the Steam Deck - https://youtu.be/kzfEkSGa45k
> This is an ambitious device. We love it. We’re going to do everything we can to support it. We’re going to make sure that every single game, Baldur’s Gate III included, is going to play really smoothly on the Steam Deck.
Valve have made adding Linux support easy and desirable (because of the market share of the Deck). And developers are responding. Don’t miss out because you want “native builds”.
It does work quite well under Proton, and runs on the Steam Deck.
No official support, but Steam make it work.
Edit: but not in gog!
I got through act one and didn’t want to play anymore. There were too many bugs, and the game is an active development as if it were in beta. The game was in beta for years before it got to this state.
Save scumming 75% off the time because almost everything needs a 15 or higher, or spending an hour on a 20 roll treasure chest, or needing so many successful swings to complete a battle is not my idea of fun.
Loading a save took over a minute sometimes
I thought it was sloggy and buggy.
The characters were fawning over me, although I barely talked to them.
Dragon age origins did it SO much better.
Then why would you do that? That isn't a feature of the game, that's a feature of the player?
>or needing so many successful swings to complete a battle is not my idea of fun.
You can use tactics waaaayyyyyy beyond "make smash thing with sword."
I'm not trying to be a Dick, but maybe don't focus on 100% completion, and think outside the box. This game has multiple ways to accomplish things. The number of times I avoided fights by using the environment to my advantage is hilarious to me.
Don't focus on perfection, just have fun?
While I think the OP is talking out of their butt, I kind of disagree with this. Smash with sword is generally the best strategy. The game is pretty darn easy. Playing with the duds of Wyll and Shadowheart give an early impression of Act 1 perhaps being very hard.
I'd be broke, dead 200 times over, and missing a ton of fun contexts if I didn't savescum. It's a feature of the game. Not a bug of the player.
Even on Explorer mode, the game is laughably stacked against you sometimes. The dice rolls make no sense. I've spent an hour trying to get a D20 on savescumming once.
I like high completion so I don't have to replay games and go through the 80+% of repeatable stuff I already did again.
But it's just not. It's the opposite. Actions have consequences, that's the entire point.
When you savescum you work against the core feature of the game, of course it's not going to be as fun.
I will say two things - BG3 today is a substantially better game compared to release day in August. Better performance and fewer bugs. Not perfect, but excellent. I have no doubt they'll keep improving the game so it'll get even better in a couple months.
And second, it's ok not to succeed on dice rolls. It's just a different path you're taking. It may feel like you're losing out on completing the whole game, but you're not. In fact, you're missing out on a path whether you succeed the roll or not.
But if it really matters to you, do what I did. I picked a bard who's excellent at persuasion and lock picking. To top it off I got the amulet that allows the wearer to cast the Guidance cantrip (adds 1d4 to all rolls). I basically never lose a roll and if I do, I usually have Inspirations that allow me to re-roll. That might be closer to the experience you're looking for.
Also, the character stats are important to pay attention to. No one character is going to be good at everything.
The new honor mode makes savescumming impossible and is still quite possible. Savescumming is optional.
> or spending an hour on a 20 roll treasure chest
A 20 roll treasure chest with only the free guidance bonus gives you a 10-25% chance to open on the first attempt. Alternatively you can just smash the chest, contrary to popular belief it doesn't have any negative consequences like destroyed items.
> The characters were fawning over me, although I barely talked to them.
That bug was fixed long ago.
3mo ago, actually. Game was in beta for 2+years before release.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/169q6zh/baldurs_g...
I finished Act 1, but the game was so unrefined and obviously unfinished. The hotfixes and patches with new content keep coming. The game is still obviously in Beta, but it's just not called Beta.
I'll revisit the game once the patches stop. Too many things changing during playthroughs.
Yes, and the launch was about 4 months ago. Sure it was in Beta for years, that's how game development works.
> I finished Act 1, but the game was so unrefined and obviously unfinished.
I have no idea what you're talking about, honestly. I'd understand if you talked about Act 3 because of the performance, or the inventory management, but aside from that I don't know what you could be referring to. I have seen fewer bugs than in some games with far less content and complexity.