Recent reviews by Macellari

EARLY ACCESS REVIEW

Because this is an early access review, I will ignore any crashes, graphical bugs, and bugged encounters (to which there are many).

To probably the main question many Baldur's Gate enthusiasts might be asking... "Does it feel like a Baldur's Gate game?"

The answer to this is... no. There are little aspects here and there where you recognize key names from the franchise which is great, other than that I found this to be a successor to Divinity Original Sin franchise but set in the world of Faerûn. This is mainly due to the nature of the combat, spell systems and environmental interactions. Baldur's gate had a much faster combat system and I find my self (especially in large combats) just staring at my screen for 2 minutes at a time while 15 little spiders take their actions and I FINALLY get a small action to do on a character. Combat is MUCH too slow, and this could be because each fight is packed with too many enemies in a single encounter. If they reduced the amount of enemies in larger encounters, this could resolve some of that.

The role-playing rolling system feels REALLY bad in a video game, especially when a bad roll (which is out of your control) could lead to your death (looking at you injured mind flayer in crash site!). I understand that the developers wanted players to feel like it was a table-top game, but that was never Baldur's Gate in social interactions (They did roll on attacks, lock-picking, etc. but those are 'actions'). Each time I roll the dice and win the roll, I'm super happy that I don't need to re-load the game to which I highly doubt that is the feeling developers wanted to give the player. I feel like on trained skills and high enough stat, it should be a garunteed success, however if its an untrained check and don't meet the stat needed, then it becomes a roll.

Issues with Combat:

Aside from the very slow combat, I would say my biggest gripe are passive skills that are treated like active ones. For example, as a rogue, I have sneak attack. Sneak attack damage should happen automatically if I am flanking an enemy. instead I have to activate sneak attack every time as an active ability. I understand the reasoning might be when I have multiple attack actions in the future, I might want to chose when to sneak attack, but none of this is taught. So I spent the first half of my time wondering why my rogue was only doing base damage until I finally figured out what was going on.

Characters:

I love the variation of personalities within the game. I do feel that the male characters are MUCH more likable than the female ones. The Gith character you have with you is always barking orders at you and the cleric is just a constantly a sarcastic b****... which makes it hard to want to get along with any of them. Reason this is important, is that if you are developing romantic encounters between them (which is present in early access) if feels like a giant pill you have to swollow to get along with any of these characters. Meanwhile, the male characters are much more easy going (maybe even bland to a degree).

Misc issues

I feel the game could use with a lot more Auto Saving points within the game. I feel that I might die at some point and see that there was no auto save in the last hour or two of gameplay. I know I could do a better job of saving more often, but the game could help with that along the way.

Final summary:

I feel the game will be great fun and I can't wait for final release. That said, I don't like that this should be called "Baldur's Gate 3" because so far, it really isn't. They could have called it anything else and had it within the same realm of Faerûn and it would have been fine. Combat needs work and as long as the massive amount of bugs found in game are fixed, I feel like this will be a really solid title.

Going into this game, I was unsure what to expect. After playing for 6 hours (Beta) and completing chapter 1 and trying out some of the "end game content" I can now post my following thoughts (I will update my review a week or two after launch as bug fixes start rolling in):

This game is pretty much what happens if Diablo 3 and Path of Exile had a baby and dressed it in Warhammer clothes. It's basically taking systems from both games and melding them together. I had a really tough time trying to identify what, if anything, made this game have it's own identity. The main thing I came up with was story and cut-scenes. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as hack-n-slash games tend to be very similar in nature... just would have been nice if it brought new systems to the table.

The game is still riddled with bugs which is to be expected for a beta, however being 3 days from release, I'd hope to see more polish on that aspect. Another thing I noted (granted this is only based on chapter 1), is that quests felt very very long. For example, after you defeat the siege of the lizards, you run off to find and destroy the source of the lizards. That turns into a super long multi zoned mission which never updates the quest to justify it's length. The quest always states, go find the Fire Breather and kill it. After a while I forgot why I was even doing what I was doing.

Loot system was very confusing to understand what was going on. As a Systems designer myself, I wanted to understand every aspect of how player stats worked, and from the wording on gear, or vast amount of stats, this was pretty difficult. I can see this being hard to understand and overwhelming for players new to the genre. I also have the feeling that stronger gear is dropping in areas than is intended. I played a 2-handed warrior and within the first 20 minutes of game, I got a hammer that just obliterated everything. I killed the fire breather boss in about 4-5 swings, dealing anywhere between 600-700 critical damage a swing. On another note, I found Unique items to be super interesting. I loved how the Unique ring I received had an attack speed penalty to balance out the flat damage increase it provided to melee attacks. It's interesting items like this that really push a player to make tough choices. Loot drop % felt good until I played the Diablo 3 style Rift system that is part of this game's end content. At that point, rare loot and uniques were dropping like candy. Each 10 minute run I was getting about 2-3 unique items and every trash pack was dropping multiple rares (this rift had max affixes). I feel these drop rates need to be revised or else the game will VERY quickly loose the appeal of seeing items drop... which is the fundamental core of this genre of game. This could also be heightened loot % just for beta in order to get the items into player's hands.

Speaking of tough choices, the talent tree system felt like it left a lot to be desired. I really liked the revolving rings that allowed you to create your own path through the talent tree, however, it really fell behind with the options provided. Everything felt like it was directed to melee, ranged, or magic damage increases. Passive stats that are 20% more melee damage on multiple nodes does not really make for interesting player choices (and this makes up for about 90% of the talent tree). There are a few nodes however, that was MUCH more interesting. For example, one that made it to where I can no longer do elemental damage, but instead I did better physical damage (Rends, Poisons, Physical). This made me have to carefully choose my gear to try and max out this bonus. On the note of 20% damage increases... There were so many of these and so early on that each level up, I was getting around a 40% damage increase and the monsters were not scaling as fast as I was. This made it to where I was just plowing through everything extremely quickly early on. This might be an aspect to re-visit and determine if you want your players to gain power this fast.

Along with the bad, there was also plenty of good. The combat (albeit a bit clunky and buggy at times) felt really good. Camera shakes when you attack along with really great audio, physics, and particle effects make for really engaging combat that just felt great. This makes for the foundations of a great Action RPG Hack-n-slash. The story feels a little rushed and forced, however it's a very nice change of pace to see a game in this genre have a strong narrative.

Despite what seems to be overall negative feedback, as it stands, I feel the game is worth playing just to play something new. Perhaps after a few patches with bug fixes go out it will receive the upvote. For now, I feel it still needs a lot of polish and improved systems before it can be on par with the competition available to players at this moment. It's a shame that they are adding in important core gameplay systems right before launch without time to properly test.

I really look forward to seeing what this game will offer in the near future.

Some QoL Improvements that would be much appreciated:
- Add 'Q' over the UI for Heal Potion, as well as key binds for other potions.
- Arrows that indicate if an item is increasing over all damage/defense or not. Not all your players will be number crunchers and there are soooo many stats in this game to where it can be very easy to get confused as to when something is an upgrade.
- If you die 3 times in an instance and get kicked out, don't instantly teleport player to town. Allow them to see a death screen as to realize wtf happened. A few times I just appeared in town and had no idea why.
- Add a more concrete reason to have gold for campaign mode. Right now gold felt pretty useless until I could add affixes to the Rift system.