Baldur's Gate II is my favorite game of all time. I was skeptical about BG3 for many reasons, which I deleted because of Steam's 8k character limit.

The extended hype was too much to handle. I caved. I bought it in October and jumped right in.

Here's how I played:

• Tactician difficulty
  
• No save scumming or cheese (e.g. reloading failed skill checks, placing explosive barrels before big fights, using OP internet builds, etc)
  
• Reload if any companion dies (downed is OK, death = reload), same way I play BGII
  
• Completionist: Complete every sidequest I can, explore every corner of every map
  
• Party composition: "Good" party (Karlach, Gale, Shadowheart, me: Assassin/Gloomstalker)
  
• Did not consume any tadpoles

The first 20 hours are great. Levels are gained slowly and your party is weak. You really learn your characters' strengths and limitations in this phase.

In the early game, you must be selective with your encounters to gain XP and gear so that you can take on the next tougher encounter. During each encounter you need to use every resource and ability at your disposal. You also need to mind your resting supplies -- at a cost of 80 resources per rest, I was extremely stingy with how many times I rested, sometimes having fewer than 3 rests available as I chipped away at the map, searching for XP and gear. This felt a lot like Gothic II, which I loved.

Acts 1 and 3 have a decent combination of story progression and dungeon crawling. Act 2 is an extended dungeon crawl that drags on too long.

Character build progression is good. The D&D system provides a lot of depth to combat and character builds. If you've played BGII, you will be comfortable managing the massive number of spells and active abilities available to characters. You can also respec any character in your party at any time for a small fee.

Most fights in BG3 have an interesting element to them. Up until Act 3, there are very few filler fights. Most fights make you account for something novel and interesting. Hacking your way through without considering the enemy's abilities, resistances, and positioning will cost you. Combat efficiency is a must if you want to succeed.

Every new enemy you encounter (and there are TONS of enemy types), you'll be right-clicking and reading about their capabilities, formulating a strategy to take them down.

This changes a bit in Act 3, as I will detail below.

Exploration is both good and bad in BG3. There are many optional areas and quests which have hidden chests, enemies, and other surprises. You can spend hours upon hours simply exploring the game world without focusing on quests.

The problem is that the material rewards for doing so are weak. After spending an hour crawling through an optional dungeon and clearing it of enemies (which is fun on its own), the non-XP rewards are not very good.

This ties into the itemization in general: There are many, many magical artifacts lying around, but the vast majority aren't upgrades to your own equipment. In act 3, most of my characters were wearing gear they picked up in act 1. I can count on one hand the number of times I actually bought a weapon or armor from a vendor. Most items are sidegrades or very situational.

This bland itemization leads to feeling stagnant in your progression. Since levels are gained so slowly, you rely more on gaining new items to feel that power increase, which is muted by all the chintzy trinkets you'll harvest, even from the main questline.

In BGII, there were TONS of unique, powerful items, and 6 characters with whom to equip them. Finding a new powerful weapon or armor was exciting, and it happened all the way to the very end of the game. "Whoa! An axe with a chance to instakill? Oh, I know exactly who's getting this one!!"

This simply doesn't happen in BG3. After a full act of wearing virtually the same equipment on all my characters, I decided to take some time to try and optimize. After spending 20 minutes examining all the equipment I had picked up over the past 30-40 hours, I made maybe 2 minor adjustments and sold the rest of it.

Looting in general could be improved. There are thousands of lootable containers in the game, most of them empty or containing junk. Holding ALT doesn't always show all items on the screen. At one point in act 2 I just stopped looting -- it simply wasn't worth my time churning through hundreds of empty containers and sifting through junk.

In BGII, every 1-2 hour play session ended with something new. A new item, level, character, plot development, something that made me think I was progressing in the game. This is the hallmark of a great RPG.

I frequently started BG3 sessions thinking "Wait, what did I do last time? Oh, I cleared that one area... but I'm the same level, and I'm still wearing all the same stuff." Especially in Act 2.

Act 3 does drop off in motivation for me. And yes, motivation is the right word, because after spending 91 hours on Acts 1 + 2, it takes determination to keep going. Here's why.

By the time Act 3 rolls around, if you're a completionist, you'll likely be at level 10 or 11. You'll have just completed Act 2, which is a long dungeon crawl. You'll still be wearing a bunch of gear from Act 1. Your characters are only one or two levels away from the level cap. Your wizard might already be at spell level 6. You've fought TONS of enemies in a bunch of different interesting environments. You've learned your party's strengths and weaknesses and how to tackle any kind of encounter.

Act 3 starts out focused, but quickly opens up even wider than Act 1. There are TONS of locations, buildings, people, and quests to manage.

I frequently asked myself, "How is this a bad thing? How can I be complaining about having too much stuff to do with all these well-written, interesting quests?"

By Act 3, you've seen everything there is to see. There's nowhere else to go. You're about to hit the level cap. You know there's not going to be an amazing sword or armor ahead. The major boss fights have annoying gimmicks. There's a quest with invisible enemies (like 20 of them) which take an extra turn or two just to try and hit them. You fight giant, HP-bloated robots that self-destruct. One character's final quest is a fight with 20 enemies. The path to the final boss is filled with huge mobs of enemies. There are puzzles which I couldn't be arsed to figure out so I looked up the answers.

Between the lack of character advancement, the combat slog and the utterly confusing quest progression, it becomes too much to fully enjoy. I skipped several major side quests and many smaller ones in Act 3 because I was burned out. I just wanted to get to the end!

How did Witcher 3 get away with a similar situation? Because quest objectives were clear and combat didn't turn into a tedious slog. BG3 has great quests, but in Act 3, after pressing through some pretty irritating fights, constantly needing to rest to restore spells after every encounter... I didn't care to take on any extra quests. Witcher 3 had excellent quests, excellent characters, and the combat, while mediocre, didn't constantly make me consider whether to turn the game off for the night.

So... would I recommend BG3? Of course. $60 for over 100 hours of RPG fun is a good buy, and it is a great game. I nominated it for GOTY. I love this game.

It's just not as legendary as BGII or Witcher 3.

I will be jumping back in immediately for a Dark Urge playthrough. This time, though, I will be skipping a bunch of side content (probably in Act 2). This will hopefully make the game more challenging due to being underleveled and reduce burnout from disappointing quest rewards. Then, I'll take on some of the stuff I skipped in Act 3. I might even turn the difficulty down, but that might get dull as well.

And after that? I will be starting up my 15th Baldur's Gate II playthrough.